Goop – An American Religion? Author: Aaron J. Smith Faculty advisor: Dr. Eliza Young Barstow Date Presented: April 10, 2021
When we look at Gwyneth Paltrow’s (or G.P.’s) business, Goop, we are looking at a lifestyle and wellness organization that is a variety of American religion in many ways. But just what is
Goop? According to Taffy Brodesser-Akner (who wrote a 2018 article about Goop and it’s haters) “Goop [is] a clothing manufacturer, a beauty company, an advertising hub, a publishing house, a podcast producer and a portal of health-and-healing information, and soon it would become a TV-show producer. It [is] a clearinghouse of alternative health claims, sex-and- intimacy advice and probes into the mind, body and soul. There was no part of the self that
Goop didn’t aim to serve.”
There may not be transcendent claims of revelation from the divine or even a codex of orthodoxy. However, there are religious elements, movements, and trends that permeate the
Goop empire. What got us here? How can I claim that a therapeutic lifestyle organization can be a type of American religion? I posit that religious trend towards self-actualization and the atmosphere of experience as empirical truth in American religious history made space for Goop to become what it is today.
The first (and perhaps most apparent) stop on the road to Goop is New Thought. New Thought was a movement that emphasized the mind's ability to visualize and attain health and material prosperity. "If one will give himself to this meditation, realization, treatment, or whatever term it may seem best to use, at stated times, as often as he may choose, and then continually hold himself in the same attitude of mind, thus allowing the force to work continually, he will be surprised how rapidly the body will be exchanging conditions of disease and inharmony for health and harmony." (Trine, 325) This idea of self-actualization was central to New Thought. It was up to the person to find the truth that they could become "God-men". Sickness and disease
were thought to be the fault of the individual. "The mental attitude we take toward anything
determines to a greater or less extent its effects upon us… no disease can enter into or take hold
of our bodies unless it find therein something corresponding to itself which makes it possible."
(Trine 326). The mind, mentality, and individual focus were all said to be the cause of the state
(for good or bad) of the individual. This was an aspirational kind of thinking. If you weren't able
to achieve it, it meant you were doing something incorrect or incomplete. It was never a flaw in
New Thought or the concept of "God-man." When we get to Goop, we find that Gwyneth
Paltrow seeks to keep Goop and its corresponding lifestyle aspirational. "[Paltrow’s] business
depended on no one ever being able to be her. Though I guess it also depended on their ability
to think they might." (Brodesser-Akner). It's almost as if the point isn't to attain what's promised, but rather to be locked in a cycle of striving for it, realizing that failure and success rests squarely on your shoulders. Without this mentality set forth in New Thought and similar strains of thinking, I don't think Goop could exist as it does. Paltrow's brand thrives on the idea that people could become her version of a "God-man"; it just happens that this time it is embodied in the form of a rich white woman.
While similar to New Thought, Christian Science offers a way to access divine healing and
wellness. "I learned that Mind reconstructed the body, and that nothing else could." (Eddy, 28).
Mind to Eddy referred to the source of "all causation… and every effect a mental phenomenon"
(Eddy, 24). In Christian Science, the focus is on the mind's divine power to bring wellness to the
body. Wellness is the goal; it is the promise. "I could only assure [the homeopathic physician]
that the divine Spirit had wrought the miracle—a miracle which later I found to be in perfect scientific accord with divine law." (Eddy, 24). Eddy gives us antecedents in her writing about how she and others were healed through Christian Science. There are no proofs offered, but we are asked to accept these stories as true because she tells them to us. It’s this combination of a desire for wellness and the reliance on personal claims without proof that creates an atmosphere where Goop can position itself as a wellness resource. "It wasn't until 2014 that it began to resemble the thing it is now, a wellspring of both totally legitimate wellness tips and completely bonkers magical thinking: advice from psychotherapists and advice from doctors about how much Vitamin D to take (answer: a lot! Too much!) and vitamins for sale and body brushing and dieting and the afterlife and crystals and I swear to God something called Psychic
Vampire Repellent, which is a "sprayable elixir" that uses "gem healing" to something something "bad vibes."" (Brodesser-Akner). Goop wanted to make these claims as "statements" absolving them of the responsibility of fact-checking. They broke ties with Condé Nast (a global media company) over fact-checking the Goop magazine. "Goop wanted Goop magazine to be like the Goop website in another way: to allow the Goop family of doctors and healers to go unchallenged in their recommendations via the kinds of Q. and A.s published, and that just didn't pass Condé Nast standards. Those standards require traditional backup for scientific claims, like double-blind, peer-reviewed studies." (Brodesser-Akner). The desire to make
"statements" without fact checking them is exactly what Eddy asks us to do in believing her claims without offering scientific proof. The atmosphere in which people accept these statements and claims blindly, alongside people's quest for "wellness" (or maybe it is because of the quest for wellness), allows the seemingly outrageous or miraculous claims to stand shoulder to shoulder with factual, provable claims. This positions experience as the arbitrator of truth. The offer is that you too can have this kind of experience if you will follow these instructions or use this product.
The next major tradition planting the atmosphere for Goop is Scientology, and here we see something more structural. "As such, the Church of Scientology is perhaps best understood not simply as a "religion" but as a complex, multifaceted, multinational corporation of which religion is simply one aspect" (Urban, 144). Here, it’s the idea that a corporation and religion can coexist under the same roof that can give us the clearest insight into Goop as a religion, not just a business. "Over the last sixty years, Scientology has been at the center of a number of larger debates surrounding alternative spiritual groups in the United States, among them the role of secrecy in new religious movements, the often vast amounts of wealth generated by some new spiritual movements, the question of copyright and trademark for confidential religious materials (particularly on the Internet), and perhaps most importantly the basic question "What is religion?" In other words, it has raised the fundamental question of whether new movements such as Scientology are best described as "religions" or as something else, such as self-help therapies or for-profit corporations." (Urban 136). The question is "what is religion?" and the stage has been set. Now Goop comes along and posits itself as a wellness/lifestyle business that just happens to have devotees, promote an experience over evidence, and creates an exemplar for its devotees to aspire to be like. When Scientology rebranded itself as a religion in 1953, The language L. Ron Hubbard (the founder) used to talk about Scientology shifted from self-help to religious. "While Hubbard's early Dianetics had been a primarily nonreligious form of self-help therapy, his new Church of Scientology began to incorporate much more explicitly religious ideas that extended well beyond the individual human mind and this particular lifetime." (Urban, 141-142). Goop's language hasn't shifted into
talk of the afterlife and transcendent things (at least that I know of), however the idea of
wellness that is being put forth goes beyond self-help and into the esoteric realm. "Also: a
manifestation workshop; acroyoga, where we bobbed up and down on scarves hanging from
the ceiling; a medium who told me my grandmother was standing next to me telling me I have
thyroid disease; a man who stuck two ungloved fingers into my ears and said he "fixed" my jaw,
which there was nothing wrong with… What I'm saying is: There was nothing that couldn't be
healed at the summit." (Brodesser-Akner). With such a wide range of wellness options being offered at Goop's wellness summit, it's hard not to see the business and religious aspects holding hands. Paltrow herself wants wellness and lifestyle/business to exist simultaneously.
"Over the last few years, as wellness went mainstream, G.P. allowed her two sides — the G.P.
who was known to sit without underwear over mugwort steam to regulate her hormones and
the G.P. who wanted the $2,132 straw pocketbook from Sanayi 313 that is, to be clear, made of
straw — to finally be one." (Brodesser-Akner). Scientology has made people rethink (positively
or negatively) what religion is and has made space for business and Goop's wellness offerings to coexist.
Finally, I want to look at the Great Awakening. It may feel counter-intuitive to compare
Christianity to the religious aspects of Goop (especially because Goop is more akin to New Age
thought than orthodox Christianity), but the atmosphere of the Great Awakening embedded in
American religion is a seed that has made Goop's religious aspects accepted without blinking
because experience is the basis for knowledge. During the Great Awakening, the was a push by the religious institutional authorities to write off the experiential nature of being "born again."
Jonathan Edwards was not one of those authorities and in fact, preached for the validity of the born-again experience at the New England revivals. Edwards suggests that the knowledge of salvation is a posteriori, a knowledge gained through experience (Dictionary.com). "Whereas, if we duly consider the matter, it will be evidently appear that such a work is not to be judged of a priori, but a posteriori: we are to observe the effect wrought… "(Edwards, 93). Edwards goes on to say that why shouldn't people find joy in a salvific experience? "And it will doubtless be further allowed, that the more eminent the saints are on earth, and the stronger their grace is, and the higher its exercises are the more they are like the saints in heaven—i.e. (by what has been just now observed) the more they have of high or raised affections in religion." (Edwards,
96). This is the case with religion in America: we judge someone's faithfulness by their fervor over their beliefs. And Goop devotees have excitement and fervor over the Goop mission.
"Goop says it sold $100,000 of [four vitamin "protocols"] on their first day." (Brodesser-Akner)
There were also people traveling across state lines to be at the summit in New York. The fervor is evident in sales, participation, and widespread recognition.
So, we see that there are many streams of religion that have paved the way for Goop's religious aspects to be widely accepted without question. The idea of wellness has captured the psyche of the American people for a long time. Coupling that with the idea of experience as both evidence of the truth of a claim and proof of its validity; and seeing how Scientology specifically made it acceptable for business and religion to co-mingle, the atmosphere was clear for Goop
(specifically) to appear on the stage as an American religion of sorts.
Works Cited:
Trine, Ralph Waldo. "In Tune with the Infinite." American Religions: A Documentary History
edited by R. Marie Griffith, Oxford University Press, 2007
Brodesser-Akner, Taffy. "How Goop's Haters Made Gwyneth Paltrow's Company Worth $250
Million." The New York Times, The New York Times, 25 July 2018,
www.nytimes.com/2018/07/25/magazine/big-business-gwyneth-paltrow-wellness.html.
Eddy, Mary Baker, Prose Works Other Than Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, First
Church of Christ, Scientist, 1925
Urban, Hugh B.. New Age, Neopagan, and New Religious Movements : Alternative Spirituality in
Contemporary America, University of California Press, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/osu/detail.action?docID=2025592
Edwards, Jonathan. "Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival of religion in New-
England." American Religions: A Documentary History edited by R. Marie Griffith, Oxford
University Press, 2007