Curious Reads: Loving Our Fat Neighbors (Or Not)

How American Christianity has exacerbated anti-fat bias.

Hello friend, Liz here.

For the newbies among us: Every other week, I write an essay about how I am seeking to practice curiosity and empathy in my own life (“the empathy list”).

Then, on the off-week, I share a curated list of essays worth reading (“curious reads”). I try to pick essays for you from publications that offer a few free essays per month (as in, ahem, incognito mode will work…).

Out of the 6 or so stories I share, I pick one to explore in greater depth—the “top of the fold” story. This deep dive is meant to challenge you in your practice of authentic, healthy faith in Jesus by offering a practical opportunity to learn about and feel more deeply for those around us—especially those who are different from us. Enjoy!

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Top of the Fold

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#1 This week’s story is about fatness at church—that is, about the Christian church and American culture’s assumption that God hates fatness, like they do.

But—PRAISE GOD—our biases are not God’s biases. Remember, when there’s no daylight between who we hate and who God hates, we likely have confused our own biases with God’s.

Rev. Anastasia E.B. Kidd, author of Fat Church: Claiming a Gospel of Fat Liberation, drives this point home in an interview everyone should read. (From her, I learned a new word: Orthorexia)

Read “God Loves Fat People As They Are. Can We?” by Greta Lapp Klassen at Sojourners

The Highlights

Greta Lapp Klassen, Sojourners: “You and other fat activists use the word “fat” as a neutral description of human bodies, just like short or tall. Why is reclaiming the word important to fat activists?”

Rev. Kidd: “Fat people are not failed thin people — they’re fat people. Claiming fatness as a permanent, immutable, and positive identity — just as one would claim any other sort of human identity marker — means that I can no more change the size of my body than I can the color of my skin.”

Sojo: “One of the things that makes your book so unique is that it outlines the history of anti-fatness in the church. What are some of the most interesting and important intersections between the church and anti-fatness?”

Rev. Kidd: “My first experience with the conflation of “righteous Christian [living]” with weight loss culture was Gwen Shamblin’s Weigh Down workshops in the 1990s. I was in high school. Shamblin had an empire based on the idea that to be fat was to be unfaithful, to be fat was to ruin your body’s temple. She made millions on this. And that was just assumed to be true in the culture of Christianity in which I grew up in.

“To lots of people throughout church history, [being] a pious and controlled person [meant denying] ourselves pleasure in whatever form it took. So, if the assumption of fatness is that overeating is what makes us fat, then being thin has a moral righteousness, even if that’s just the body structure your genetics gave you.

“Early American diet culture was very concerned with pure and holy living, defined through diet and exercise, because disease was thought of as a response to sin; anything that was unhealthy in your body was your fault or the fault of your ancestors, and God was punishing you for that. That led to terrible things being done to anybody who had a non-normative body and continues to inform the rampant individualism that is behind the idea that we can bootstrap ourselves into a whole other body size or shape.”

“Repentance is the backbone of diet culture. Food moralism, the idea that there are good or bad foods, and that we’re righteous if we eat an apple and we have to repent for eating a hamburger, either through shame or actually doing something to ‘work off’ the ’sin’ of whatever we’ve done.”

Sojo: “You offer up a different version of Christianity: fat church. What does that mean to you and to the people who are part of your community?”

Rev. Kidd: “To me, [fat church] is …true body liberation would be the end of discrimination against anybody, for any reason. True body liberation would be the end of discrimination against anybody, for any reason. So body liberation in full would necessitate the end of white supremacy, the end of policing, the end of patriarchy, of usury, capitalism, structural class hierarchies, and all these other systems of violence that we have in society. Body liberation… means accommodation [of different body sizes and abilities], which means collective care, which means believing in the diversity of God’s creation as a good thing.”

Reflection: Christians Believe Thin = Godly

I recently experienced anti-fat bias at the pediatrician. I took my kids for their once-yearly physical, and during the assessment, their doctor (note: their doctor, not my doctor) asked me whether I’d received any new diagnoses lately—such as obesity? she asked. Her question took me off guard, and later, I confronted her about it. Why did you ask me that? Because I’m fat? What does that have to do with my string-bean, middle-of-the-road healthy children?

The doctor hedged—no, of course, she hadn’t asked because of how I look. She has to ask. She asks everyone that question. (Need I tell you that I had to stop myself from rolling my eyes when she said that? Of COURSE she doesn’t ask everyone that question, that’s absurd.) Even if your kids are obviously active, she claimed, even if they are and always have been in a healthy weight/height range for their entire lives (and the 9 years we’d been receiving check-ups at this doctor’s office), even if she had no reason whatsoever to believe that my kids would necessarily have their own weight issues based on the data… she still needed to ask me, their caregiver, about my diagnoses.

(Please read the entire thread about my fatphobic experience with my kids’ pediatrician before commenting about it. It’s a doozy of a thread.)