It all started while idly browsing the Incredibly Strange section at Waxidermy. That utterly fabulous blog had this brain-gougingly weird Christian aerobics record seen above, with an equally bewildering back cover:

Naturally, I went out in search of other weirdness along similar lines. How many people out there are sweatin’ for Jesus, or at least WERE doing so when this nonsense came out? Apparently, a lot of them.

This was clearly part of the fad that raged through right-wing circles back in the 80s, when people were trying to establish a born-again subculture for EVERYTHING, including death metal and exercise routines. The notion that these things were being done by and for right-wingers made them “OK” to enjoy. It was a brilliant bit of marketing–the implication that born-again Christians might be doing something wrong unless they were spending their money on other right-wingers.

See, back in the 80s and part of the 9os, there were a lot of people in evangelical Christendom who were trying to sell people on the idea that religious people shouldn’t listen to “secular music”, as in, anything not performed by a sweaty born-again rightie. Again, BRILLIANT marketing as there was an up-and-coming Christian music industry that badly needed the sales…hence you get cultural oddities like this that fell in with that sort of thinking. “Don’t buy THEIR evil aerobics videos with that dirty old SECULAR music, buy OURS with this nice, clean whitebread model on the cover and boring by-the-numbers religious rock instead.”