Christian Community, COVID-19, and the Slaughterhouse

by Sarah Withrow King

Photo by @ninastrehl | Unsplash

Photo by @ninastrehl | Unsplash

In May of this year, COVID-19 outbreaks in meatpacking plants grabbed national headlines around the world. Despite their identification as hotspots for the spread of the virus, in the US, slaughterhouses were ordered to stay open as “essential” businesses, along with farms and other food packaging facilities. As a result, months later, more than 45,000 US slaughterhouse workers have been infected with COVID-19, 214 of whom have died. 

Slaughterhouse workers around the globe are often members of underserved or marginalized communities. U.S. data indicates that, early in the pandemic, 87% of COVID-19 cases in slaughterhouse workers occurred among racial and ethnic minorities. In Germany, the majority of workers infected in an early outbreak were from Romania and Bulgaria. And after a cluster of cases was traced to one meatpacking plant in Australia, a worker told the Guardian Australia that they felt unable to question management policies or practices because of a language barrier. “I don’t speak English well,” said the employee. “I just stay silent and work...We just come to the factory and go home. Everything they tell us to do, we don’t say no.”

Communication failure about critical health and safety information is just one of the many injustices faced by the people who have continued to work in food production as the global pandemic rages on. Even before 2020, workers on farms and in slaughterhouses endured low wages, abysmal working conditions, harassment, lack of access to adequate health care or benefits, unfair labor practices, and more. As COVID-19 began to take its toll on slaughterhouse workers, the United States Department of Agriculture moved to increase the already-too-fast-line speeds at chicken plants from 140 to 175 birds per minute (faster line speeds force faster movement). A Foster Farms chicken plant in Livingston, California was forced to close recently. The company had months to heed the local health department’s urgent warnings and to increase safety precautions at the plant. Nine workers have died. Hundreds more tested positive for the disease. 

Every slaughterhouse, farm, and food factory worker is a beloved child of God, created by God, formed in the image of God, and a member of our community, our family. Our animal kin also suffer in this food system that values profit over all. And they, too, are beloved by God, created by God, and members of the whole community of creation. 

How can Christians live in community—in mutual interdependence with all of creation—in a time of despair, pandemic, and injustice for so many? Paul’s letter to the early church in Rome may guide us: 

Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good; love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honor. Do not lag in zeal, be ardent in spirit, serve the Lord. Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer. Contribute to the needs of the saints; extend hospitality to strangers. Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. Live in harmony with one another; do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly; do not claim to be wiser than you are. Do not repay anyone evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all. If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God; for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.” No, “if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads.” Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” Romans 12:9-21

I think as we read this passage, it’s important to be conscious of the ways in which we situate ourselves within it. Members of the early church in Rome, for instance, were in a very different position than the one in which my identity as a white, North American Christian places me. In many ways, my social location aligns me more with the Roman Empire and its power than with the early believers. In this passage Paul, like Jesus before him, reminds believers that there are ways to subvert the empire and dismantle systems of oppression that do not rely on mimicking the acts of oppressors. Weeping and rejoicing together, and holding space for one another to flourish, is one way we might live that out today. In a time of pandemic, perhaps that means holding a video prayer meeting, writing and sharing a Psalm, or meeting as a small group to lament and give thanksgiving for those who are abused by the food system. 

I’ve been thinking about how I can be mutually interdependent with farmed animals and slaughterhouse workers, when, even without the limits of physical distancing, I lack proximity to both. Perhaps you share this dilemma. So, I offer a few suggestions:

  1. For readers who eat animal products and who are connected to slaughterhouse workers and animals in that way: research the farms and slaughterhouses. What can you learn about these members of our family? How can your eating and community building practices better reflect love, affection, honor, service, hospitality, harmony, peace, and good? 

  2. For readers who do not eat animal products: research the farms and packing facilities of the plant-based foods you eat. What can you learn about these members of our family? As CreatureKind co-director Aline Silva wisely says, “A local organic peach picked by slave labor isn’t CreatureKind.” How can your eating practices better reflect love, affection, honor, service, hospitality, harmony, peace, and good? 

  3. For readers in the US: let your government representatives know that you support the Farm System Reform Act, that you want to see changes to our food system by returning power and resources from mega-corporations to local communities. 

  4. For all readers: follow the social media accounts of organizations like the United Farmworkers of America and The United Food and Commercial Workers International Union. As these organizations work for justice for their members, they shed light on the real stories of people working in food systems. Pray specifically for the people you meet through these accounts, and follow through on actions these organizations recommend. 

This is not a comprehensive plan for the community to flourish, but a few creaturely steps we might take to care for all our neighbors. In the words of Father Ken Untener, “It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord's grace to enter and do the rest.” May it be so.

What Does Christianity Have to Do With Animals (Book Excerpt)

From Genesis to Revelation, and from the early church to the present day, there are vivid examples of God's—and the church's—love of, care for, and delight in animal creatures.

By Sarah Withrow King

EvanTheobook.jpg

From Genesis to Revelation, and from the early church to the present day, there are vivid examples of God's—and the church's—love of, care for, and delight in animal creatures. William Wilberforce and other leaders of the British antislavery and anti–child labor movements were also early founders of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and worked to pass legislation protecting animals from various forms of cruelty.

Many accounts from the lives of saints include moving tales of meaningful friendships between saints and animals, such as the story of St. Macarius, who healed a blind hyena pup: the pup's mother tried to repay Macarius's kindness by bringing him a sheep's skin. As the story goes, Macarius took the skin, but only after insisting that if the hyena was hungry, she was not to kill another creature, but should come to him for food, which she did.

Today, many churches include food for companion animals in their food pantry programs. Others take special care to protect and provide for wildlife who wish to make a home on church grounds. Christian college students take internships at animal welfare organizations and ask their campus dining halls to provide vegan and vegetarian food options. Some pastors publicly support legislation that promotes better animal welfare, preside over pet funerals, or preach on topics that include concern for animals. Church animal welfare groups hold film screenings, book discussions, and small group studies to promote dialogue about Christianity and animal welfare in their congregations. There are many ways to care for animals, and Jesus followers are often moved to do so not in spite of their faith, but because of it. Of course, human beings are a kind of animal creature, different from sibling species by a matter of physiological and genetic degrees. But for our purposes, I refer to human beings as "humans" and nonhuman beings as "animals."

There are many ways to care for animals, and Jesus followers are often moved to do so not in spite of their faith, but because of it.

A reading of the Scripture that is attentive to animals shows that humans and animals are both created by God, worship God, and are provided for by God; humans are made in the image of God and given a particular role in that image; the whole (broken) world is in the process of being reconciled to God through Jesus Christ; and the vision of the promised kingdom is marked by peace between and flourishing of all species.

Humans are made in the image of God.

While the creation narrative in Genesis 2 portrays animals as potential partners to humans, in Genesis 1, God says, "Let us make mankind in our image, in likeness" (Gen 1:26). In English translations, Christ is also referred to as the image of God: "The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth" (Col 1:15‑16).  Humans have not always lived up to the image endowed by the Creator in us. Eleazar S. Fernandez posits one possible source of this failure:

We have learned to develop our identities as human beings through disconnection, rather than through connectedness and interdependence. Our way of relating to fellow human beings parallels our way of relating to other beings in the cosmos. We seek to disconnect ourselves because we want to establish our difference from other forms of life. But the difference that we seek through our acts of disconnection is an adjunct to claim our superiority. We establish our difference through disconnection because we believe deep in our hearts that it is only in disconnecting ourselves that we can claim superiority. Rather than seeing our difference and uniqueness as a reminder of our interdependence, we confuse our difference and uniqueness with superiority.

When we downplay the kinship between animals and humans portrayed in Genesis 2 and center ourselves in the story of the creation and redemption of the world (anthropocentrism), there are far-reaching consequences not only for our relationship with animals and the environment, but for our relationships with other humans as well.

When we downplay the kinship between animals and humans portrayed in Genesis 2 and center ourselves in the story of the creation and redemption of the world (anthropocentrism), there are far-reaching consequences not only for our relationship with animals and the environment, but for our relationships with other humans as well. Liberation ethicist and pastor Christopher Carter asks us to consider whether humans are "living up to their potential as beings created in the image of God? Are they capable of re-imagining their divinely appointed role in Creation to care for nonhuman animals in a way that conforms to this image?"

Humans are given a particular role in that image.

Immediately after creating and blessing humans, God tells these beings made in the image of their Creator that they are to "rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the earth" (Gen 1:28). And right away, God points to the lush landscape and says, "I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food" (Gen 1:29). Our first responsibility was to cultivate the plants of the land so that all God's creatures could eat. Even as the Scriptures describe sin and its consequences, including the reality of food from animal and human death, God placed limits on human use and consumption of animals, outlined in the Law. Working animals were to be given weekly rest (Ex 23:12); fields were to lie fallow, in part to allow wild animals the opportunity to eat (Ex 23:10); and it was a sin to kill an animal without giving appropriate thanks to God (Lev 17:3‑7).

When humans fail to obey God, the whole world suffers (Gen 7–8); when humans fail to keep God at the center of their lives, the whole world suffers (Jer 7:16‑20; 12:4).


This piece appears in Evangelical Theologies of Liberation and Justice, edited by Mae Elise Cannon and Andrea Smith and appears here with permission. Copyright (c) 2019 by Mae Elise Cannon and Andrea Smith. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL.

Why Talking about Christianity and Animals Requires Talking about Race

by David Clough

Aphro-ism by Aph Ko and Syl Ko is essential reading for all animal advocates.

Aphro-ism by Aph Ko and Syl Ko is essential reading for all animal advocates.

When I started writing about Christianity and animals I confess that I didn’t see the connection with race and white privilege. I was sympathetic to the idea that some theologians and Christian ethicists should be working on race, but I thought I could let them get on with that while I pursued my own research on animals. I’m now convinced that view was not only wrong, but dangerous, and that my resistance as a white, male, British theologian to attending to race in my own work was part of a long destructive pattern in the academy and beyond that perpetuates racism and white supremacy. So it seems to me worth outlining why I now think Christian theologians and ethicists who write on animals — along with others — need to engage the connection with race, and why CreatureKind is committed to taking that intersection seriously.

I’m now convinced that view was not only wrong, but dangerous, and that my resistance as a white, male, British theologian to attending to race in my own work was part of a long destructive pattern in the academy and beyond that perpetuates racism and white supremacy.

First, those who work on Christianity and animals share a general obligation with those working in other fields to avoid reproducing academic debates that have ignored the voices of black and brown theologians. Since my own academic formation inducted me into an overwhelmingly white theological discourse, if I don’t attend seriously to which theological voices I’m listening to, I will inevitably be playing my part in ensuring that the status quo continues and only white voices are centred in the canons of my discipline. That will ensure the interests of students of colour continue to be excluded from the curricula for which I’m responsible and the work I publish, which contributes powerfully to ensuring that whiteness will continue to be privileged in the future academy. This isn’t only socially unjust, but is also clearly defective academically in the partial and selective account that results. Race is a crucial component of the academic malformation I and others similarly situated need to work to overcome, but is obviously not the only one. We could start the list of additional intersections with gender, sexuality, disability, socio-economic status, class, global location, and so on, though it is important to note that people of colour suffer disproportionately within each of these categories, too.

Second, there is a particular offensiveness in white people showing compassion towards non-human animals while ignoring the suffering of black and brown people. At a panel on the intersection between race, gender, theology and animals at the American Academy of Religion in 2018, Jeania Ree Moore, United Methodist Church Director for Civil and Human Rights, described the reaction among African Americans to how white people responded to the killing of Cecil the lion in Zimbabwe in 2015 by an American recreational big-game hunter. Black commentators complained of white news anchors shedding tears on air for Cecil when they hadn’t been similarly moved by the killing of black people by the same weapon. Roxane Gay tweeted: “I'm personally going to start wearing a lion costume when I leave my house so if I get shot, people will care.” Addressing the plight of non-human animals without showing awareness of how white supremacy functions to subject people of colour disproportionately to violence, injustice, and poverty risks making concern for animals part of the distraction tactics that persuade white people they don’t need to think about race.

Third, it turns out that there is a strong connection between the construction of human supremacy over non-human others, and the construction of white supremacy over non-white others. This is most acutely set out in Aph Ko and Syl Ko’s book Aphro-Ism: Essays on Pop Culture, Feminism, and Black Veganism From Two Sisters. The Ko sisters argue persuasively that whiteness functions as the norm for humanity, and blackness is characterised by distance from this norm. This is clearly exemplified in the long history of racist abuse that identifies black people with non-human animals such as gorillas or monkeys. Peter Fryer’s Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain documents the long history of this trope in British racism, the continued currency of which is seen in a Tottenham fan throwing a banana at Arsenal’s Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang during a football game in 2018. Analyses of the intersection of theology and race by J. Kameron Carter and Willie Jennings support the case that universalized accounts of humanity frequently make whiteness definitive of the human, and render non-whiteness sub-human. Engaging the human/animal binary without attending to its relationship with the white/black binary misses the crucial connection between racism and abuse of non-human animals.

Fourth, unjust treatment of black and brown peoples and other-than-human animals intersects practically. Examples here are unending, but we could start with the repeated pattern of indigenous people growing arable crops being displaced by colonial domesticated animals; the environmental racism of situating polluting industrial animal agricultural sites disproportionately in places where black and brown people live (such as pig farms in North Carolina); the demography of workers in slaughterhouses and meat-packing plants, who are disproportionately black, brown, migrant, undocumented, and female; the urban contexts where the unhealthy animal products of subsidized industrial animal agriculture are the only affordable options for poor inhabitants who are disproportionately black and brown. The frequent association between the exploitation of non-human animals and racial injustice means that addressing animal welfare in isolation often neglects racial oppression.

For all these reasons it seems to me crucial that Christian theologians and ethicists working on animals are attentive to the way the issue intersects with issues of race and white supremacy. This is a road I’m committed to walking, but I am late setting out on it and haven’t yet progressed far. On Animals Volume 1 doesn’t show much evidence of attention to the issue. Volume 2 does pay attention to the intersection but could usefully have done more. CreatureKind is also on this journey. We’ve had helpful feedback that the course material in the current version of our course on Christianity and Animals for church small groups draws only on white voices from within the tradition and doesn’t make connections with racial justice. We should have recognised that when we put the course together four years ago, and we’re committed to a second edition of the course that addresses these concerns. As we build the organization we’re committed to ensuring that people of colour are part of the leadership of CreatureKind and our board. We've produced an intersectional resource list of academic resources addressing the intersection between animal issues and other issues, including race. There’s more we can do and more we will do, and we hope to learn well and quickly from the mistakes we will inevitably make.

There's a risk that white advocates for animals and other good causes feel that they have an excuse for not engaging with race or other intersectional issues because their cause is all-important. Carol Adams called this attitude out in relation to gender in her acute lecture at Harvard Law School on #MeToo and the animals movement. There's no free pass here: thinking, writing, and advocating well in the Christianity and animals space requires talking about race in order to avoid being part of the problem.