R. Marie Griffith has written a book that examines Christianity's approach to the body, concentrating especially on the modern Christian diet. Sounds like an interesting book, though this review is enough for my tastes. Excerpts:
Griffith's main argument can be stated in two sentences. Between the early 17th and the late 20th centuries, American body discipline practices evolved from a ritual of repentance to an exercise in self-gratification. Though a wide range of more or less secular forces propelled the process, Christians in general and white middle-class Protestants in particular pioneered that development. . . .
In her analysis of the postwar Christian diet industry, Griffith isolates at least two problems that ought to trouble the conscience. The first is the redefinition of the sins of the mouth. Where once the emphasis was on gluttony (enslavement of the appetites) or disordered desires (longing for a good less than God), now it was on fat. Just that, fat. And so it was that Gwen Shamblin, CEO and founder of Weigh Down workshop, could say, "Grace ”¦ does not go down into the pigpen."
For Griffith, the second and more troubling problem is the diet industry's race and class pretensions, intended or not. She shows that the presumed audience was white, sustained by a "racialized ideal of whiteness, purged of the excesses associated with nonwhite cultures." It also was middle- or upper-middle-class, sustained by the affluence and leisure that made costly diet foods and gear (and for women, cosmetic enhancements) affordable.
