In my last column, I argued that mainline Christians ought to worry a bit more about private morality, to be a little more willing to risk being moralists and scolds. As long as I’m being a killjoy, I might as well go all the way. Here I consider some areas of ostensibly private morality that may have larger implications than we want to realize.
It’s football season. As we savor the crisp fall air and the smell of cheap stadium beer, we’ll be ignoring a settled scientific consensus: American football destroys people’s brains for fun and profit. Repeated head trauma cannot be avoided in this sport, and it turns out that repeated head trauma is bad for you. Moreover, though the sport compensates its best players with money and glamour, it also attracts people who lack other ways of making a decent living—and becomes one more way they suffer disproportionately. This argument can be extended to other sports, such as boxing, hockey, and mixed martial arts. God formed these people’s skulls for a reason, and that reason isn’t my entertainment.
How about eating meat? I find few things in everyday life to be as satisfying as a decent hamburger. But the climate impact is devastating, and a cow is a conscious creature. I try to avoid supporting abusive farming practices, the concentrated animal feeding operations—aka torture chambers—that blight my region. But today’s fake meat tastes all right, and you can hit your protein macros with powders or filtered milk, so there are few nutritional reasons to eat even a freely ranging animal whose happy life ended in a quick death. My belief in human exceptionalism isn’t strong enough to afford me a claim to anything more than a share of animals’ eggs and milk. I think it’s good for people who want to hunt to do so, if they eat their kill; we need folks to maintain that hard-won expertise for everyone’s sake. But I can’t steer around the conclusion that most of us should eat meat rarely if ever.
