Walk into any American strip mall on a Sunday morning and you will see the new congregation. They file in wearing Lululemon and Hoka, clutching Hydro Flasks like communion cups, nodding at the front desk girl the way parishioners once nodded at ushers. They are not there to worship God. They are there to chase a number on a scale.
We have replaced the pew with the treadmill, and nobody is asking what got lost in the exchange.
It happened so gradually that we barely noticed. Church attendance collapsed. Community clubs died. Bowling leagues, Elks lodges, neighborhood potlucks — gone, one by one, until the only remaining place where an American leaves the house, sees other humans, and feels briefly accountable to something larger than themselves is Planet Fitness at 6 a.m. And so we go. We pay $24.99 a month for the privilege of being watched by strangers while we suffer on a StairMaster, and we call it self-care.
Here is what the fitness boom is really doing. It has quietly absorbed the social function that religion, family, and civic life used to perform. It gives us ritual (the pre-workout scoop, the post-workout shake). It gives us community (the 5 a.m. crew, the running club). It gives us a sense of moral worth — because in 2024, being fit is not just healthy. It is righteous. It is the last virtue a secular society will let you openly judge people for lacking.
That is why the fat-shaming debate never really ends. We have outsourced our entire moral framework to the body. If you are disciplined, you are good. If you are not, you have failed at the one thing we all agree matters. We deleted the Ten Commandments and replaced them with ten thousand steps.
Meanwhile, the actual numbers are grim. The average American spends over $800 a year on fitness — memberships, gear, supplements, classes — and roughly 70% of gym memberships go unused. We are paying for a faith we do not practice. We buy the shoes. We buy the ring light. We buy the protein powder. We post the mirror selfie. And then we sit back down on the couch, exhausted from the performance of it all.
The fitness industry, to its credit, has figured this out. It no longer sells exercise. It sells identity. Peloton did not sell bikes. It sold a version of you that wakes up early, that has its life together, that is worth loving. That is not a product. That is a religion, and the monthly subscription is the tithe.
What worries me is not that people are working out. Moving your body is good. It is one of the few unambiguously good things left. What worries me is that we have loaded so much meaning onto it — worth, discipline, virtue, belonging — that we now feel like failures if we skip a Tuesday. We have turned a simple act of health into a referendum on our souls.
The gym is the new church. The problem is that churches used to offer forgiveness. The treadmill does not.
**Closing thought:** We did not become healthier as a society. We became more anxious, more comparative, more exhausted — and we dressed it up in athleisure and called it progress. Maybe the real workout is learning to close the ring, put on regular pants, and go sit with a friend who does not care what your resting heart rate is.