Spirit Tech and the Nones

This morning I entered my favorite exercise class. The coach was there, full of encouragement. She led the class through some warm-up exercises and then the music began. The workout was a typical cardio-oriented set with rapid movements designed to get the heart beating and the blood flowing. All through the song, the coach issued advice on form and encouragement. The music faded from the first song and I caught my breath for a few seconds before the next song started and the process began again. This might sound like a fairly usual event held at gyms across the nation, yet this didn’t take place at a gym. It took place in my basement. And rather than a view of weights and treadmills, from my view the first workout took place at the foot of the Chichen Itza pyramid, the second on Easter Island. I am in a virtual reality program on the Meta (Oculus) Quest called Supernatural. The coach, while a real person, is pre-recorded and present physically only for the warmup and cooldown exercises. Otherwise, she exists as an encouraging voice in my ear, giving me suggestions and advice for the workout while my gaze is fixed on gorgeous landscapes. As the pandemic shutdown gyms across the country, people turned to other options that allowed them to remain socially distant but keep up their exercise routines. Peloton bikes that also include a similar coach and environment became a costly alternative. But the Quest headset I purchased cost $300 dollars, and for an extra $20 a month I work out in a 360-degree photorealistic environment, from the pyramids of Giza to the glaciers of Iceland to the tropical shores of New Caledonia. During these workouts, I am whisked from place to place, where I hit balloons with virtual bats while I squat and lunge. I begin with this anecdote because as I read Wesley Wildman and Kate Stockly’s Spirit Tech, particularly the chapter on virtual reality, I was reminded about my morning experience, panting at the foot of Chichen Itza’s pyramid. What has become clear to me is that Supernatural is not merely about physical exercise. Early on, the program included a meditation option where a subscriber can be guided through a 10-minute meditation, likewise in one of these beautiful spots around the world. Additionally, while the coaches spend their time talking about form and encouraging physical activity like deeper lunges or harder strikes, they also spend a good deal of time talking about things like self-love, courage, forgiveness, and sacrifice. What the program promotes is more a self-help spirituality that starts with the physical but quickly transitions to the spiritual. The fact that the program is called “Supernatural” is meaningful in more than one sense. It is, of course, a non-sectarian spirituality. The religion of Supernatural is self-help and selfhealing, with no god, no scripture, only the ritual of regular exercise, and a final short homily that the coaches do as they demonstrate cool-down exercises. Spirit Tech anticipates the creation of precisely the kind of VR spiritual movement that one finds in Supernatural. While their examples focus on VR Church and technodelics, and in general the book continually returns to the relationship between these technologies and institutional religion, it is the impact of VR on the religiously unaffiliated for which I saw the greatest potential. As is well established, the rise of the Nones is a phenomenon that has made headlines for almost a decade now (Briggs, 2012; Cooper et al., 2016; Fetsch, 2014; Mitchell, 2021). While the rising tide may have plateaued (Shimron, 2020)—though the pandemic may have had unexpected consequences (Schnabel, 2021)—the U.S. remains at historically high levels of religiously unaffiliated people, with numbers reaching 40% or more of young people. Studies show that religion produces a host of mental and physical health benefits (Koenig, 2012; Mueller et al., 2001). Is there a way that