Obesity, Overeating, and Overspending

For the third time in recent weeks, I am beginning this post by referring to an Oscar winner. Early this month, June and I watched The Whale. Brendan Fraser won the Academy Award for the best male actor of the year for his portrayal of Charlie, the obese central character in that engaging film. 

The Whale deals with several issues, but morbidly obese Charlie was the focus of the film, which was made in consultation with the Obesity Action Coalition (OAC). The mission of the OAC is “to elevate and empower those affected by obesity through education, advocacy and support.”

The OAC website states that their organization, formed in 2005, wants to help create a society where all individuals “are treated with respect and without discrimination or bias regardless of their size or weight.”

That is a good and important mission statement, and I wholeheartedly affirm it. That doesn’t mean, however, that obesity is not a serious problem for most obese people themselves and for society as a whole. According to a 2019 report, the annual medical cost of obesity in the U.S. was $147 billion.

Another organization, the Obesity Society, was formed in 1982, and its webpage states,

Obesity is a highly prevalent chronic disease characterized by excessive fat accumulation or distribution that presents a risk to health and requires lifelong care.

People such as Charlie, and those who are far less obese or just markedly overweight, need understanding and support. No one deserves “fat shaming” or belittling because of their weight.

Not all obesity is caused by overeating, and not all overeating results in obesity. Still, most obese people do eat too much and too much of the wrong foods, and most people who eat too much and too much of the wrong foods are overweight, if not obese.

Regardless of the cause, all people with health problems need medical (including, sometimes, psychological) help with those problems. That is true for all those who have health issues because of “addiction” to food or whatever might cause them to be overweight.

Such problems need to be addressed, for they impact both the quality and length of life for such individuals. Certainly, not all people who maintain a healthy eating and drinking lifestyle live to the age of 90 or more, but very few people who do not practice such a lifestyle live to an advanced age.

How do/should we eat when so many don’t have enough to eat? Now I am addressing all of us, not just those who are overweight or may be obese.

This is a matter I have been concerned about for decades. As I mentioned in my 9/20/22 blog post about Ron Sider (1939~2022), his most widely-read book was Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger.  

That book was hailed by Christianity Today as one of the one hundred most influential books in religion in the 20^th century. Originally published in 1977, a revised, expanded, and updated edition was issued in 2015.

The first of the four parts of that powerful book is titled “Poor Lazarus and Rich Christians.” The reference, of course, is to the story Jesus told about a poor man named Lazarus, and an unnamed “rich man who clothed himself in purple and fine linen, and who feasted luxuriously every day” (Luke 16:19).

There is no indication that the rich man was obese or even overweight, but Jesus told this story in criticism of the Pharisees, “who were money-lovers” (v. 14)—and also likely lovers of expensive fine food.

Sider’s first chapter is “A Billion Hungry Neighbors.” Maybe there are not as many now as in 2017, still, I can’t help but wonder how many of us, regardless of how much we weigh, spend too much for fine food to eat at home and in pricey restaurants and give too little to help our “neighbors.”

Those who are obese or overweight because of metabolism issues or food addiction may not be able to choose to do/be different from what they are at present.

Most of us can, though, choose to eat less expensive food and spend less on restaurant meals. But will we do that in order to share more generously with our hungry neighbors? 

A Model for Christians: In Fond Memory of Ron Sider

You may find it hard to believe, but I once was a member of the KKK. Well, not that KKK. Not long after moving to Fukuoka City on the Japanese island of Kyushu, I became a member of the Kyushu Kenkyu Kai (kenkyu = study; kai = meeting).*

A little over ten years later, our KKK’s monthly meeting discussed Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger (1977). That was my introduction to author Ron Sider, and I was one of his many admirers who was saddened by his sudden death in July. 

Ron Sider (1939~2022) in 2019

Ronald James Sider was born in Canada on Sept. 17, 1939. Following the completion of his Ph.D. studies at Yale in 1969, Sider took a position teaching at Messiah College’s Philadelphia campus and then in 1977 became a professor at what is now Eastern University’s Palmer Theological Seminary.

Sider was an Anabaptist, reared in the Brethren in Christ Church in Canada. He was ordained to the Christian ministry by both that Church and by the Mennonites.

Sider had a long and fruitful career as a professor, author, and activist. He published over 30 books and wrote over 100 articles for both religious and secular magazines.

By far, his most widely-read book was Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger. Hailed by Christianity Today as one of the one hundred most influential books in religion in the 20^th century, it has sold over 400,000 copies in nine languages.

Ron Sider was “a model for an evangelical Christianity committed to social justice.” That is how Tish Harrison Warren, an Anglican priest, describes Sider in her Aug. 7 New York Times opinion piece. I heartily agree.

When he was still 34 years old and before moving to Eastern, in 1973 Sider helped convene a group of evangelical Christians in Chicago. They issued “The Chicago Declaration of Evangelical Social Concern.”

Writing about that document in 2012, one author explained that “Sider and his colleagues condemned American militarism, sexism, economic injustice, and President Nixon’s ‘lust for and abuse of power.’”** (Sider and his fellow evangelicals then were quite different from many evangelicals today.)

It was because of “The Chicago Declaration,” which in addition to Sider was signed by over 50 progressive evangelicals, including Art Gish and Jim Wallis as well as James Dunn and Foy Valentine, two Southern Baptists I highly respected, that I was able to long self-identify as an evangelical.

Then, under Sider’s leadership, “The Chicago Declaration” became the founding document for Evangelicals for Social Action, a progressive group organized in 1978. (In 2020 the ESA changed their name to Christians for Social Action.)

I did not agree with all of Sider’s positions, such as his unwavering anti-abortion stance. Nevertheless, I appreciate the emphasis he made in his 1987 book titled Completely Pro-Life: Building a Consistent Stance on Abortion, the Family, Nuclear Weapons, the Poor.

Despite some disagreements, Sider was clearly a model for Christians, especially for those in the evangelical tradition, who take the teachings of Jesus seriously.

Ron Sider was an active Christian model into his 80s. In 2020, his succinct book Speak Your Peace: What the Bible Says about Loving Our Enemies articulated his Anabaptist understanding of Christianity and summarized the biblical case for pacifism and active nonviolence.

Also in 2020, Sider was the editor of The Spiritual Danger of Donald Trump: 30 Evangelical Christians on Justice, Truth, and Moral Integrity. In addition to the Introduction and Afterword, he also authored chapters 8 and 11 of that book.

His last blog post, a 900-word article titled “Advance Both Religious Liberty and LGBTQ Civil Rights,” was made on May 29 before his death of cardiac arrest on July 27.

So, I post this in fond memory of Ron Sider, who as Warren wrote “helped birth a movement and blaze a trail. And though at times it seems that trail has been hidden under Christian political partisanship . . . many Christians are still trying to walk the narrow path he left behind him.”

Thank God for faithful Christian scholars and disciples such as Ron Sider!

_____

* One of my first blog posts, made here on 7/21/09, was titled “James Cone at a KKK Meeting.” Up to this point, there have been only 24 pageviews of it, but many of you would find that brief post about the black liberation theologian to be of interest.

** The words are from Asbury University professor David Swartz’s book  Moral Minority: The Evangelical Left in an Age of Conservatism (2012, 2014).

De-escalating the Abortion Wars

Abortion is extremely contentious, and for more than 45 years now, there has been considerable “warfare” between “pro-choice” and “pro-life” people. Is there any way to de-escalate such negative polarization?  

The Abortion Wars

James Davison Hunter is a “Distinguished Professor” at the University of Virginia and author of the seminal book Culture Wars (1991).

“The Issue of Abortion” is a major subsection of the ninth chapter of my book Fed up with Fundamentalism, and as I mention there, Hunter (b. 1955) has suggested that abortion could well be the catalyst for America’s next civil war.

That kind of talk didn’t end in the 1990s, though. In May of last year, the conservative Christian Post featured an online article titled “The coming civil war over abortion.” That same month, The Guardian posted “Christian rightwingers warn abortion fight could spark US civil war.”

Among Christians, abortion was primarily only a Catholic issue until Francis Schaeffer convinced Baptist pastor Jerry Falwell in 1979 to use it to gain political power—and the abortion wars have now raged for four decades among Christians as well as in society at large.

In this election year, abortion is at the heart of the political “wars” between the Republicans and Democrats. Vice President Pence said in his acceptance speech last week,

President Trump has stood without apology for the sanctity of human life every day of this administration. Joe Biden, he supports taxpayer funding of abortion, right up to the moment of birth.

(It has often been said that truth is the first casualty in war, and Pence’s last statement is misleading and untrue.)

De-escalation Efforts

In spite of the rhetoric being used by the Trump administration and its staunch conservative evangelical followers, there are both Catholics and evangelical Christians who are seeking to de-escalate the abortion wars by broadening their ethical concerns.

In 1972 a group of Catholic sisters organized for social justice as the Network. They became widely known because of their first Nuns on the Bus tour in 2012. (In 2014 I wrote about them and their leader, Sister Simone Campbell, here.)

Long known as just NETWORK, their website is NetworkLobby.org and they are promoting PopeFrancisVoters.org in their campaign against the current President. Even though they are Catholics, they say little about abortion and much about a broad gamut of social justice issues.

Ron Sider, the founder of Evangelicals for Social Action, is an example of a Protestant evangelical who has through the years been strongly against abortion. But long ago he began to emphasize the importance of being “completely pro-life,” publishing a book by that name in 1987.

In de-escalating the abortion wars, Sider was the editor of a book published earlier this year under the title The Spiritual Danger of Donald Trump: 30 Evangelical Christians on Justice, Truth, and Moral Integrity.

A Spark of Light

Jodi Picoult is a superlative novelist, and I was greatly impressed with her 2018 novel A Spark of Light. In fact, I decided to write this blog article mainly because of reading it.

The novel is about just one day—a very fateful day when there was a shooting in an abortion clinic.

Picoult skillfully narrates the deep thoughts and convictions of all the people involved in that tragic day: the shooter, the policeman seeking to get the shooter’s hostages released, the protesters outside the clinic, the women inside the clinic, and the doctors and nurses providing the abortion services. 

Dr. Willie Parker (b. 1962)

The doctor performing the abortions that day is based on a real-life abortion doctor, Willie Parker, who tells his story in Life’s Work: A Moral Argument for Choice (2017).  

Even though it will be quite perplexing to some, Parker believes that performing abortions and “speaking out on behalf of the women who want abortions” is his Christian calling and his “life’s work” (p. 16).

For all of you who wonder how a Christian can justify abortion, I highly recommend reading Picoult’s novel and/or Parker’s book. Doing so thoughtfully, I believe, would go far toward de-escalating the abortion wars.

A Shout Out for CPT

Although I have long been opposed to war and am a strong advocate of peacemaking, for some reason I have not known much about Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) until fairly recently. But they are a significant group that deserves recognition and support.

On Palm Sunday, Sarah Thompson was the guest preacher at Rainbow Mennonite Church in Kansas City, Kansas. Sarah has been the Executive Director of Christian Peacemaker Teams since January 2014. She is an impressive person, and she gave an impressive sermon.

Sarah was born in Elkhart, Indiana, and in 2006 graduated summa cum laude from Spelman College in Atlanta. (That is the historic predominantly African-American college for women from which Mariam Wright Edelman and Alice Walker graduated.) Then in 2010 she earned the M.Div. degree from Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary.

“Christian Peacemaker Teams” was founded in Chicago in 1986. It grew out of the challenge presented by Canadian-born theologian Ron Sider at the 1984 Mennonite World Conference in Strasbourg, France. He criticized Mennonites and others in the peace churches for limiting their peace witness mainly to just being conscientious objectors.

Sider challenged the Mennonites to be ready “to risk injury and death in nonviolent opposition to the injustice our societies foster.” That call to active peacemaking sparked study groups in Anabaptist churches all over North America and gave rise to the formation of Christian Peacemaker Teams.

(Sider tells about his 1984 challenge and the subsequent work of CPT in his 2015 book “Nonviolent Action: What Christian Ethics Demands but Most Christians Have Never Really Tried.”)

Originally sponsored by the two major North American Mennonite denominations and the Church of the Brethren, CPT has become increasingly ecumenical and now receives support from Friends (Quakers) and from other Christian groups, such as the Baptist Peace Fellowship of North America.

CPT has operated in Iraq since October 2002. They teamed up with Voices in the Wilderness (now known as Voices for Creative Nonviolence) to form the Iraq Peace Team (IPT). Among other things, the IPT formed “human shields” to help protect Iraqi civilians when Baghdad began to be attacked by the U.S.

In November 2005 four CPT activists were captured in Baghdad, leading to what came to be known as the Christian Peacemaker hostage crisis. In spite of CPT’s opposition, three of them were rescued by a military operation in March 2006. The fourth hostage was not so fortunate.

Tom Fox (1951–2006), an American Quaker peace activist, was one of the CPT members captured—and subsequently killed. Upon Fox’s death, the CPT released a statement of condolences—and also asked that people not “vilify or demonize others, no matter what they have done.”

In keeping with the core beliefs of CPT, Fox himself said, “We reject violence to punish anyone. . . . We forgive those who consider us their enemies.”

On their current website, CPT explains what they are about:

Partnering with nonviolent movements around the world, CPT seeks to embody an inclusive, ecumenical and diverse community of God’s love. We believe we can transform war and occupation, our own lives, and the wider Christian world through the nonviolent power of God’s truth, partnership with local peacemakers, [and] bold action.

CPT says that they place teams at the invitation of local peacemaking communities that are confronting situations of lethal conflict. Those teams seek to follow God’s Spirit as they “work through local peacemakers who risk injury and death by waging nonviolent direct action to confront systems of violence and oppression.”

Christian Peacemaker Teams is an organization certainly worthy of our respect, prayers, and financial support.