DON'T EAT THAT - THE EROTICS OF ABSTINENCE IN AMERICAN CHRISTIANITY

We are all now gastropornographers.

(British celebrity food writer Nigella Lawson)

Monks fasting in the desert, saints beating their bodies and sleeping on nails, apostles renouncing all pleasures and subsisting on the charity of benefactors, pious men and women starving their senses in emulation of Christ: It is by now a truism to note that devout Christians of earlier eras displayed profound ambivalence about food and flesh. For both patristic and medieval followers of the faith, the body was felt to be a burden that must be suffered resignedly during earthly life while yet remaining the crucial material out of which devotional practice and spiritual progress were forged. Thus the body, cultivated as an instrument for salvation, was to be endured, subjected to the scrutiny of the spirit, and strenuously disciplined.

Such discipline would take many forms, one of the most recurrent of which was extreme abstinence from food. The discipline of fasting, well established in the Mediterranean world long before Christianity emerged, became especially important in Christian communal practice during the early fourth century c.e., used variously as a method of baptismal preparation, a means of purification, a sign of grief, a work of charity, or an expression of penitence and the desire for God’s mercy. Over the next several centuries, as Caroline Walker Bynum has richly documented, both the meaning and the practice of Christian abstinence changed significantly, so that by the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries preachers and theologians urged “spiritual more than physical abstinence,” meaning general restraint or moderation in all areas of life. Yet many Christians of the later Middle Ages, particularly women, decried this perspective as a dangerous compromise with the world and chose the path of extreme asceticism, imitating and deeply identifying with the broken flesh of Christ on the cross through rigorous sacrificial fasting. For those such as Catherine of Siena, who died of self-induced starvation at the age of thirty-three, true nourishment came only from Christ, and to rely too heavily on earthly food was to commit the terrible sin of gluttony.1

Prescriptions and practices of nutritive abstinence fluctuated in subsequent eras, and scattered examples of intense food refusal among Christians, again mostly though not exclusively women, have continued to dot the historical record. Since the transformative religious revolutions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Catholics and Protestants alike have participated in the ascetic tradition, though always in very particular, localized ways. Martin Luther condemned extravagant forms of self-denial that destroyed the body; yet he urged moderated fasting both to curb distracting physical desires and to take care of the body so that it might minister to others’ needs. John Calvin held more strictly to fasting as a necessary discipline for appeasing God’s wrath, a view echoed in later groups like the English Puritans. The Churches of England, Rome, and the Eastern world followed fixed calendrical times for fasting—such as Lent, Ember Days, Rogation Days, Fridays, and Vigils prior to certain holy festivals—but varied in the precise meaning given to “fasting” per se.

Meanwhile, medical and devotional writers on both sides of the Atlantic increasingly recommended a sober and temperate diet for the health of the body as well as the glory of God. In fact, since the Colonial period, American Christians have wrestled with questions about bodily asceticism and gluttony in ways that would arguably feel increasingly unfamiliar to their patristic and medieval forebears. While critiques of gluttony—articulated variously by Puritans and Social Gospelers, radical Catholics and Holiness adherents— recall themes expressed by earlier Christian ascetics, an evolving fixation on health and perfection (chiefly among Protestants) represents a stark departure from the older emphasis on corporeal acts of penitence. Even more discordantly, the contemporary obsession with slender, toned bodies and the ideal of extreme thinness bear only a distorted resemblance to rituals of purification and self-denial that occupied Christians in earlier periods. Somehow, it seems, the kinship between body and soul has become dramatically reconceptualized, with significant help from men and women professing Christianity but focusing as much on the “promised land of weight loss” as on the eternal Kingdom of God.

How did this happen? What exactly is the relation between Christianity and the modern American diet obsession, the compulsive anxiety felt by so many women, men, teenagers, and increasingly even children toward their weight, food intake, and body size? Our knowledge of Christianity’s profound impact on diet in prior historical periods, including the antebellum body reform movements inspired by figures such as William Alcott, Sylvester Graham, and Elizabeth Blackwell, helps us see how Protestant morals were transformed into somatic disciplines, such that dietary correctness became central to the larger reform project of forging a Christian nation.2 Many people would nonetheless argue that religion is so attenuated in the modern world as to have little if any tangible connection to, say, contemporary food refusal. Some, like Joan Jacobs Brumberg in Fasting Girls, have promoted a fairly standard model of secularization, arguing that religious fasting was transformed into secular dieting sometime during the nineteenth century (though neglecting to show just how and why this change occurred). Others, most notably Hillel Schwartz in Never Satisfied, have argued that modern dieting is itself a central ritual in what has become the predominant religion of late twentieth-century America: the worship of the body beautiful, lean, and physically “fit.” But though religion plays an important—albeit mostly speculative— role in such accounts as a Foucauldian disciplinary apparatus to be resisted and rejected, its appreciable impact has not been clearly elaborated. So the problem remains unsolved: what relation might a specific tradition such as Protestantism have to modern American bodily practices and food obsessions?3

"This was one of the questions that led me into my book, Born Again Bodies: Flesh and Spirit in American Christianity. The project explores the recent trajectory of religious struggles with food and the body, historicizing the links between varied dietary regimens and devotional practice. Included are such topics as the trajectory of fasting from an act of mortification into a masculinized therapeutic practice; sundry quests for physical vigor, purification, and immortality among such groups as Methodists, Pentecostals, and proponents of mind cure; the rhythms of hygienic discipline and celebratory abundance in organizations like Father Divine’s Peace Mission Movement; the advent of evangelical dieting in the postwar era; and the persistent ideals of corporeal beauty and “fitness” in contemporary Christianity. American culture’s treasured doctrine of the perfectible body is deeply indebted to Christian currents that have perceived the body as central for pushing the soul along the path to progress. And nowhere is that relationship more evident than in the deeply contested arena of the appetite, where desire and pleasure, once associated with excessive food intake, now more typically inhabit the realm of strict abstinence".

“Sculptors of Our Own Exterior”: Modern Quests for Physical Perfection

"The modern chapter of Christianity’s struggle with the appetite begins with the New Thought movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. New Thought was a Protestant offshoot whose proponents were intensely preoccupied with metaphysical questions and with uncovering the relations between mind and matter, the soul and the body. A cousin of Christian Science, it was a movement whose impact went far beyond the bounds of its own institutional structures to inspire the traditions of positive thinking, the self-help movement, so-called New Age philosophies, and the therapeutic ethic that has permeated virtually all major manifestations of twentieth-century American Protestantism. Its participants tended to be well educated and were interested in Eastern and occult traditions. They believed that “thoughts were things,” that is, that mind power could secure wealth, health, and happiness through techniques that would now be called “creative visualization.” New Thought leaders were deeply concerned with healing bodily illness and with attaining prosperity, and they described God not as an authoritarian father but rather as the “immanent, indwelling Spirit,” Mind with a capital M, the All-Supply or Universal Supply of power that any human being could access with the right skills. And while New Thought writers often seemed to be saying that this power was accessed by means of mind energy alone, a closer look reveals clearly that, for many at least, the body was the real source of might. That is to say, while New Thought disciples frequently displayed an apprehensiveness toward materiality and doggedly insisted upon the ultimate power of Spirit, they also gave strenuous attention to the flesh and to the food that sustained it, paying meticulous attention to dietary regimens and systems of physical culture as a way of suggesting that physical development was the primary source of mental and spiritual development".

Prentice Mulford (1834–1891) was one well-known New Thought writer who considered matter essential to the life of the spirit. Mulford took care to note that as faith increased, the spirit would call in “many material aids” to aid in personal renewal, including the selection of foods. Elsewhere Mulford explained his view more thoroughly:It is not a good sign for a person to say that he or she doesn’t care what they eat… It is the spirit that demands varying dishes and flavours. The spirit has reasons we cannot now explain for such demands. When the palate becomes indifferent in these respects, and one flavour is counted as good as another, it proves there is a deadening or blunting of the spirit. The higher the spiritualisation of any person the more vigorous and appreciative becomes the palate. It is the spirit that receives the pleasure of eating through the physical sense of taste.

The pleasures of eating, like other physical pleasures, were to be savored and taken very seriously, in Mulford’s view, lest one fall into gluttony. “The glutton does not eat,” Mulford observed. “He swallows. Proper eating dwells on every morsel with relish, and the longer it can be so dwelt upon, the longer it serves as the physical medium for the conveyance of life to the spirit.”4 Readers were urged, then, to eat what most pleased their taste, rather than eating merely for health from a sense of duty.

Paradoxically, the advice to eat only such foods as were individually pleasing was followed by a lengthy exposition of the proper and most spiritual diet. Topping the list were fresh meats, vegetables, and fruits, said to “contain the most force” (though meat was noted to be “grosser” and “coarser”). Products that were salted or pickled had reduced force, since the preserving process depleted them of life. Reduced intake of food in general, and of meat in particular, was unambiguously associated with higher spiritual attainment. This Mulford attributed to the fact that the fear and helplessness implanted in animals at the time of slaughter (and even in plants at harvest) was, through ingestion, transferred to the human eater. Other New Thought teachers similarly urged their hearers toward vegetarianism, many holding out the hope that the day would eventually come when humanity would be so spiritually advanced as to live on air alone. A good number of these approached that goal through rigorous, extended fasting, a devotional technique that had fallen out of many branches of mainstream American Protestantism by the mid nineteenth century, only to be reborn some decades later as a system for obtaining perfect health, happiness, longevity, and beauty. According to this “New Gospel of Health,” nearly all diseases and illnesses could be attributed to excessive eating, to gorging oneself on immoderate quantities of food out of habit or “morbid hunger.” A vast and diverse parade of apostles soon entered the scene, expanding and popularizing the gospel of fasting to a degree that its ancient practitioners could scarcely have imagined. Most were Protestants who had been inspired by New Thought optimism and preached a cheerful gospel of health and wealth into which fasting fit quite nicely. Few sang the joys of austere living, instead arguing that brief periods of fasting were pleasurable in and of themselves, not to mention their results. Rather than glamorize ascetics and mystics, these gospelers defended fasting from the so-called epicuric point of view: food would be relished more thoroughly, rest would be sweeter than before; in short, fasting opened the way to a richer enjoyment of all life’s embodied pleasures, perhaps most especially controlled ingestion.5

By the early decades of the twentieth century, Anglo-American diet reformers had achieved colossal success in their quest to demonize corpulence and preach thinness as necessary to personal salvation, condemning the wayward appetite even as they elevated the role of proper food in the life of the spirit. While these ideas were nurtured at the fringe of Protestant culture in their own time, they were steadily gaining ground, eventually coming to look downright conventional. Christian piety and diet reform first enthusiastically reunited in the mainstream avenues of mid-twentieth-century America, disseminating to the hungry populace an updated equation of thinness with godliness that has only grown stronger over time. By the middle decades of the twentieth century, with religion firmly ensconced as a “this-worldly” and therapeutic enterprise, Christians could reclaim their concern with beauty and health, conveniently packaged as a scripturally sanctioned matterof holy discipline. Weight loss would prove its robustness as a vital and highly lucrative theme in Christian literature and practice for decades to come.

Praying the Weight Away: Scripture and Devotional Practice in Service to Weight Loss “We fatties are the only people on earth who can weigh our sin,” wrote Presbyterian minister Charlie W. Shedd in 1957.

"Evil thoughts don’t come by ounces; vile temper, hatred, unbridled passion, censorious words, selfishness, these do not measure in pounds. But your sin does, and mine! Stand on the scale. How much more do you weigh than you should weigh? There it is: one hundred pounds of sin, or fifty, or eleven".

Shedd’s book, published when the author was in his early forties, was aptly titled Pray Your Weight Away. Here Shedd, who professed having lost one hundred pounds himself, announced his “new truth” that was “glorious news for the obese.” Writing to an audience rather less jaded by diet books—and far more unfamiliar with combining spirituality and weight loss—than later readers would be, Shedd promoted a gospel of slimness that condemned fat bodies in the explicit language of sin and guilt while guaranteeing weight loss by means of sustained prayer, devotion to the Bible, and unshakeable faith in thinness as a sign of sanctity.6

To claim that “reducing,” in the parlance of the day, was a “spiritual problem” rather than merely a medical one echoed older themes rehearsed in the Jacksonian and Progressive Eras while replaying them in a new key. Since at least the 1920s, Protestants in the old-line churches had been importing and absorbing New Thought notions of health and healing into their practice, including under that rubric both emotional and physical well-being. The Pentecostal tradition, which spawned such widely influential preachers and healers as Aimee Semple McPherson, William Branham, and Oral Roberts, further contributed to the increasingly accepted belief that good health was at the heart of God’s plan for all believers.

At the time that Shedd wrote, however, there had been very little public attention paid to overweight as something that itself required healing from divine hands. Although the postwar period was a time of increased consciousness about weight and an upsurge in diet, the religious literature remained mostly silent on the issue. Shedd argued that such diseases as were associated with obesity—from diabetes to heart problems to flat feet—were all in opposition to God’s design for humanity. Moreover, because fat preceded and in some sense seemed actually to cause these and other maladies, fat in any amount could not logically be part of God’s plan. “When God first dreamed you into creation,” he chided hisheavy readers, “there weren’t one hundred pounds of excess avoirdupois hanging around your belt. No, nor sixty, nor sixteen.”7 In this way, Shedd shifted the discussion surrounding religion and health by insisting that fat itself, and not simply the medical illnesses it helped create, could be—and should be—subject to God’s healing, slimming power.

During the following decades, other Christian diet books began to emerge on the scene, until by the mid-1970s and carrying on well into the 1990s and beyond, this had become a visible and well-publicized genre that promoted slim bodies for the sake of God’s Kingdomin highly individualized, thoroughly modern terms. Older theories of the body as sinful and dirty yet ultimately perfectible were joined anew with condemnations of fat and flabbiness, in a discourse that distinguished the righteous from their sinful brethren with implacable seriousness. Representative and best-selling titles in the early years included Help Lord...The at! (1977), God’s Answer to Fat (1975), More of Jesus, Less of Me (1976), Slim for Him (1978), Jogging with Jesus (1978), and Free To Be Thin (1979), which itself sold more than a million copies worldwide and spawned a virtual industry of diet products marketed by the Pentecostal author, including an exercise video and a low-calorie, inspirational cookbook. These were later joined by an outpouring that included titles from Greater Health God’s Way (1984, 1996) to The Bible Cure for Weight Loss and Muscle Gain (2000), Fat-Burning Bible Diet (2000), and The Bible’s Seven Secrets to Healthy Eating (2001). Nor has this been solely a genre produced by White Christians: in 1997, African-American evangelist T. D. Jakes published Lay Aside the Weight, replete with before-and-after photographs of himself (from 338 to 228 pounds) and his wife, Serita (from 210 to 169 pounds).

In concert with this escalating literature have arisen biblically based diet groups, which had emerged in scattered fashion during the 1950s and 1960s as prayer-diet clubs only to bloom into full-blown organizations during the 1970s and 1980s. This trend expanded into the 1980s and swelled still more in the 1990s, as growing numbers of Christian diet groups emerged locally and went national. Some, such as Jesus Is the Weigh and Step Forward, enjoyed only modest success, while others, such as 3d and Overeaters Victorious, grew by leaps and bounds, at least for a time. The two most successful organizations (numerically and financially, at least, if not demonstrably in terms of weight loss) have been the Texas-based First Place (1981), whose curriculum is now owned by the Southern Baptist Convention; and the Weigh Down Workshop (1986), headed by Gwen Shamblin from her corporate headquarters in Nashville. First Place was founded by twelve members of Houston’s First Baptist Church who wished to form their own Christian weight-loss program. It peaked during the 1990s with groups in approximately 12,000 churches in the country, including some in each of the fifty states and abroad.8 Throughout these Christian counterparts to nationalweight-watcher programs, the message seemed apparent: God expects His children to strive for perfection in this life, and the most visible index of one’s progress along that path is the size and fitness of his or her body.

The largest devotional diet program, by far, has been the Weigh Down Workshop, a twelve-week Bible-study program founded by nutritionist and fundamentalist Gwen Shamblin in 1986 and, by 2000, offered in as many as thirty thousand churches, seventy countries, and sixty different denominations.9 The program gained national attention with the publication of Shamblin’s first book, The Weigh Down Diet (1997), which was published by Doubleday and distributed at chain bookstores across the country. As the book quickly reached sales in the millions, Shamblin’s program received national press coverage, on television programs such as cnn’s “Larry King Live” and abc’s “20/20,” as well as in print venues such as Good Housekeeping and most recently The New Yorker.10 Shamblin has become well-known for her insistence that there are no “bad” foods and that dieters can eat anything so long as they do so in strictly limited quantities. If one remains in doubt about how much should be eaten, Shamblin counsels prayer, advising her audience that God will answer them in no uncertain terms. Advertising herself as a “size 4–6” in her midforties (at 5'4'' she weighs 115 pounds), Shamblin is an advocate of extreme thinness and denounces body fat as a sign of unholy disobedience to God’s spiritual laws. Putting her program in more positive terms, Shamblin echoes other popular diet writers in her descriptions of overeating as the misguided attempt to fill what is instead a spiritual hunger for God.11

How successful are these programs at helping their members lose weight and maintain a slimmer physique? No one knows, though we do know from the research of Purdue University sociologist Kenneth Ferraro that churchgoing Christians (and especially southern evangelicals) have high rates of obesity, well above those of any other American religious group.12 Not surprisingly, Christian leaders contend that their plans assist dieters in achieving their goals to a far greater extent than non-Christian programs, but there are no studies to support this claim. Promotional materials typically put a positive spin on this sparse data by presenting the program’s leaders as exemplars of the victory others can expect from following their regimen. Gwen Shamblin avoids talk of statistics by placing the burden of failure directly on the hopeful dieter. To the question, “What is the average weight loss for people attending the Weigh Down Workshop?” Shamblin responds: “God has made each of us wonderfully unique. Some people take the program only to lose five or ten pounds, while others need to lose one hundred pounds or more. It doesn’t matter how much weight you have to lose; being obedient to the way God created the body to maintain itself will allow everyone to achieve their weight loss goals.”13 Those who do not lose or maintain their losses, in other words, are simply disobedient to God’s will.

This religious concern for diet and thinness has not been strictly limited to Protestants: alongside guides by evangelicals, fundamentalists, Pentecostals, charismatics, and mainliners have also emerged Mormon diet books such as Joseph Smith and Natural Foods (1976, 2001) and The Mormon Diet (1991), and at least one religious Jewish text on weight loss, entitled Watching Your Weight...The Torah Way (1989).14 Even Christian Scientists, still denying the materiality of the body and declaring that the true nature of human beings is nonmaterial spirit, addressed the problem of excess weight and diet control in a special 1997 issue of the Christian Science Sentinel, where readers were encouraged to pray about what foods to eat.15 Yet the vast majority of energetic disciples working in this arena of religious weight-watching have been Protestant; in fact, not a single book of this type seems to have surfaced from the pen of an American Catholic writer, though there exists at least one Catholic weight-loss program (The Light Weigh, based in Kansas). On the whole, leaders and participants involved in these and countless other Christian fitness enterprises in America have agreed that God commands human beings to glorify their bodies as God’s own temple, and they have dieted vigorously to keep healthy. As one author put it, in a bubbly reformulationof Christian theology, “Think of your ‘promised land’ as a thin body.”16 Whether all would express it this crudely, this promise permeates the wider Christian diet culture.

In Bondage to Boston Cream Pie: Food as Taint and Transgression

And what about the means employed, the attitudes inculcated about food in this culture? The practice of dieting, of “watching what one eats” in service to particular ideals of health and weight, subsists on the rhythms of restraint and excess. Like other acts born of desire piled on necessity, eating can be an act of passion and anticipated satiation, while also carrying live possibilities for regret and shame. For American Protestants, for whom sex, alcohol, dancing, and other bodily behaviors have often been restricted or eschewed altogether, eating has long carried dense and contradictory meanings.17 Those contradictions have been nowhere more richly evident or expressive than in modern Christian diet culture, where food has everywhere been the object of desperate longing as well as embittered loathing, of ambivalent attitudes toward pleasure no less than sin.

As in earlier historical periods, latter-day religious diet reformers have promoted a variety of messages, some advocating fasting as a useful means of weight control and others urging against it, several advocating vegetarianism while opponents uphold the benefits of meat, growing numbers recommending special vitamin supplements to fight toxins while the more conservative proffer basic dietary variety mixed with exercise. As in the wider diet culture of which Bible-based writers have been part, there is no general consensus as to the most proper and righteous way to eat (indeed, authors often seem to thrive on denouncing each other’s programs), but few if any authors question the belief that following God means taking a deeply suspicious stance toward food.

Food, in fact, has consistently remained an evil temptation in this literature. Most authors have echoed the idea early suggested by Deborah Pierce in I Prayed Myself Slim (1960), that while they were once taught to say grace for their food, they now pray for the grace to stay away from food.18 For decades, Christian diet writers have likened love for food to idolatry. “Did you know,” write Marie Chapian and Neva Coyle in Free To Be Thin, “that you stifle God’s working in your life when you habitually overeat?” They approvingly cite one man’s admission of how a divine voice intervened to prevent him from eating a particularly sinful food: “I wanted to eat a fattening dish—it was spareribs soaked in greasy tomato sauce. Ugh! Anyhow, just as I was about to order it, the Lord spoke to me and said, ‘Don’t eat that.’ ” God will always be there to advise His children about the proper amount to eat; in fact, His instructions are far more important than any humanly constructed diet plan, say the authors, who provide no calorie-counting plans for their readership. God, in fact, “is more concerned with your weight than anyone else you know. Let Him speak to you and direct every morsel you eat.”19

For Chapian and Coyle, as for most other writers, particular kinds of foods have been evil and others virtuous, in much the way that these divisions have structured the food plans of nonreligious diet instructors. In Free To Be Thin, victuals are divided as “World Food vs. Kingdom Food,” while the authors argue, “The foods that have defiled our bodies are foods that have appealed to our flesh, not our spirit.” Tootsie rolls, pizza, candy, and cookies, as well as the low-calorie substitutes and artificial sweeteners marketed as diet products, all come under fire as being “fattening” and hence “worldly” foods. Foods from the Kingdom of God, by contrast, consist of lean meats (steamed, water-packed, skinless), dairy products (“lo-cal,” not processed), fruits and vegetables (raw or steamed, without butter), and wholegrain breads and cereals. The authors recommend the daily food guide published by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which they advise adapting to individual daily calorie limits. And they urge readers to pray with them: “Dear Lord, help me to develop an interest in nutrition and what my body needs to function beautifully for your glory.... I renounce the lusts for those foods that are harmful to my body. I refuse to be a friend of the world’s system and foods. I choose to eat Kingdom food to the glory of God. In Jesus’ name, Amen!”20

The anticonsumer-culture strain evident in such refrains against “worldly food” has rarely been taken very far by diet writers—certainly not the most popular ones, who have benefitted handsomely from the rising consumer ethos within American evangelicalism witnessed powerfully in the publishing industry (among other places). Yet a persistent lament against processed foodstuffs rings strong, with evil heaped in correlative increments upon the more “commercialized” types. Good foods are plainer in their packaging and preparation, unembellished by sauces, dressings, or immoderate spices. The biblical figure of Daniel has provided the ideal model for this system of austerity and renunciation, in as much as he rejected the rich food and wine of King Nebuchadnezzar in favor of simple vegetables and water. Quoting Daniel, Chapian and Coyle note that his spare diet was a choice against “defiling himself,” according to the scripture. They conclude on a dismal note: “Think of the last time you binged on some rich or fattening food. By eating that food, you were actually making your body filthy, unclean, unfit, desecrated.” The authors also try to appeal to their readers’ personal revulsions, observing, “You wouldn’t want to eat a hair, a roach, or a rat, but that éclair or those greasy french fries may be just as defiling.”21 Authors such as these have worked hard to upend readers’ own food hierarchies and unhealthy tastes, here and elsewhere utilizing disgust in an attempt to turn tempting treats into aversions.

Mab Graff Hoover’s 1983 book of “meditations for munchers,” inspired by Chapian and Coyle’s best-selling volume, cites Paul’s letter to the Colossians as proof of the need to put lust for food to death, which she herself attempted to do by recalling the corpse of her own mother.

When mother died, the body looked like my mother, but it wasn’t she. Mother liked to eat, but that body never grew hungry. Even though her body had no appetite, I knew mother was still alive—hidden from me, but alive in Christ. The apostle Paul says that my life also is hidden with Christ; because I have died to self, I am commanded to kill my earthly nature!22

Like the lifeless body that no longer hungers, so should living Christians adopt indifference toward food. Those who care too much about food, Hoover notes, make a “god” of the stomach (another reference to Paul) and are hypocrites as she herself has been: “I see myself sitting in church, hands folded over the Bible, innocent eyes on the pastor, but with my mind on waffles, sweet rolls, pancakes…”23 Heavy, sweet food could be tempting as a fantasy no less than as victuals actually partaken, for they drew her mind away from God’s Word to the evil things of this world.

Hoover mocks her own struggle to choose righteous foods over wicked ones, writing, “Can I imagine myself picking up a grease-filled, chocolate-covered donut, and saying, ‘I eat this in the name of the Lord Jesus?’ ” Indeed, she laments, “When I look at chocolates or a beautiful birthday cake or Danish pastries, it’s hard for me to believe they are being offered through the Evil One. But I know from Scripture that Satan continually tries to ruin the temple of God, the church, (my body!).” Instead of giving in to her temptation to eat such foods, she resolves to emulate Paul and Jesus, eating sparingly as she presumes they did. “Today, I will eat one piece of chicken (without the skin), a lot of salad (chewing it well), some vegetables, fruit, and one small slice of bread! I will imitate the Lord.” Yet the struggle continues, admits Hoover, and perpetually she must “come to the place where I am totally convinced that sugar, chocolate, and fat are also [with alcohol and nicotine, her former vices] dreaded enemies.”24 As fitness writer Pamela Snyder later taught in A Life Styled by God, “We have a choice to make: living within the bounds of Christ or living in bondage to Boston cream pie.”25

That liberal Protestants have been as subject to this mode of thought as their conservative counterparts was made clear early on in a 1981 Christian Century article by Unitarian Universalist minister Bruce Marshall. Noting that, “in this age salvation by diet seems easier to conceive of than salvation by grace,” Marshall gently lampooned what he called “the Protestant approach to eating” as “purification through sacrifice.”

"Virtue is won through deprivation. The faithful are warned against the lure of pleasure. If you enjoy what you are eating, chances are that it’s bad for you. Your menu has been formulated by the devil to tempt you to ruin... If I don’t drink wine, I’ll be a more virtuous person. If I don’t eat sugar, if I don’t eat meat, if I avoid cream sauces and rich desserts, God will shower his blessings upon me. Salvation is earned by not eating things".

Arguing that this theology, like other contemporary theologies of eating he outlined, was “sacrilegious,” Marshall sought to promote a more joyous, less constricted notion of divine feasting. Yet he spoke for many of his ilk in noting that his own occasional indulgences in such “illicit” foods as doughnuts sparked an inner voice warning of the torment soon to follow this pleasure.26

An example of the occasional Christian diet book aiming to promote a more positive view of food is Edward Dumke’s The Serpent Beguiled Me and I Ate: A Heavenly Diet for Saints and Sinners (1986). An Episcopal priest and licensed counselor in the state of California, Dumke taught “seven lessons” about food as taught in the Bible (and, he argued, religions more generally) that included “food as a symbol for the sacred,” “food as a symbol for love,” and “food as a symbol for community.” Dumke titled another section “Enjoy Your Food,” recommending the benefits of eating slowly for enjoyment as well as eating less; and he urged readers at one point to “Eat the foods you really like. Many people associate dieting success with deprivation. It doesn’t have to be this way. Remember, if you enjoy what you eat, you will not need to eat as much and you won’t get bored with your diet.” Yet the very title of Dumke’s book, evoking the biblical theme of temptation and the transgressive dangers of eating, conveys a primary equation of food with sin—or, in the book’s more nuanced passages, a line demarcating foods into opposing categories of virtue and indulgence. Intermittently in the text, as in his “Ten Commandments of Good Nutrition,” Dumke instructs readers in religio-scientific terms: “Thou shalt consume sufficient protein but thou shalt limit the amount of animal protein... Thou shalt create a diet in complex carbohydrates... Thou shalt create a diet low in saturated fat... Thou shalt limit the amount of chocolate thou eatest.” His test at the end of this section has readers attempt to distinguish between the “good” and “not” good foods in a list of pairs that include such combinations as chocolate cake and grapefruit, fried chicken and boiled chicken, steak and fillet (sic) of sole, pastrami and tofu. “Remember,” he concludes, “you are what you eat.”27

Stories of failure abound, though, for while the knowledge that certain foods and ways of eating are sinful may be simple to grasp, the life change that is supposed to follow such awareness is surely more difficult. At one point, Hoover admits her problem to being, deep down, “not totally convinced that eating chocolate, sweets, or even overeating is all that bad, much less sin.” Discouragement combines with her flesh, “a hungry tiger, always ready to break out of the cage of discipline and gobble everything in sight.” But the Bible teaches that gorging is sin, according to Hoover’s interpretation, as is over-indulgence of any kind. Hence, she advises herself sternly, “Participating in food orgies (even at church!), helping to plan unhealthy dinners, or offering junk foods to my loved ones is sin. As long as I overeat or poison my body with chemical additives, I shall not become the righteousness of God.”28

Poisoned Bodies, Blemished Souls

The poisoned body: the notion hearkens back vividly to health reformers of earlier eras, who similarly equated gluttonous eating with contamination and filth. Naturalists and alternative health advocates have long deplored the toxins and impurities allegedly infecting the body ignorant or blasé about its intake, and they have counseled abstinence as an indispensable therapy for this sad situation. Even mainstream Christian diet books that oppose the alternative health culture have imbibed many of these ideas about bodily poisons, as seen in Hoover’s concern about chemical additives or this passage in Jewish convert Zola Levitt’s How To Win at Losing: “God has, in a sense, already committed himself on the matter of eating. The foods found easily and naturally on the earth are the ones that do you no harm. The weird combinations made by men—the processing and drying of grains, the ‘enhancing’ of foods with sugar—are the ones that got you where you are today.”29 Chapian and Coyle repeat the belief that fasting “giv[es] the overworked internal organs and tissues of the body a good rest and time for rehabilitation. Fasting (over six days) flushes out toxic matter and poisons from the body system. Fasting improves circulation and promotes endurance and stamina. Fasting renovates, revives and purifies the cells of the body.”30 Twentieth-century technological innovations in food production and pest control have, of course, only given new force to these fears, making for a much expanded list of sinful foods than those that are simply “fattening.”

The most publicized and widespread of the Christian programs of this kind has been the North Carolina–based Hallelujah Diet. Conceived by Baptist minister George Malkmus after he allegedly cured himself of colon cancer in 1976 by eating only “natural” foods, the Diet consists mainly of raw fruits and vegetables and is grounded in Genesis 1:29: “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it.” On that early diet, Malkmus argues in Why Christians Get Sick (1989), people lived over nine hundred years, but once meat and cooked food were added to the human diet sickness came into being and radically reduced the life span. Whereas raw fruits and vegetables are “good” foods, junk foods are bad and to eat them morally wrong. The partition of the world into such stark classifications of good and evil provisions once again points to a conflicted, ambivalent stance toward food and ingestion, though of a profoundly different sort than that proffered by more mainstream dieters like Coyle and Hoover—or Gwen Shamblin. The tensions among these programs over which foods to demarcate as “good” or “evil” represent, in a sense, larger disagreements over which parts of secular culture to appropriate and which to reject.31

Shamblin, the reigning queen of the Christian diet industry, has been especially direct in teaching that food is something to be transcended and sometimes avoided altogether: it is a devilish lover, tempting human beings to betray their covenant with God and enter a lascivious relationship with food. In her words:

"We fell in love with the food by giving it our heart, soul, mind, and strength... We obeyed it. It called us from the bed in the morning, and we used our strength to prepare it. We also used our strength to force more of it down into the body than the body called for. We gave it our mind all day long by looking through recipe books and discussing the latest diets with our friends, asking, “What do you get to eat on your diet?” We lusted after the foods that were on the menu, and we gave our hearts to the 10 o’clock binge".32

Shamblin’s explicit identification of food with sex contains the corollary that to overeat— regardless of one’s weight—is a sin closely aligned with adultery. Though she notes that food can be enjoyed if it is not desired too much, her teachings throughout suggest a deeply embattled relationship with food and a strict regimen of asking God for guidance at each and every bite. Shamblin’s image of food as a seductive lover who entices the over-eater away from her true husband, God, is unusually graphic for this literature; yet the overriding distrust of and loathing for food is widely shared.

Human beings must eat to live, however, and since conservative Christian theology assumes God to be the author of all things, food cannot be unredeemably evil. In fact, authors often linger at great length on the subject of food, which they claim to enjoy more now that they are liberated from obsession with it. Gwen Shamblin writes about food with erotic abandon, in sensual language that makes her experience of it sound as lush in its ordinariness as that of celebrity “gastroporn” writer Nigella Lawson.

"As soon as I get to the movie theater, I can smell the popcorn and the hot dogs. I like to make sure I am hungry when I arrive, so most of the time I won’t eat supper before going to the movies... I find the best kernels of popcorn with just the right amount of butter and salt on them. Ilike to eat one kernel at a time so I can savor the combined flavors of the popcorn, salt, and butter... Keep in mind that I still have my box of candy, so I do not want to fill up entirely on the popcorn... If the candy comes in a variety of colors or flavors, I will eat my favorite colors and flavors first. I take a bite, savor it, and take a sip from my diet drink."33

Sometimes Shamblin’s descriptions of her food habits, which conclude all but one of Rise Above’s fourteen chapters, seem as obsessive as any overeater’s:

"My friends and I love to celebrate a special occasion with a wonderful steak dinner. I may skip lunch to make sure that I am really, really hungry! When the meal arrives at the table, I eat the best morsels while they are hot, remembering to save room for my favorite dessert. Plenty of real butter and sour cream for my baked potato assures that I can create the perfect combination... I then move on to the medium-rare filet mignon. I cut until I reach the center, which has the juiciest pieces... The filet that is cooked right will just melt in your mouth... This occasion calls for the ultimate brownie topped with hot caramel, chocolate fudge, whipped cream, nuts— and several spoons for sharing! Again, I search for the perfect bite before the towering dessert begins to melt".34

It is easy to forget, when reading such passages that practically moan with ecstasy, that they come from a text that denounces Christians for loving food to the point of idolatry.

But for Shamblin, unlike so many of her predecessors, food itself is not sin (there are no sinful foods in Shamblin’s world, only sinful worshipers of it); fat is sin, and so long as one can eat blissfully within the limits set by God’s hand, no rules have been broken. The ideal attitude toward food is a kind of thoroughgoing indifference combined with exhilaration and a sensual basking in the pleasures of eating. Achieving this delicate balance is not difficult, in Shamblin’s view: God wants people to enjoy food, after all, and as soon as one’s will is fully submitted to his, he will restore the joy of eating that remains unavailable to the person obsessed with food. Those who greedily keep hold of their bodily desires will fail to find contentment or satisfaction, but those who surrender will be blessed with the immeasurable bliss of a thin body and a guilt-free way of eating. Set free from enslavement to food, the truly Christian eater may revel in all good things and inhabit a kind of succulent paradise on earth. Where other devotional diet programs teach followers that they must restrain their appetites for the rest of their lives, Shamblin promises complete emancipation and libidinous fulfillment.

Christian authors have clearly differed on the finer points of righteous eating. Still, the loud chorus of voices propounding abstinence has left most churchgoers with little doubt as to the value of eyeing food through a religious lens. For virtually all who have bothered to write on the subject, moreover, that lens has been acutely focused on discerning transgression, defined from a wide variety of angles. Zola Levitt early made a typical point when he noted that bad eating was a theological problem. “Eating wrongly is a matter of conforming to this world and denying that we can forego temptation,” he warned. “It’s a doubting of the power of God, in whose perfect image we are all made.”35 By citing scriptural precedents for eating well—from Adam and Eve to the exiled Israelites (who ate only manna and meat), Daniel (who fasted on vegetables and water), John the Baptist, and Jesus—Christian authors may well elude criticism that their instruction conforms too closely to the body standards of American popular culture. At the same time, they provide biblical justification for their readers’ desire to be lean and appealing, for although the material rewards of slendernes offered by the secular world have been repeatedly decried in this literature as superficial, Christian diet writers appeal to them unremittingly.

The biggest sell by far, though, seems to be Shamblin’s promise of carnal gratificationfor those who repent of gluttony and surrender to the master genius who created all foods, from brownies to Fritos (two of Shamblin’s frequent examples), and who is also a romantic husband for those who love him. The desert monks and medieval fasting women would hardly find all aspects of Shamblin’s pleasure theology recognizable, however rapturous their own ascetic practices. Her fusion of sin and salaciousness, austerity and consumerism, disciplined submission and delicious seduction, captures the profuse contradictions within American Christianity (not to mention the wider culture shaped by and shaping it), offering more than a few clues to the ever intensifying eroticization of food and appetite within a devotional culture once based on abstinence.

NOTES

Epigraph: Nigella Lawson, “Gastroporn,” Talk, October 1999, 153–154; cited in Elspeth Probyn, Carnal Appetites: FoodSexIdentities (London: Routledge, 2000), 59.
1. Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 42 and passim.
2. For the medieval and patristic periods, see especially Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast; Rudolph M. Bell, Holy Anorexia (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1985); Teresa M. Shaw, The Burden of the Flesh: Fasting and Sexuality in Early Christianity (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998); Veronika Grimm, From Feasting to Fasting, the Evolution of a Sin: Attitudes to Food in Late Antiquity (London and New York: Routledge, 1996); and Walter Vandereycken and Ron van Deth, From Fasting Saints to Anorexic Girls: The History of Self-Starvation (New York: New York University Press, 1994 [published in Germany as Hungerkünstler, Fastenwunder, Magersucht: Eine Kulturgeschichte der Ess-störungen, 1990]). On the nineteenth-century health reform movements, see especially James C. Whorton, Crusaders for Fitness: The History of American Health Reformers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982); Stephen Nissenbaum, Sex, Diet, and Debility in Jacksonian America: Sylvester Graham and Health Reform (Westport, ct: Greenwood Press, 1980); and Robert H. Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination, especially chapter 7, “The Body Reforms” (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 163–182.
3. Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Fasting Girls: The Emergence of Anorexia as a Modern Disease (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988); Hillel Schwartz, Never Satisfied: A Cultural History of Diets, Fantasies, and Fat (New York: The Free Press, 1986).
4. Prentice Mulford, “Grace Before Meat; Or, The Science of Eating,” in Essays of Prentice Mulford: Your Forces and How To Use Them, 4th Series (London: William Rider & Son, 1909), 34–47; 38.
5. See R. Marie Griffith, “Apostles of Abstinence: Fasting and Masculinity during the Progressive Era,” American Quarterly 52:4 (December 2000), 599–638.
6. Charlie W. Shedd, Pray Your Weight Away (Philadelphia and New York: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1957), 11–12, 14.
7. Shedd, Pray Your Weight Away, 14, 15, 40.
8. The story of First Place’s founding is recounted in Carole Lewis, Choosing to Change: The First Place Challenge (Nashville, tn: LifeWay Press, 1996), 7–17; testimonial quote from p.89.
9. Statistics obtained from the official Weigh Down Web site: http://www.weighdown.com/home.htm (January 11, 2001).
10. Laura Muha, “The Weight-Loss Preacher,” Good Housekeeping 226:2 (February 1998), 26; Rebecca Mead, “Slim for Him,” The New Yorker, January 15, 2001, 48–56.
11. Shamblin’s clothes size is listed on the Web site for the Weigh Down Program, http://www.wdworkshop.com/wdw/wdwfaq.asp#q1 (accessed January 22, 2001), under the question headed “Who Is Gwen Shamblin?”
12. Kenneth F. Ferraro, “Firm Believers? Religion, Body Weight, and Well-Being,” Review of Religious Research 39:3 (March, 1998), 224–244.
13. Obtained from Weigh Down Workshop Web site: http://www.wdworkshop.com/wdw/wdwfaq.asp#q9 (accessed January 23, 2001).
14. John Heinerman, Joseph Smith and Natural Foods: A Treatise on Mormon Diet (Manti, ut: Mountain Valley Publishers, 1976; Springville, ut: Bonneville Books, 2001); Earl F. Updike, The Mormon Diet: A Word of Wisdom: 14 Days to New Vigor and Health (Bayfield, co, and Orem, ut: Best Possible Health, 1991); Ethel C. Updike, Dorothy E. Smith, and Earl F. Updike, The Mormon Diet Cookbook: Easy Permanent Weight Loss: Fat Free, Cholesterol Free, High Fiber (Bayfield, co: Best Possible Health, 1992); Moshe Goldberger, Watching Your Weight...The Torah Way: A Diet That Will Change Your Life!! (Staten Island, NY: M. Goldberger, 1989. (Updike later altered his books and published them under the title The Miracle Diet: Easy Permanent Weight Loss [Phoenix, az: Best Possible Health, 1995]. See also Colleen Bernhard, He Did Deliver Me from Bondage: Using the Book of Mormon and the Principles of the Gospel of Jesus Christ as They Correlate with the Twelve-Step Program to Overcome Compulsive/Addictive Behavior [Orem, ut: Windhaven Publishing and Productions, 1994].)
15. Christian Science Sentinel 99:36 (September 8, 1997). See also David M. Wilson, “Overeating Can Be Checked,” Christian Science Sentinel 86:24 (June 11, 1984), 1003–1005.
16. Marie Chapian and Neva Coyle, Free To Be Thin (Minneapolis: Bethany House Publishers, 1979), 17.
17. For a different take on these matters, see Daniel Sack, Whitebread Protestants: Food and Religion in American Culture (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000).
18. Deborah Pierce, as told to Frances Spatz Leighton, I Prayed Myself Slim (New York: The Citadel Press, 1960), 19.
19. Chapian and Coyle, Free To Be Thin, 21, 27, 31, 33 (italics in original). Neva Coyle, who eventually gained all her weight back, has thoroughly recanted her own earlier views about God’s desire for Christians to be thin; see, for instance, Coyle, Loved on a Grander Scale (Ann Arbor, mi: Servant Publications, 1998). However poignant and noteworthy such later retractions, however, her earlier promotion of Bible-based dieting remains far more influential (as she herself pensively realizes).
20. Chapian and Coyle, Free To Be Thin, 107, 109, 115.
21. Chapian and Coyle, Free To Be Thin, 60, 64. This story comes from the first chapter of the Book of Daniel in the Hebrew Bible.
22. Mab Graff Hoover, God Even Likes My Pantry: Meditations for Munchers (Grand Rapids, mi: Zondervan, 1983), 20.
23. Hoover, God Even Likes My Pantry, 56.
24. Hoover, God Even Likes My Pantry, 24, 29–30, 26, 110.
25. Pamela Snyder, A Life Styled by God: A Woman’s Workshop on Spiritual Discipline for Weight Control (Grand Rapids:Zondervan Publishing House, 1985), 22 (italics in original).
26. Bruce T. Marshall, “The Theology of Eating,” Christian Century 98 (March 18, 1981), 301–302.
27. Edward Dumke, The Serpent Beguiled Me and I Ate: A Heavenly Diet for Saints and Sinners (New York: Doubleday, 1986), 109, 110, 82–85. Episcopal authors generally seem more positive about food than their evangelical counterparts. Episcopal priest Victor Kane, author of Devotions for Dieters, had earlier taught his readers that Jesus was no ascetic but rather a lover of food; yet Kane also distinguished between “good” and “sinful” foods (Kane, Devotions for Dieters: A Spiritual Life for Calorie Counters, with a Touch of Irony, by a Fellow Sufferer [Old Tappan, nj: Fleming H. Revell Co., 1967]).
28. Hoover, God Even Likes My Pantry, 95, 96.
29. Zola Levitt, How To Win at Losing (Wheaton, il: Tyndale House Pub.; London: Coverdale House Pub., 1976), 83–84.
30. Chapian and Coyle, Free To Be Thin, 40.
31. George Malkmus, Why Christians Get Sick (Eidson, tn: Hallelujah Acres Pub., 1989).
32. Gwen Shamblin, The Weigh Down Diet: Inspirational Way To Lose Weight, Stay Slim, and Find a New You (New York: Doubleday, 1997), 149.
33. Shamblin, Rise Above: God Can Set You Free from Your Weight Problems Forever (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 2000), 196.
34. Shamblin, Rise Above, 81.
35. Levitt, How To Win at Losing, 15.

By R. Marie Griffith in "The Gastronomica Reader", edited by Darra Goldstein, University of California Press,USA, 2010, excerpts pp. 34-50. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.