Thinness: Ideal or Idolatry?

So in the last ten years, you've seen a lot of evangelical leaders endorsing weight loss programs or writing weight loss books.  T. D. Jakes has a weight loss book, Pat Robertson has his "Skinny Wednesdays"every week devoted to weight loss.  Charles Stanley wrote the forward to a weight loss book; Ted Haggard before his scandal wrote a weight loss book.  When you read those weight loss books--and talk with people in Christian weight loss programs--there a great deal of concern about the fat Christian leader and the way the fat Christian leader reflects on evangelicals in general.

Vast sums of money are at stake in the weight loss industry.  Do you see these Christian weight loss programs as well-intentioned, or as money-making schemes?

I have no doubt that a fair number of the prominent evangelical leaders have gotten into this precisely because they can sell a great number of books.  Yet there is also a hope to mainstream evangelical leaders and programs.  If a Christian leader can be seen as an authority on weight loss, then perhaps he could appeal to a broader audience and use a weight loss program as an evangelizing tool.  It could be a way of broadening the authority of evangelical leaders, and a successful weight loss program could bring people into the church. 

The other side, I think, is that evangelicals historically have been very attuned to popular culture and media.  In some areas, evangelicals try to mark themselves as different.  Yet Christian weight loss programs are not about evangelicals trying to demonstrate their difference.  In this case, evangelicals are trying to exemplify certain American values, trying to show Americans that they are even better than Americans in general at weight loss, and thus to become sources of cultural authority. 

Many of the people I spoke with said, "I've tried all the other programs.  I thought now I should give it to God.  Maybe God and the inclusion of God in the weight loss program can do something that the secular weight loss programs could not."  The people who are writing books and publishing and broadcasting on these things are savvy to that and market themselves to that hope.  Some in the world of Christian weight loss believe that evangelicals, since they have such strongly developed spiritual resources, should have a corner of the holistic weight loss market. 

It's important to note, though, that not all of these projects are about making money. First Place, for instance, doesn't cost a great deal to join and many groups have ways of defraying their costs. In the Christian weight loss world there is a wide range of the spectrum between those motivated by good intentions and those motivated by profit.

Perhaps the fear is that if evangelicals can do no better, in terms of cultivating self-discipline and forming godly attitudes toward food and the body, then that might discredit the evangelical message? 

Yes, that's an explicit concern.  It is often framed theologically in the language of the fruits of the spirit.  According to the Apostle Paul, if you genuinely have the spirit within you, then you will manifest certain characteristics, among them self-control.  To these folks, fat, in and of itself, was evidence beyond dispute of a lack of self-control.  That's the concern.  If Christians in general and Christian leaders specifically cannot manifest the kind of self-control that would reflect the presence of the Spirit in the body, then our lives do not demonstrate the benefits of the Christian gospel and what it can do for you. 

In my opinion, evangelicals could be distinguishing themselves instead by rejecting the dominant ideals of our weight loss culture.  They could say something like this: "God loves our bodies and doesn't require that we lose weight.  God's love transcends the number on the scale.  God's love is not even referenced to the effort to lose weight.  God's love extends past that.  And we have a place for people who are experiencing some pretty harsh social forces, we have a place for them to find actual acceptance and welcome, a place that doesn't require that they pursue this often futile errand in order to be seen as representatives of God."

In the world of weight loss, few people are saying, "We're standing by a different set of values because we believe that God loves people of all sizes."  Few are challenging the dominant way of understanding weight loss in terms of a system of regulations on what you eat and how you exercise.  Evangelicals are apparently not interested in being all that different from American culture in the way they regard body size.  Concerns about fat and obesity are so salient in this culture that no sub-group that seeks cultural influence can afford to challenge them.  The price of maintaining a counter-cultural position on body size would be very high, because our society places such a tremendous value on thinness.