The Emerging Food Ethic

What? know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you …?—1 Cor. 6:19

When you sit down to your Easter ham dinner this year, your conscience may be a lot harder on you than it has been at previous holiday feasts. You’ll be obliged to wonder not only whether you are eating too much but whether you have chosen your foods wisely.

It has yet to be recognized in standard works on ethics, but there is growing awareness in affluent Western society of the moral dimension in what goes on the dining room table. Fasting and Lenten dieting have been going out of style somewhat. There has been a move toward better eating habits the year around. Devout Christian believers are realizing that they must look out for the “whole man,” and be good stewards of their own bodies. This involves the use of healthful physical as well as mental and spiritual food, and indeed, an understanding that there is some correlation between these aspects of a person’s well-being.

Behind the new food ethic consciousness is a growing demand for so-called natural foods. People are flocking to health-food stores and are trying to forsake processed foods. “Organically grown” foods, those cultivated without the use of pesticides or what are regarded as chemical, artificial fertilizers, are in great demand. Some foods are being touted as especially heathful, among them wheat germ, soybeans, honey, and sesame seeds.

A great new sensitivity has been developing among consumers toward additives used for coloring, flavoring, preserving, and otherwise conditioning food; some are known to be harmful to human health, and others are suspect. This is one phase of the much broader, widely discussed concern over human environment.

Younger men and women are spearheading the revolution in food consumption. Many are ecology-minded, eager to “live in harmony with nature.” The New York Times quoted a young woman who lives on a communal farm as saying, “I feel the earth is a very holy place.” She said she meditated during the planting season while others prayed, danced, and chanted in an effort to benefit the crops. “It’s a respect for life,” she said, “that goes right down to the radishes.”

Such an outlook stems from the influence of such Eastern religions as Zen Buddhism. Mainstream Christianity has heretofore paid little heed to what kind of food is good for the body, despite the Apostle Paul’s admonitions. This is probably attributable to the lack of any explicit teaching on food in the New Testament. The custom of eating ham for Easter is a dramatic repudiation of the old Hebrew stricture against pork.

In the Old Testament, of course, dietary laws were legion, and Orthodox Jews still have strict rules on foods. Rabbis continue to certify preparation on the spot.

Among today’s Christians, Seventh-day Adventists take the most pains in relating their faith to eating habits. They seek to avoid meat altogether on grounds that it is unhealthful over the long haul. Loma Linda Foods, owned by the denomination, carries a complete line of vegetarian dishes, including a number of meat substitutes. An Ohio firm that puts out similar products was sold by SDA businessmen to Miles Laboratories in 1970. An SDA publishing house reported it was deluged with orders for a new, five-volume cookbook, Vegetarian Cookery.

Interestingly enough, Seventh-day Adventists had much to do with the beginning of the processed breakfast-cereal industry during the nineteenth century. J. H. Kellogg started a health center in Battle Creek, Michigan, that promoted the value of grains as breakfast food. His brother, W. K., founded a company to market them. Both were Adventists for a time.

Another originator of breakfast cereals was Sylvester Graham, a temperance lecturer and food faddist who developed graham crackers; Encyclopedia Britannica says he “promised to save souls through the stomach.”

The New Testament speaks of fasting and gluttony, and records a major controversy over the eating of meat offered to idols. But there can be no proof-texting of theories on food morality because the principles given are broad. Christians now face the challenge of interpolating and relating the principles to modern data.

The Gospels record Jesus’ presence at a number of feasts, which suggests that eating should be seen as a pleasure and not merely a duty. Also obvious is that certain foods may be good for some people and not for others. Accumulation of knowledge places upon today’s Christian a responsibility that his spiritual ancestors did not have. It is a form of indirect suicide, for an example, for a person whose blood has a high cholesterol content to consume food that will aggravate the problem.

By the same token, a Christian might consider it a moral duty to take positive steps toward good health. One such step would be to strive for ample roughage in the diet, for some experts think the absence of it in our highly processed intake might be a cause of cancer.

Beverages such as tea, coffee, and alcohol warrant special ethical consideration. Many people still avoid alcohol, and some purists rule out all three, arguing that they are drugs rather than food because they directly affect a person’s behavior. Others argue that the benefits of their use outweigh the risks. There is currently a big boom in wine sales, which seems to run counter to the general trend to avoid eating or drinking things that might be harmful.

A number of considerations cloud the ethical picture in the realm of food. Not the least of these is that millions of people the world over have no choice of food—they do not have enough of any kind! Efforts to alleviate their conditions invariably run into political, economic, and even cultural snarls. But moral indifference still ranks number one.

Budget Diplomacy

If the recommendation of the Stewardship Committee of the Presbyterian Church in the U. S. (Southern) is approved, the National and World Councils of Churches will be conspicuously absent from the denomination’s 1973 general mission budget.

J. Gaston Williamson, committee chairman, said the recommendation is intended to make the mission budget “more appealing to many persons in the church.” He added that the committee suggests that individual churches and persons contribute to the two councils.

Meanwhile, the denomination will be absent—$322,000 worth—from the budget of one of its largest churches if that church’s local presbytery goes ahead with a proposed merger with a United Presbyterian Church in the U. S. A. presbytery. The Highland Park Presbyterian Church of Dallas is only one of 146 churches that have threatened such action.

Unbecoming

Trustees of the Southern Baptist Sunday School Board expressed “deep regret” over “misunderstandings and ensuing difficulties” resulting from the withdrawal in late 1971 of 140,000 copies of Becoming, a youth training guide. Two articles and a photo showing two white girls and a black boy standing in a hallway were replaced with non-controversial material by board head James Sullivan and an aide. An editor resigned and many Southern Baptists voiced dismay at Sullivan’s action. The incident received national coverage, a situation that seemed to pain board members more than Sullivan’s decision.

At first, Sullivan said he acted because the material was “subject to misinterpretation.” But at the recent board meeting he declared, “Never once did we say take out black people. I would have preferred a round table with some adults in it. The two white girls had sneers. They were the problem.”

The board went on record encouraging staffers to speak out on Christian attitudes in race relations “without equivocation.”

Limbo In Limbo?

Columnist David Greye Perrey roiled the water with his “Let’s Stop Baptizing Babies” in U. S. Catholic. His point: “Very many” of the babies the Catholic Church is baptizing “are not turning out to be Christians, convinced and active disciples of Jesus the crucified.”

The paper went on to sample readership opinion concerning issues raised by Perrey. The results show a gap between personal and official belief among Catholics. Of those responding, 85 per cent disagreed with the statement, “I believe that a baby who dies unbaptized cannot go to heaven.”

“Good-bye limbo,” commented theologian Martin Marty in his newsletter, Context.

Memories, Good And Bad

Three historical churches, a seminary chapel, and a former parsonage have been added to the Interior Department’s National Register of Historic Landmarks. They are: the domed First Unitarian Church of Baltimore, erected in 1817 and the prototype for many nineteenth-century churches; the 1812-vintage Monumental Church in Richmond, Virginia; the Minor Basilica of the Assumption in Baltimore, first (1806) U. S. Roman Catholic cathedral church; St. Mary’s Seminary Chapel, also built in 1806 in Baltimore, the first Neo-Gothic style church in the land; and a Natick, Massachusetts, house associated with Horatio Alger, Jr.

Alger spent his summers from 1866 until his death in 1899 at the house, the residence of his father, a Unitarian minister. Here he wrote many of the books that “indoctrinated a whole generation of American youth with the comforting value that virtue is always rewarded with wealth and honor,” said an Interior Department committee.

About the same time that the committee linked Alger to virtue, historian Richard Huber unearthed church records asserting that Alger was a homosexual who apparently preferred young boys. He was forced out as minister of a Brewster, Massachusetts, Unitarian church when his “gross immorality” with boys was uncovered, according to the records.

Alger quit the ministry, went to New York, and embarked on a writing career, producing more than one hundred books. The books urged millions of boys who read them to live clean and work hard if they wanted to achieve success.

GLENN D. EVERETT

Career Capstone

Noted church architect Pietro Belluschi, 73, was chosen to receive the 1972 Gold Medal award of the American Institute of Architects, the highest honor bestowed by the 24,000-member national professional society.

“His churches are known for their elegant spiritual feeling,” said the institute in announcing the honor at this month’s AIA national convention in Houston.

Belluschi’s Central Lutheran Church in Portland, Oregon, was named in 1956 by the AIA as one of the most significant buildings erected in the last 100 years in the United States. His most recent creation is St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Cathedral in San Francisco, described by the institute as “the first to base its concept in the new liturgy of the Catholic Church, a cathedral as surely of its time as the great medieval cathedrals were of theirs.”

GLENN D. EVERETT

Stereotype Struggles

Some of the Bible’s most courageous women—Deborah, Rahab, and Esther—have disappeared from church-school curricula.

Diana Beach, in a recent issue of the National Council of Churches education bi-monthly Spectrum, claims that these women have been ignored and disregarded by the writers of Sunday-school material. Instead, only “passive, obedient, humble” women—“impoverished images of femininity”—are presented.

From Miss Beach’s research, the NCC’s Division of Christian Education has formulated a set of guidelines to prevent “sex role stereotypes.” As a start, writers and editors should avoid the use of “man” when “person” would say the same thing.

Artists and photographers must be careful how they picture girls and boys. Girls should be shown with their fathers, and women should be pictured in business and industry, not just in homes or schools, the guidelines suggest. Both men and women should be seen cooking and working in the yard. And children should be taught that it’s not only girls and women who cry.

Until the curriculum is revised, Miss Beach asked that sensitive parents and teachers compensate for the material’s weaknesses. “These stereotypes,” she insisted, “run counter to the teachings of Christ.”

Religion In Transit

Southern Baptists in Mississippi beamed a week-long series of twenty-two missions programs over a CBS television station as part of a regular missions conference.

The conservative Committee of Catholic Laymen Pro Ecclesia aims to combat alleged “harm” done to the Catholic Church by “anti-Catholic” thrusts of Newsweek, Time, the New York Times, and other media, including “what used to be called the ‘Catholic’ press.”

A new government report labels alcoholism the nation’s greatest drug problem, afflicting 9.6 million Americans and draining the economy of $15 billion a year. Of religious groups, Jews and Episcopalians have the most drinkers. Among nationality groups, the Irish lead in heavy drinkers.

Official Lutheran and Roman Catholic drafting committees are at work, hoping to come up with a common statement on the place of the papacy in the church.

Catholic students at Ball State University in Indiana spent their spring break “getting involved”—as inner-city tutors, as social workers in an Appalachian town, and as fix-up, paint-up specialists in a youth center.

A 500,000-copy press run of a new evangelistic tabloid is scheduled for next month, according to the Enquirer, a Canada-based newspaper that will publish it. It will be distributed quarterly in the United States and Canada.

Busing school children to achieve integration is a theological issue and may be the way to achieve God’s will, declared Florida Episcopal bishop James L. Duncan in a pastoral letter. It was also a hot campaign issue in the state’s primary.

The 800-member Los Angeles church for homosexuals pastored by professed homosexual Troy Perry has signed a contract to broadcast its Sunday-morning services.

International Students, Inc., has sold its Washington, D. C., headquarters and will move next month to Star Ranch near Colorado Springs, a facility purchased from Young Life.

New York Bible Society International has produced a tabloid newspaper for the street scene. Entitled Great News, it features contemporized passages from John’s Gospel with graphics. Already on the scene: more than 100 newspapers being published by grassroots Jesus people, with a total circulation well in excess of one million.

Personalia

The secretly consecrated Ukrainian Catholic archbishop Vasyl Velyshkowsky, 67, was released after serving a three-year prison term in the Ukraine for allegedly committing “ideological sabotage.” He was on his way to administer last rites when arrested. Earlier, he had been sentenced to death, then to a Siberian labor camp, as part of the Soviet government’s attempt to destroy the Ukrainian Catholic church.

The Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) is sending Cecil Shaw, Jr., 24, a black from Gary, Indiana, who has been blind since age 15, as a missionary to Buenos Aires.

World Scene

Golden anniversary celebrations under way: the Dominican Evangelical Church, with forty congregations and 8,000 members; the Evangelical Free Church of America’s mission work in the Ubangi area of Zaire, led by fifty-four missionaries; the Methodist Church in Poland, with 4,133 members in forty-five congregations.

Reports of persecution of Christians and expulsions of missionaries are flowing in from the East Malaysian state of Sabah, formerly known as British North Borneo. The powerful United Sabah Islamic Association is pressuring everyone to convert to Islam.

Roman Catholics now outnumber Protestants in Switzerland 3.1 million to 2.9 million for the first time since the Reformation, mostly because of immigrants with temporary work permits. Protestants are a 55 per cent majority of Swiss citizens.

Delegates to the Puerto Rican Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) annual assembly asked the United States to discontinue its ten-year-old trade embargo against Cuba. Pastor Josue Lopez of Guaynabo was elected president. His predecessor noted that youth work is booming among the 9,000 members of the church’s fifty-six congregations.

A Pain In Painesville

The big abortion sign on North State Street in Painesville, Ohio, is gone. The sign, just a block from St. Mary’s Catholic church and school, had been put up by a Michigan family-planning agency. A flurry of complaints from local citizens and pressure from the police brought it down.

In large letters was “Abortion.” Under it was a Michigan telephone number to call for abortion information, and at the upper right the sign said, “Male and female sterilization.”

The sign’s sponsor said a Michigan court had struck down a law prohibiting such signs in that state under freedom-of-speech provisions. While maintaining that he had the right to put up an abortion sign anywhere in the country, he admitted it pained him to find one had been placed so near a Catholic church.

Nigeria’s North-Central State announced it will take over all post-primary schools next month, a decision affecting nine Protestant and six Catholic high schools and teachers’ colleges. It is the third of the nation’s twelve states to take over all schools. Prayers and Bible instruction will continue; staffers will work for the government, which cited the “immense contributions” of the private agencies.

Noting the upsurge of spiritual interest and largely evangelical activity among Europe’s six million gypsies, a Vatican commission called for Catholic pastoral and missionary outreach to them.

The Vatican Council of the Laity has urged the Holy See to stop keeping Vatican and other church finances secret. The council’s report also suggests that a “cultural change” department be set up to help the hierarchy face up to changes and conflicts. The report, appealing for acceptance of a wide variety of opinions, says no one—not even the Church—has a monopoly on truth.

Poland annulled a ten-year-old law requiring the Catholic Church to make full financial disclosures. Tough taxation of church property will be eased. Polish bishops meanwhile urged the government to allow construction of more new churches.

Representatives of Carl McIntire’s International Council of Christian Churches and Christian immigrants from the Ukraine harassed Metropolitan Nikodim of Leningrad as he visited in New Zealand and Australia during church council meetings. A woman struck him with a crumpled poster. Australian Council of Churches head F. G. Engel charged that protestors were indulging in a witch hunt after they accused Nikodim of being a KGB agent.

The eighteen-month old Vatican agency promoting use of the Bible is surveying laity around the world to find out how it can “best assist the layman in the use of the Bible in his private life.”

Jesuit leaders have ordered their 31,700 members to help stem public criticism of Pope Paul in Catholic circles. The Pope has been under attack for alleged conservatism, too many speeches, and running the Vatican like a world government.

Prominent Church of England vicar Hugh Lorimer Rees lashed out against the “liturgical anarchy” of the growing house-church movement in England.

Approximately 1,000 Protestant churches are expected to take part in the Evangelism-in-Depth program in southern Chile next month.

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