Jesus, Junk Food and Christian Charity

Douglas Wilson’s writings are incredibly helpful, and I have often had occasion positively to quote him. But I do sometimes weary of Wilson continually defending junk food and stereotyping those who try to be healthy. It is clear from Wilson’s writings and statements over the past decade that he has an animus against any health care practice that is not mainstream, whether health food, chiropractic, naturopathy, home birth, etc.When challenged about this with respect to health food, Wilson always responds that he doesn’t actually have a problem with health food as such; rather, his target is a type of food idolatry. That sounds fine, until one looks closer to find out exactly what Wilson means when he refers to “food idolatry.” For Wilson, the class of “food idolaters” doesn’t just include a person who finds it difficult to receive hospitality when the food isn’t up to a certain standard, or who goes around feeling guilty instead of thankful for his lunch, or who looks down on everyone else in the world that makes different food choices. If Wilson was only attacking these types of attitudes, there wouldn’t be a huge controversy about this in Moscow right now and I wouldn’t be writing this post.

Rather, Wilson defines health food idolatry so broadly that it pretty much includes anyone who is really concerned about nutritional issues, organic farming, or even anyone who is just really into healthy eating. Similarly, anyone who thinks God cares about what we eat is guilty of food idolatry within Wilson’s calculus.

Judgmental Stereotypes

My concern is that Wilson’s writings are fueling these judgmental attitudes towards those who want to be healthy. Consider a few examples. In a Credenda Agenda article from 2009 titled ‘The Fat is the Lord’s’, Wilson wrote that if you are zealous for healthy food, the chances are that you have been infected by false religion. In the same article he compared health-conscious Christians to both the 1st century Judaizers and to 19th century cult leaders. In his article ‘Allergic to Other People‘, Wilson goes even further and suggests that those who have food intolerances and allergies and consequently take their own food to someone else’s house are enemies of church unity. As he writes, “If you have ever showed up to a dinner party (not a potluck) unannounced with your own food, then you are an enemy of church unity.” Nor is that all of Wilson’s one-size-fits-all stereotypes which effectively stigmatize vast swaths of the Christian population. In his two-part video series ‘Organic or non-organic? Does God Care?’, (see here and here) Wilson suggests that those who think God cares about what they eat are “a certain type of soul, a certain type of heart.” Throughout Wilson’s series on ‘Creation and Food’ he continually focuses on the negative aspects of health food (which he calls ‘foodism’), including the statism, neopaganism, romanticism, sentimentalism, New Age influences and the “cluster of food confusions” that “include guilt, fear, acceptance of manipulative doctrines, not to mention acceptance of slanders against the goodness of God.” On the other hand, the positive aspects of healthy eating (which, in the interest of pastoral balance, should at least be acknowledged as existing) get no mention at all.

The result of this imbalanced approach is that everyone who decides to pursue a healthy lifestyle, let alone those who disbelieve in the spiritual neutrality of food (more about that in a minute), are squeezed into the caricature of “a certain type of soul, a certain type of heart.” As Valerie Jacobsen pointed out in a comment on Wilson’s blog, he wastes no time condemning those who have special diets as being

• self-deluded hypochondriacs
• enemies of church unity
• play-acting, engaging in fakery
• manipulative and selfish
• disrupting table fellowship
• an insult to justification by faith alone
• irrational, unreasonable, deceived
• allergic to charity
• not loving God with all their minds
• usually women not cared for by their radically cowardly husbands
• usually women experiencing the abdication of authority by fathers and husbands
• possibly radically unsubmissive
• the cause of widespread divisiveness that threatens to split churches
• typically experiencing severe marital breakdown
• destructive to their own families
• can be compared to someone faking a ‘broken leg’
• a rash on the Body of Christ
• customers of the ’boutique allergy industry’

Those familiar with Wilson’s corpus of writing about food will recognize all of the above labels, which Wilson routinely applies to those in his community who are overly concerned with health food. Jacobsen went on to suggest that these stereotypes leave no room for relatively healthy people who want to stay that way and are limiting their diets in some way. Because everyone gets squeezed into the same mold, the operating assumption is that if you want to pursue a healthy lifestyle, it is probably because of sin issues or psychological disfunction. Indeed, Wilson teaches that anyone
who informs their host of food allergies (unless they were facing immediate death) are self-centered sinners engaged in acts of treason against the unity of Christ’s body.

Now normally things like this are just matters of personal choice that can be left up to each family. However, various Christians have shared with me that in communities influenced by Wilson’s teaching, they feel increasingly marginalized, stereotyped and judged for their decision to embrace a healthy lifestyle. Some have even told me that they have to keep secret what they buy at the grocery store.

Wilson on Food Intolerances

One of the ironies about Doug Wilson’s writings on food is that he has gone to great lengths over the years to try to show that we cannot really trust the science behind what the, so called, ‘experts’ tell us. Other pastors in his presbytery have also chimed in on this anti-science bandwagon, delighting to list all the times when science has got things wrong. Yet at the same time as dismissing the entire scientific establishment when it comes to issues of health, Wilson apparently thinks we have warrant for accepting his radically idiosyncratic views on the science of health, such as that in order for an allergy to be symptomatic it has to be visible, a view which has no grounding in any peer reviewed research and which functions in the context of Wilson’s polemics to obscure the distinction between an allergy and a food intolerance. (My friend Stacy McDonald has written an excellent Biblical-based response to Wilson’s views on food intolerances in her article ‘Just Eat It?‘.)

The Larger War Against Health

Wilson is not alone. He now has a chorus of followers in the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC) who seem to have nothing better to do with their time then to sit around and write invectives against Christians who think healthy bodies and healthy land is a good idea. This is all done in the name of ferreting out idolatry, although the possibility that we can make an idol out of junk food is conveniently ignored.

For example, in December 2010, James Arrick wrote an article for Credenda Agenda titled ‘Agnosticism and Agriculture’ in which he argued that the concern about industrialized farming among Christians is “about a newer pagan movement sneaking into the church.” He suggests that those Christians who think the earth is being raped by chemical fertilizers are basically ‘Marxists.’

Similarly, Toby Sumpter (pastor of Doug Wilson’s sister church in Moscow Idaho) has suggested that “the sheer volume” of “facebook likes and shares” related to eating well is symptomatic of our idolatry problem in this area. Like Wilson, Pastor Sumpter automatically assumes that anyone who values organic food and healthy eating must only be doing so because of deep seated sin issues. As he writes,

So pretty much when anybody tells me they are really concerned about nutritional issues, organic farming, or are just really into healthy eating, I pretty much just picture them going home and kissing little icons of Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud.

Although Douglas Wilson was quick to praise Toby for his “clarion blast that reveals exactly what is going on”, not everyone was happy with Pastor Sumpter’s rash words. The following day, following significant push-back against his diatribe, Pastor Sumpter wrote another piece defending his rhetorical flourishes by painting himself as a purveyor of Lady Wisdom, and Lady Wisdom herself as a kind of ghoulishly-shrieking, mascara-streaked face Mad Woman deliberately turning people off with her screechy, fanatical ugliness – only to turn round and laugh heartily at them as they die in the torment of their sins for having rejected her counsel.” I wish this were an exaggeration, but you can read Pastor Sumpter’s follow-up post here.

Some of Doug Wilson’s fans have taken it even further and suggested “that those with these intolerances ought to be disciplined publicly if need be by the church…” Douglas Wilson does not go that far, but we might ask ‘why not?’ since he does call people with food scruples “a real rash on the body.”

Not to be beat, earlier this year Douglas Wilson’s daughter issued a call to repentance to Christians who are supposedly guilty of letting pagans have authority over their consciences, if not indirectly complicit in sins such as abortion and homosexuality, because they prefer the healthy food produced by God-haters to chemically-processed, hormone-saturated food produced by Christian farmers. In reality, however, Christian farmers who grow organic food hardly get a better rap in the Wilson calculus, excepting his acknowledgement that “Joel Salatin sounds like a fun guy.” The real irony, of course, is that Wilson’s continuing defense of large-scale corporate farming and his antipathy to any and all practices that sound like something Wendell Berry would support, cannot help but offer indirect support to God-hating agricultural magnets like Monsanto and other mega-corporations.

On street level, the frequent casting of aspersions on people’s character, the over-the-top rhetoric, and the incessant stereotyping, is resulting in some major pastoral problems that tend to be ignored. In one CREC church in the Pacific Northwest that will remain unnamed, friends have told me that they have to keep their preference for organic food secret, that they try not talk about the food they like in all cases where that food happens to be healthy, and that they even feel very hesitant to invite the church leaders over to their house for dinner if healthy food is on the menu, for fear that they will be judged and funneled into the growing network of stereotypes with which health-conscious people are routinely associated in that church. Ponder that last point and it should be clear that the disruption of table fellowship cuts both ways.

It would seem that within parts of the CREC and those ministries influenced by Douglas Wilson, the edgy thing right now is to be anti-health, and to write endless articles criticizing organic eating and stereotyping everyone who chooses to pursue a healthy lifestyle. (From what I can make out, this campaign against health is limited to the pulpits, publishing outlets and conferences in the CREC churches of the Pacific Northwest. In the global CREC churches or in the American South and East, being anti-health does not seem to be quite as trendy right now.)

In one sense this is not surprising. Anyone who has spent any time in reformed Presbyterian churches will know that Calvinists love to have things to argue about. Pick five Calvinists who seem to have common beliefs, put them in a room together, and within twenty minutes they will have found something to dispute over. So if it wasn’t organic food, it would be something else. In thirty or forty years from now, I think our children and grandchildren will be chuckling that so many people could get this uptight about trying to make others jump on the anti-organic bandwagon (by then they will have moved onto other erroneous debates, if they haven’t got fed up and left the reformed tradition completely). But right now, while we’re in the midst of this fad, there is a real pastoral need to address this as completely unbiblical.

In a minute I’ll explain why this anti-health trend is so unbiblical, based on Romans 14. At the moment, however, I’d like to issue a positive challenge. To all these church leaders in the Pacific Northwest, my challenge to you is this: don’t simply call on your flock to reevaluate their love of healthy foods without also reevaluating your own priorities. Maybe instead of writing so many blog post and Facebook comments against health-food fanatics, you could spend a fraction of the time trying to hunt down some unhomogenized organic milk for an elderly lady in your church who can’t digest anything else. Maybe instead of devoting so much energy in a largely imaginary war against food fanatics who are about to take over the church, you could spend a fraction of the time getting some gluten-free products for a single mother who is experimenting to find out if a gluten-free diet will help her autistic son. And when your kids ask you what you are doing you can teach them a valuable lesson: “I’m buying this organic milk for Mrs. Krammer because she can’t digest ‘ordinary’ milk, and this is how is how we show Christian love to those God has put in our lives.”

Science and the Herd Instinct

Wilson and Sumpter have both alleged that one of the problems with health food fanatics is their blind acceptance of the authority of ‘science.’ The irony of this charge is that Wilson and his followers are quick to advertize any and all scientific discoveries that supposedly show that alternative health practices are bogus, or that supposedly prove there are no benefits to eating organic. Wilson’s glowing response to Alex Avery’s The Truth About Organic Foods is an example, and other instances could be multiplies endlessly. If there is a study that a university issues claiming to prove that free-range eggs are no better than eggs from caged hens, or that organic bread isn’t all it’s cracked
up to be, you can be sure that Douglas Wilson will use all his weight to advertise it. I sometimes wonder if this is propelled by the kind of unthinking herd instinct that is willing to just blindly accept whatever the scientific establishment says is true. As John Barach pointed out in a thoughtful response to Toby Sumpter’s tirade:

[Sumpter] criticizes homeopathic medicine or the interest in organic food because it isn’t backed up by science, real science, he says, with “proof” — as if that kind of science isn’t precisely the sort of thing that is manipulated all the time (e.g,. the tobacco company that funds research that proves that tobacco, additives and all, isn’t bad for you; preciselythe cancer society that funds research that proves that tobacco is bad for you).

Meanwhile, what’s wrong with sticking a piece of garlic in your child’s ear to heal an ear infection because you heard a couple friends say it worked for them?  Do you need to wait for guys in white lab coats to tell you that that’s okay?  Do you have to trust those labcoat guys when they say not to use garlic but to use their antibiotics instead, the sale of which is paying their wages so that they have a strong motive to promote their product?  Or is it the case that we’re free, as Christians, to use the antibiotics or not, to use the garlic or not — and to post about it on Facebook if we feel like it, and to love each other regardless?

Don’t Forget Romans 14!

By now you should get the picture. There has been a passive-aggressive internet disputation about these doubtful matters that has been going on for years and years. But let’s assume that people like Wilson and Sumpter are justified in some of their criticisms, and that Moscow’s health-food crazies can even match Wilson and Sumpter in their uncharitable responses. Let’s assume that all Wilson’s stereotypes are correct. Let’s assume that most people who put a premium on healthy eating and a healthy lifestyle are indeed as immature as Wilson alleges. Let’s assume that most instances of gluten-intolerance are actually just hang-ups with no medical basis. Now ironically, if you give Wilson the benefit of the doubt and assume all of this, it hardly helps his overall theological point. For if these people with health hang-ups really are the weaker brethren like Wilson alleges, then Paul’s comments in Romans 14 ought to be definitive: bear with their scruples, lest the unity of the body be disrupted. For Douglas Wilson, however, bearing with the food scruples of the weaker brethren is actively discouraged. In his post ‘Allergic to Other People‘ he writes that the church can accommodate all sorts of people, just not people with food scruples:

The church is capable of including any number of subcultural groups within her pale, and can do so without great difficulty. Ham radio operators, rodeo riders, surfers, and rock climbers are all welcome. And what they all do the Saturday before worship does not disrupt the reality of their worship together.

But food subcultures are a different matter. Food scruples are the deathly enemy of church unity.

Wilson isn’t too specific what type of food scruples he’s talking about, and the only one he mentions specifically in the above article is gluten intolerance. Elsewhere he criticizes those who prefer organic food or who try to avoid chemically-processed food. But think about this through the lens of the Pauline teaching I mentioned earlier. If Paul could tell believers in Corinth and Rome to bear with the scruples of the weaker brethren who wouldn’t eat meat sacrificed to idols, surely we should be able to bear with those who eat organic or think they suffer from a gluten intolerance.

The reason it’s important to make this point is because Wilson is not merely targeting a certain type of Pharisaical holier-than-thou-health-food idolatry. He isn’t just talking about people who go around judging anyone who eats at McDonalds. He is critiquing that, to be sure, and I applaud him for doing so. But he is also going beyond this to suggest that the gospel has no place for health food subcultures at all.

But what’s wrong with a health food subculture in the church? Why should gluten intolerance “disrupt the reality of their worship together” in a way that being a ham radio operator doesn’t? If Paul could advocate a Jew-Gentile mixed church (Galatians), a church in which some people eat meat and other weaker brethren have scruples about eating meat (Rom. 14), then how much more should we be able to tolerate, in the name of charity, a church made up of people whose conscience allows them to eat junk food and other ‘weaker brothers’ whose conscience only allows them to eat organic food? It is when we ask question like this that we find that this whole issue really hinges on Christian charity.

Or again, if Saint Paul could tolerate the food scruples of weaker brethren (Rom 14:1), then why does Pastor Wilson teach that we shouldn’t? If Paul could tell the Christians in Rome “Do not destroy with your food the one for whom Christ died” (14:15) and “let us pursue the things which make for peace” (14:19) and “Do not destroy the work of God for the sake of food” (14:20), then how can it be right to say, as Wilson does, that all these other subcultures can be tolerated in his church but he draws the line when it comes to a health food subculture?

Building on Romans 14, I would argue that what Wilson calls ‘Food fadism’ is not something that brings division to the church. Rather, the thing that brings division is when leaders tell their flock not to tolerate weaker brothers who follow after food fads, or when we imagine that the church cannot accommodate people who have different views on the question “Does God care what you eat?” Interestingly, Wilson himself used to advocate this more charitable approach, for he once said, “You don’t get to despise someone for having extra scruples; you don’t get to judge someone for not having nearly as many as you do.” One wishes that Wilson had stopped right there, instead of making it nearly a full time business out of despising those who have more scruples than he does.Okay, but what are the issues behind the issues? Why so much antipathy against the health food movement? After looking through Wilson’s large and growing corpus of articles, blog posts and videos about health food, I have come to the conclusion that the antipathy against healthy eating springs mainly from four myths. I will identify those myths below and explain why I think they are mistaken.

Myth 1. Food can’t help you deal with sin issues.

Throughout his expanding corpus of articles about food, Wilson suggests that what we eat or abstain from eating has no relation to overcoming sin. In his Credenda Agenda article ‘The Fat is the Lord’s,’ he suggests that we are treating food as “false sacraments” if we think it can help us deal with sin. James Jordan echoed this in his book Pig Out?

“It is not a serious matter for a physician to advise abstaining from foods for medical reasons, based on human wisdom. It is, however a very serious thing when men advocate abstaining from foods for religious reasons.”

The reason it is a myth to say that food can’t help you deal with sin issues is because the church has always understood (right from its earliest days) that fasting and abstaining from certain foods as a spiritual discipline are activities that, in concert with other spiritual disciplines, can assist a person in overcoming sins. This isn’t magic, and you can be sure that fasting from meat every Friday and during Lent isn’t going to help the person who doesn’t do it in faith. However, there are enough stories from church history to undermine Wilson’s universal negative statement that food can never help a person to deal with sin issues. (Keep in mind that the presence of even one counter-example is sufficient to refute a universal negative statement.)

Conversely, it is a matter of common knowledge that certain foods make it easier to sin. If I load my child up with energy drinks just before putting him down to bed, or if I feed my children a breakfast of refined foods and high sugar just before leaving for church, I can virtually guarantee that I have created temptations for him to sin. After all, the devil works through means just as God works through means.

Precisely because of this, we must reject the wedge that people like Douglas Wilson and James Jordan are trying to drive between religion and health, that resembles the wedge that secularists try to drive between religion and science

Myth 2. God doesn’t care what’s on the plate, He cares what’s in the heart.