Christianity 5.6 Activism: Ethics in Action

1 John 3:18

…let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.



[E]verybody thinks of changing humanity, and nobody thinks of changing himself. (Leo Tolstoy, “Three Methods of Reform,” n.p.)


Christianity is a way of life, a lived experience in this world that includes “reflection and action, contemplation and practice” (Mische 591). Through action and spiritual practice, Christians are to serve God through creation in their daily lives, as explained in scriptures and as modeled by Jesus and the prophets.


While Jesus was concerned with the worldly state of affairs, particularly the plight of the downtrodden, many do not view him as an activist. This is because they rightly see activism as a human enterprise while the actions of the embodied Jesus were directed at inaugurating God’s Kingdom (which humans cannot do). In this view anything Jesus did was part of God’s larger plan for a new dispensation, which is not how activism is necessarily understood.


Both of these understandings coexist under the broad canopy of Christianity. Both those who view Jesus as Lord and Savior and those who view Jesus as an earthly activist, recognize the need to work with God within Creation. Whether or not one views Jesus as a liberationist, this chapter recognizes our earthly responsibility as servants of God, to actively work to serve and protect creation in daily life by envisioning and striving for radical change.


Public good doesn’t automatically flow from private virtue. A person’s moral character, sterling though it may be, is insufficient to serve the case of justice, which [requires that we] challenge the status quo, . . . try to make what’s legal more moral, to speak truth to power, and to take personal or concerted action against evil, whether in personal or systemic form. (William Sloane Coffin, ordained, Presbyterian, Credo, 49)

Sephiwe Sithole of The Black Mambas, an all-female anti-poaching force in South Africa that protects nature preserves, particularly critically endangered wildlife such as rhinos, both with boots on the ground and by teaching and modeling in their communities. (Photo courtesy of We Animals Media.)


5.6 Outline

I. Jesus as Liberationist

II. The Prophets as Activists

III. Christian Anymal Activism

  1. Dr. Humphrey Primatt

  2. Leo Tolstoy

IV. Websites: Christianity and Animals


Conclusion

Endnotes

(To view all Christianity topics, visit 5.1 Christianity: Introduction and Outline)


Seble Nebiyeloul (in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia), co-founder of the International Fund for Animals, with three of her rescued dogs. The International Fund for Africa provides plant-based school lunches, health clinics and supplies (such as menstrual pads), as well as veterinary care for working animals. (Photo courtesy of We Animals Media.)

Kessewa Opuku serving food at the Sarx Creature Conference in London. (Image courtesy of Sarx.)


I. Jesus as Liberationist


Christians are to base their lives on the life and teachings of Jesus. While Jesus was gentle as a lamb, he was also proactive, working (with God) to establish peace and justice in the here-and-now. The Gospels indicate that Jesus abhorred “both passivity and violence.” While honoring and valuing quietude, there were times when he engaged in aggressive acts of peace (Wink 189). In such cases, the Gospels reveal Jesus as one who “seeks out conflict, elicits conflict, exacerbates conflict” in order to move “against perceived injustice proactively with the same alacrity as the most hawkish militarist” (Wink 192).


More specifically, Jesus worked on behalf of those marginalized, on behalf of the disabused and those comparatively powerless. Jesus embraced “the misunderstood and marginalized” and breached social barriers “in order to love and redeem” a fallen humanity (S. King, 38). Among human beings, anymals are disempowered and cruelly exploited—to the point of mass slaughter for no better reasons than profit, taste, and recreation.

“About Us” from Creation Care Church. (Image courtesy of Creation Care Church.)


The ethic of compassion—to love God and neighbor, to do unto others as we would have them do unto us—is the essence of how Christians are called to practice Christianity. . . following the example set by Jesus . . . .

I wanted to explore how my diet could reflect my cultural identity as an African American and be consistent with the principal values of my Christian faith: love, justice, and solidarity with the marginalized. . . . Soulful eating aims to disrupt an unjust food system and call attention to the systematic oppression of Black people, nonhuman animals, and nonhuman nature. (Christopher Carter, Ph.D., The Spirit of Soul Food, xi, 4, also 130) 


In Johannesburg, Cora Bailey founded and leads South Africa's Community Led Animal Welfare (CLAW, a project of the International Fund for Animal Welfare), which helps impoverished communities care for anymals. In this photo, one of the many residents of the Randfontein municipal dump site cuddles his cat, whom he named Freedom. (Photo courtesy of We Animals Media.)



Jesus sought change. His words and actions sometimes targeted economic corruption, including corruption in the anymal enterprises of his day. In the Gospels, when Jesus approaches the temple, he finds money changers and people selling cattle, sheep, and doves. Making a whip of cords, he drives them out, saying: “It is written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer’; but you are making it a den of robbers” (Matthew 21:13). Here Jesus disrupts the peace, speaking boldly against the status quo, targeting property, and disrupting a business that exploited anymals.

Carl Heinrich Bloch, 1874, “Jesus Casting Out the Money Changers at the Temple. (Christ Cleansing the Temple).” (Image courtesy of Wikipedia.)

In the Summa Theologica, Thomas Aquinas “noted that anger looks to the good of justice,” and that those who do not feel angry “in the face of injustice love justice too little” (Aquinas n.p.). Early Church Father and archbishop of Constantinople, John Chrysostom, commented that anyone who is not angry “when there is cause for anger, sins!” (Aquinas n.p.; also Maguire 419).


Imagine Jesus walking through a slaughterhouse, a vivisection lab, or a poultry farm: “How would the Prince of Peace feel about contemporary exploitation of pigs, mice, and hens? Would he justify these institutions as readily as we do?” (Lisa Kemmerer, Ph.D., in Animals and World Religions, 212)

In Toronto, an activist with Furbearer Defenders protests trapping and the fur industry. (Photo courtesy of We Animals Media.)



Both in teachings and action, Jesus “lays the foundation for social revolution” (Wink 183) for changing the status quo with an eye to reinstating the original peace created by God: peace on earth, peace for all creatures. Scriptures tell us that human beings are to participate in the necessary work to lead humanity “out of the violence and selfishness that made a hell out of the paradise” (Hyland 3).


Through bold acts of compassion and unwavering dedication to Godly ideals, the life of Jesus provides inspiration for Christians, including anymal liberationists, some of whom work quietly behind the scenes while others destroy property and risk their freedom to protect and defend “the least of these” (Matthew 25:40).


Our job is to share glimpses of the difference Christ makes. Our job is to demonstrate the radically impractical conviction that one lamb’s rescue is worth any cost. (Margaret B. Adam, Theologian, n.p.)

“Our Mission.” Christian Animal Rights Association. (Photo Courtesy of Christian Animal Rights Association.)


II. Prophets Model Activism


It is difficult to change behaviors, let alone inspire deep, spiritual change, but this is the hope and daily labor of the Biblical prophets. (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the Twelve/Minor Prophets: Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi.) Working to turn minds, hearts, and lives back to God, they speak against the irreligious and the unjustly empowered on behalf of the marginalized. They remind of religious ideals such as sharing, compassion, and mercy (Wink 188). The prophets live scriptural moral expectations and encourage others to do the same.

Marc Chagall, 1968, “The Prophet Isaiah.” (Image courtesy of MPullar.)




Where there is no prophecy, the people cast off restraint. (Proverbs 29:18)


Each of us has a call to prophecy, and we need to answer that call, because without prophecy, nothing impedes injustice. (Stephen Kaufman, M.D., Guided, 135)

Animals Now activists raising awareness about cruelty in the dairy industry in Tel Aviv, Israel. (Photo courtesy of Animals Now.)


Proverbs 29:18

Where there is no prophecy, the people cast off restraint.


The prophets “intuited that only outrage speaks to outrage. . . . Only shock gets through” (Maguire 420), and so they used whatever means they deemed necessary to gain attention and turn people back to a Godly way of life (Maguire 420). Designed to startle people out of a routine stupor, raise awareness, and inspire change, prophetic eccentricities are common in scriptures (Maguire 420). Under divine instruction, Jeremiah harnesses himself to a yoke (Jeremiah 27:2), for which he was labeled a “madman” (Jeremiah 29:26). Though “nakedness was taboo in Judaism” (Wink 179), Isaiah wanders “naked and barefoot for three years” (Isaiah 20:3). Micah also vows to “lament and wail” and “go stripped and naked” (Micah 1:8). Running against secular norms was so common among the prophets that, when Saul “stripped off his clothes” and “lay naked” for a day and a night, people ask, “Is Saul also among the prophets?” (1 Samuel 19:24).


Some interpret “naked” in these passages to mean “torn clothes,” but Hebrew scholar Dr. Samantha Joo notes, “The Hebrew word, 'arom, means “naked” and not “torn clothes” (see Job 1:21—“Naked I came from my mother's womb, and naked shall I return” and also Ecclesiastes 5:15 “As they came from their mother’s womb, so they shall go again, naked as they came”). Dr. Joo reminds that Isaiah was living in exile and was dehumanized, clothes being understood as synonymous with being a civilized human being.

Cooks (working with International Fund for Africa and A Well-Fed World) providing healthy vegan foods to children at risk. (Photo courtesy of We Animals Media.)


Members of the body of Christ are called to be prophetic witnesses to the whole world. That means we look forward to a fully reconciled creation, to paradise restored. So, our challenge is to examine what’s happening in our world today and how we are contributing to brokenness and make changes to reduce suffering and increase reconciliation. In the past, the church has struggled for the abolition of slavery, for women’s suffrage and other basic rights for women, for children’s rights, and more. One hundred years from now, the church should look back and be proud to have been a leader in the animal protection movement. (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, “Human and Animal,” n.p.)


Today’s norms accept the exploitation of earth and anymals without regard for the Creator. Teachers expect children to dissect anymals in classrooms; the wealthy display their status with leather and fur; “sportsmen” kill for pleasure; and the mainstream household chooses to eat anymal products when other options are readily available and more economical, thereby choosing to support a system of massive suffering and bloodshed. (Non-processed vegan foods are often less expensive—despite the norm of heavy government subsidies that support anymal agriculture—including rice and beans, lentils and potatoes, pasta and vegetables, nuts and bread.) Standard behaviors in contemporary, industrialized societies expose the need for desperate means in order to turn people back to kindness, respect, and the serving of God by caring for creation.


We advocate for ethical alternatives to animal experimentation. . . . We advocate incorporating cruelty-free household products into daily life. (Christian Animal Rights Association, “How Can Christians Live Mercifully?” n.p.)


Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets.” (Numbers 11:29)


Behind the success of Sarx is the rapidly growing number of Christians who, like the Wilberforces, Welseys and Spurgeons before them, consider it to be a pressing duty for today’s generation of evangelicals to ask tough questions about our use of animals and challenge the cultural status quo. (Daryl Booth, co-founder of Sarx: For All God’s Creatures, n.p.) 



III. Christian Anymal Activism

Christianity “created a state of mind out of which the modern movement for the legal prohibition of cruelty to animals grew” (Hume 3). Some of the earliest anymal protection organizations were founded by Christians, largely Protestant clergy (Phelps, Longest, 85), whose activism rested “on exclusively Christian principles” (Preece 257). Reverend Arthur Broome was among the founders of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (1824). For Christian anymal activists, humanity and philanthropy “were united and could not be separated”; anymals were firmly inside their moral circle (C. Li 271). Dr. Humphrey Primatt and Leo Tolstoy are among the earliest known Christian anymal liberationists, and today, tens of thousands of Christians walk in their footsteps.


Compassionate Eating . . . [begins] with the vision of an ideal toward which we are called to strive. . . . The transformation we have in mind here, recall, is not a “once-and-for-all” arrival at a perfected state, but rather a disciplined process of ongoing striving that proceeds in full view of our fallen limitations, challenging us, nonetheless, to shoot ever higher as progress is achieved. (Matthew Halteman in “Compassionate Eating as Care of Creation,” 9)

(Photo courtesy of Catholic Concern for Animals.)


Dr. Humphrey Primatt, an eighteenth-century Anglican priest, offers what appears to be the first theological argument for extending justice to anymals and for anymal liberation. In “A Dissertation on the Duty of Mercy and the Sin of Cruelty to Brute Animals” (1776), Primatt notes that “cruelty is atheism” (Primatt, Dissertation, 342 or 321) and that Christian justice requires service to the Creator through creation. Primatt also notes that differences between species are irrelevant to the primary Christian commandment to love, writing that “pain is pain, whether it be inflicted on man or on beast; and the creature that suffers it . . . suffers evil” (Primatt, The Duty of Mercy, 20-21).


Excerpts from Primatt’s 1776 Dissertation: on the Duty of Mercy and the Sin of Cruelty to Brute Animals (all-caps removed):


Mercy to brutes is a duty commanded and cruelty to them is a sin forbidden. (78)


Now, if amongst men, the differences of their powers of the mind, and of their complexion, stature, and accidents of fortune, do not give any one man a right to abuse or insult any other man on account of these differences; for the same reason, a man can have no natural right to abuse and torment a beast, merely because a beast has not the mental powers of a man. For, such as the man is, he is but as God made him; and the very same is true of the beast. . . . And being such, neither more nor less than God made them, there is no more demerit in a beast being a beast, than there is merit in a man being a man. (12-13)


I am not ashamed as a Christian to testify my utter

abhorrence of every instance of cruelty. (77-78)


The cruelty of men to brutes is more heinous (in point of injustice) than the cruelty of Men to Men…. what Court of judicature does now exist in which the suffering Brute may bring his action against the wanton cruelty of barbarous man? (35, 37)


Christian love is without partiality and without hypocrisy: . . . let us examine ourselves well, and if we find that we hold any doctrine or tenant that explicitly or consequently represents the Supreme Being as partial or injurious to any of his creatures, such doctrine is a contracted misrepresentation of divine goodness. (30-31)


Whether we walk upon two legs or four, whether our heads are prone or erect, whether we are naked or covered with hair, whether we have tails or no tails, horns or no horns, long ears or round ears, or, whether we bray like an ass, speak like a man, whistle like a bird, or are mute as a fish; nature never intended these distinctions as foundations for right of tyranny and oppression. (18)


We may pretend to what religion we please, but Cruelty is Atheism. We may make our boast of Christianity; but Cruelty is Infidelity. We may trust to our Orthodoxy, but Cruelty is the worst of Heresies. The Religion of Christ Jesus originated in the Mercy of God and it was the gracious design of it to promote Peace to every creature upon Earth. . . . For, indeed, a Cruel Christian is a Monster of Ingratitude, a Scandal to his Profession and Beareth the name of Christ in vain. (322-23)



To give our churches no peace until they take up the cause of animal welfare as a normal and essential part of their work and witness is our duty not only to animals but to our fellow-Christians. But we shall never succeed in this unless we ourselves through the life of the Spirit and of prayer, grow in awareness of the truth, and come to know the world more deeply as God’s world, with all the responsibilities for our fellow-creatures which He has given us within it. (Rt. Rev. Dr. John Austin Baker, “Speech,” 46)


The fashion industry is disturbingly cruel. . . . Adam and Eve originally used fig leaves as clothing (Genesis 3:7). We advocate for cruelty-free fashion, with products made from plants or synthetic materials. There are many alternatives, such as faux leather and faux fur. (Christian Animal Rights Association, “How Can Christians Live Mercifully?” n.p.)

A lamb is rescued from the meat industry by an activist with Animal Equality. (Photo courtesy of We Animals Media.)



In early life, Christian writer and social justice activist Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) was a hunter and a soldier, but as his faith grew, he could no longer justify killing for pleasure or food. Tolstoy’s faith required that he stop shooting living creatures and change his diet. In “The First Step,” Tolstoy provides reasoned spiritual justification for this need to change. Describing the horrors he witnessed in a slaughterhouse, “Tolstoy argues that killing for food is unnecessary, contrary to our moral sense, violates our deepest feelings of sympathy and compassion for all living creatures, and is provoked only by a selfish lust” (Young 42). He concludes: Those “really and sincerely seeking to live a good life” will change what they put on the table (Tolstoy, The First Step, 60).


Near the end of his life, Tolstoy noted that changing his diet never cost him “the slightest effort or deprivation”(Tolstoy’s Letters 622). Today, with plentiful supermarkets offering a plethora of vegan options, this is yet more true. What Christians eat must be chosen with an eye to the many contemporary moral and religious concerns that come with the production and consumption of anymal products.


When Mahatma Gandhi was in Africa and just beginning to organize against injustice, he read Tolstoy’s Christian writings. They exchanged a handful of letters, through which Tolstoy helped shape Gandhi’s philosophy of peaceful resistance. Gandhi, in turn, influenced Christian activist Martin Luther King Jr., whose son and wife are vegan (“Coretta Scott King n.p.).



Excerpts from Tolstoy’s The First Step (1900):


[S]he cannot avoid causing suffering to animals—for she eats them (58).


I had wished to visit a slaughter house, in order to see with my own eyes the reality of the question raised when vegetarianism is discussed. But at first I felt ashamed to do so, as one is always ashamed of going to look at suffering . . . and so I kept putting off my visit (50).


We are not ostriches, and cannot believe that if we refuse to look at what we do not wish to see, it will not exist. This is especially the case when what we do not wish to see is what we wish to eat (59).


If he be really and seriously seeking to live a good life, the first thing from which he will abstain will always be the use of animal food, because . . . its use is simply immoral, as it involves the performance of an act which is contrary to the moral feeling—killing (60).

Leo Tolstoy. (Photo courtesy of Wikipedia.)



We lifted the freed hens out of the box and set them in the hay. They took small steps and looked around at their new home. It was lovely to see. . . .

When animals are set free and slaughterhouse equipment is rendered useless, the iniquitous violence against animals is made visible, while our utopia—a society that takes hens and pigs seriously—is rendered clear and concrete, albeit on a small scale. When we act in this way, our means and our ends coincide. (Pelle Strindlund, “Butchers’ Knives into Pruning Hooks: Civil Disobedience for Animals,” 172)



Conclusion


Christianity is a lived experience, a way of life—every day, throughout the day. Christians are to serve God through creation, as modeled by Jesus and the prophets, striving to be perfect and holy, working together toward God’s ends, and living according to laws and ethics laid out in scriptures. The prophets model activism, working to draw humanity back to God and back in line with core teachings of scriptures. Humphrey Primatt, Leo Tolstoy, and tens of thousands of contemporary Christian activists follow in the footsteps of Jesus and the prophets, working to return to Peaceable Kingdom, as the Bible tells us to do, showing the way.


The God who led the Israelites out of oppression and bondage in Egypt is the Creator God who is concerned with leading all creatures out of oppression, injustice, and bondage. (Richard Alan Young, professor of New Testament Studies at Temple Baptist Seminary, Is God a Vegetarian? 143 )


We go forth in the company of the church body, and we hold each other accountable to the identity we claim in Christ. (Margaret B. Adam, Theologian, n.p.)

Gwenna Hunter (founder of Vegans for Black Lives Matter and Vegans of LA) and Olabamidele Husbands package vegan food (in coordination with Vegan Outreach) for Los Angeles communities in need. (Photo courtesy of We Animals Media.)