I started running into these Evangelical attitudes 15 years ago when I started doing yoga to help discipline myself to stretch better, something I'd not been very good at in my amateur running career.

When I told my dad, a former Baptist minister, about how much I was starting to love yoga, he had a fit. I was totally confused, until he told me I was worshiping demons in the guise of Hindu gods.

I laughed, but he was dead serious. He had (literally) no idea what he was talking about, but he was quite willing to talk at length. He'd been indoctrinated somewhere with nonsense. That his thinking about yoga was not based in reality was one thing, that he was super emotional about me doing stretching exercises with a group of friends was another thing entirely.

This is, I feel, a perfect object lesson in the dangers of religious extremism.