"They Are Communities Like Your Own": The Abrahamic Religions and Animal Rights

By Norm Phelps
Date: Saturday, June 12, 2010 03:00 PM
Duration: 45 minutes
Tags: animal religion rights

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America is the most religious country outside the Moslem world. Religion affects our public discourse and social policy to an extent that would be unthinkable in Europe. No social justice movement has ever succeeded in the United States in the face of unified opposition from the religious community. And animal rights will not be the first. We will succeed only if we are able to gain at least the acquiescence of a significant segment of organized religion.

This talk will examine both the teachings and the record of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam regarding animals in the context of the importance of converting America's religious communities to the animals' cause. It will conclude that the core ethical teaching of each of these religions is universal, unbounded compassion, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," applied to all who are able to suffer. Specific teachings that approve of animal sacrifice, meat eating, and other forms of animal exploitation contradict this core principle and must, therefore, be rejected; they are a cultural overlay rather than an authentic, integral part of the faith. An instructive model is human slavery, of which the Bible-in both the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament-explicitly approves. There is no passage in the Bible that condemns human slavery or suggests that it ought to be abolished. And yet, it was Christian advocates who led the fight against slavery in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Religion must reject nonhuman slavery as it has rejected human slavery before it can be true to its own deepest principles.