Animals: Tradition - Philosophy - Religion Article used with permission from All-Creatures.org

Jon Hochschartner reflects on the moral wrongness of animal exploitation in all its forms and how eating meat constitutes sin in his panentheistic understanding.

Yes, meat eating is a sin
From Jon Hochschartner, Slaughter-Free America, slaughterfreeamerica.substack.com
October 2025

Photo from Canva

Leftists I know are generally reluctant to talk about sin. This is understandable in my view. If you’re about my age, there wasn’t a vibrant, religious left in your formative years. As a result, such talk often sounds fundamentally conservative. Of course, spiritually-inspired leftism has a long history. Socialists like Eugene Debs and civil-rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. peppered their political messaging with biblical references.

On a purely pragmatic level, I think there’s political benefit to packaging left-wing ideas in superficially-conservative trappings. It makes these ideas seem more familiar and less threatening. In contrast, for most of my time on the left, activists, including me, have gone out of their way to describe their views as radical or revolutionary. There may be a time and place for such declarations, but more often than not I don’t think this kind of framing is helpful.

That’s why, as an animal activist, I want to make clear I believe meat eating — and all other forms of animal exploitation — is a sin. This isn’t to say I’m without fault. Nothing could be further from the truth! I know many people who come from strict, religious families struggle with feelings of guilt connected to notions of original sin. However, I find the idea to be somewhat freeing. We’re all deeply flawed and this must be accepted to a certain degree.

For me, to say something like meat eating is sinful is synonymous with saying it is morally wrong, which I certainly believe. In my panentheistic understanding, God isn’t a being, though we might refer to the divine as such for convenience’s sake. God is all goodness, beauty, truth, and joy. It’s a force, present in all things, which undergirds and extends beyond the universe. Aligning ourselves with this means living in accordance with the divine will.

On the other hand, consciously choosing to act in a manner contrary to the divine will is a sin. Killing animals, for no better reason than gustatory preference or cultural habit, is about as clear an affront to God as there can be. It’s wanton destruction of the divine, of the goodness, beauty, truth and joy in others. Perhaps the first sin occurred when one sentient being decided to consume another. Something along these lines was the reality of the mythological Fall.

I’m a perennialist, which means I think the divine will can be accessed by earnest seekers in any time and place, though our conception of this is filtered through our unique circumstances. As a result, I don’t feel bound to what a given scripture does or does not say about a particular issue, like animal exploitation. These texts are valuable sources of time-tested wisdom, but ultimately they document the spiritual experiences of certain humans in certain periods.

Still, it’s worth noting that even in the Bible, a far more anthropocentric text than scriptures found in Eastern religions, meat eating is portrayed in a very ambivalent light. For instance, veganism is depicted as God’s ideal in the Garden of Eden. The divine eventually allows for the killing and consumption of animals, but it’s a reluctant concession to human sinfulness. Similarly, the Peaceable Kingdom described in the Book of Isaiah is one without interspecies violence.

So, yes, meat eating is a sin. I should mention, however, that as an animal activist I’m far more interested in addressing societal sin than individual sin. By this I mean I’d rather focus on the systems which promote animal exploitation than the moral failings of particular humans who take part in it. Again, I believe we’re all deeply flawed in different ways. Beyond this, I don’t think focusing on individual action is a politically-effective approach for a variety of reasons.

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Posted on All-Creatures.org: November 6, 2025
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