My Review of Christpiracy

Why I wanted to see it

(written the day before I saw it)

I do a lot of activism, and when I come across a person who justifies their animal abuse because “god gave us animals to eat”, it’s one of the very few times I disengage. Not because I don’t have counterpoints, but because I don’t see the value in trying to rationalize with someone who uses “god said I can” as a catch-all “get out of jail free” card that they can use for whatever they want. So I’ll be curious to see if this movie changes my mind and gives me a new perspective to engage with these types of people.

My kids are non-vegan and Christian (the universe is not without a sense of irony), so I’m mostly going just to see if it’s something I can recommend to them to watch that will get them thinking more about veganism, but that they won’t see as insulting or blasphemy.

——————————————————————————

My review the day after seeing it

I’m still working to collect my thoughts on it. It wasn’t quite what I expected it to be. There were also lots of scenes of animal abuse and death that I wasn’t expecting, and I don’t do well with those, so I’m still trying to recover from that.

Here is my very short high-level synopsis of the movie: the filmmakers make the argument not that the Bible itself promotes a vegan lifestyle, but just that Jesus himself was likely a vegetarian (there was no word for vegan back then). They say that he was a member of the Nazarenes, as were many of his core disciples, and the Nazarenes were vegetarians who were very against eating and killing animals. They say that the thing in the temple where Jesus lost his shit was him being angry about all the animal sacrifices and killings and that’s why got him crucified.

The filmmakers don’t use the Bible to make their point, they use other books from this time period that talk about Jesus and his views against eating meat. They argue that the early church hid those books and deliberately kept them out of the Bible because of their anti-meat stance.

So the movie isn’t about “the Bible says this” it’s about “the people that formed the early church after Jesus and made the Bible engaged in a massive conspiracy - hence the name Christpiracy - to hide the truth.”

This may go over with some cafeteria Christians or the like, but I suspect the “born again” types who believe that the Bible is the “perfect word of god written and guided by the Holy Spirit” will just dismiss this as nonsense.

The movie also delves into the hypocrisy of other religions as well, and interviews monks and people from other religions who are complete hypocrites about eating meat.

——————————————————————————

Follow-up Response

I shared the above thoughts, and a friend asked me: “Do you think it would make any impact on non-vegans and get them to go vegan after they see this documentary?“

My response to them was:

I’m still forming my thoughts on that. If they’re a born again Christian like my son is, probably not. I say that because the argument that Jesus was a vegetarian mostly comes from non-canonical books, with the argument that there was a major conspiracy to suppress this information that Jesus was against meat eating. Born agains are going to immediately dismiss that. Now if you get a casual Christian, maybe they believe that the Bible is flawed and corrupt, the early church was also corrupt, and that Jesus was a vegetarian against eating meat. If they believe that, maybe there is a chance they go vegan.

I think the only people this truly reaches are people like the Christian director of the film before he set out to make it - someone of faith who was already struggling with the morality of eating animals and didn’t understand how it could be done in a spiritual way. And then realized while doing research for this movie that it can’t.