30/08/2026
Yoga Is Not a Stretch, It Is a Religion
A brother wrote to me with a request. “Would you consider addressing the issue of believers practising yoga? It is becoming more prevalent and people are being deceived thinking they are just doing stretching exercises.”
He is right about the deception. And I write on this not as a theologian who has read about it from a distance, but as a man who grew up inside the system that produced it. I can tell you plainly that the thing being sold in gyms and church halls across the West as harmless exercise is not what it is at home. At home nobody pretends it is exercise. That pretence was invented for export.
So let us go to the root, because a doctrine cannot be evaluated by its packaging.
The word yoga is Sanskrit and it means union or yoking. That is the entire purpose of the system. Union with what? Not with the God of Scripture. The goal is moksha, liberation from the cycle of rebirth, achieved by the realisation that the individual self, atman, is one with ultimate reality, Brahman. The great sayings of the Upanishads state it directly, tat tvam asi, that thou art, and aham brahmasmi, I am Brahman (Chandogya Upanishad 6.8.7 and Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 1.4.10). The whole system exists to bring a person to the realisation that he is himself divine.
Now stop and see what that means. The founding claim of yoga is the founding lie of Eden, "you will be like God" Genesis 3:5, and the founding sin of Romans 1, where men "exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator" Romans 1:25. Between the Creator and the creature Scripture places an unbridgeable distinction, "for I am God and not man, the Holy One in your midst" Hosea 11:9, and "I am the Lord, that is My name; I will not give My glory to another" Isaiah 42:8. Yoga does not merely differ from Christianity at the edges. It denies the first thing the Bible says about reality, that God is God and we are not.
Then there is the structure of the system itself, and this is where the exercise argument collapses completely. Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, the classical text of the whole tradition, lay out eight limbs, ashtanga. Yama and niyama are moral disciplines. Asana is posture. Pranayama is breath control. Pratyahara is withdrawal of the senses. Dharana is concentration. Dhyana is meditation. Samadhi is absorption, the dissolving of the self into the absolute (Patanjali, Yoga Sutras 2.29). Notice that the postures are the third limb of eight. They were never designed as fitness. They were designed to prepare the body to sit still long enough for the mind to reach the goal, and the goal is spiritual absorption into an impersonal divine.
The Bhagavad Gita is equally direct about the purpose, describing the yogi seated with mind controlled, "having made the mind one pointed... he should practice yoga for self purification," and calling him the one who "beholds the Self in all beings and all beings in the Self" (Bhagavad Gita 6.12 and 6.29). That is not stretching. That is a doctrine of God, of man, and of salvation, and it contradicts Scripture at every point.
Now consider the postures themselves, since we are told they are just movements.
Surya namaskar, the sequence taught in almost every beginner class, means salutation to the sun, and it is performed with traditional mantras addressing the sun deity Surya by his names. That is not an interpretation. It is the translation. Scripture speaks about this exact act. Ezekiel was shown men in the temple with their backs to the house of the Lord "prostrating themselves eastward toward the sun" and God called it an abomination that provoked Him to wrath, Ezekiel 8:16 and 17. Job named it as a sin he would have had to confess, that if his heart had been secretly enticed watching the sun, "and my hand threw a kiss from my mouth, that too would have been an iniquity calling for judgment, for I would have denied God above" Job 31:26 to 28.
And many other postures carry the names of deities and figures from the Hindu pantheon. Natarajasana is the pose of the lord of the dance, a title of Shiva. Hanumanasana is named for the monkey god Hanuman. Virabhadrasana, the warrior pose, is named for a fierce being created by Shiva. Even the closing of a class, hands pressed together with namaste and the head bowed, carries a meaning most Westerners have never asked about, since it is commonly explained as the divine in me bows to the divine in you. That is the whole theology of the system compressed into a greeting, and Christians repeat it as though it meant have a nice day.
Then there is the breath work and the meditation, which is where the real danger lies and where the fitness argument has nothing to say at all. Pranayama is not simply breathing exercise, for prana means life force, and the practice is the manipulation of that supposed cosmic energy through the body's channels, culminating in some schools in the raising of kundalini, described as a serpent power coiled at the base of the spine. And the meditation aims at emptying, at the stilling of thought until the sense of a separate self dissolves.
Christian meditation is the exact opposite in method and in aim. It never empties, it fills, and it fills with one thing. "This book of the law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night" Joshua 1:8. "But his delight is in the law of the Lord, and in His law he meditates day and night" Psalm 1:2. "O how I love Your law! It is my meditation all the day" Psalm 119:97. Scripture never once commands us to empty the mind. It commands renewal by truth, "be transformed by the renewing of your mind" Romans 12:2, and the deliberate filling of the mind with what is true and honourable and right, Philippians 4:8. An emptied mind is not a neutral mind, and the Lord Jesus warned about a house swept and put in order and left empty, and what came back to occupy it, Matthew 12:43 to 45.
Now to the Western Christian who says he has stripped all this out and only does the poses. I want to answer that fairly, because there is a real question underneath it.
Is stretching sinful? Of course not. Bodily discipline has some value, 1 Timothy 4:8, and a believer is free to stretch his back, strengthen his legs, and breathe deeply for the rest of his life. But ask yourself honestly why the word yoga must be kept. If the spirituality has genuinely been removed, then what remains is stretching, and stretching already has a name. The insistence on keeping the name is itself the evidence that something more than movement is being sought.
And the practitioners themselves will tell you the truth if you ask them. Serious teachers openly say that the postures carry the philosophy whether or not the student understands it, and that the practice will eventually work on the person spiritually. The Hindu American Foundation has run an entire campaign, Take Back Yoga, on precisely this point, insisting publicly that yoga is inseparable from Hinduism and objecting to its secularisation by the West. When the adherents of a religion tell you their practice is religious, and Christians reply that it is only exercise, something has gone badly wrong with our discernment.
Paul dealt with a version of this question in Corinth, and his answer is instructive because it cuts both ways. Meat that had been sacrificed to an idol was still just meat, and a believer with a clear conscience could eat it, 1 Corinthians 8:8. But when it came to participation in the idol's ceremony itself, he closed the door completely. "No, but I say that the things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to demons and not to God; and I do not want you to become sharers in demons. You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons; you cannot partake of the table of the Lord and the table of demons" 1 Corinthians 10:20 and 21. Yoga is not the meat. It is the table. The postures are the liturgy of another religion, and a Christian performing that liturgy while insisting he does not mean it is standing in a place Scripture told him to leave.
There is also a matter of witness that the Western church cannot feel and my part of the world feels immediately. When a Christian in India practises yoga, no Hindu neighbour thinks he is exercising. They see it as an acknowledgment that their system has something to offer, and my ability to tell them that Christ alone saves is quietly undermined by the mat in my living room. Paul cared enormously about this kind of effect, "but take care that this liberty of yours does not somehow become a stumbling block to the weak" 1 Corinthians 8:9. And there is a further reality that comfortable Western believers dismiss and missionaries in my country do not, that these practices are doorways, and that people who open them sometimes find something waiting on the other side.
So here is where I land, and I hold it without apology. Stretch your body, strengthen it, discipline it, and thank God for it, because the body is a gift and its care is not sin. But do not take up the practice of another religion and rename it fitness. Do not salute the sun. Do not empty your mind. Do not say namaste. And do not let a culture that has never read a Sanskrit text tell you what the sacred texts of my ancestors plainly say about themselves.
I came out of that system by the mercy of God, and I have no interest in the church walking back into it with a yoga mat under its arm, congratulating itself on how open minded it has become. "You shall have no other gods before Me" Exodus 20:3, and "abstain from every form of evil" 1 Thessalonians 5:22. There is one union the human soul was made for, and it is not absorption into an impersonal absolute. It is union with Christ, given freely to everyone who repents and believes, "the one who joins himself to the Lord is one spirit with Him" 1 Corinthians 6:17. That union costs nothing and gives everything, and no posture on earth will ever produce it.
He who has ears to hear, let him hear.
Jeremiah Knight
The Reformation Resurgence
