David Clough, SARX For All
God's Creatures
April 2018
David Clough, Professor of Theological Ethics at the University of Chester, argues that concern for animals is a fundamental aspect of Christian discipleship: "My diagnosis is that care among Christians for animals is therefore disenfranchised: it’s there, but we don’t think we have permission for it from our faith or the churches we belong to".
Who cares? Sometimes it seems like no one does, based on how we treat
them.
Who cares? Sometimes it seems like everyone, from the popularity of kitten
pictures on Facebook, from how many people invest time, trouble, and money
in companion animals, and giving to animals charities.
Who cares? Often it seems that it is secular animals groups that lead on
animal issues, such as the RSPCA, or PETA, inspired by the atheistic
utilitarianism of Peter Singer, or Tom Regan or Gary Francione’s animal
rights theory.
So what about Christians? Well, there’s plenty of evidence of Christians
caring about particular animals, just like everyone else, but animals are
not prominent among current faith concerns. Few Christians seem to think of
concern for animals as a faith issue. I think we tend to think of animals in
the same category as soap operas, or Game of Thrones, or football, or your
guilty pleasure of choice: we love them, but we don’t connect them to our
faith, and don’t expect to hear about them in church. We confess faith in
Jesus Christ, and we love animals, but we don’t often put the two together.
My diagnosis is that care among Christians for animals is therefore
disenfranchised: it’s there, but we don’t think we have permission for it
from our faith or the churches we belong to.
Perhaps that’s what brings some of us here: feeling strongly that we need
to be more concerned about treating animals well, but puzzled about how that
fits with faith, and puzzled that other Christians don’t feel the same. For
some people this disconnect puts them on the fringes of the church, or makes
them give up on the church altogether: perhaps that’s you, or someone you
know.
And this situation seems very odd to me, because there are strong biblical
and theological reasons to care about animals, and it’s clear that
Christians in the past have seen concern for animals as belonging to their
faith and acted in response.
I used to think I just happened to be a Christian who was concerned about
animals. Now I think that it was my Christian upbringing that led me into
feeling compassion for animals, and that concern for animals is a
fundamental part of my Christian discipleship: there’s a connection both
ways.
Christianity and animals: Making the Connection
So I think we need to reconnect Christian faith with concern for animals.
I’ve spent most of the last ten years working on this in my academic life
and won’t bore you with all of that now but here’s how I’d summarize the
case that Christianity and concern for animals are strongly linked, that
Christians have strong faith-based reasons to care about animals, and so
that animals should feature more strongly in the concerns of our churches.
1. Bible: The Bible gives us reason to believe that God cares for animals, that we should too, and that redemption is not just for humans. We see God as active in gracious provision for animals throughout the Bible, in texts on creation, providence, reconciliation, and redemption. The Bible’s identification of humans as image-bearing and dominion in Genesis 1 are reasons for showing this care to other animal creatures, not reasons against concern for animals.
2. Theology: Defending the goodness of creation was a mark of Christian
orthodoxy from the first Christian centuries. It’s true that theologians
sometimes found reasons to exclude non-human animals from moral concern,
based on Greek and Roman ideas of a boundary between humans and other
animals on the basis of reason, but we can recognize what’s wrong with their
arguments, especially given modern discoveries about non-human animal
intelligence.
3. Spirituality: Stories of the saints repeatedly make clear that concern
for animals belongs to Christian holiness. including my favourite, told of
St Macarius of Alexandria, an Egyptian hermit in the 4th century. The story
goes that one day as Macarius was sitting in his cell he heard a knocking at
his door. Thinking a fellow monk had come to see him, he opened the door and
was astonished to find that a hyena had been knocking on the door with her
head. She held her puppy in her mouth, and offered the puppy to him,
weeping. Macarius took the puppy in his hands and looked to see what was the
matter. He saw that the puppy was blind in both eyes. He took the puppy,
groaned, spat on the puppy’s face and signed it on the eyes with his finger.
Immediately, the puppy could see, ran to his mother, suckled from her, and
followed her away.
The next day the hyena returned and knocked on the hermit’s door again. This time when he opened it he saw she had a sheepskin in her mouth. He asked her where she had got the sheepskin, if she had not eaten a sheep, and told her that he would not take the sheepskin if it had come of violence. The hyena struck her head on the ground, bent her paws, and prayed on her knees for him to take it. He said he would not take it unless she promised not to harm the poor by eating their sheep, and she nodded her head as if she were promising him. Then he told her he would not take it unless she promised not to kill another creature, and said if she was hungry she should come to him and he would give her bread.
The hyena bent, nodded, and looked him in the eye as if she were promising him. So Macarius offered praises to God for giving understanding to the animals and letting Macarius come to understand God’s ways. He took the sheepskin from the hyena and she went away. From time to time she would come to Macarius for food, and he would give her bread. He slept on the sheepskin until he died.
This story of St Macarius combines the recognition that it belongs to
Christian holiness to be friendly towards animals, a high view of the
capacities of animals to be responsive subjects, and an appreciation that
God’s will is for peace between all creatures. Together with many other
examples from Helen Waddell’s wonderful collection Beasts and Saints (DLT,
1995), such as St Jerome’s hospitality to the lion, or St Godric’s
protection of a stag from the Durham Prince Bishop’s hunt, it shows that
Christians have long recognized that Christian holiness has implications
well beyond the human realm.
4. History: Christians in England in the 19th century, alongside a prominent
Jew, successfully lobbied for the first anti-cruelty legislation, and for
the abolition of vivisection against the scientific establishment . This
means that in the past, Christians led on campaigns for animal protection.
For all these reasons, we can see that Christians have strong faith-based
reasons to seek the flourishing of all their fellow animal creatures.
C. Christianity and animals: who cares?
1. Given the unprecedented cruelties we are currently inflicting on farmed animals in intensive systems, it seems to me urgent for Christians to reclaim the connection between concern for animals and Christian faith, and be in the vanguard of campaigns to resist production systems that have no regard for the flourishing of animals.
2. If you’re one of those who shares this view, I think we need to get together to take out this conversation to our sisters and brothers in Christ.
3. That’s why I founded CreatureKind a year ago: which is a new Christian organisation seeking to engage Christians with farmed animal welfare as a faith concern.
4. We’ve got some great ideas for how to do this.
(a). We’re working on a programme to get Christian institutions to set
targets to reduce consumption of animal products and move to higher welfare
sourcing of remaining products, which will mean significant numbers of
animals will not be raised in intensive conditions. The University of
Winchester was the first institution to sign up with us in November and we
are in the process of recruiting more.
(b). We’ve developed a website, blog, and social media platforms to help
Christians make the connection between their faith and concern for animals.
Find ‘becreaturekind’ on Facebook and Twitter to follow our updates, and
visit our website to sign up for our email newsletter.
(c). And today, we’re launching a new, free, six-week course for churches
that introduces Christians to the place of animals in Christian faith, how
we’re currently treating farmed animals, and asks them to reflect on an
appropriate Christian response. We need your help to run it in your church.
Animals: who cares?