Related articles and links |  1 of 3

Whitebread Protestants: Food and Religion in American Culture
Daniel Sack
St. Martin's, 272 pages, $24.95

Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal
Eric Schlosser
Houghton Mifflin, 288 pages, $25

I love my church, but if I could change one thing about it, it would be the coffee hour. I have fantasies, perhaps based on stories of my mother's Baptist childhood, of lively socializing, ginger ale gelatin salad, and hearty fellowship. At my church, things are a little simpler. Some people take off right after the service, and the rest of us gather for a few minutes around a basket of Entenmann's doughnut holes. Often as not, coffee hour is a visit to the nearest Starbucks with a buddy from the parish.

I may be nostalgic for some halcyon coffee hour that never existed. But my nostalgia is stoked by Daniel Sack's new book, a delightful romp through the foodways of American Protestantism, which shows that we Christians have always infused our food with religious meaning. "[F]ood-centered socializing has played an important part in American church life," he writes. "Church meals have built community among members and brought visitors into the church. Congregational social events have provided children wholesome and safe entertainment and adolescents a good place to meet and court the opposite sex. And they have fed hungry people."

In our ever-time-crunched society, those meals may be getting squeezed out. Sack's book makes clear, though, that we ought to cherish them. They do more than just feed our bodies; they nourish our communities and our souls.

Sack, who has taught religion at Hope College, examines church suppers and the Lord's Supper. The celebration of the latter, he shows in a fascinating opening chapter, changed in the 19th century as some Protestants embraced two social reforms. Their zeal for temperance inspired a switch from Communion wine to grape juice, and their involvement in the nascent sanitation movement led some Protestants to abandon the single, germy communion chalice in favor of individual communion cups. A simpler feast, Sack shows, usually follows church services, with worshipers heading to the social hall for a second communion of coffee and cookies, doughnuts, or cheese straws.

He tells the fascinating stories of 20th-century Protestants protesting global hunger and 19th-century Protestant food reformers criticizing lavish American diets. Americans' taste for meat and grease, the antebellum crusaders believed, was "as scandalous as slavery and drunkenness." One of those reformers, Sylvester Graham, searching for pure food that would befit the pure Christian body, invented the Graham cracker; Seventh-day Adventist Will Keith Kellogg developed the corn flake.

But this book is more than just an exploration of Protestant menus. It is also, perhaps unwittingly, an apologia for—and an illustration of the weaknesses of—the Protestant mainline. The mainline often gets a bad rap. Take the chapter on "emergency food." Focusing on soup kitchens in Atlanta, Sack shows the dogged devotion with which prosperous mainliners in a booming city have tackled poverty and hunger. But he also takes pains to point out that while "Religious faith. … provides them with a motive for ministry," most Protestant soup kitchens avoid "overt evangelization." Atlanta's food-bankers are much more motivated by "the call to service" than "the call to evangelism." Indeed, Sack himself evinces a little discomfort with evangelism—twice in one paragraph he describes the mainliners who staff soup kitchens as hesitant to "force" Christianity on anyone. Indeed, the most evangelical evangelists are hesitant to "force" faith on people, too. Sharing the gospel doesn't mean inaugurating a new Inquisition.

next page... |  1 of 3

May 21 2001, Vol. 45, No. 7