How Evangelicals Can Recover Their Love of Animals

IN MANY WAYS, the modern animal-welfare movement was birthed by evangelicalism.

Given current-day categories and political alignments, this history is surprising. But evangelicalism’s concern for animal welfare began with John Wesley, who many consider the father of evangelicalism. Wesley offered weighty words about animals and their treatment by humans. In his sermon “The General Deliverance,” for example, Wesley laments the plight of animals subjected to human cruelty:

And what a dreadful difference is there, between what they suffer from their fellow-brutes, and what they suffer from the tyrant man! The lion, the tiger, or the shark, gives them pain from mere necessity, in order to prolong their own life; and puts them out of their pain at once: But the human shark, without any such necessity, torments them of his free choice; and perhaps continues their lingering pain till, after months or years, death signs their release.

In Wesley’s lifetime, which spanned most of the 18th century, animals played a central and visible role in most people’s lives. Animals were sources of food and clothing and means of transportation. Sadly, animals were also a common source of entertainment in various forms of brutal blood sports—including bull and bear baiting, dog fighting, and cock throwing. As plentiful paintings, literature, sermons, and tracts from the age show, cruelty to animals was as pervasive as the animals themselves.

The general understanding of animals at the time was gravely influenced by a Cartesian, mechanistic view of the world. The same disciples of the Enlightenment who envisioned God as a distant watchmaker also viewed the “lower creatures” as mere machines. Well into the 19th century, animals were viewed under the law, according to the Animal Legal and Historical Center at Michigan State University, “as items of personal property not much different than a shovel or plow.”

But evangelicals helped change the view of animals. In their efforts to reform all of society, early evangelicals saw that, in its coarsening effect, this prevalent brutality toward animals worked against human receptivity to the gospel. So while evangelicals worked to end the slave trade, improve the morals and manners of both the upper class and low, and increase biblical literacy, they sought also to eliminate cruelty toward animals. For example, during the same years he was leading the campaign to abolish slavery, William Wilberforce helped found the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, the first organization of its kind. As a result of early evangelicals, cruelty to animals became increasingly prohibited by law and rejected by civilized people.

Like a machine in a factory

Today, in place of animal fights, we have professional sports, movies, video games, and an endless array of entertainment choices. Even zoos and circuses are quickly falling out of favor because they treat animals so unnaturally. Additionally, Americans spend more than $60 billion a year on pets. Putting all these facts together, it’s easy to think that animal cruelty is largely a thing of the past and that stewardship over animals need not be a pressing concern for Christians today.

But we still eat meat.

In fact, Americans eat more meat per person than do the people of nearly any other country in the world. And how animals are treated before their lives are sacrificed for our use is a central concern to those given by God the task of stewarding creation. Because the Bible has been understood to give its blessing on the use of animals for food, as well as for labor and clothing, the question today for many evangelicals—who are defined by high regard for God’s word and witness to the world about the authority of that word—is not so much whether but how.

The fact that the vast majority of consumers are far removed from the processes by which animal products are derived does not diminish stewardship responsibility. Indeed, the more distant we are from the process, the greater our responsibility becomes because of the added responsibility we bear for those we employ to provide us with our meat and leather. It should tell us something that most of us would not choose willingly even to witness some of these practices because they are so unendurable.

As stewards of the animals God declared to be “good,” evangelicals have to reckon with the methods of animal agriculture that emerged in the mid-20th century—methods that radically transformed the lives of billions of animals and are in wide use today. An article in Hog Farm Management from the 1970s reveals the mindset behind modern farming practices: “Forget the pig is an animal,” the article said. “Treat him just like a machine in a factory. Schedule treatments like you would lubrication. Breeding season like the first step in an assembly line ... In other words approach building a pig just like an automobile or anything else.”

Similarly, National Hog Farmer, in the same era, advised, “The breeding sow should be thought of, and treated as, a valuable piece of machinery whose function is to pump out baby pigs like a sausage machine.”

Such practices were promoted as more productive and cost-effective than the pastoral farms of our grandparents. These intensive systems—sometimes called industrial or factory farming—use extreme confinement that allow animals little or no movement to increase stocking density, ease feeding and waste management, and maximize production while lowering costs. Such systems promised increased profit and decreased global food shortages, hitting the sweet spots of the particularly American form of cultural evangelicalism: capitalism, entrepreneurship, and humanitarianism.

These values are echoed by an evangelical Christian I know who operates a large agribusiness that supports commercial egg producers. Requesting anonymity out of fear of targeting by animal rights groups, she assured me in an email interview that her Christian faith is central to how she runs the business. She insists that large-scale operations are humane and feed more people. Using “traditional” caging systems (by which she means 20th century, not first century, tradition), she said, “allows for the best health and safety of the birds, where they are protected from predators, parasites, and disease.”

She argues that European Union regulations requiring laying hens to be raised cage free “have caused drastic egg shortages and increased costs.” Such laws, she maintains, “hurt farmers and consumers and jeopardize the health of the chickens.” She says that egg farmers in the United States produce 6.9 billion eggs each year for consumption by 323 million Americans, and that “at 17 cents a serving, eggs are the cheapest natural protein that you can buy.” If the U.S. follows Europe’s example in requiring chickens to be raised cage free, she claims, it will take 10 times the land in current use for egg production, a larger percentage of Americans to go into farming, and a decline in egg quality and bird health.

“Is it moral to jeopardize the health of chickens so they can be somewhat less confined?” she asked me. “Is it moral to create an artificial standard for eggs that does nothing but drive up the cost of a product that was easily available and affordable for everyone, including the poor?”

The most inefficient model ever

Joel Salatin tells a very different story. Salatin, owner of Polyface Farm in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, argues that treating animals in ways that allow them to function as they were designed to function—whether flapping, grazing, rooting, or roosting—is not only moral, but Christian.

In his newest book, The Marvelous Pigness of Pigs, Salatin makes his coming-out not only as a Christian but even as a graduate of the ultraconservative Bob Jones University. In the book, Salatin makes explicit how his Christian faith informs the farming practices that have made him famous for years, methods that center on allowing chickens, cows, and pigs to live (and die) according to God’s design for them.

Doing so not only honors the animals God made, Salatin says, but is essential to our Christian witness. He argues that “it is how we protect the least of these—pigs in this case—that creates an ethical framework around how we protect the greatest of these—people and then God’s reputation.” He continues, “Our children can’t see God. But they can see pigs. Our friends can’t see God. But they can see pigs. When we honor the pigness of pigs, we create a philosophical imperative that we can see.”

Upholding “the sanctity and dignity of the pig—the glory of the pig” (and, by extension, all animals), Salatin argues, provides Christians with “a credible launchpad to a bigger discussion about the glory of God.” He continues, “Putting the pig in this position does not make God smaller; it makes God bigger and more awesome. ... Because we care about the pigness of pigs, we care about the Godness of God.”

But what about people? What if it’s true that industrial farming practices alleviate human suffering? I asked Salatin these questions in an email interview. He responded that these concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) “are the most inefficient production model ever invented.”

Not surprising, the narrative about concentrated animal operations echoes the mythos of American individualism: In this rendering, such operations tower against the backdrop of the antiquated agrarian model as a kind of colossus, tall and rugged, a benevolent bestower of cheap meat and pristine eggs.

Salatin dismantles this myth. “CAFOs do not stand alone; they are not islands,” he says. Intensive farming methods depend, he argues, on cheap energy to transport food in and waste out, on acres of additional land to produce the feed brought in, and on out-sourced labor. The food produced carries “huge hidden costs” from pollution and sickness. “When you add up the fish kills, aquifer pollution, airborne toxins, nutrient adulteration, and outright pathogens like super bugs from mutated drug resistance, it's not cheap food and it certainly isn't healthy,” Salatin told Sojourners.

And what about the ability of industrial farming methods to feed more people? “Nobody is hungry because there's not enough food,” he answered. “For the first time in human civilization, we are throwing away nearly half of all human edible food. If we could double production tomorrow, not a single additional person would be fed.” (The United Nations reports that, worldwide, one-third of all food produced is lost or wasted.)

Animals are a test of our character

Regardless of whether the animals under discussion are those that provide us with food, labor, entertainment, education, or companionship, they all belong to God. Animals are far more than just a resource for human use. Republican speechwriter Matthew Scully writes in Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy that godly dominion is humanity’s “first calling.” Animals are “a test of our character, of [hu]mankind’s capacity for empathy and for decent, honorable conduct and faithful stewardship.”

Salatin points out that, in their dependency on us, animals reflect our dependency on God. Further, they provide a “mirror” of how relationships work and how to treat others: good treatment yields one type of relationship; bad treatment, a very different type.

Finally, Salatin says, each species of animal has unique gifts that offer healing to creation. “Cows can prune biomass far more efficiently than humans or machines,” he says. “Pigs can turn compost far more efficiently than humans or machines. Chickens can spread cow pats and debug a field far more efficiently than humans or machines. As a human, my role is to extend redemptive capacity into the landscape, and nothing leverages my gifts or extends my reach better than animals.”

And inasmuch as human flourishing depends on a flourishing economy, systematically humane treatment contributes to both. The early evangelicals discerned, rightly, how inhumanity toward animals dehumanizes us.

Today, humane treatment of animals is increasingly necessary to a thriving economy, a development examined at length by Wayne Pacelle, president and CEO of the Humane Society of the United States, in his book The Humane Economy. From the entertainment industry to wildlife management to medical research to food production, Pacelle shows how what is good for animals is, ultimately, good for both people and the economy. When all of God’s creation flourishes, human beings flourish, too.

The consciences of Christians regarding animal stewardship will be awakened, Salatin told Sojourners, only when Christians are willing to ask “Does God care?”

The “Every Living Thing” statement on animal care issued last year by leading evangelicals faces this question. In celebrating “the wonder and beauty of God’s creation” and calling for commitment to “compassionate living,” the statement not only reclaims evangelical tradition, but returns to scriptural principles for stewardship of animals. These principles reflect the care shown by God in scripture for animals: from allowing Adam to name the animals to the inclusion of animals in the Noahic covenant, from the instruction in Proverbs 12:10 that the righteous person has regard for the life of beasts to Jesus’ declaration that not one sparrow falls outside of God’s care

A hallmark of evangelicalism is caring about the things God cares about as revealed in scripture. The challenge for evangelicals today is to expand our vision beyond the narrowness of present-day politics and categories, to see what scripture has already said concerning animals, and to heed the wise, historical perspectives of those outside our time and place. Often the way forward in faith requires looking back.