When Donald Trump ran for president in 2024, the predominant social media chatter among Christians in my demographic was around the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement. The movement’s critiques of America’s food and drug systems brought recognition to a key issue my friends had been wrestling with for some time: concerns around what they’re putting in their bodies and the bodies of their kids.
The movement, led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., formally articulates itself as an effort to improve childhood chronic disease rates, which often presents as a skepticism toward traditional medicine and an interest in addressing the root causes of chronic illnesses. MAHA has had its fair share of concerned critics. Yet parts of its platform can resonate with all of us: We all care about our health and the health of the ones we love.
MAHA is not the first movement to capture our collective cultural imagination when it comes to food and eating. Climate change activists have promoted vegetarianism or veganism for some time because of environmental concerns. The pharmaceutical industry is pushing new drugs like GLP-1s, originally for treating diabetes, to help people who haven’t been able to lose weight. And Instagram is full of influencers promoting niche supplements and diets (ever heard of Liver King?) to achieve a certain sort of lifestyle and physique.
Each of these movements can come with its own dark sides. Our conversations about diets and meals can too often swerve into the territory of fear. In contrast, a biblically faithful perspective on food is always driven by love—love for God, for creation, and for community.
Toxic Fears: Our Us-vs.-Them Approach to Health
When I studied food and faith for my master’s thesis, I discovered that the two are inextricably connected in Scripture and most of Christian history. In the Old Testament and the early Jewish tradition, feasting, fasting, and obeying food regulations played an essential part in one’s relationship with God. The Catholic church throughout the medieval era and now (though to a lesser degree) integrates food into its faith practices, like fasting during Lent.
Following the Reformation, however, Protestant groups sensitive to any sort of ritualism have largely shied away from food guidance. In the absence of clear directives from the church, evangelicals today are turning elsewhere.
Not all of MAHA’s claims are wrong. Some specific concerns are rooted in real research, like how ultra-processed foods have been shown to have negative effects on our health. But for Christians, focusing only on these concerns puts us in danger of missing the bigger picture.
Before humans ever cared about how and what we ate, God cared. He pays attention to these things because food is one of the ways through which he shows us his grace and deepens our relationships with himself, with each other, and with the world.
Scripture’s story about food begins in the Garden of Eden, when the very first gift that God gives to humans is sustenance (Gen. 1:28–30), providing them an opportunity to delight in him through even their most basic needs. In Exodus, God uses food as one of the primary means of revealing his identity to the Israelites after he delivers them from their enslavement in Egypt: “Tell [the Israelites], ‘At twilight you will eat meat, and in the morning you will be filled with bread. Then you will know that I am the Lord your God’” (Ex. 16:12, emphasis mine). The miraculous provision of food—and the establishment of feasts and festivals in Leviticus 23—is the means through which the infant nation learns that God is its God and grows in worshiping and trusting him.
In ancient civilizations like Israel, agricultural challenges and their human consequences were obvious to the community, solidifying the idea that all creatures’ well-being connects to and relies upon God. For example, in Scripture, famine regularly ravages communities and even drives narrative action (Gen. 12:10; 26:1; 41–42; Ruth 1:1).
In the Levitical laws, God uses food to teach his people how to interact with each other, with their animals, and with the land. God commands those who work the land to not reap to the very edge of their fields, so that the poor and the foreigner can collect what’s left for themselves, inviting people into dependence on one another (23:22). There are strict regulations around animal eating, a way for the Israelites to recognize their place of power over their livestock and hunted creatures and to ensure that life (represented by blood) is taken seriously (chapter 17). Likewise, God also requires the Israelites to let the land “rest” every seventh year—the number associated with the Sabbath (25:1–7).
Through its careful attention to food and the land, Leviticus establishes the idea that the well-being of the land and animals depends on the Israelites and that the Israelites’ interactions with the nonhuman creation affects their standing with God. Most seriously, the Israelites could be considered clean or unclean before God simply by what they ate (11:24).
According to biblical scholar Ellen Davis, this incessant attention to food in Leviticus teaches us that God sees our own well-being and the well-being of animals and the land as interconnected, and all life as fully dependent on God.
Food was also central to Jesus’ ministry on earth. He provided wine and bread to people in their moments of need (John 2:1–11; Matt. 14:13–21). The Lord’s Prayer’s “Give us today our daily bread” (Matt. 6:11) calls us to rely on God to provide what’s needed from day to day. Later, food is Jesus’ preferred way for the church to remember his redemptive sacrifice (26:26–28) through the Eucharist and to anticipate his second coming.
As Scripture demonstrates, food is one important way we experience the grace of God and anticipate our eternal life with him. But man does not live on bread alone, and simply cleaning up the ingredients in our store-bought loaves will not bring us closer to godliness. Applying a biblical food theology to our modern era requires paying attention to the broader community around us.
It Is Not Best for Man to Eat Alone
In my family’s household, we make it a point to drive to a farm about 30 minutes from our house each month to pick up our meat share, a surprise variety of beef and pork from animals raised on that very farm. With these regular visits, my city kids have come to learn that the chicken in their soup doesn’t come from a package but from the live birds they’re chasing. It’s not the sort of the relationship with animals we’re used to, but it places us right in the web of interconnectedness that Leviticus imagines: chatting with the farmer who raises our animals, walking on the land on which the cows graze, and asking face-to-face questions about how the livestock are treated.
God’s delight in our codependence on one another, himself, and his nonhuman creation is clear from the beginning of Scripture (Gen. 2:18). Purchasing our food from coolers in a climate-controlled supermarket is an isolating task, but my visits to the farm do more than open my eyes to where my food comes from—they put me in relationship with people I otherwise might never meet and let me peek at the good lives of the animals I’d otherwise only know as food.
A food theology based in Scripture also requires me to look beyond my own refrigerator to consider what’s happening around me and to recognize injustices related to food. For example, food deserts are areas with limited access to affordable and nutritious food, usually located in lower-income communities. While I may have access to healthy food (and the freedom to drive an hour once a month to get meat), a compassionate food theology compels me to be sure my neighbors can have access to good food and care for their families and themselves.
A faithful food theology will look different for different people. It may look like regularly inviting friends, strangers, and even enemies to the table, creating new relationships over food to mirror the fellowship of the early church. For others, food will become an opportunity to intentionally and prayerfully engage with God, who faithfully provides them with every bite, even when food feels scarce.
Some people may choose to forgo eating meat out of ethical concerns for the treatment of animals or the climate impact of meat eating. Within immigrant communities, food may be an opportunity to stay connected to family traditions and one’s cultural history, helping people to remember God’s faithfulness across seas and borders. A healthy food theology includes taking the Eucharist regularly and cultivating a conscious, eager anticipation of the messianic banquet, when we will celebrate Jesus’ final victory over sin and death (Rev. 3:20; 19:7–9; 21:2).
Living into a proper food theology also requires going beyond the individual to engage with church communities.
Jennifer Ayres in Good Food encourages churches to consider how US policy has affected small-scale farmers and to look for opportunities to alleviate economic burdens on modern agricultural communities, applying a hyperlocal and systemic perspective to Scripture’s idea of the “least of these.” My church, for example, has put significant effort into developing a food pantry for our neighborhood, making sure everyone in our area has the opportunity to share in communal meals and delight in God’s gift of food.
The beauty and challenge of food theology is that it cannot provide a prescription for perfect eating. But however we live it out, we as the church must recapture how we see food as a spiritual matter. Just as the MAHA movement’s popularity demonstrates, it’s ingrained in us to care about what we eat, and not just because it’s a biological necessity. We desire to find meaning within our food and food systems; this desire both comes from and is met in God. Rather than serving as a political barometer, food is meant to draw us closer to our Creator and to our communities.
MAHA is not the first movement to take ideas infused with truth and motivate them with fear, and it won’t be the last. On this side of the messianic banquet, Christians can and should engage with some of the ideas offered by these ideologies.
But in doing so, we can’t forget that Scripture offers us something far better: a redemptive love that drives out fear (1 John 4:18), strengthens our bonds with one another, and deepens our relationship with the one who created it all.
Abigail Brougher writes about creation, food, and faith. She has an MTS from Calvin Theological Seminary and lives with her husband and young children in West Michigan. More of her work can be found on her Substack, Milk & Honey.
