Should Christians be vegetarians?

Warning: Do not read this article until Nov. 23.

"Thanksgiving serves as a national myth about the salvific power of meat," complains Stephen H. Webb, a scholar who thinks the Bible supports vegetarianism. He finds the holiday spiritually vapid, "more about our gratitude for the stuffed turkey than for the variety and abundance of food options God has given us."

Besides, it's not even true that the Pilgrims feasted on turkey in 1621, he reports. They celebrated a "vegetable-laden harvest" by consuming corn mush, nuts, fruits, pumpkin, popcorn, squash and bread, with some venison and game birds merely "on the side."

Not necessary today

A bit of flesh-eating may have been necessary for the Pilgrims or ancient Israelites to survive, Webb suggests, but that hardly describes modern Americans.

Webb teaches philosophy and religion at Wabash College in Indiana and chairs the Cleveland-based Christian Vegetarian Association. He develops a Christian case for vegetarianism in "Good Eating: The Bible, Diet, and the Proper Love of Animals" (Brazos).

Webb knows his view is hard for conventional Christians to swallow, so he sharply distinguishes it from pagan-tinged vegetarianism and animal-rights zealotry.

Those movements make nature and animals divine rather than their Creator, or erase the biblical boundary between humans and other mammals, he says. Eastern religions add the factor of reincarnation: Animals are revered because they might have been human souls in past lives.

By biblical standards it's acceptable to use the labor and products of animals, Webb believes. "Animals are here in part to serve us." But the Bible insists they're to be treated respectfully, as creatures of God.

Webb pooh-poohs the "Jesus Was a Vegetarian" campaign. If we take the New Testament at face value, Jesus ate fish if not other flesh, although Webb notes liberal claims that fish-eating stories were "late additions" to the Gospels.

The Last Supper was a vegetarian meal, Webb points out.

In any event, he argues, the ethical question isn't what Jesus ate in the first century but what he'd eat if he were a 21st-century American, in light of his own teachings. Webb is convinced Jesus would forswear flesh due to these factors:

Heavy consumption of meat can harm human health. Heart disease aside, 70 percent of food-borne illnesses stem from meat and poultry.

Worse is the cost to animals. The only way to produce so much meat so cheaply is by raising animals "in ways that are clearly contrary to the life that God intended for them."

In terms of world hunger, 8.7 billion humans, far more than Earth's population, could be sustained by the food required to raise cattle.

Meat production is "tremendously costly to the environment." More than plant farming, raising of livestock causes soil erosion, deforestation and excessive use of water. In America, livestock produce 130 times the waste that humans do.

The biblical vegetarian's pet (so to speak) Bible text is God's dictum in the Garden of Eden: "Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food" (Genesis 1:29).

After the flood

The Bible mentions meat-eating only after Noah's flood: "Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you; and as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything. Only you shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood" (Genesis 9:3-4).

In the vegetarian view, meat was a concession to fallen humanity's sinfulness while plants-only was God's original intent.

What about the animal sacrifices in Old Testament worship, something the Bible itself never explains? All ancient peoples followed this practice, Webb figures, so God permitted sacrifices at an early stage of Israel's development, to control "the all-too-human lust for animal flesh."

One Webb slogan is a twist on "What Would Jesus Do?" (W.W.J.D.): "What Would Jesus Eat?"