[joker_minmax]

From my perspective, the belief that the soul and the body are totally separate and that the body is lesser is not actually a Christian belief, but rather a Gnostic one. Unfortunately a lot of the Christianity of America has a twinge of Gnosticism present. The "C.S. Lewis" quote that gets thrown around, "You don't have a soul; you are a soul. You have a body," was never actually said by C.S. Lewis. I actually got a better connection with my body from listening to an Eastern Christian priest talking about how if you think you can separate your body, mind, and soul from each other, you've created a false sense of self.

[luxuryballs]

Yeah agreed, CS Lewis has said a lot about the body and the soul, a few come to mind from first Mere Christianity and then a quote from Screwtape Letters

“And let me make it quite clear that when Christians say the Christ-life is in them, they do not mean simply something mental or moral /…/this new life is spread not only by purely mental acts like belief, /…/ It is not merely the spreading of an idea; it is more like evolution–a biological or super-biological fact. There is no good trying to be more spiritual than God. God never meant man to be a purely spiritual creature. That is why He uses material things like bread and wine to put the new life into us. We may think this rather crude and unspiritual. God does not: He invented eating. He likes matter. He invented it.”

(Screwtape gives advice to use a “body doesn’t matter” philosophy as a way of making the human distracted or ineffective) “At the very least, they can be persuaded that the bodily position makes no difference to their prayers; for they constantly forget, what you must always remember, that they are animals and that whatever their bodies do affects their souls. It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping things out.”

[User23]

The Catholic Church continues to teach that human beings are body and soul and both are essential to the human person. While Lewis wasn’t Catholic, his theology basically was.

[haswell]

Whatever its origins, it’s what the baptists who raised me believed, and it was a view of self and body that was prevalent in the Christian circles of my childhood.

And to your point, it has permeated Christianity more broadly, and arguably western thinking even broader still. I left the church in my teens. My conception of self didn’t shift until decades later after many years of intentional deconstruction. It’s a powerful illusion.