Cotton Mather would have hated fitness influencers.
Not because he would have disagreed with them. In many respects, he would have found them alarmingly familiar. The problem is that after spending an entire lifetime building one of the most influential Puritan ministries in colonial America, Mather would be deeply annoyed to discover that Americans eventually recreated his profession while insisting they had escaped it.
The man devoted decades to warning people about hidden corruption. He preached against vice, excess, temptation, complacency, and moral decline. He produced hundreds of sermons and dozens of books. He worried that prosperity made societies soft and that comfort encouraged bad habits. Like many Puritans, he viewed civilization as a fragile project requiring constant maintenance. Left unattended, people drifted. Standards slipped. Discipline weakened. Before long, entire communities convinced themselves that destructive behavior was perfectly normal.
Naturally, he was delighted to learn that modern Americans had moved beyond such thinking.
Then he downloaded Instagram.
Within half an hour, Mather learned that seed oils were poisoning civilization, breakfast was optional, sunlight had to be consumed according to a strict schedule, tap water was suspicious, vegetables occasionally caused inflammation, and half the population suffered from a mysterious condition called "metabolic dysfunction" that apparently explained everything from obesity to the decline of Western civilization.
The resemblance was immediate.
The names had changed. The sermon had not.
To understand why Mather would find all this so familiar, it helps to understand the world that produced him. Seventeenth-century Puritans were not simply dour religious fanatics wandering around looking for reasons to ban enjoyable activities. They were participants in a grand social experiment. Men like John Winthrop, Increase Mather, Richard Baxter, and Cotton Mather believed they were building a godly society in a fallen world. They took human weakness seriously because history seemed to provide endless examples of what happened when people stopped taking it seriously.
John Winthrop warned that New England's colonists would become "a city upon a hill," watched closely by the world. Increase Mather repeatedly argued that prosperity often produced moral decline. Cotton himself lamented the tendency of comfortable societies to forget the principles that had created them. Across countless sermons ran the same theme: corruption rarely arrived dramatically. It appeared gradually, disguised as convenience, pleasure, or harmless indulgence.
One can almost hear modern wellness culture nodding along.
After all, fitness influencers tell a remarkably similar story. The modern world is making people sick. Convenience is the problem. Comfort is the problem. The average American is surrounded by hidden dangers that appear harmless until it is too late. Society is drifting in the wrong direction, and only a small group of enlightened individuals seem willing to discuss it.
The Puritans feared spiritual decay.
Fitness influencers fear chronic inflammation.
The emotional architecture is nearly identical.
Both begin with the assumption that most people are living incorrectly. Both believe hidden threats are everywhere. Both insist that discipline is the solution. Both divide the world into those who understand the danger and those who continue wandering unknowingly toward ruin.
The Puritans at least had the decency to call this religion.
Modern wellness culture insists it is merely "asking questions."
Mather would have found this particularly irritating because Puritans were famously honest about what they were doing. They believed they possessed moral truths and spent little effort pretending otherwise. Modern Americans, by contrast, often describe themselves as having escaped the judgmental rigidity of previous generations.
Then someone admits to eating a doughnut.
At that point, the discussion acquires the intensity of a seventeenth-century theological dispute.
The doughnut ceases to be a pastry. It becomes evidence. A skipped workout becomes a character assessment. A second beer at a barbecue transforms into a public declaration of surrender. Entire internet communities emerge to debate cooking oils with the seriousness previous generations reserved for questions of salvation.
Mather would not be shocked by any of this.
He would be offended by the lack of originality.
What would truly fascinate him is the modern obsession with self-monitoring. Puritans spent extraordinary amounts of time examining their own conduct. Serious believers kept journals tracking temptations, failures, doubts, and signs of spiritual progress. The goal was constant self-improvement through rigorous self-examination.
Americans have not abandoned this practice.
They have digitized it.
Today people monitor sleep scores, body-fat percentages, recovery metrics, resting heart rates, glucose levels, hydration, protein intake, step counts, and something called "heart-rate variability," which sounds suspiciously like a medical condition invented by a Puritan looking for new reasons to worry.
Entire communities compare these numbers daily. Charts are posted. Data is analyzed. Tiny fluctuations provoke existential concern. The technology is impressive. The anxiety is colonial.
Had Puritans possessed smart watches, New England would have become unbearable.
The similarities continue. Every successful reform movement eventually develops its own authorities. Puritans had ministers, theologians, and respected elders. Modern wellness culture has podcasters, authors, entrepreneurs, former athletes, and men whose primary qualification appears to be having visible abdominal muscles.
Followers quote them enthusiastically. Studies are shared. Testimonies are exchanged. Converts spread the message. Skeptics are regarded with increasing suspicion.
Every movement develops its heretics.
This is not to say that fitness influencers are entirely wrong. The Puritans were not entirely wrong either. Human beings are remarkably talented at making decisions that damage their long-term interests. Americans could probably stand to exercise more, sleep more, and consume fewer ingredients that sound like industrial solvents.
The problem arises when practical advice becomes moral identity.
Once that transformation occurs, everything becomes theological.
Nobody is discussing nutrition anymore. They are discussing virtue.
Nobody is discussing exercise anymore. They are discussing discipline.
Nobody is discussing cooking oil anymore. They are discussing righteousness.
This is where Cotton Mather would finally throw up his hands.
After centuries of scientific progress, technological innovation, democratic government, industrialization, electrification, aviation, antibiotics, space exploration, and the internet, Americans have somehow arrived back at a familiar destination: a society convinced that hidden corruption lurks everywhere and that salvation belongs to those disciplined enough to avoid it.
The church has disappeared.
The sermon survived.
And so Mather would likely survey modern wellness culture with a mixture of admiration and exasperation. Admiration because discipline remains valuable. Exasperation because Americans spent three hundred years escaping Puritanism only to rebuild it with podcasts, protein powder, wearable technology, and significantly better abs.
The theology changed.
The guilt remained.
By John Handcock