page_title: Vegetarianism and religion
section_title: Christianity
hierarchical_section_title: Vegetarianism and religion / Abrahamic religions / Christianity
context_page_description: Vegetarianism is strongly linked with a number of Dharmic traditions that originated in ancient India and Nepal, and it is sometimes linked with non-Dharmic religions.
  In Jainism, vegetarianism is mandatory for everyone; in Hinduism and Mahayana Buddhism, it is promoted by scriptures and religious authorities but is not mandatory. In the Abrahamic religions, the Bahá'í Faith and certain Dharmic religion such as Sikhism, vegetarianism is less commonly viewed as a religious obligation, although in all these faiths there are groups actively promoting vegetarianism on religious grounds.
context_section_description: Within Eastern Christianity, vegetarianism is practiced as part of fasting during the Great Lent (although shellfish and other non-vertebrate products are generally considered acceptable during some periods of this time); vegan fasting is particularly common in Eastern Orthodoxy and Oriental Orthodox Churches, such as the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria, which generally fasts 210 days out of the year. This tradition greatly influenced the cuisine of Ethiopia.
  Some Christian groups, such as Seventh-day Adventists, the Christian Vegetarian Association and Christian anarchists, take a literal interpretation of the Biblical prophecies of universal veg(etari)anism and encourage veg(etari)anism as preferred lifestyles or as a tool to reject the commodity status of animals and the use of animal products for any purpose, although some of them say it is not required. Other groups point instead to allegedly explicit prophecies of temple sacrifices in the Messianic Kingdom, e.g. Ezekiel 46:12, where so-called peace offerings and so-called freewill offerings are said that will be offered, and Leviticus 7:15–20 where it states that such offerings are eaten, what may contradict the very purpose of Jesus' purportedly sufficient atonement.
  Several Christian monastic groups, including the Desert Fathers, Trappists, Benedictines, Cistercians and Carthusians, all of the Orthodox monks and also Christian esoteric groups, such as the Rosicrucian Fellowship, have encouraged vegetarianism.
  The Bible Christian Church, a Christian vegetarian sect founded by Reverend William Cowherd in 1809, were one of the philosophical forerunners of the Vegetarian Society. Cowherd encouraged members to abstain from eating of meat as a form of temperance.
  Some Christian vegetarians, such as Keith Akers, argue that Jesus himself was a vegetarian. Akers argues that Jesus was influenced by the Essenes, an ascetic Jewish sect. The present academic consensus is that Jesus was not an Essene. There is no historical record of Jesus' precise attitudes to animals, but there is a strand in his ethical teaching about the primacy of mercy to the weak, the powerless and the oppressed, which Walters and Portmess argue can also refer to captive animals.
  Other, more recent Christians movements, such as Sarx and CreatureKind, do not maintain that Jesus himself was a vegetarian, but instead argue that many practices which occur in the contemporary industrialized farming system, such as the mass culling of day-old male-chicks in the egg industry, are incompatible with the life of peace and love to which Jesus called his followers.
caption: Joseph Bates, vegetarian and one of the founders of the Seventh-day Adventist Church.
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