The Slave Trade And Cattle Farming

I took a long walk just before yesterday's church service, and on that walk I found myself once again reflecting upon an unpleasant truth.

And I came to a decision I've been avoiding for more than a decade.

It starts off with a "Greatest Hit" story that many Christians know. I'll keep the story short here. Longer versions are available elsewhere.

John Newton was a sailor and slave trader back in the 1700s who came to Christian faith after the ship he was sailing on nearly sank. We know his name today because he later penned the most famous hymn of all time: Amazing Grace. A life turned around.

So far so good? Yeah Go Rah!

But the story isn't that simple. The truth is that Newton continued to ply his trade in human flesh for another ten years after his conversion experience. What's worse, it seems that his decision to leave the slave trade was driven by health reasons and not by a guilty conscience.

In short, John Newton's timeline is a mixed bag.

1748: makes his first decision to follow Jesus Christ
1754: retires from active slave trading after having a stroke
1788: publishes an anti-slavery tract that helped end slavery

Newton's story ends well enough, but getting there takes forty years.

That's not very fast. When I heard John Newton's story as a child, I was always under the impression that he "got saved and got out."

Not so.

It took took literally decades for Newton to reach the point where he wrote "a confession, which ... comes too late ... It will always be a subject of humiliating reflection to me, that I was once an active instrument in a business at which my heart now shudders."

But what does this have to do with cattle farming? Bear with me...

The slave trade and cattle farming have a few things in common. Both businesses trade in flesh. And both involve practices we prefer not to look too deeply into.

Most people in John Newton's day were happy to remain ignorant about what happened on slave ships and to slaves in general.

This was easier to do if the slaves were considered less than human.

How well does that assumption fly today? Not very well.

Yet today, how many of us can honestly say that we've visited a slaughter house. Watched animals killed by the thousands. How many of us really want to know what, end to end, goes into the preparation of the meat we eat?

Or is that a topic which we in turn prefer to remain ignorant of?

Let's face this topic head-on. When we take animals out of their natural state and put them through factory meat-production lives, haven't we in a sense denied them something even animals deserve?

If we cram 10,000 chickens into a small room where they cannot even walk... would it not be fair to say that we have treated these animals as less than animals?

But I'm pretty sure that's how a Tyson Chicken factory works.

It is is a much greater evil to treat humans as less than human.

I agree.

But it's also quite wrong to treat animals as less than animals.

Maybe we meat-eaters need a John Newton moment.

Even if it takes us forty years to get there.

To be continued...