Fundamentalism is Overpermissive about Fat

Posted on May 8, 2004 in Eating Morals & Ethics Reading Sugar and Fat

I know gluttony is a bad thing. But I don’t know many gluttons.
  – Jerry Falwell

Sure, we have heard the ministers bash their fists on the table against abortion and same sex marriage. We have heard them wail against the decline of family values and the lack of control over children. But at the root of it all — besides being hateful in complete contradiction with the word of Christ — Fundamentalists have promoted gluttony. While they jeer at women entering family planning clinics and spit on the graves of AIDS victims, they chew on super-sized meals and steadilly grow to dimensions that emulate the globe.

Overeating is the board in their eyes.

I am struggling with a weight problem. And when I go to all-you-can-eat salad bars or fast food restaurants, I see people gorging themselves, me among them. When you see a man with a waist that is three times the size of a pregant woman’s going for his third or fourth heavy helping, you know that it is not just a “chemical” thing. He’s got a self-control problem.

These are godly people. I know that by the crosses they wear around their necks, the fish they post on their cars, and the nasty allusions they make about the sensuality of thin people.

And they are gluttons. If they cannot see this, then they do not know themselves.

Through Greg Crister’s book Fat Land : How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World, I’ve been facing the gluttony in myself. I am about 35 pounds overweight. I’m working on bringing it down. I know that this has nothing to do with my depression or my biochemistry: I got this way because when there’s food around the house, I eat it. I like the fatty stuff best of all. Too often, I do not put up a fight when I eat to calm my nerves. In me, you can sometimes see a moral decline. Despite my professed agnosticism, my faith in my senses, I act as one who believes in the separation of the mind and the body. And for this reason, I have become a Type 2 diabetic. It’s my own damn fault.

A 1998 study by Kenneth F. Ferraro revealed that:

Obesity was highest in states where religious affiliation was highest, but the specific differences in body weight were more likely explained by differences in class, ethnicity, and marital status. Of all religious groups surveyed, Southern Baptists were the heaviest, followed by Fundamentalist and Pietistic Prostestants. Catholics fell at the middle of the list, while the lowest average body weight was found among Jews and non-Christians. Surveying attitudes within those groups, Ferraro concluded that obesity was associated with higher levels of religiosity….”Consolation and comfort from religion and from eating,” Ferraro wrote, “may be a couple of the few pleasures accessible to populations, which are economically and politically deprived.”

….did modern sects act to inhibit gluttony or obesity — the answer was…surprising. It didn’t. Instead the church had become a nest of unqualified social acceptance. [As long as you weren’t a single mother or gay/lesbian.] As Ferraro wrote: “There is no evidence of religion operating as a moral constraint on obesity.” Instead, Ferraro went on, “higher religious practice was more common among overweight persons, perhaps reflecting religion’s emphasis upon tolerating human weakness and its emphasis on other forms of deviancy such as alcoholism, smoking and sexual promiscuity.”

Ferraro warned that it wasn’t that religion indirectly promoted higher body weight. Rather, most pastors simply saw obesity as too risky a subject. “They feel they would risk alienating the flock — at least at this point,” says Ferraro. “In that sense, we are in a stage with obesity like we were with smoking in the 1950s and 1960s.” [pp.56-57]

I think Ferraro might be just a little too cowed to say what is obvious: antinomian religion promotes denial about overeating and poor health.

Jerry Falwell stands as a crowning example of permissiveness and deep denial when it comes to overeating. So are those who talk about “fat as a human right”, who claim that they are overweight simply because of “big bones” or because they have a chemical problem. “Oh, I eat very little,” you hear them say. Then you see them, with their plates piled high at a smorgasbord and you know that most of them are liars.

Their religion, it seems, aids and abets them. The followers of this version of Christianity which insists on the Bible as the inerrant word of God and insists that the Creation story is the One True Account of how the Earth came to be are well-used to ignoring Science, commonsense, and anything that might leave the coffers a little emptier than the minister would want to see it. Not only do ministers turn a blind eye to members of their congregations, but men like Falwell don’t see the glutton in themselves. Fundamentalism fails to challenge its followers to mind their waistlines. Porcine Jerry Falwell stands as a monument to their denial: they eat too much. It’s a matter of self-control and hatred of the body: mind the soul, they say. Mind the soul. The body is evil and it can just rot.

I say that a sure way to obstruct the soul’s walk towards harmony with the cosmos is to inflict the suffering of too much fat upon it. Something I have been doing all too well in this life of mine. I’m in the midst of a conversion. If you wail at me about anything, point to my midline. Studies show that those who are nagged about their waists and encouraged to eat better, do lose weight.

I’ll thank you for it.