The sight of Goats roaming through the streets of locked down Llandudno was not a one-off. All over the world, animals are responding to the mass human hibernation by venturing into towns and cities. The photos are funny and endearing, but they have provoked a little unease in my conscience, because I used to be vegan and I’m not any more.
It happened in 2010 after reading Second Nature, by Jonathan Balcombe. It’s an astonishing account of the rich complexity of animal life, and shatters the illusion that animals live, eat and reproduce mindlessly. Once you’ve read it, you have no choice but to see them as the truly sentient beings they are.
At the time, I was minister of a Congregational Church, and completing my ministerial training. I never referred to animal rights in sermons or prayers, but I needed some theological outlet, and it came with my final dissertation called ‘Why Don’t Churches Care About Animals?’
Churches really don’t care about animals. In wider society there is a persistent minority of charitable giving and social campaigning focused on animals. But I found literally no example of a single church action, whether charity donation, social campaign, sermon, prayer or newsletter item, that was for the benefit of animals. Some individual church members were vegetarian or vegan, some even campaigned for animal rights, but this was never expressed through the church.
How come churches were filtering out concern for animals? Was the Bible to blame? It does come to us from cultures in which eating and sacrificing animals were unquestioned, but so was slavery, segregation, and patriarchy. The church has moved away from these ills, so how come animals missed out?
The creation story itself is grounds for veganism. In Genesis 1:29 God instructs Adam and Eve thus:
“See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food."
The Garden of Eden was a meat-free zone. But then Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit and were expelled before they could become immortal. They were sent into the harsh environment that we now inhabit, in which death reigns, and work, childbirth, and relations between the sexes, are all painful and distorted.
Christianity understands itself as showing us a way back to paradise - to a form of life in which the effects of the Fall do not rule over us. Christians aspire to a life fitted to an unfallen world, so why isn’t a plant-based diet part of this?
I blame 13th century monk Thomas Aquinas, the most influential Catholic theologian of all time. He aligned the church with the philosophical thought of Aristotle. Regarding our duty towards animals, he applied this Aristotelian gem: all of nature is created with a purpose; the purpose of humans is to worship God, the purpose of animals is to be used by humans.
His peculiar take on Fallenness then cemented the Church’s antipathy towards animals. Unlike the Reformers, who taught that humans are fallen in every sense, Aquinas taught that only the lower nature of humans is fallen. Our rational minds, he claimed, are not. Cue a hierarchy, in which how rational we are determines how fallen we are. So, humans were capable of being rational, animals were not. It didn’t stop there. Men were deemed more rational than women, and white Europeans and their descendants more rational than the dark-skinned indigenous people they met in the lands they colonised.
The church has started to free itself from such assumptions based on sex or race. But medieval assumptions about animals still reign throughout Christendom - among Protestants and Catholics. How can this be? From the perspective of the Fall, animals are better than us. What animal ever committed murder? What animal ever killed for pleasure? All of creation, except humans, lives in harmony with its creator’s design. It’s humans that are fallen, animals that are innocent. It’s their nature that Christians are supposed to aspire to. Yet all churches exclude concern for animals. Or so I thought.
One of the many benefits of leaving mainstream Christianity for Unitarianism, is becoming part of a movement that cares about animals at least as much as wider society, and possibly more. There’s no theological filter here. But veganism is demanding, and years of swimming against the tide within mainstream Christianity wore me down. When I discovered I was soya intolerant, it was easy to back away from a completely plant-based diet. These days I avoid milk-based products and red meat, but not entirely and I’m conscious of animal welfare standards when shopping. But the sight of the goats in Llandudno made me think that I may need to go further. It’s easy for us to ignore animals when we frighten them into invisibility. It’s easier still in a church that filters out all concern for them. But I’m a Unitarian now, and the animals are coming back into view in a way that I’ll find harder to ignore from now on.
I’ve posted the dissertation referred to on this blog. If you’re interested in a more detailed analysis and theological foundation for animals rights click here, or on the title on the right sidebar.
Thanks Francis. It never occurred to me that the Garden of Eden was a 'meat free zone'. You probably know that within the British Unitarian Movement Rev Feargus O'Connor is the leading light in the field of animal rights.
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