[Oe List ...] 10/13/2022, Progressing Spirit: Rev. Fran Pratt:It's Time for Christianity to Ditch Diet Culture; Spong revisited
Ellie Stock
elliestock at aol.com
Thu Oct 13 07:51:43 PDT 2022
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It’s Time for Christianity to Ditch Diet Culture
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| Essay by Rev. Fran Pratt
October 13, 2022
Recently, Fat Activist and Yoga teacher Jessamyn Stanley was featured on the cover of Self Magazine along with the headline, “The Future of Fitness.” Jessamyn is a Black, Queer, Fat woman leading in the yoga and fitness space. I was so encouraged to see her gorgeous image and message gracing the cover of a mainstream fitness magazine that has mostly ever served as a mouthpiece for Diet Culture. She and so many other Fat trainers, fitness teachers, nutritionists, and activists are doing important and beautiful liberation work that Progressive Christians have an opportunity to become aware of and lend support to. Christians believe in a holistic, non-hierarchical vision of humanity and culture that celebrates beauty and health in diverse bodies and works for the good and thriving of all. They are doing this work very capably and gracefully and don’t need our help, but hopefully we Christians won’t be able to resist adding our voices to their chorus once we realize how aligned their message is with the message and ethos of Jesus. I am a former Nutritionist turned Clergyperson. While I remain passionate about food as a means of connection both to the earth and to our communities, and an advocate for viewing food from lenses of pleasure, nourishment, sustainability, and liberation; I no longer practice in the field of nutrition. The farther I went with it, the more deeply I realized that the field is rife with Diet Culture and toxic beauty standards, as well as ableism and health-shaming. I could no longer preach a message of calorie restriction or perpetuate body shame. After 20 years of chronic dieting, I left food restriction (1) behind and began to heal my own body image issues.
Diet Culture is a $72b industry (as of 2020) that is predicated on the scientifically-validated fact that diets fail in the long term for the vast majority of people who undertake them. Because of its failure rate and the ongoing stigma attached to fatness, it becomes a revolving door of failure-success-failure that leaves many of its victims mentally ill - think eating disorders, compulsive disorders, stress, depression, irritability due to hunger, low self-esteem, disrupted relationships; and physically less healthy than they started - think weight-cycling, nutrient deficiency, and increased risk of heart attack and stroke (2).
Diet Culture is innately ableist and hierarchical, with its roots in racism and Euro-centrism as well as in toxic beauty culture. It operates under the premise that there are some bodies who are “good,” “best,” “bad,” etc., and leaves no room for bodies with a disability to occupy a “good” or “beloved” space. Under its rules, “bad” (read: not thin) bodies are not beautiful and need fixing; and disabled bodies need ignoring. Shame is its main tool for motivating people to conform. That and the carrot-on-a-stick that says a person’s life will be better once they lose the weight and achieve the thin ideal, which any person who has learned contemplative skills can tell you is an ego-based hoax.
Diet Culture’s gospel is: you are not good enough. You are in need of fixing and perfecting. If you gain perfection (become thin) and lose perfection (gain weight) you have failed and must do penance (further starvation). Your inability to conform to Euro-centric beauty standards means you are unworthy of love; and the diet culture industry preaches that for “a low monthly price” you can once again buy yourself respect and validation, and therefore self-esteem. Because Diet Culture teaches, your self-esteem is contingent on your outward appearance.
If you grew up in mainstream religious culture, you may recognize this message. Your worth and belonging are dependent upon your behavior and adherence to various religious and cultural rules. Sound familiar?
But we know a better gospel taught to us by the Christ and by the mystical and contemplative traditions: you are beloved just as you are. You are God’s image in bodily form and no circumstance can separate you from that fundamental truth and closeness with God. The doorway to presence is through the heart. God’s Commonwealth resides within you (Luke 17: 21). We know that the journey of the love-based spiritual person is one of gradual and deepening awareness of our union with God. It was always there, we just forgot when we came through earth’s bodily birth portal.
People who genuinely follow Christ and internalize his message know better than to trust Diet Culture’s messaging (and if we don’t, then we need some re-education). We know that each human is a unique expression of the creativity of the Divine and therefore inherently good, beautiful, and acceptable. We know how to celebrate diversity, uniqueness, and alternative ideals of beauty. We know that we are all one - with Christ, with God, and with one another. There is no hierarchy in God’s kin-dom. If anyone is preferred, it is the most vulnerable and under-resourced among us, the ones who need the most healing from a traumatizing culture.
Many Christian churches told their congregations that they needed to improve their “Bod for God,” (3) ostensibly to make those congregants more healthy and therefore productive for evangelism and proselytizing (after all, says the dominant culture: why would anyone listen to a fat person talk about Jesus? Who would want the life they have? (4)). But really, it was to make money off the pain and ostracization of a significant portion of the population. It was Christian Capitalism and hierarchy was its bread and butter.
By participating and partnering with Diet Culture and toxic beauty culture, Christianity has diluted its message and witness. Instead of working for food sovereignty and eliminating food deserts, to fill hungry bellies with good things (Luke 1:53), to improve access to evidence-based healthcare for all regardless of race, orientation, level of fatness, or any other human-imagined qualifier. Christianity chose the way of judging outward appearances - a way which, incidentally, Christ explicitly denounced: “Woe to you … You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean” (Matthew 23:27). From the beginnings of the Judeo-Christian canon we learn that God “does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but … looks on the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7)
Instead of supporting and nourishing people, Christianity took the path of insisting on bodily and behavioral conformity. Instead of dismantling narratives that invalidate folks who are outside of, or on the margins of society’s accepted ideals - cis-hetero-patriarchal, capitalist, monogamist, ableist, thinness constructs - Christianity reinforced those narratives with its behave-and-conform-to-belong mentality.
And instead of preaching an actually good “Good News” that all bodies are good bodies regardless of gender, sexuality, race, color, shape, size, disability, or level of health; Christianity propped up the culture’s hierarchical vision of humanity, marginalizing some and exalting the most “ideal” according to Diet Culture.
Look around you at all the amazing Fat people who are doing amazing work in this world and living beautiful, happy lives, despite the fact that the culture - and Christianity as part of that dominant culture - constantly tells them that their bodies are wrong and need to be changed. Witness their resilience. Witness their art and activism, the advocacy they are doing, and the change they are making in the world. Witness especially those who are on the leading edge of self love; those who are making the radical daily decision to believe Jesus’ assertion that they are already one with God and were all along (John 14). Witness the joy present in people who have decided to no longer police or punish themselves, but instead to enjoy each moment, each bite, each breath in the body they’ve been given.
We have an opportunity to help re-write this story. Progressive Christians can embrace a whole-hearted, whole-bodied ethic of loving non-hierarchy. We can educate ourselves on the latest science that proves that health, both physical and mental/emotional as well as spiritual, can be in and for people of every size (5). We can fixate on solving systemic problems and softening our own hearts, rather than policing plates and bodies. We can stop participating in systems that judge and demean Fat and disabled bodies. We can work with the Fat Liberation movement, rather than against it. We can celebrate leaders and heroes of all sizes, shapes, and abilities across the spectrum of race and gender. And we can lend our efforts and energy to dismantling Diet Culture’s hierarchical and harmful hold on our collective consciousness.
We can, like the Christ who went before us, love everyone who comes into our path, accept each person as they are, and use our faculties to perceive the beauty inherent within them. We can take our own selves off the hamster-wheel treadmill of diet culture and do our own inner work of accepting ourselves as God accepts us, unconditionally and non-judgmentally.
Getting our Christian faith out of bed with Diet Culture and toxic beauty culture will take some work. It will take effort and unlearning while we remain open-minded to new science and new ideas. Some of us will have to take a hard look at our own complicity and participation, and the ways our minds have been colonized. Some of us will breathe a sigh of relief when we realize that we too can get off the treadmill and out of cycles of shame and restriction and learn to nourish ourselves with kindness.
As I’ve repeated to my church community many times: the awareness is the medicine. We can do the work of waking up to the hold Diet Culture has had on our culture and our faith. Once we realize how we (collectively) have been harmed and complicit in a system of harm, the good work has begun and the real Good News of the Gospel of Christ has more space to flourish. By working through our own fat-phobia and bias, we can learn to embody more joy.
- I advocate Intuitive Eating with zero attention paid to calories. I personally eat a plant-based diet, as that is what is most aligned with my understanding of creation care, specifically animal welfare and environmental crisis mitigation.
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4241770/
- Info about Bod for God: https://pastorstevereynolds.com
- That’s sarcasm, ok? Because that line of thinking is utter bollocks.
- Recommended reading: "Health at Every Size" by Lindo Bacon, Revised and Updated Edition
~ Rev. Fran Pratt
Read online here
About the Author
Rev. Fran Pratt is a pastor, writer, musician, and mystic. Making meaningful and beautiful liturgy to be spoken, practiced, and sung, is at the heart of her creative drive. Fran authored a book of congregational litanies, and regularly creates and shares modern liturgy on her website and Patreon. Her prayers are prayed in churches of various sizes and traditions across the globe. She writes, speaks, and consults on melding ancient and new liturgical streams in faith and worship. Fran is Pastor of Worship and Liturgy at Peace of Christ Church in Round Rock, Texas. |
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Question & Answer
Q: By Bob
I have been reading Dr. Spong’s idea that the Gospels were written for the Synagogue worship. Didn’t the Synagogue worship use Hebrew as its language? Then how did the Gospels get used if they were written in Greek? Could any followers of Jesus speak or write Greek?
A: By Rev. Roger Wolsey
Dear Bob,Spong’s theory about the Gospels certainly is valid and compelling. We know that Hebrew was used by the priests in the Temple. And we know that Hebrew was not in common use by the general population of Israel/Judah in the 1st Century CE. To remind us, the era of the synagogues began many years before the life of Jesus; i.e., during the 6th Century BCE during a time when most of the ancient Hebrews were living in exile in the diaspora outside of Israel/Judah; i.e., during the high zenith of the Greek Empire. During that era, the entire region, including Israel/Judah, was Hellenized. They were smack in the middle of rivaling Greek Empires, the Ptolemaic Kingdom and the Seleucid Empire. Greek was the lingua franca for the entire empire(s), and the culture of the Greeks became well known and was in many ways assimilated.
To help us fathom this, it is effectively the case that the U.S.A. has replaced the British Empire – we have over 700 military bases around the globe to protect “the American way of life.” And along with this, much of today’s world conducts business via English and much of the world’s population is steeped in Western values via American movies, TV shows, music, etc. They aren’t merely “familiar” with American customs, history, myths, religion, values, etc. – they are notably knowledgeable about them. They “know their Star Wars.” When the ancient Hebrews gathered to meet (starting in exile, but also after) they did so via embracing the Greek phenomenon of synagogues. “The Greek word synagogue means a bringing together or assembly”
(see https://drivethruhistoryadventures.com/synagogue-first-century/ and also https://www.worldhistory.org/article/828/the-ancient-synagogue-in-israel--the-diaspora/ ). To be sure, they would have started gathering in similar ways during the previous Babylonian exile in the 6th Century BCE, but it wasn’t formally called synagogue until the 3rd Century BCE during their exile in Egypt. During that era, the ancient Hebrew texts were translated into Greek. Starting with the Pentateuch during the reign of Ptolemy II, and eventually more texts were translated, and the Septuagint was created – the Greek version of the Hebrew Bible.
Back to your question, in the 1st Century CE, most all Israelites were bilingual. They spoke Aramaic and Greek. A high percentage of the words attributed to Jesus are of him quoting from the Septuagint and it was the Septuagint that Jesus read from when he taught in the synagogue in his hometown of Nazareth. This suggests it was Greek that people were speaking even in the synagogues in Israel/Judah.Some posit that Jesus was likely trilingual – fluent in Aramaic, Greek, and Hebrew. What is clear is that Jesus frequently spoke in Greek. What’s clear is that it would have been Greek that he would have used to communicate if the Jesus of history actually had an audience with the Roman official Pontius Pilate. Also of note is the absence of Hebrew in the inscriptions placed above Jesus’s head on the cross referenced in John 19:3. Given that almost all of the New Testament was written in Greek - including the letters of Paul, the other epistles, the Gospels, James, Hebrews, and the Book of Revelation – it seems quite clear the followers of Jesus who were Jew and Gentile were fluent in Greek and that it would’ve been Greek they would have used to interact with each other and when they worshipped together.~ Rev. Roger Wolsey
Read and share online here
About the Author
Rev. Roger Wolsey is a United Methodist pastor who resides in Grand Junction, CO. Roger is author of Kissing Fish: Christianity for people who don’t like Christianity and blogs for Patheos as The Holy Kiss and serves on the Board of Directors of ProgressiveChristianity.Org. Roger became “a Christian on purpose” during his college years and he experienced a call to ordained ministry two years after college. He values the Wesleyan approach to the faith and, as a certified spiritual director, he seeks to help others grow and mature. Roger enjoys yoga; playing trumpet; motorcycling; and camping with his son. He served as the Director of the Wesley Foundation campus ministry at the University of Colorado in Boulder for 14 years, and has served as pastor of churches in Minnesota, Iowa, and currently serves as the pastor of Fruita UMC in Colorado, and also serves as the "CRM" (Congregational Resource Minister/Church Consultant) for the Utah/Western Colorado District of the Mountain Sky Conference. |
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| Don't miss the next Episode of PC.org's Executive Directors Mark and Caleb on:
The Moonshine Jesus Show
- every Monday at 4:30pm Eastern Time – watch live on Facebook,, YouTube, Twitter, Podbean |
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| This Week's Featured Author
Study Guide for the Core
Values of Progressive Christianity
The background material and the questions of this Study Guide were designed to stimulate conversation and to raise issues that might not otherwise come up. None of these materials are intended to make a final theological, Christological, or canonical argument. The last thing we would want to do is to tell anyone how he or she should believe or approach their faith. We simply offer this as a starting point to the conversation and we look forward to the continual evolution of our faith. Read More ... |
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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited
The Birth of Jesus, Part X:
Matthew Sources and the Hebrew Scriptures
Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong
February 21, 2013Reading the Bible with any real comprehension in the 21st century is not an easy task. The gospels are a product of the 1st century, a dramatically different time, and they reflect a vastly different culture. They do not translate easily. Most Christians do not realize that Christianity itself was born in the womb of first-century Judaism and it did not leave that womb until some 50-60 years after the crucifixion of Jesus or, to say it another way, the Christian movement did not separate itself from the synagogue until late in the ninth decade of the Christian era. This means that the gospels of Mark, Matthew and probably Luke were all written while Christianity was still a movement within the synagogue, and that only John, the last gospel to be written, reflects a time after the synagogue and the church had separated.
While the disciples of Jesus were still members of the synagogue they would have listened to the Hebrew Scriptures being read Sabbath by Sabbath and they would have searched within them for what they were certain were messianic clues, which they believed would help them process and understand the experience they had had with Jesus of Nazareth. That is, they looked to the Hebrew Scriptures to enable them to understand both his meaning and his appeal, and the gospels reflected the fact that they had wrapped the memory of Jesus inside their understanding of these Scriptures. As fellow members of the synagogue, they knew the stories of their Jewish past and would recognize when part of that tradition was being used first in preaching and later in gospel writing to illumine the Jesus experience. By the middle years of the second century of the Christian era, however, the followers of Jesus had become almost exclusively a Gentile movement. This meant that the Jewish knowledge necessary to understand the gospels, which had been products of the synagogue, had disappeared among the Gentile faithful. So it was that these Gentile Christians began to manifest profoundly ignorant attitudes toward the gospels, which resulted in both a tendency toward literalization and in a heightened sense of the supernatural and the miraculous. That distortion plagues the Christian Church to this day. These ideas, almost unknown among Jewish worshipers, became quite popular in Gentile Christian circles, even though they distorted badly the relationship of the story of Jesus to the Hebrew Scriptures and especially to the writings of the prophets. The historical reality is that among the disciples of Jesus, the process had actually been the other way around. Convinced as these followers were that Jesus was the promised messiah, they poured over the messianic expectations that permeated Jewish biblical thinking, especially after the time of the Babylonian exile in the first quarter of sixth century BCE, and then forced their memories of Jesus to conform to what they determined were scriptural prophetic expectations. Thus the “Servant” passages of II Isaiah (Is. 40-55) shaped many aspects of the first written version of the story of the cross and, in the process, Jesus was forced to look more and more like Isaiah’s “Servant.” The Shepherd King of II Zechariah (9-14) was also a determinative figure. The Shepherd King, who came riding to his people on a donkey only to be removed for thirty pieces of silver by those who bought and sold animals in the Temple, is a good illustration of how the process worked.
In addition to this, narratives from the lives of the great figures of Jewish history were regularly magnified and then retold about Jesus of Nazareth, so that when we read the gospels, we should not be surprised to discover that events that occurred in the lives of former Jewish heroes – people like Moses, Samuel, Elijah and Elisha among others – were simply retrofitted by the gospel writers and then retold as if they had happened in the life of Jesus of Nazareth.
Matthew employed this technique over and over again in his story of Jesus’ birth. Everything that Matthew related as happening to Jesus during his infancy was in fact designed to place his life into what Matthew believed were the messianic expectations chronicled in the Hebrew Scriptures.
Matthew was also writing apologetically, that is, he was seeking to defend Jesus and the Jesus movement against charges that were currently being leveled against them. There was first what came to be called “the scandal of the cross.” Jesus had been crucified, a fact that seemed to violate all messianic expectations. The passion stories in both Paul and the gospels speak to this issue. When critics in the 9th decade of the Common Era began to question Jesus’ paternity, something that might be called “the scandal of the crib” arose, and Matthew, who was the first author to introduce a narrative about the birth of Jesus, responded directly in that narrative to those charges. Today we move this series of columns into this arena.
First, we need to be aware, as Matthew surely was, of the deep, historic division in Jewish history between the tribe of Judah and the ten other tribes, who came to be called the Northern Kingdom of Israel. Judah was ruled by the House of David. The Northern Kingdom never established a long term ruling family, but identified its people as the descendants of Joseph, the favorite son of the patriarch Jacob, who, after wrestling with an angel, had his name changed to Israel. If Jesus was truly to be messiah, his first task was to bring together the Judah traditions in Hebrew history with the Joseph traditions of Hebrew history.
Matthew did this first in the genealogy by going from Abraham through Judah to David and Solomon and then through the royal house of David, which ruled Judah from 1000 BCE to 586 BCE. The Judah root of Jesus’ life was thus clear. Next he introduced into his story an earthly father, whose role it was to protect and to legitimize Jesus and gave to him the name Joseph. To make his readers certain of his purpose, he then developed the biographical details of this Joseph character right out of the Hebrew Scriptures. Please be aware that no father of Jesus had ever been mentioned anywhere prior to the writing of Matthew. There are no references to Joseph in any of the epistles of Paul (51-64) and none in Mark, the first gospel to be written (ca.70-72). There are some who argue that both the Q document and the Gospel of Thomas also antedate Mark. I do not agree with that, but I simply note that, even if that were to be proved to be true, there is no reference to Joseph in either of those sources.
Matthew appears to be the one who chose the name of Joseph for the character he would create as the “earthly” father of Jesus. This Joseph was then assigned a primary role in Matthew’s story of the virgin birth. In that patriarchal society, someone had to be the guardian of this vulnerable, pregnant woman and eventually of her infant and presumed illegitimate, son. Matthew made those the duties of Joseph, the earthly father. Once this character became part of his story Matthew then had to flesh out his creation with content. It should come as no surprise that he would draw that content from the story of the patriarch Joseph in Genesis (37-50).
In this Genesis story, one discovers three primary identifying marks associated with the patriarch Joseph. First, he has a father named Jacob. Second, he is associated again and again with dreams. In the Genesis story, the young Joseph is always dreaming about how important he will become. In his adult life while in prison, he becomes the interpreter of the dreams of two people hauled into prison by Pharaoh. One was the Pharaoh’s butler and the other was the Pharaoh’s baker. Joseph’s interpretations of these two men’s dreams come true. Then he becomes the interpreter of the Pharaoh’s dreams and he rides on his ability to interpret dreams into political power in Egypt. The Genesis patriarch, Joseph, is overwhelmingly identified with dreams. Third this Joseph is also given the task in Jewish history of saving the “people of the covenant” from death. This threat of death to the Hebrew people came at that time in the form of a famine in which starvation was real. How did Joseph save them? He took them down into the land of Egypt where food was still plentiful.
Now look closely at the character of Joseph as drawn by Matthew in his birth narrative that opens his story of Jesus. Matthew makes three claims for this Joseph. First, he tells us that Joseph had a father named Jacob. Second, Matthew portrays his Joseph, just like the patriarch Joseph, as being constantly associated with dreams. God never speaks to him except through a dream. In a dream God, or the “angel of the Lord,” instructs Joseph to take Mary to himself assuring him that the child she is having is “of the Holy Spirit.” In a dream, Joseph is instructed to flee from death at the hands of Herod. In a dream, Joseph is directed to return to their Bethlehem home following the death of Herod and then in a dream, Joseph is told to seek the safety of a town in Galilee called Nazareth, so that the child might grow up in relative security. Finally, just as the role of Joseph in the book of Genesis was to save “the people of the covenant” from death by fleeing to Egypt, so now Matthew’s Joseph will save the messianic figure of Jesus from death by fleeing with him down to Egypt. No, this is not literal history. Joseph is a literary creation, not a person of history and the “flight to Egypt” was a literary device to link Jesus to Moses. This Joseph then disappears from the biblical story as soon as the birth narratives are complete and is never portrayed again in any context. Jewish readers would recognize Matthew’s sources. Later Gentile readers would not and because they did not understand would proceed to assume that they were reading history.
At every point in Matthew’s story, the symbols, drawn out of the Hebrew Scriptures, are not just present, but they have been incorporated into the memory of Jesus. When this series continues, we will examine those quoted passages. They come from Isaiah, Micah, Jeremiah, Hosea and a final mysterious source. Matthew’s message is clear. He has interpreted Jesus as the fulfillment of the expectations found in the Jewish Scriptures.
~ John Shelby Spong |
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