Their hard work already helped to return a moral man to the
Oval Office. Now a group of Kansas Baptists has launched another ambitious
campaign: taking on the $40 billion a year pork industry.
‘Other White Meat’ Unclean Say Church Groups
By Deanna Swift
Spring Hill, KS--After the decisive role they played in the re-election of President George W. Bush last week, you might think that members of the Spring Hill Baptist church in northeast Kansas would be celebrating Sunday as a day of rest. Instead, Pastor Roy DeLong is exhorting the faithful—a crowd of 1,500 strong—to prepare to wage their next battle: against the $40 billion dollar a year pork industry.
In
the months leading up to the election, DeLong urged church members to
keep a moral man in the White House. Now he wants them to take on the
“other white meat.”
The issue fueling the nascent campaign among these churchgoers isn't the indignity of factory farming or poor working conditions in the meat packing plants that process millions of pounds of pork every year. Instead, it’s a rarely cited passage from Leviticus that warns followers to stay away from the meat of pigs because it is unclean. "It’s right there in Leviticus,"says DeLong. "The bible tells us that we shouldn’t eat pork or even touch it because pigs are dirty. Pork isn’t a Godly food."
Spring Hill resident Becky Brown says that she'd never given much thought to the pork that has long been a presence on her family supper table. "Pork chops, sausage, you name it, we've been eating it," says the diminutive blond mother of four. But once Pastor DeLong began prosthletizing on the subject of pork, she knew it was time to change her family’s diet. Bacon may prove particularly hard for the Browns to part with, she says, because her husband Ken, who manages a suburban Kansas City supermarket, can't get enough of it. "He'd eat a BLT for lunch everyday if I'd let him. But that’s going to have to change. Pork is dirty. It says so right here in the bible," says Brown. "I'm not going to touch it and we're not going to eat it."
What did Jesus eat?
On this cool fall Sunday, the only bacon to be found at the Spring Hill Baptist Church is that depicted on banners and posters; the Browns have joined some 100 other church members in the building's cafeteria to paint colorful signs, urging other Kansans to put pork behind them. Seven year-old Marly Hunt is putting the finishing touches on a super-sized bacon strip, while her older sister Jessica carefully stencils the words from Leviticus 11. Bob and Kathy Marshall are at work on a 15-foot long banner that features an image of the Savior, a picture of a hog with a red slash through it and the words "what did Jesus eat?".
Soon, the parishioners will hit the road, meeting up with members of
dozens of other churches, and traveling in a weekly caravan of school
buses that will stop at the state's largest hog farms. While they're
eager to spread the word that eating pork is a sin, the church members
recognize that persuading Kansans to forego ham, chops and ribs may be
a tall order in a state that produced more than 450,000,000 pounds of
pork last year. “It can take time to convince people that they’re
living in a way that isn’t right with God,” says Marshall. "But we'll
get there in the end." Besides, Marshall and the others are convinced
that this time around, even an unabashedly secular culture is likely to
sit up and take notice of their pork protest. "We're values voters,"says Marshall. "What we think matters."
A biblical beef?
Not everyone is pleased over the prospect of the culinary crusade. Elder Dennis Hicks of the Faith Baptist Church in nearby Olathe, KS, says that it may be a mistake to try to apply biblical principles to such bread and butter issues as what's for dinner. While he maintains that these principles apply to everything from homosexuality to tax relief, he draws the line at using the bible to influence what people eat. "Just because Leviticus says that pork is unclean doesn’t mean that we shouldn't eat it."
Some pork industry officials in Kansas are seeing red at the prospect of a high-profile bible-based boycott of their product. One official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, even pointed a finger at a competitor: the rival beef industry. "I wouldn't be surprised if it’s the cattlemen who’ve got the Christians all riled up over this thing," said the gentlemen, pointing out that northeast Kansas is home to a dense network of beef packing plants. "You talk about unclean meat. Isn't that how we ended up with Mad Cow disease?"
But the Spring Hill parishioners say that they're not buying it. Leviticus warns against eating cattle that has been torn apart by wild animals, says Pastor DeLong, but otherwise the Bible is silent on the subject of beef. "There's also a prohibition against eating the fat of cattle. But with today’s leaner cuts that shouldn’t be a problem," he says.
If Christians are persuaded to pass on the pork, they won't be the first religious group to do so. Jews and Muslims already abstain from the meat of pigs because both regard the swine as an emblem of impurity.
Deanna Swift can be reached at [email protected]
I can't believe the remark made by Dennis Hicks of the Faith Baptist Church. "Just because Leviticus says that pork is unclean doesn’t mean that we shouldn't eat it." If an elder of a church puts his own desires in front of the law of God than what hope is there for Christianity in America today?
Posted by: Scott | September 15, 2006 at 07:43 PM