By Elizabeth Prata
SYNOPSIS: This essay warns against Christian books that prescribe one “correct” lifestyle—whether radical missions, fasting trends, or wellness movements—while neglecting the gospel. Such approaches risk legalism, implying moral superiority through programs rather than justification, grace, and the New Testament’s broader principles of faithful Christian living.
Are you doing Christianity right? Correctly? By this I mean that there is always a trend of books pumped out from Christian authors that tout the ‘correct’ way to live as a Christian.
Now to be sure, the Bible holds believers to a high standard of living. Behavioral expectations in the Bible abound. We are to reflect Christ in all we think, say, and do. The New Testament expects us to conform to Christlikeness in our personal demeanor.
But so many authors these days are publishing books that tell us believers we are doing our lifestyle wrong. And guess what? THEY (and they alone, some say) have the key to living the right Christian lifestyle. These are the books that forego teaching about personal behavior from the Bible, and formulate programs and strategies for a certain and specific lifestyle we should uniformly adopt and in so doing, will please God. By intimation, their touted lifestyle is morally superior to all others. It’s the right way.
In my time, fifteen years ago what kicked off one particular lifestyle trend was David Platt’s book Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream. The blurb at Platt’s Radical.net website says,
It’s easy for American Christians to forget how Jesus said his followers would actually live, what their new lifestyle would actually look like. They would, he said, leave behind security, money, convenience, even family for him. They would abandon everything for the gospel. They would take up their crosses daily…
His book was an immediate success. It vaulted up the bestseller lists to the top, and stayed there for a year. It sparked a resulting cottage industry of sequels by Platt. What was successful once might be successful again, so we have more Platt books titled; Radical Bible Study, Radical Together, The Radical Question, A Radical Idea…
The problem many saw with the Radical book was that it was not sufficiently grounded in the Gospel with calls for a lifestyle drawn from justification.
Kevin DeYoung said of Platt’s book Radical at the time:
Now I don’t believe that every command we ever give must include a drawn explanation of the gospel. But in a book-length treatment of such an important topic I would have liked to have seen “all we need to do in obedience to God” growing more manifestly out of “all God’s done for us.”
At times the discipleship model came across as: “Here’s how we need to live. Here’s how we are falling short. Here’s how Christ can help us live the way we ought.” The gospel looks more like a means to obey the law, instead of resting in the gospel as respite from the law.
Remember the Christian fasting movement that started around 2011? Daniel Plan. Daniel Fast. Intermittent Fasting, Fasting like an Old Testament Prophet…another food trend that came and went and comes back during Lent…
Trends come and go. Now we have the wellness craze. Crunchy Craze. Trad Wife Craze. Holistic Health. Whatever you want to call it, these books are calling believers to eat a certain way, live a certain way, or look a certain way. They (and they alone?) have THE ANSWER. And with their answer comes with it a more than detectable feeling of moral superiority.
The same problem exists with these books as did with Radical and others like it- devoid of gospel and heavy on “do this to be godly”.
Last April, Kat Owens with initials FNTP (Functional Nutritional Therapy Practitioner) after her name, self-published a book called-
Eat by Faith: Nourishing Yourself and Your Family in Light of Creation, Dominion, and the Gospel Paperback
Founders Press has now picked it up and will publish it through Founders Press this July. I am disappointed that Founders Press is publishing this book. Founders has been seen as a credible and solid para-church ministry and is generally associated with the Reformed Baptist tradition. But promoting this book seems to be a wobble in my opinion. A foreword by Anglican Joel Salatin and his blurb states about this book,
I beg you: If you’re a Christian and you want the real skinny (no pun intended) on biblical food and farming, this book will set you up for right thinking, right eating, and right growing. I read straight through it and couldn’t put it down. It flows naturally and systematically. Every church should add this book to its required reading, along with books about marriage, empowered Christian living, and child rearing.
“Biblical food”? What is biblical food?
We’re all supposed to be farmers now?
Salatin makes the book sound just like…yet another plan of action, strategy for right living or program that if I follow it, God will be happy with me.
Kat Owens says in her own book blurb, “It’s time to replace the world’s ascetic, food-hating nutrition with food-loving, creation-honoring, dominion-taking, Christian nutrition.”
Christian nutrition? What is Christian nutrition? There is no such thing as Christian nutrition.
I have a few short words to say about this before I return to the main point-
1. ‘The world’ doesn’t ‘hate nutrition’. If you’ve traveled to France or Italy you know that they love to eat and do it well and healthily. Same with Japan! And I am sure many other countries. Over-generalizing and making inflated statements are rife with these type of books.
2. There is no such thing as “Christian nutrition”. Remember when everything was called ‘Gospel’? Prosperity Gospel, Social Justice Gospel, Racial Reconciliation Gospel… when the terms are broadened it’s a marketing ploy. Now we have Christian Wellness, Christian Nutrition, Christian health, Christian diet…
3. The opinions on the subject of health have always been diverse and dizzying. Advice changes as time passes. Red meat is bad. Red meat is good. Eggs give you cholesterol. No, eggs are good. In the 1970s we were told that a strict, low-fat, high-carb diet was the way to go. In the 1990s and 2000s, low or no-carb and healthy fat was the best diet. Like the weather, wait a while and it’ll change.
4. Food alone is not the cause or cure for a long healthy life. Natural movement, strong social networks, and low stress are part of it, too. Nutrition fads always tell us we are eating wrong, but then change later as new trends or new information comes in.
Trying to eat a snack these days… https://youtube.com/shorts/XLj7NKndCFk?si=hk0Gqv3DUXZ1_rEM
The main point is, beware of books that say they are Christian and insist you are living the wrong lifestyle. We saw that with Platt’s Radical, we saw it with the array of different fasting advice, now we are seeing it in the Trad wife/Nutrition/wellness female-led movement focusing on healthy nutrition and farming lifestyles. All these are just lifestyle advice with a slapped-on Christian or Biblical word in front, broadening the term and thus rendering it meaningless.
Jessica Grose said in her opinion piece in the NY Times “The Unrepentant Return of Christian Diet Culture” about these ‘fitfluencers’-
“…our ever-present diet culture once again has a conservative, Christian bent to it…. keeping women occupied with controlling our bodies, rather than gaining power in ways that go beyond our physical selves, is the goal.
Amen! And it IS a culture. You are living wrong if you’re not skinny and farming the land for your food. You are living wrong if you don’t radically sell everything you own and live uncomfortably barefoot in Bali doing missions. You are living wrong if you are not protesting systemic racial injustice…and so on ad nauseum.
Calls to obedience without sufficient grounding in the gospel and justification is legalism, pure and simple. That’s what many of these books are, legalistic plans of action for you to feel morally superior.
“you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier provisions of the Law: justice and mercy and faithfulness; but these are the things you should have done without neglecting the others.” (Matthew 23:23)
Ladies beware of these books. As I paraphrase Kevin DeYoung’s questions about the book Radical, in these crunchy wellness books, do you sense the strong call to obedience is also marinated in God’s lavish mercy? Do you see sanctification more clearly flowing out of justification? Do you read all we need to do in obedience to God growing more manifestly out of all God’s done for us?
I ask, does the book inspire you to want to know more about Christ and live like Christ? Does it offer a balm for when we fall short? Or does it instill a low-level guilt that we are failing God if we don’t perform to the Legalistic standard the book describes?
As DeYoung has said of Radical, and as I post his quote again, is the book “sufficiently grounded in the Gospel with calls for a lifestyle drawn from justification”?
Does it come across as: “Here’s how we need to live. Here’s how we are falling short. Here’s how Christ can help us live the way we ought.” The gospel looks more like a means to obey the law, instead of resting in the gospel as respite from the law.
The New Testament shows us various lifestyles, a plethora of different occupations, and discipleship in various forms. It does not tell us one way to eat, it does not prescribe certain foods, it does not advise as to one certain profession…in fact many of the people we meet in the NT were not farmers. Instead, the NT focuses on principles of moderation in all we do, gratitude for all we have from Christ, and stewardship of the body to the best of our ability.
So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all to the glory of God. (1 Corinthians 10:31)
Serve with good will, as to the Lord and not to men, (Ephesians 6:7).
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