Gluttony and Americans

American Christians tend to be rather selective in the sins they focus on. Abortion is a big deal for conservative Christians, despite not being condemned in the Bible, but gluttony is hardly ever addressed despite having been considered one of the Seven Deadly Sins for centuries.

In The Boston Globe, Rich Barlow writes:

In an era in which reports about the two-thirds of Americans who are overweight saturate the media, should spiritual leaders remind their flocks that religions deem gluttony not just unhealthy, but sinful? ... Christian thinkers famously lumped gluttony among the seven deadly sins. ''Consort not with winebibbers, nor with those who eat meat to excess; for the drunkard and the glutton come to poverty, and torpor clothes a man in rags," warns the Book of Proverbs, while Deuteronomy orders the parents of a ''stubborn and unruly son" to denounce him as ''a glutton and a drunkard."

There has been some movement on the part of a few Christians to bring gluttony to the forefront, but it hasn't had much success. They don't receive much attention and what attention they do receive seems to be almost as much negative as it is positive.

Does that mean that celebrity chefs and their followers who lavish time on culinary pursuits are sinners? ''Don't ask me about Julia Child," Schimmel says. ''Ask me about the amount of intellectual resources that go into advertising food that is either unnecessary or unhealthy or wasteful."

This is a bit more interesting: address the social context that makes bad choices more likely rather than condemn the individuals who make bad choices. It makes a lot of sense to tackle the structural issues that encourage problems to develop but it's a distinctly un-evangelical methodology to adopt.

Evangelical Christians in America typically reject the idea that social structures might contribute to sin or injustice, preferring instead to lay the whole blame on the shoulders of individuals. If only people choose to do the right thing, then everything will be OK. Reality isn't quite that simple or easy, but it's how evangelicals tend to approach matters.

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• Evangelicalism
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