Animate creation
‘…as we deal rightfully with men, so we should use the like duty even towards the brute beasts… God will condemn us for cruel and unkind folk, if we pity not the brute beasts…’ Sermons on Deuteronomy p877, 770 – my emphasis

As Calvin elsewhere notes, animals are innocent, and their suffering is the consequence of human sin. Moreover, animals cannot ask for mercy; rather we must go to them ‘of our own good will’ . Solomon bluntly informs us that a man who is cruel to his beasts is wicked . The argument, 'I was not cruel, I only ate it' is like the bank-robber's claim to innocence on the basis that he only drove the get-away car.

Cruelty to animals in industrial husbandry is well documented. It would require a deliberate act of will to be ignorant of this. The conditions for chickens, pigs, and cattle cause routine suffering; selective breeding results in ill health and anatomical dysfunction such as the inability of a turkey’s legs to support its body weight without fracturing. Slaughterhouse studies show a significant failure rate in stunning, and deliberate sadism by workers . The latest example of the latter is the two workers fined for playing baseball with live turkeys - and this in a facility claiming to have some of the highest standards in the UK. Worse, it is increasingly likely that the meat in your mouth was imported, and that the animal was bred in industrial facilities with little or no welfare regulation.

Matthew Scully describes the condition of livestock in a modern industrialised facility in the US: The animals ‘lie covered in their own urine and excrement, with broken legs from trying to escape or just to turn, covered with festering sores, tumours, ulcers, lesions, or what my guide shrugged off as the routine “pus pockets.”’

Which is the more morally contemptible: those who build their fortunes on such abuse, or those who build their paunches on it?

Human beings
Vexing of [the poor is]… a kind of sucking of the blood…. Take heed that you use no such cruelty towards your neighbours ... God in heaven considers your cruelty, and in the end he will revenge it. Deut p574-5

Fairtrade has drawn our attention to inequitable trading practices and subsidies. These evils favour the rich over the poor. Less well-known are the indirect effects of meat-eating in the industrial world.

a. Two thirds of cattle food in the industrial world is imported from the developing world where there is a shortage of grain. The UN estimates that 15% of the cereals now fed to livestock would alleviate global starvation. Bizarrely, at the height of the same 1984 famine which inspired the Band Aid concert, Ethiopia exported crops to the UK to feed our livestock. If we in the industrial world reduced our meat consumption by half over a fifteen-year period, the number of malnourished children in the developing world would decline by 3.6 million . That figure would be much higher if international food policy were co-ordinated with reduced meat consumption. Similar considerations apply to the unsustainable use of water resources in factory farming: globally, 1 billion people lack adequate safe water. As Ron Sider, echoing Gandhi, put it: 'Live more simply that others may simply live'.

b. I hesitate to mention that contemporary levels of food consumption in the industrial world, especially of meat, are associated with an epidemic of eating related illnesses: heart disease, diabetes and cancer. Although there is a strong Judeao-Christian tradition which condemns such self-abuse, it seems a merely sub-Christian matter of self-interest to point this out. However, as none of us is an island, I suppose that the impact of our self-abuse on family and friends, not to mention the health-care system, ought to commend itself to us as an ethical consideration. Moreover, rapidly increasing meat consumption in parts of the developing world means that globally, for the first time in history, the illnesses of overconsumption are set to outweigh those of malnourishment.

If we ‘corrupt by abuse’ the gifts of God, he will judge us ‘cruel and unkind folk’. Even if we aspire only to ethical eating, a good place to start would be to discriminate about the sources of the food in our mouths, and to cut out the routine consumption of meat. Covenant consumption involves more. It is in ‘graceful meals’ that we recognise who Jesus is,  and anticipate in repentance and hope the restoration of all things in him.

Books and Resources
There are two excellent recent books by conservative Christian authors:

Matthew Scully (2002) Dominion St Martin’s Griffin NY
Stephen H Webb (2001) Good Eating Baker Grand Rapids

There are many useful organisations with websites, including:

Compassion in World Farming – a campaigning organisation with a high standard of factual accuracy, and good policy suggestions. 

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals – again, generally reliable campaigning organisation, but more focused on ‘headline’ issues.

Vegan Society – includes practical advice on diet and sources; has links to 2000 recipes.

Christian Vegetarian Association – a broad church; includes FAQs and recipes

The Bible is rich in references to that most basic form of consumption: eating. Indeed, eating is emblematic of consumption more generally; we can be frugal with resources, eat into them, or gobble them up. As we ‘give thanks’ for food, we symbolically give thanks for all we consume, and consider it superfluous to repeat our thanksgiving for each individual gift (Eph 5.20). Yet the contemporary Church, especially the evangelical church, has little to say on the matter of eating. It was not always so. Until the mid-nineteenth century, our eating habits, their effect on other people, and the associated use of resources, all featured in sermons and commentaries. The ‘deadly sin’ of gluttony was simply sin for the Reformers to whom all covenant-breaking is deadly; nowadays gluttony is a super-size virtue, but poor fare for a sermon. The loss of such teaching coincides with both the growth of industrial production methods, and the Church’s retreat from piety to pietism. The result has been the associated loss of any biblical perspective on consumption in general, and eating in particular. Christian freedom has become un-Christian licence. Fat bodies, thin theology.

Evangelical Christians in the industrial world are usually fully integrated into a life-style which promotes unsustainable consumption, contempt for creation, oppression of the poor and high levels of self-induced illness. Our light is hidden in a burger. There are many aspects to this. I consider below only the economic and ethical aspects of covenant consumption (through the emblem of eating) as it occurs in inanimate, animate and human creation. Of course, a full gospel vision of covenant eating is full of positive hope for the restoration of creation (see here and here), so this is merely an ethical reminder of our collective neglect.

I have been told that the issues treated here are driven by mawkish sentimentality about animals, pragmatism or a slavish subservience to a Green agenda. Space prevents a full biblical rebuttal of these allegations, so I will rely upon John Calvin, the sixteenth century reformer, for an ethical introduction to each section.1 Now Calvin has been accused of many things, but rarely of maudlin sentimentality, mere pragmatism or subservience to Political Correctness. Moreover, most commentators will concede that his theology is thickened with scripture to an unusual degree.

Inanimate Creation

‘Let him who possesses a field, so partake of its yearly fruits, that he may not suffer the ground to be injured by his negligence….  [L]et every one regard himself as the steward of God in all things which he possesses. Then he will [not]… corrupt by abuse those things which God requires to be preserved.’ Genesis Commentary 2.15

a.       We should not, as Calvin puts it, corrupt by abuse those things which God requires to be preserved. In modern parlance, good stewardship requires sustainability. International trade is one thing; it is another to routinely consume food which has travelled half way round the world. The pattern of meat consumption in the industrial world is especially unsustainable. If it became the global pattern, several planets would be required to grow animal feed, and several more to dispose of waste. Already the consequences of such meat consumption are apparent: destruction of the rain forests; desertification; excrement pollution of water and land.

b.      Good stewardship also requires prudence in our use of land so as to provide for all, not just the rich. Livestock in traditional mixed economy farms can be efficient sources of labour, clothing, fertiliser, barter and, rarely, meat. However, in industrial economies, meat is the most resource-costly form of food because livestock waste most of what they eat: 1 kg of beef requires 16 kg of grain; it also needs 200 times the volume of water as 1 kg of potatoes. Between one third and one half of the world’s grain harvest (mostly grown in the developing world) is fed to livestock (mostly consumed in the industrial world). The dramatic destruction of rain forests is one direct consequence.

c.       It is not often recognised that meat production, storage and marketing is responsible for 10% of Green House Gas (GHG) production. The Stern Report noted that reduction of meat consumption is a highly cost efficient and effective way of reducing GHGs. Eshel and Martin calculate that the most effective single thing a family can do to combat global warming is not to switch to a Prius car, but to cut out routine meat consumption.2 No great sacrifice or change in life-style is required.

The duty of stewardship requires us to live, as an ethical minimum, sustainably.

1. Space prevents more than the tip of an iceberg. For further discussion see chapter 3 of my Six Modern Myths (2001 IVP )

2. G Eshel & P Martin (2006) Diet, Energy and Global Warming Earth Interactions vol 10.9

It is quite common these days to hear people talking about “Christianity and Politics” and perhaps the suggestion is made that we should not view them as existing in two separate worlds.  There should be, we are told, a dialogue between the two.  Politics can benefit from an injection of Christian ‘values’ (a term that should be submitted to some careful scrutiny), and Christianity itself can profit from a more public profile.  The idea of a dialogue requires there to be dialogue partners and here there may be a number of ways to proceed.  Is this a dialogue between the church(es) and state, or between theology and political science, or is this just a call for Christians who are involved in politics to be more forthcoming about their faith?  However we answer this, the implication remains that 'Christianity' and 'politics' are seen to be, at least potentially and possibly usually, self-contained spheres that should nevertheless talk to each other.  Now it may well be true that such an implication is not intended, and even denied, but it is there nevertheless and so the title of this piece wants to suggest, a little provocatively, that it is time to end any dialogue on this basis.

We will only be able to make a genuine contribution to politics in the UK on a Christian basis if we recognise the twofold necessity of a Christian politics.  On the one hand we must accept that politics involves us whether we like it or not.  We may not support a particular party, or even go out to vote on polling day, but the very real political difference between living in Britain or Iraq concerns us and should lead us to prayer (1 Timothy 2:2).  Politics then is one of the fundamental ways in which we are joined together with our neighbours in this world.  This draws us on to the second necessity which is that God calls us to love our neighbour and this command contains within it a responsibility for politics.  The Gospel is a reshaping power that turns our whole life around to follow the King Jesus.  This Gospel is concerned also for our political life.

It might be that we prefer to close our eyes and forget about such things, but this twofold necessity means that politics is part of our life and that the Gospel, as the message and power of God’s redemption of our whole existence, claims this part of our life also.  The Christian life is an integral whole so a Christian politics is not an artificial creation born out of our own striving, our own ingenious dialogue with ‘the world’.  Just as any other part of the Christian life, politics must start with confession of our own failing and weaknesses, and progresses only as far as we let the Gospel work through us.

What we will need to begin in this column is an exploration of the nature of the political task, along with other social tasks, so that in exploring the key issues and problems facing us today we may clarify how the Gospel enlightens the way forward for politics in the UK.  Given that politics is a specific and limited task we will also enquire into other areas where our lives are necessarily engaged in different societal structures.  Coming next will be a discussion of "Covenant Eating".