Why Religious People Should Be Vegan

It's at least prudent.

Aug 21, 2024

Religious people (at least from the Abrahamic tradition) are hard to get through to with the animal rights message. This is because they usually believe that humans have a special status granted to us by God, and that animals are there “for us”. They’re a gift. They’re our property.

This is hard to tackle, because attacking this claim requires either giving a different reading of their holy text (which most of us non-religious folks don’t know much about), or it requires undermining the text itself - which isn’t exactly going to be easy. If the usual objections worked, then the person you’re talking to probably wouldn’t be religious.

I do, however, think that even if I were Jewish, Christian, or Muslim, I would still be vegan - because if you accept one of these faiths, there’s an enormous prudential risk involved in buying animal products.

Note: I’m going to use the term “religious” to refer to Abrahamic religions here. I just can’t be arsed to write Abrahamic or Muslim/Jewish/Christian over an over.

Jennings’ Wager

The first thing to point out is that there is at least some reason to doubt that God permits us to do whatever we want to animals (I will talk about Halal later, don’t worry). Even if God gave us “dominion” over the animals, he clearly wants us to embody certain virtues, and not embody certain vices. God is, and wants us to be, compassionate, merciful, kind, generous, etc. He isn’t, and doesn’t want us to be, cruel, violent, selfish, gluttonous, etc. These are all things I think your average religious person would agree with.

So, we find ourselves in a situation where we don’t need to harm or use animals to live, and we know that God wants us to embody virtue. What, in this situation, do you think a benevolent God would want us to do?

Abstain from using animals.
Kill them because it’s convenient and pleasurable, while risking torturing them (most farms are factory farms, and producers often lie about being “humane”).

Seems like God would want us to go for number 1. Even if you disagree, you should think it’s at least a little likely he’d want us to go for 1. This is because killing animals for trivial reasons clearly embodies the sorts of vices he wants us to avoid, and abstaining from killing embodies the virtues he wants us to have.

The important thing to note, however, is that beside the moral risk, there’s an enormous personal risk here too. If you’re religious, there’s a decent chance you think if God thinks you’re a sinner, you will be tormented in Hell. Given that he almost certainly doesn’t has a problem with you being vegan, but there’s some chance he has a problem with you killing animals in the modern era, the expected value of continuing to eat animal products is terrible.

I wrote “Uncertain” here, but even if the chance is as low as 1% that he doesn’t permit eating animals in our circumstances, the disvalue of hell is so bad that veganism is still the rational choice.

I know if I believed there was a chance that I would burn in hellfire for eternity, I would do absolutely everything in my power to avoid that. If I thought there was even a slim chance that buying an animal product caused factory farming (which you should), and that factory farming would be considered a sin (which you should), I would not risk hell for a sandwich that tastes slightly better. (Also, honestly, after a while it doesn’t even taste better. It makes you a bit nauseous when you look at it).

On Halal

Halal is held up by Muslims as the cruelty free way of getting meat. I’m not sure why - getting your throat cut open obviously still hurts. I imagine if a Muslim had to put their dog to sleep, they wouldn’t whip out the box cutter. Let’s just say it’s better though, for sake of argument.

What’s interesting about Halal rules is that their existence gives us even more reason to think that God cares about animals. The story usually goes that while we needed to use animals to get by in the olden days, God didn’t want us to hurt animals unnecessarily. As a result, he laid down some ground rules about rearing and slaughtering them that limited the pain they suffered (Seems like he could’ve just made meat grow on trees, but hey, I’m not the omniscient deity here).

So, if we are Muslim, we find ourselves in this situation.

God thinks it’s a sin to cause unnecessary harm to animals (Halal).
Animal products are unnecessary.
Buying Halal meat causes some harm to animals (They still get their throat slit open, uncertainty around humane/halal labelling, death, etc.).

Given these three beliefs, it seems like we should be vegan! God gave us the rule set to follow when we needed to use animals. It stands to reason that once we no longer need to use them, he wouldn’t want us to continue killing them for pleasure and convenience. It would be really weird if he cared enough to make Halal rules, but didn’t care enough to say you shouldn’t kill animals for trivial reasons.