c. 2007 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Advocates at the Humane Society of the United States have long suspected God was on their side, and now they’re hoping his followers will join them.

They’re focusing their fight on the most vulnerable creatures: factory farm hens and pigs crammed into cages so tight they can’t move, and boiler chickens genetically altered to grow so fast their limbs can’t support them.

But too many religious people, they say, remain in the dark, not recruited as potential allies.

“Very often … I’ll hear a preacher talking about our obligations of mercy and compassion to one another, and our stewardship of the earth, and I just want to jump up and say the missing piece in the middle is the animals,” said Lois Godfrey Wye, an animal advocate who attends the Washington National Cathedral.

With an initiative unveiled this month, the Humane Society hopes to form deeper relationships with believers by educating them on the mistreatment of factory farm animals and promoting animal-welfare traditions that run through Christianity, Judaism, Islam and other faiths.

“With the last presidential election, it became clear how powerful religion is in this country,” said Christine Gutleben, director of the Humane Society’s “Animals and Religion” program. The organization “has a tremendous opportunity to create change for animals,” she said, noting that there has never been “a successful social movement in history without religion.”

Gutleben, who studied theological and ethical food choices at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, Calif., said many believers, “if they knew what was going on,” would not support the unjust treatment of factory farm animals.

Faithful people simply aren’t getting the message of animal stewardship in church, said the Rev. Andrew Linzey, director of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics in Britain and author of “Animal Theology.”

“When did you last hear a sermon on animals? When did a national church synod or conference last discuss the need for a cruelty-free lifestyle?” he asked. “When did you last hear a national church leader saying _ for example _ that a Jesus-shaped ethic involves privileging the poor, the marginalized, the outcast and the vulnerable _ including animals?”

Linzey said churchgoers are reachable, but a successful appeal will have to explain how animal stewardship is a biblical mandate.

“It is there in the Bible. Animals are God’s creatures; the land animals are created on the same (sixth) day of creation (as humans). We have dominion over animals but that doesn’t mean despotism. It means that we should look after them because God cares for them,” he said.

Gutleben has collected statements on animal welfare from a number of religious traditions, and hopes they can help religious people view concern for animals as an obligation of faith.

“The pope essentially condemns factory farming,” she said, referring to a statement against cramped hen quarters and the overfeeding of geese that Benedict XVI made before his 2005 election.

“They become just caricatures of birds. This degrading of living creatures to a commodity seems to me in fact to contradict the relationship of mutuality that comes across in the Bible,” then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger said.

His comment wasn’t just pulling an idea from the sky. Animals were integral to Christianity hundreds of years ago, said Laura Hobgood-Oster, assistant professor of religion at Southwestern University and former co-chair of the American Academy of Religion Consultation on Animals and Religion.

In addition to the creatures that flocked to St. Francis of Assisi, the 12th century Italian animal-friendly friar, animals were present in extra-biblical texts, Hobgood-Oster said. In one, St. Paul converted a lion. In another, Jesus called on a lion to stop its attack.

Animals largely dropped out of the religious worldview with the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, according to Jay McDaniel, professor of religion at Hendrix College in Conway, Ark.

Human concerns became paramount, he said, and with the onset of urbanization, most individuals were no longer forced to raise and kill animals for food. Farming was romanticized, and compassion for animals decreased.

“Supermarkets protect us. We don’t see faces, eyeballs and feet. (There’s also an) overwhelming artificiality of urban settings. … We see a bird in the sky, but not up close,” he said.

Godfrey Wye, the animal advocate from Washington National Cathedral, said it’s possible to use saints and texts to promote animal welfare today.

“St. Francis told of the transformative power of the love of God. We need to take hold of that transformative power and use it to transform (animals’) lives when they’re in conditions of suffering like factory farming and puppy mills,” she said.

KRE/PH END McCANN800 words

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