Should Christians Be Vegetarians? — An unqualified perspective
I don’t believe in God. I’ve never read the bible cover to cover. For these reasons, I’m entirely unqualified to write seriously on Christian ethics. But this paper isn’t designed to make a Christian put down the knife and pick up a fork, it won’t even set the table for debate. All I’m doing is writing a menu of which questions are worth asking. And because I am clearly taking a position on the issue and my biases are bound to be displayed, I will write in the first person.
Starting with an exercise in futility, I will attempt to argue that Christians should be vegetarians using bible verses. Of course, these bible verses are entirely out of context, and have been translated, interpreted, and re-translated, and re-interpreted more times than most Christians would like to admit. But for whatever reason, they consistently arise even today as the backbone of Christian thought, so I can’t ignore them.
We appropriately begin with Genesis 1:26.
And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
Obviously, the most important word used is “dominion”. And as is our luck, translations don’t agree that “dominion” is the proper translation for this passage, let alone what the definition of the term is. But for the sake of our futile discussion, let us assume divine perfection in our chosen translation of the passage. The twenty-first century definition of “dominion” is sovereignty or complete ownership. From this interpretation, it would seem as if God has bestowed upon us a duty of guardianship as leaders and stewards of the animal kingdom. Oddly, this particular passage, which can easily be construed as mandating compassion to animals, is commonly used as justification for the slaughter of animals. Strange. But there’s more to the bible of course, and I can’t be 100% certain of the intent of this passage, so I move to ignore it.
Perhaps there are less ambiguous verses to discuss? Such as Isaiah 66:3.
He that kills an ox is as if he slew a person. He who sacrifices a lamb is like the one that breaks a dog’s neck.
Better? Not really actually. Generally, this passage is seen in the context of sacrifices or offerings. However tempting it is, I am unable to justify putting this passage in the context of vegetarianism. And I don’t want to. The only purpose the passage serves is to prove God gave at least some consideration to the lives of animals. Further demonstrating this point is Proverbs 12:10.
A righteous man has regard for the life of his animal.
By safely assuming that “regard” can be interpreted as “assigns value” or “gives consideration to in moral decisions”, it is clear that God valued animals at least to some extent. They were never meant to be meat machines to manipulate and modify to best suit our gustatory preferences. At least some consideration should be given to their lives. Keeping this in mind, we can move on from simple bible passages to stories and themes.
At first glance, Acts 10 is in accordance with Christians eating meat. Almost commanding it. As the story goes, a tired and hungry apostle named Peter is on a roof praying. While in prayer, he falls into a trance and the sky opens up before him and a voice commands “Get up, Peter. Kill and eat.” The vision displayed all manner of “four footed animals, as well as reptiles and birds”. Peter protests, saying that he would not eat that which is “unclean”. God gets pissed, and tells Peter that he shouldn’t call anything made by god “unclean”. In Acts 10:16 they repeat the whole exchange two more times cus God does what God wants.
Now to interpret this. While Acts 10 is often portrayed as permission to kill for food, when put in context, there is more to it. In fact, “Kill and eat” as relating to animals is never referenced again in Acts 10. Peter himself gives us his interpretation of the events in Acts 11, and he decides that the vision of animals was meant to represent gentiles and non-believers. God was telling Peter that the non-believers are not “unclean” for they were made by God, and he should not discount them as inferior. Never for a second does Peter consider his vision to be a statement on animal subjugation. Because it is unclear the bible is even referencing literal animals in Acts 10–11, it should be ignored in our discussion.
That leaves us to tackle the “Lamb of God” and the Eucharist. Before Jesus died, he told his followers to partake in a feast of bread and wine. Bread symbolizes Jesus’ body, and wine his blood. Jesus is the Lamb of God, so today Christians often interpret the Eucharist as feasting on a lamb. Extrapolating a feast on the metaphorical Lamb of God to justify a feast on a literal, less-divine lamb requires a substantial stretch of the imagination. And yet for Catholics who take the Eucharist literally, this is a common conviction. Using the Eucharist as evidence of God’s permission to eat meat is misguided. I understand the importance that the Eucharist has to Christians, and I recognize the value of tradition, however arcane. But when a metaphorical practice is taken literally to rationalize the slaughter of an animal, it is no longer defensible.
Finally, I will address larger Christian themes and ethics. I’m no longer referencing bible passages, bible stories, or really the bible at all. Instead, I’ll use Christian philosophy and overlying themes of morality to argue my point.
I can reasonably assume that most Christians would agree to the following guideline for morality:
Do not commit acts that you would not commit in the name of God.
Because God is omniscient, then a Christian should keep God in their mind at all times and act accordingly. Accepting this premise, a good Christian would only endorse that which God would endorse. Act how God would act. Have compassion for creatures God would have compassion for. If a Christian chooses to buy factory farmed meat in the name of God, they implicitly assume that God endorses the practices used by factory farms. But I challenge any Christian to walk into a fully stocked feed-house and, while gagging on the smell, tell me where they see God’s presence. See those who have lost jobs due to the hypoxic zones in the Gulf of Mexico and tell them it is part of God’s plan. Observe blood-stained kill floors of a slaughterhouse and announce that this is the Lord’s wish. Inform a patient suffering from infection that there is no medicine to fight their sickness because God gave us the right to use animals however we want, and that includes using enormous amounts of antibiotics. See chickens bred too heavy to stand, perpetually sick cows living whole lives on medication, and calves separated from their mothers at birth, and tell me that this is justified because God put animals in our “domain”. God would not endorse these acts. And I hope a God-fearing Christian wouldn’t either.
Endlessly, Christians lecture on God’s limitless compassion and the sacredness of life. Fighting zealously to ban abortions, they consider themselves voices for the voiceless. But they do not see their own logic through. A fully mature, thinking, breathing, and feeling cow’s slaughter is justified because it tastes good, while a newly conceived, unthinking, unbreathing, and unfeeling blastocyst must be protected at all costs*. I don’t mean to promote any abortion agenda, I only mean to expose logical inconsistencies that Christians must address.
Political hypocrisy aside, there are many philosophical arguments that Christians cherry-pick through and apply inconsistently. Consider Pascal’s Wager. There are many faults with this wager, but it still presents itself in Christian thought, so I will mention it. Pascal said that logically you should believe in God, because if you believe in God and he exists, you get infinite happiness. If you believe in God, and he doesn’t exist, your gains and losses are minimal and finite. Reversed, if you don’t believe in God and he exists, you receive infinite damnation, whereas you can gain only finitely if you don’t believe God and he doesn’t exist. Put in a table…
Applying similar logic to the vegetarian debate, we can imagine new conversations at the Pearly Gates. Here is the logic table…
The only debatable element in this table is the top-right box. It is easily explained. If you are a vegetarian, and you do so out of compassion and love for animals, then God with his famed omniscience should recognize this. The Christian God is so exceptional because he valued intent over action. If the intent is clean, the action is clean. I acknowledge the likelihood of the bottom left box is low, but while we can debate the likelihood of the logic boxes to occur and wager our actions accordingly, this line of reasoning persists. Compassion will not be punished by God.
To close, I will summarize what I perceive as Christianity’s major tenets. God instructed humility. The humility to realize that humanity is not above the animal kingdom. God admonished greed. The greed that leads us to eat Earth destroying foods and consider ourselves justified because of a claim to “dominion”. But above all, God extolled love. If God did not mean for this love to unconditionally be extended to all beings, then is it really love? While God did not explicitly make vegetarianism a precept for Christians, following this lifestyle can surely do only good.
— Ben Chapman, 2017
*I wonder, would the same Christians who adamantly attack abortion of humans as an abomination also attack an animal’s right to an abortion? If a dog hypothetically wanted an abortion, should it be allowed one? Does trimester matter?
