Staying Centered in the Vegan Christian Community While I Pray for My Mom

6:18 PM Monday.

Shalom Craig, 

Thank you so much for your prayers. They are sincerely appreciated. 

We just heard from the doctor, and it's cancer. Invasive. But they caught it early and it's small, so we have a realistically hopeful outlook for my mom's full recovery.

I pray you don't mind my putting this message on my blog. It feels important that I keep all of my readers on the same page.

You wrote, "Yes, I believe God gave us delicious fruit and vegetation for our enjoyment and animals for friendship. Eating the animals for enjoyment is a misuse of His creation and therefore wrong. We are supposed to enjoy what is good and abhor what is bad. That is my reading, and I have a high degree of confidence that I am correct about this point."

I appreciate your pushback on the vegan theological animal rights front. "Abhor" is not too strong a word. Your high degree of confidence is well-placed, and I hope you never lose it. At the same time, for right now, I am thinking that eating animals is definitely wrong in God's eyes for about a third of us alive on planet Earth. For another third, I think it's definitely wrong in God's eyes to be other than vegetarian. And for a final third, I think it's definitely wrong in God's eyes to eat too many animal products, especially animal products that are produced in the cruelest ways. But I appreciate that my stance is a compromise that carries some risks. I could well be wrong to think that our merciful God is calling humanity to different vocations in this area. Maybe the era of God's concession has completely ended. There has been another round of climate science updates, and the outlook is not good. From an environmental perspective alone, my formula of 1/3rd vegan by 2050 may not be enough to protect the climate. If we really listen to science and do the right thing for future generations, we should probably aim for 50% vegan by 2030. But this would shock the economy more than the COVID lockdown. It would take a declaration from the World Health Organization that climate change is a long-term public health emergency and that vegan transition is our best near-term vaccine. I don't want to scare children or their parents, but I don't want to let them down, either.

On a related front, I recently wrote the following to Matthew King: "I am thinking I might be a speciesist vegan theologian and philosopher. Do you know of anyone who falls in this camp? How would you determine if I was speciesist at heart, and could this still comport with an animal rights approach? This could be a good focus for a conversation between us in 2026."

It would be great to have you as part of this conversation, too.       

I am not ready to allow comments from the general public on my blog, but I will post any feedback you may have for me moving forward if that's okay with you. I am trying to externalize as much of my correspondence as I can.

Kindest regards, 

Jonathan 

End 6:29 PM. Addendum 7:35 PM. Craig's brilliant and very helpful response:

Hi Jonathan,

I read your blog response. I suppose you could fit my perspective within yours. I could be confident that God is using me to call everyone into the 1st third, because ultimately that is His perfect will, even while he temporarily allows them to be in the other two thirds.

As far as being a speciesist philosopher, I suppose I could also fit into that category. I have a masters degree in philosophy, so that would earn me the philosopher's robe. And I believe what Jesus said in Matthew 6:26, that we are more valuable than animals. I don't think lack of equality is permission to harm those less valuable though. I believe the airplane pilot is more valuable than any given passenger, not intrinsically, but because if the pilot doesn't do their job, all the passengers are doomed. Similarly, we are more valuable because of our dominion role. We were given the responsibility to manage the earth and all the animals, and to do so in God's image and likeness (i.e. in His way of peace and love). If we do our job, the whole earth is blessed. If we fail to do our job, the whole earth is doomed. Therefore we are more valuable, not intrinsically, but because of the unique responsibility given to us by God that was not given to any other creature. If that makes me (and by extension---Jesus) a speciesist philosopher, so be it.

Craig