Dieting our way to holiness

Cults and high-control groups often employ some form of food control

Stodgy cake sweetened with apple juice instead of sugar.

Aloe vera juice that stank like a highly chlorinated swimming pool.

Soy margarine.

I forget where I first discovered the term “orthorexia,” but it felt like a revelation about my childhood experience.

An obsession with healthy food, orthorexia is a form of disordered eating, though it can masquerade as “clean eating” or an elimination diet. In my household, orthorexia looked like compulsive checking of ingredient lists, elimination of entire food groups (all sugar, all wheat, all dairy), and a feeling of superiority around our “safe” food and intolerance of other people’s “garbage” food.

Cults and high-control groups often employ some form of food control with their members. Cult members experience malnutrition from fasting or develop eating disorders fueled by stringent food rules. It’s not that some of these food rules are bad—many 19th-century cults practiced a vegetarian diet—but in the hands of abusive leaders food can become a tool of manipulation and control. For instance, survivors from the International House of Prayer in Kansas City testify that the constant fasting left them with chronic health issues.

While it’s common to focus on women when we talk about disordered eating, food control respects no gender boundaries in cults. This email excerpt from a pastor at my childhood church highlights the spiritual language of food control for men.

“Band Of Brothers 2022... Are you in?” email sent to CFC men, December 19, 2021

To join their “Band of Brothers,” the pastor frames the rules as God’s truth: “Many of us have unknowingly accepted lies and are not living according to God’s truth.”

So what are the requirements for “rejecting passivity, uprooting the lies, and living out biblical masculinity, God’s way”? 

We will expect each other to embrace a lifestyle change during these 90 days that will include: daily SOAP (in a journal Scripture, Observation, Application, Prayer), intense daily exercise, no alcohol, no video games/phone games, share screen time statistics with your cadre, no white sugar, no sweetened drinks, no solo entertainment, at least 7 hours sleep per night and maybe more as God leads us. 

There’s nothing inherently bad in abstaining from alcohol and sugar (and goodness knows we all could use more sleep), but framing this kind of lifestyle as God’s divine plan allows high-control churches to blame mental illness and chronic health issues as something that can be fixed with “clean eating.”

Another Christian Fellowship Center pastor—son of the senior pastor—highlights his belief that right eating can heal people on his podcast:

“…As soon as I start talking to somebody who's wrestling with things like depression and anxiety, I'm going to ask about sleep and food and physical activity. We're people; we're body, soul, spirit, and there's a real physical dimension to the health of the whole person.

I'm a fan of medicine, but even more so, I love seeing people supernaturally healed. Jesus went about healing the sick, and he still heals today. So when I encounter someone with mental health problems, I pray for supernatural intervention that they may be healed.”

Disordered food consumption can also lead people like my parents and their friends to trust in Iridology and Acupressure Point Testing instead of seeking treatment from medical professionals. My former senior pastor’s daughter explains in a blog post how she tried chewing tree bark before seeking medical care.

Blog post from the senior pastor’s daughter, March 20, 2012.

I experienced constant fatigue and nausea as a child and my mom finally took me to get checked for Lyme disease with a doctor.  When my blood tested negative for Lyme disease, it confirmed her belief that food allergies were the cause of my ailments.  Looking back, it’s clear to me that these were symptoms of childhood anxiety and depression, not food allergies, but I spent the next two decades dieting and dosing myself with supplements from fraudulent chiropractors. (One chiropractor prescribed an expensive powder for my nausea. Dear reader, it was sodium bicarbonate.)

Some people choose not to consume meat for environmental reasons. The bike rack outside my local coffee shop has a PETA advertisement saying, “Care about the planet? Go vegan or put a cork in it.” (I prefer to target Big Oil rather than meat-eaters, but you do you.) Other people suffer from autoimmune disease symptoms that subside when they avoid US grain products. There are myriad reasons for our food choices, but be wary of groups who want to control your food intake. Don’t let a cultish church tell you a certain diet is God’s plan.

Try as we might, we cannot diet our way to holiness.