Category: Theology & Faith

From Christianity Today:

The local grocery store is the space where we gather the fruit of the earth — all of which come from God’s gracious hand — and distribute them to the creatures made in God’s image. Take away all the sophisticated marketing labels and bold two-for-one signs, and you have a place where the gifts of God and the people of God meet.

Among those gifts are the products or the very flesh of the “beasts of the earth and birds of the air,” given to us as food, according the Book of Genesis (9:2-3). I think it’s fair to say that Jesus — through whom all things were made (Col. 1:16)—has a special interest in grocery stores and what we do there.

He’s concerned about, among other things, the fact the eggs we have for breakfast and the rotisserie chicken we pick up for a quick dinner may have come from circumstances that are appalling — chickens crammed in buildings by the tens of thousands, treated like machines that are fed a diet designed simply to make them produce more eggs or tastier flesh.

When my eco-friendly friends tell me facts like these, well, I sometimes resent it. I feel like they are sticking their noses into my business. But as I think about it, I know that Jesus is using them — even the self-assured and self-righteous among them — to remind me that he’s just as nosy as they are.

Read the rest.

The author goes on to make the case that animals will be part of God’s redeemed creation and that it matters how we treat them here and now.

However, then there’s this:

To be sure, we still live between the times, the time before the kingdom, when by God’s design we have the right and responsibility to use animals for clothing, for scientific research, for entertainment, and for food — especially on behalf of the poor and oppressed. Given the poverty and hunger and disease that infects our world, I do not believe that these wild and arresting biblical images demand we all become vegetarians or buy only cage-free eggs or only organic-fed beef or whatever.

This is partly right, I think. We shouldn’t insist on an unattainable moral purity or downplay real human need. But it seems to me that the author is positing an opposition between animal and human well-being (especially that of “the poor and oppressed”) that, if not illusory, is often overstated.

Just a few examples:

–It’s been well-known for a long time (and it’s really just common sense if you think about it) that it takes far fewer resources to raise plant foods than to raise meat. A shift to a less meat-intensive diet could, therefore, feed many more people than the current shift to global levels of meat consumption that approach those of the western world (particularly the USA).

–The clear-cutting of the South American rain forests to raise cattle not only damages the environment and causes the extinction of species, but it pushes small producers (often indigenous people) off their land.

–The meat industry is responsible for a large percentage of greenhouse gases and, as is well known, the effects of climate change will be experienced soonest and most acutely by very poor people throughout the world.

In other words, the poor and oppressed would likely benefit the most from a large-scale shift toward a less meat-intensive diet. And what’s most required is for rich countries to curtail their unsustainable use of animal products, both because of its effects on animal, human, and environmental well-being and because of the example it sets for the rest of the world, encouraging a stampede toward an unsustainable lifestyle.

I’m not saying that there are never genuine conflicts of interest between animals and human beings, but our tendency to overstate the scope and intractability of those conflicts can lead to complacency about very real problems. Moreover, our primary response to the needs of poor people should be to institute policies to alleviate poverty, not to use it as one more excuse to sacrifice animals to our insatiable appetites. (I’m leaving aside what possible justification, in terms of benefiting the poor, there could be for using animals for entertainment.)

I think it’s great that CT is talking about this, but I would want to push them a bit in recognizing how unnecessary many of our uses (and abuses) of animals actually are for human flourishing.