In regards to elite magazines, I have not read anything unfavorable about New Age religious topics in recent years.
But when it comes to coverage of mainstream religion, watch out.
I was frustrated to read a recent New Yorker story — that I’ll call the Gospel of Poo — that soberly related the tale of a serial entrepreneur and corporate mysticism with the seriousness of someone trying to dissect the Talmud.
The entrepreneur at the center of the piece is given the kind of serious treatment that other groups, say, Southern Baptists, could only dream of. See Jia Tolentino’s disparaging New Yorker piece not long ago about her childhood at Houston’s Second Baptist Church. That’s a 180-degree treatment from the following article:
A few days after Suzy Batiz learned that she’d made Forbes’s 2019 list of America’s richest self-made women, she lay down on her kitchen floor and wept. Batiz, whose net worth is estimated at more than two hundred and forty million dollars, grew up poor. …
One day, she went to see a hypnotist, who told her that her life lacked purpose. He gave her the book “Man’s Search for Meaning,” by Viktor Frankl, which inspired Batiz to take what she calls a “spiritual sabbatical.” She studied Buddhism, Kabbalah, Hinduism, and metaphysics. “I had an insatiable desire to find something,” she said. “I was the ultimate seeker.” At a bookshop, she came across “Loving What Is,” by the motivational speaker and author Byron Katie, who teaches a method of self-inquiry called the Work.
“Two weeks later, I’m at her ten-day workshop,” Batiz said. “I went in drinking a big thing of Yellow Tail every night, and, when I came out, I was sober for eight years. After that, I was in a bliss state. I knew there was a larger meaning here.” She developed a self-help course called Inside Out: How to Create the Life You Want by Going Within. She started to meditate. She got out of her head and into her body. She listened to her gut. “Then,” she recalled, “I was at a dinner party, and my brother-in-law asked, ‘Can bathroom odor be trapped?’ And lightning went through my body.”
Finally we get to what journalists call the “nut” or main paragraph of the story.
Batiz is the creator of Poo-Pourri, a bathroom spray made from essential oils, which has sold sixty million bottles since it launched, in 2007. As its name suggests, Poo-Pourri is designed to mask the smell of excrement — or, more precisely, to trap unpleasant odors in the toilet, below the surface of the water, and to release pleasant natural fragrances, including citrus, lavender, and tropical hibiscus, in their stead.
But this woman sees herself not just as a businesswoman — but a spiritual explorer. This is the topic on which the New Yorker story waxes eloquent for the rest of the tale.
She buys a Methodist church to live in and creates it as a temple to “wellness and personal growth.” Her headquarters is a potpourri of religions: A Zen garden, Buddha statues, a statuette of Ganesh, a Hindu god.
When Batiz tells her life story, it hews to a particular American narrative—redemptive, merging New Age corporate mysticism with the traditional recovery speech. It’s a Horatio Alger story for the new millennium. …
Batiz was raised in the Church of Christ, an evangelical denomination. She was taught that God loved her but wouldn’t think twice about consigning her to Hell for wearing shorts. On movie nights, the kids were shown films about Armageddon. Batiz rebelled.
One thing leads to another and she happens to invent a scent that does away with the bathroom smell. She names it Poo-Pourri.
Poo-Pourri’s breakthrough came in 2013, when the company’s first commercial, “Girls Don’t Poop,” went viral. The commercial featured the company spokesperson, Bethany Woodruff, a pretty Scottish redhead with a convincingly posh English accent, sitting on a toilet in various locations, primly extolling the product’s benefits in shockingly scatological terms.
I remember that commercial. I thought that it was gross.
But obviously it struck a chord with the enlightened crowd.
Batiz began to wonder whether she should be a shaman, and asked for advice from one of her own shamans, whom she described as “a former heroin addict who owned one of the largest psychic networks in England.” He replied, “Shamans move energy. They pull negative energy out. They make space for positive energy. Money is energy. And business is the biggest way to move money. …
The article goes on to how business executives like this woman are turning to meditation, yoga, even mind-altering drugs to find success and ends with a reference to Buddhist symbols.
All of which is fine in many ways and most of the religions mentioned in this piece are referred to with respect and deference. The one exception, of course, is what the magazine calls her “oppressive” Christian upbringing.
I do wonder why so many reporters find Eastern or alternate religions so fresh and interesting but not so much with any variety of Christianity, unless it’s the Amish way of doing things or Orthodox pysanky.
For instance, Batiz is given kid-glove treatment on her unashamed mix of religion and capitalism.
Linking financial success to spirituality is nothing new: it’s been done by people from the productivity guru Stephen Covey to the basketball coach Phil Jackson. But Batiz is an especially improbable example of the C.E.O. as spiritual leader — her gospel is late capitalism taken to its extreme. “Business, for me, isn’t just something I do. It’s a purpose,” she told me. “This is not a rags-to-riches story. It’s a spiritual-evolution story.”
The reporter might have mentioned that prosperity gospel preachers were linking godliness to financial success long before Covey ever thought of it. But look at how these preachers — Paula White and T.D. Jakes are good examples — are pilloried in the press for their mansions and riches while a New Ager like Batiz draws nothing but the highest praise.
I keep on wishing (in vain) for the plain vanilla evangelicals to be treated as fairly as are the more exotic breeds of spirituality.
The premise of the story — that commerce and spiritual talk go together — is engaging but in the end, it’s all about high-end consumption or spirituality for those who can afford it. Which is the premise that Scientology is founded on as well; that spiritual mastery or becoming “clear” is only possible after laying out serious money.
For the rest of us, Poo Pourri is available on Amazon for $19.99; probably the most that people may spend for enlightenment.
There’s a lot of millionaires who use spiritual principles to get where they are. Few are as colorful as Suzy Batiz. That doesn’t mean their stories aren’t this colorful and, thus, shouldn’t be told.
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