The Problem with Christian's Concessions
The Advent of my break up with factory farmed meat and drive-thrus
“If a consumer begins to think and act in consideration of his responsibilities, then he vastly increases his capacities as a person. And he begins to be effective in a different way – a way that is smaller perhaps, and certainly less dramatic, but sounder, and able sooner or later to assume the force of example.”
Wendell Berry
It was lunchtime, in the middle of one of those weeks where the stillness and slowness of Advent was locked in a sustained head on collision with the tenor of church work in mid-December. I had just pulled through the drive-thru of the nearest Chick-Fil-A, and sat with the car still running, looking down at the box of chicken fingers in my lap. And though consuming fast food wasn’t the norm for me, sometimes, especially at Christmas when the schedule got tighter and the to-do-list of ministry, parenthood, and the farm, exceeded the boundaries of a work day, meals like these seemed like a necessity, and a worthy concession made in the name of the good and important work that needed to get done in both church and home.
There was traffic everywhere, with motorists jockeying for position from the parking lot to the congested street in the periphery of my gaze, and it almost felt like the noise was destined to dull the sound of silence, that I ached for in that moment, out completely. But somehow, one simple question managed to pierce the noise, and in four short words it covered everything about my actions, motivations, and the spirit inspiring my decisions that day, from the list of things that I had committed to, to each and every concession that I had made in recent weeks, to the consumption of that meal, and most importantly to the witness that my current mode of being was offering to my daughter, to the church that I hoped to minister to, and to the world. And the question asked quite simply, “does this glorify Me?” Does this meal, and everything surrounding my decision to consume it, glorify the One who I claim to be serving in and through this haste? Or is it bearing witness to the lordship of someone or something else instead?
Which gets to the heart of what the work of ministry really is. Though we seem to have gotten to this place where the term ministry has become kind of synonymous with programming, or social justice initiatives, or bringing people “to Christ,” or what we prepare or offer to a congregation on Sunday morning, rather than a lifetime spent aiming and aligning ourselves with God’s will for all of creation. So that our lives in Christ, might glorify God and say something to anyone who is watching about the truth and life and hope that guides and inspires our actions and response in the world.
And when we do this its compelling, because the Kingdom of God is compelling when its authentically embodied in the world. It’s like a scent that leads you into a bakery in search of just what exactly it is that smells so stinking good, and how might one go about getting some of that? People will wonder. That is the ministry of the Church. The smell of which is Good News, great joy, for all people. To bear witness is to be that smell that leads others towards Jesus through the fragrance of our lives.
What that question, “does this glorify Me?” helped me to see was that the concessions that I was making had left me smelling like exhaustion, gluttony, and fast-food.
And I realized that my calling as a minister of the Gospel wasn’t to be someone who made concessions in the name of ministry, but was instead a calling to become someone who asked questions of my consumption, and who held those choices up alongside my stated obedience to Christ, so that He could enlighten me on whether or not they aligned with God’s hope and plan on Earth.
Which I think is what Jesus was trying to point out in some of his many altercations with the Pharisees, who on an external level served the temple well and whose actions were apparently righteous, but whose hearts remained hard and resistant to the kind of obedience that can only come from love.
In his book, the Divine Conspiracy, Dallas Willard points out that Jesus used the term hypocrite seventeen times throughout the New Testament – adding that it is clear from literary records that it was Jesus alone who brought this term into the moral vocabulary of the western world. And Willard states that Jesus’ intention with it was to create a clear distinction between our face before the world – and our person before God.
Which he worded as, “Woe to you scribes and pharisees. Hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which on the outside look beautiful but on the inside, they are full of the bones of the dead. And all kinds of filth. So you also on the outside look righteous to others but inside you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.”
To be clear, I don’t think that Jesus was trying to shame the Pharisees here, he never used shame to motivate people, it’s the devil who does that. I believe Jesus’ aim was to crack through the walls of their egos and layers of resistance, so that beauty could get inside of them too. Knowing that once God’s beauty had penetrated their interior, it would expose that same beauty and glory externally on behalf of the watching world.
And for some reason whenever I think about Jesus’ use of the word hypocrite, in light of Dallas Willards explanation of it, I often think about Western Christianity’s concessions on consumption, which in part involves food. Which is why that day at Chick-fil-a was the last day that I purchased factory farmed meat. And when people ask me why I don’t buy it, my answer is simply because I am a Christian. Which is also why I no longer go to drive-thru’s. Its why I will never consume lab grown synthetic meat. And its why I don’t drink soda. Because these products and the values that drive their production and their consumption are out of alignment with what I know about the will of God, for me as a consumer and for creation itself.
Whenever I talk about Christian’s support of fast, cheap, or industrialized food, I get a lot of push back, which doesn’t surprise me, though I will say that these responses are often based on false assumptions and narrow views about the benefits of cheap food. One of which is that its an entitled position to be able to resist it. Which is on partially true. Though recent data suggests that 42% of fast food is consumed by the upper class and 36.4% is consumed by middle class. Americans spend about $50 billion annually on fast food. Food that is designed to literally go right through your system and therefore offers little actual nourishment at all. So in essence, it’s a massive industry that only produces waste and illness. I could talk about this for a long time, and there are a lot of other points that I would love to make here, but what I want to point out today is that a large portion of the demand for cheap food is not driven by hunger or poverty, but by a wealthy and distracted and impatient nation that is running on overcommitment and haste, while simultaneously assigning a painfully low value to the lives of the animals and the well-being of the land that is behind this production model. All of which can also easily be detected in Western churches as well.
Meanwhile last week I learned from a source that I consider extremely reputable that a poultry processing plant abruptly closed it operations in Arkansas and Oklahoma which then led to the directive to kill hundreds of thousands of perfectly healthy chickens, and waste millions of pounds of meat by leaving them to rot in the chicken houses where they had been raised (in despicable conditions) thus far. This is just one tiny fragment of what we support when we support factory farmed chicken. This is the food system that our desire for cheap and fast food has created. And the question for Christians is, does this glorify God? Is this exchange in the destruction of life, the abuse of animals, the waste of energy and resources, a worthy concession towards whatever it is that we think we are doing for Him?
Is this want we want on our tables? Is this what we want to serve to our kids? Is this what we want to ingest? Is this the fragrance that we want to emit to the world?
Or is this hypocrisy? And an image of “whitewashed tombs, which on the outside look beautiful but on the inside, they are full of the bones of the dead. And all kinds of filth.”
That’s the passage that rings in my heart when I look at images of these chicken houses.
The problem with concessions is that they allow us to create loopholes where we feel justified to excuse away the injustices, abuses, or evils associated with the lives we have created for ourselves, while still trying to project an external show of righteousness and right religion to the world. And to this, Jesus calls us out. Out of ourselves. Out of the thought that we need to take on so much that we lose the ability to live in alignment with His will. And into lives of authentic ministry where we find a balance and a pace that enables us to ask questions and to stop making concessions in our efforts to glorify God. That’s what I learned about myself that day in the Chik-fil-a parking lot. And it wasn’t shame or guilt that inspired this act of repentance, it was love.