Body by Jesus

It’s 11:15 on a Saturday morning at the CenturyTel Center in Shreveport, Louisiana. The Women of Faith conference is in town and last night this place was rocking with music and laughter and spiritual pep talks. But right now the women sit silent, some with tears in their eyes, as Mandisa stands on stage and talks about her addiction to food.

“My struggle with weight has been the biggest struggle of my life, and it began as a very young girl,” she tells the women. “But, one day at a time, God is tearing down the strongholds that encourage me to turn to food for comfort, instead of to God.” Heads across the audience nod knowingly.

A devoted Christian with a powerful voice, Mandisa was cobbling together a living leading worship at Beth Moore conferences and doing session work in Nashville recording studios when she shot to fame during the fifth season of American Idol. Now 32, Mandisa was the oldest contestant on the show and also, as judge Simon Cowell pointed out right after her first performance, its fattest.

A few days before the Shreveport conference, Mandisa sat in Houston and discussed the 80 pounds she’s lost since American Idol and her new message of freedom from overeating. It’s a message she delivers not just at Women of Faith events, but also on her recently released CD, titled simply Freedom. “So many women struggle with food, they identify with my story. And if their issue isn’t food, women can still relate to feeling bound by a destructive habit,” she said.

Clearly, it’s not just women who struggle with food. One could argue that America’s most destructive habit is its diet of large quantities of processed foods. And attempts to resist the omnipresence of processed options take on their own manic hue. Our culture is obsessed with food—eating it, not eating it, preparing it quickly, preparing it slowly, spending as little as possible on it, investing in organic ingredients in it.

We are eating food and the food is returning the favor—our food is eating us.



The Weight of Gluttony

While the explosive growth in obesity rates over the last three decades has leveled off in the last few years, the rates remain high—34 percent of US adults aged 20 and over have BMIs above 30 (20 to 24.9 is considered healthy, though it should be noted that use of the BMI in predicting actual health has come into question in recent years). Alarm over these numbers and rising rates of obesity among children has led to a series of public policy decisions that are often referred to as the “war on fat.”

But the war on fat is nothing new for Christians. The church has a long history of battling the bulge, dating at least back to 590 AD when Pope Gregory I gave his list of the Seven Deadly Sins. (Gluttony sits at number two.) And in her book Born Again Bodies, Princeton scholar R. Marie Griffith suggests that Christianity and its attitude towards fat is intricately involved in America’s modern-day obsession with thinness, diet, and fitness.

Starting in the late 50s, Christian books like Pray Your Weight Away by Charlie Shedd popularized the notion that fat was a mark of disobedience and distance from God, while weight reduction signified the restoration of holiness. “We fatties are the only people on earth who can weigh our sin,” wrote Shedd. Fifty years and countless diet books later, most Americans live in an area where they can avail themselves of a panoply of groups—First Place, Weigh Down Workshop, Thin Within, etc.—that offer support and guidance to Christians looking to slim down.

And yet, studies suggest conservative Christians are more likely to be overweight or obese (even when controlled for other factors including poverty, race, etc.) than the general population. And anecdotal evidence reinforces the idea that potluck-loving Christians struggle with their weight. In a light-hearted memoir of his open-heart surgery and subsequent weight loss, Fox News reporter Todd Starnes issues this call to his fellow Christians: “Put down the fried chicken leg, step away from the buffet, and wipe the chocolate sauce from your lips. The body of Christ, my friends, is a bit too big!”

Part of the problem is that our view of glutony is too narrow. In the thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas wrote that there are six ways in which one can be gluttonous: eating too soon, too expensively, too much, too eagerly, too daintily, or too wildly. If gluttony is any disordered approach to food, then it is a sin to which our time and place leaves us uniquely susceptible. We have easy, cheap access to far more calories than our car- and desk-bound bodies use in a typical day. And the panoply of entertainment options we have that revolve around food (Iron Chef, anyone?) inspired the Center for Science in the Public Interest to coin a new term—food porn. As Aquinas might observe, regardless of our weight, we’re all gluttons now.  

Photo: Tim Platt/Getty Images