Thinness: Ideal or Idolatry?

Given evangelical commitments, how ought parents to shape their children's perceptions of the body?  How might Christian parents raise children within their own tradition and not reinforce worldly ideals of beauty and thinness that are out of reach for most people?

First, I would have to say that I am singularly unqualified to answer that question!  I am not a parent, and I am not an evangelical.  But the shift in perspective I personally would encourage is to know that body size and health can be quite different.  We assume that one is a reflection of the other, but thinness does not necessarily reflect health and fatness does not necessarily reflect unhealth.  These things are far more complicated.  Thinness and health get slapped together so quickly in our minds, and disrupting that is important.  Can we think about health and human thriving independently of body size per se?  I think it's a huge challenge, but an important moral project for Americans at large. 

For Christians especially it should be important, because of concerns about the way that hatred and fear of body size impacts everybody at every point of the weight spectrum.  There's a real Christian concern about the way people are socially marginalized and ostracized on the basis of their body size or shape.  Now, I want to speak carefully here, because I'm not saying that health is not a value.  But when Christians accept the dominant ideal of thinness, then suddenly there's very little space for the sick, for people who do not realize that ideal.  Our notions of health can be so dominated by the absence of any kind of human frailty and vulnerability and the reality of human bodily limitation that there's no space in the Christian world for people who struggle with that in a range of ways, whether they're fat or not. 

A part of the strength of the Christian message, historically, is that it has preserved a real social place for the broken and socially rejected.  The deification of "health" (quote-unquote), and the correlation of health with thinness, eliminates that space.  I think that's a loss.  I would hold out hope that Christians would reject "health" as an indicator of Christian belonging, and that the Christian message and the Christian possibility would find again a place for brokenness, for illness, for people who are rejected by the culture at large. And not a place of sympathy or simple "compassion," but a place where human vulnerabilities and social insults can truly be transformed.

Lynne Gerber is Research Fellow and Grants Coordinator at the University of California at Berkeley's Religion, Politics and Globalization Program.  She received her doctorate at the Graduate Theological Union.  MTS at HDS.  Dissertation on Ruling the Unruly Body: Cultural Capital and Symbolic Power in Two Para-Church Ministries.