Christianity Today August 15, 2026 7 min signal 2026-08-15

Body surveillance shames what God calls good

Archived text mirror, captured for personal reading when the Signal ran. Formatting is approximate — read the original at the source.

Christianity Today

August 14, 2026

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Frazer Harrison / Staff / Getty

In 2012, an article for Hollywood Life invited readers to indulge their curiosity about a celebrity’s body: “Kate Bosworth Looks Scary Skinny—Too Thin? Vote.”

That year, I was recovering from anorexia. The disease had shattered my health and cost me most of my friendships. My treatment required me to go to weekly appointments with a therapist, a doctor, and a nutritionist. Before (and during) my recovery, I pored over photos of famous personalities like Keira Knightley and Nicole Richie, trying to evaluate their health, looking for clues about how they might be eating or exercising. At my lowest point, these women were my inspiration.

It would take years for me to recalibrate my beliefs about my weight. But even after more than a decade post-recovery, I haven’t been able to fully shake the suspicion that my body, like Kate Bosworth’s, is always under scrutiny—by a family member or a stranger on the internet or, worst of all, a friend.

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The public reaction to pop star and actress Ariana Grande’s striking skinniness has followed some of the patterns of 2000s tabloid body-shaming. Eye-catching screenshots and images circulate on social media, along with provocative language like “alarming.”

This time, though, the tone is different. Content creators cloak their posts in words of concern, and columnists try to defend the discourse, arguing that we should be able to talk about the dangers of extreme thinness without being accused of mean-spiritedness. Recent reevaluation of past media coverage has some wondering whether we should simply condemn all commentary on women’s bodies—even public figures who willingly put themselves in the spotlight—or if there’s value in pointing out when a celebrity seems to be modeling something harmful, like disordered eating.

Whether it aims to protect or titillate, I’d argue that any pop culture body surveillance—the tabloid photos, but also more measured articles—has bad trickle-down effects. When ordinary people allow themselves to give undue attention to candid shots of celebrities, engaging in commentary about cellulite or ill-fitting clothing, then we get accustomed to monitoring bodies in general. That includes the bodies of people we actually know. Eventually, many women learn to assume that our friends and neighbors are doing the same to us.

In clinical settings, “body surveillance” most often refers to policing one’s own appearance through compulsive checks and adjustments. For many women, self-surveillance is a reaction to the belief that our bodies are under constant external surveillance. If our observers find us lacking, we believe, we’ll be deemed less worthy of respect or love. All those glances in the mirror add up to a survival tactic.

Churches aren’t immune to these pressures. Christian millennial women like me who were exposed to purity culture experienced body policing of a different kind. Leaders and mentors encouraged us to keep modesty front-of-mind while shopping for clothing, because men were watching our bodies closely. (They “couldn’t help it”!) Female bodies were desirable and dangerous.

Psychologists Charlotte vanOyen-Witvliet and Mary Inman note that religious faith seems to help bolster body image for men, but not for women. This, they theorize, is probably due to the “appearance norms”—expectations and pressures “often more caught than taught”—that can be placed on women in religious settings.

Pastors jokingly warn women not to “let themselves go,” and young women hear older women engaging in “fat talk” or sharing diet tips. The Christian diet and wellness world, including weight-loss programs like Weigh Down and The Daniel Plan and popular Christian living books like Made to Crave and The Forty-Day Sugar Fast, pushes believers to see body size and shape as reflections of internal goodness.

The intensity of this pressure and the prominence of Christian diet culture varies from congregation to congregation. But for some women, church has been yet another place where the pressure to be beautiful and thin is reinforced—and sometimes made more intense.

Body surveillance poisons our relationships—especially female friendships. Over the past six months, I’ve interviewed over 100 women about their experiences with Christian diet and wellness culture. I spoke with women who have thin, toned bodies who worry constantly about losing their figures. What if I gain weight and my husband loses interest in me? One woman told me that her friends in bigger bodies always seem a little jealous of her. I spoke with a woman who was afraid to sit too far toward the front of the sanctuary on Sunday mornings because she didn’t want to have to say hello to the pastor’s wife, who is conventionally attractive and posts often on social media about her diet and workout routine.

Every woman I spoke to was a victim of a culture that taught them to expect constant evaluation. Women who adhered closely to the ideal beauty standard felt precarious, like they had a limited shelf life. Those who felt far from society’s beauty standard suspected that the thinner women around them were internally mocking or, worse, pitying them. Everyone assumed they were being watched and evaluated.

For many of us, pushing against the impulse to evaluate our and others’ bodies takes effort because it feels so normal. But I don’t want this for my kids. If there are young people in your life (especially tween and teen girls) who are watching Ariana Grande’s new video or looking at tour photos, you may have opportunities to discuss eating disorders and body dysmorphia.

But though I do want to talk about the pressure women feel to shrink or sculpt our bodies, I also want to have those talks without dwelling on the body of one celebrity. Getting out of the surveillance cycle means proactively addressing these issues instead of relying on pop culture to dictate the terms and timing of the conversation.

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Even with the best intentions, I can’t provide an analysis of Grande’s health from afar. Because I’ve experienced anorexia, I could speculate about symptoms she might be dealing with—hair loss, weak fingernails, the ceasing of menstruation—but I can’t sit with her and ask questions about how she actually feels. If I knew Grande, though, I’d be checking in with her.

The active involvement of friends and family is often part of successful eating disorder treatment. We can’t neglect each other’s bodies. But if the only information about a person we have is photographs, we can’t really care. All we can do is watch, assume, speculate.

Bodies matter, but our obsession with them prevents us from seeing each other as complex, multifaceted beings. As the wellness industry spends billions to keep us preoccupied with the physical, and as the rise of GLP-1 drugs brings a new wave of celebrity weight speculation, Christians can agree that, yes, our bodies matter—but there is so much more to a God-created human than size or shape.

Kelsey Kramer McGinnis is the worship correspondent for Christianity Today. She is a coauthor of The Myth of Good Christian Parenting and the author of Thin, Holy, and Never Enough (forthcoming).

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