\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\ni admit i haven\u2019t done a shred of research about this and i\u2019m sorry if this comes off as offensive or insensitive but
\nWhy does Christianity not have any dietary laws or restrictions? Judaism and Islam do. Why is there an Abrahamic religion that just skips the concept?
\nThis is a great question. To my mind, there are two components to this question. In order to understand why Christianity doesn\u2019t have dietary restrictions (except when it does, as I\u2019ll elaborate below), we need to ask why Judaism and Islam do.
To begin, what are Judaism, Christianity, and Islam? That isn\u2019t as simple a question as you might think. \u201cReligion\u201d is extremely difficult to define; we have a list of cultural phenomena that everyone agrees are religions, but attempting to find the common factors all of them share almost always ends up either excluding something that everyone agrees is a religion or including something that everyone agrees isn\u2019t one.
But essentially, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are monotheistic traditions that link their origin to the covenant Abraham made with Yhwh. Each of them has a set of beliefs that they adhere to (and those beliefs have a lot in common) and rituals they observe.
But Judaism and Islam have something that Christianity lacks. In addition to being religious traditions, Judaism and Islam are legal traditions. They have extensive bodies of literature that deal with exactly how to govern communities, how to set up courts and make legal rulings, how precedent should be established and maintained, how criminals should be punished and civil disputes decided, etc.
And one of the things that both Jewish law (halakha) and Islamic law (sharia) govern is diet. This isn\u2019t actually that unusual for a legal tradition. The United States has an extensive body of law on how food is to be grown and packaged, how animals can be slaughtered and butchered, and so on. In the case of Judaism, a lot of these laws began as a way to separate Jews from their non-Jewish neighbors and in time evolved into extremely complex practices, all of which are carefully and explicitly defined in halakha.
Islam is a parallel legal tradition to Judaism and a lot of its laws are very similar to Judaism\u2019s. When it comes to dietary restrictions, Mohammad copied Judaism\u2019s requirements for animal slaughter and the ban on pork. He dispensed with everything else.
Christianity, on the other hand, is not a legal tradition. Originally, the movement that would become Christianity was just a sect of Judaism. It followed Jewish law and if a gentile wanted to join them, she had to covert to Judaism\u2013and thus agree to abide by Jewish law\u2013first. That changed with Paul. Paul had an experience that convinced him that the legal tradition of Judaism was not central to following Jesus. The rules that governed Jewish communities did not apply to gentile converts. Christians (the term is somewhat anachronistic\u2013it dates to a few decades after Paul) didn\u2019t have to be circumcised, didn\u2019t have to observe the complete rest of Shabbat\u2026 and didn\u2019t have to abstain from pork and other forbidden meats.
Even at their most theocratic, Christian communities rarely reached the degree of theocracy that Jewish and Islamic communities could. In Judaism and Islam, to be an expert in the religion was effectively to be a lawyer. In Christianity, a lawyer was (and is) a secular professional who did not need to be an expert in theology.
In the modern world, it\u2019s a bit more complex. Even in Israel, Jews are governed by secular laws, not halakha. Obedience to halakha is an observance and a practice, but it\u2019s not a criminal or civil offense to violate it. This is also true of Muslims in Europe and the Americas, as well as several majority-Muslim countries.
Meanwhile, some sects of Christianity did adopt dietary restrictions. Catholicism had a complex system of fasting and certain foods were forbidden at certain times of the week and year (e.g. meat other than fish on Fridays) that has been largely abandoned. Seventh-Day Adventists are vegetarians. Mormons don\u2019t drink alcohol, tea, or coffee. There are probably others that I don\u2019t know about. But all of those restrictions arose in a very different context than the legal one that halakha and sharia provided.
The Anglosphere/parts of europe horsemeat taboo was, I\u2019m told, based on a now expired Church prohibition on eating it in the early days of conversion (we\u2019re talking the 700s), as horsemeat was ritually consumed in the recently supplanted religous tradition. Allegedly, the whole \u201cif you convert to Christianity, you have to give up horsemeat\u201d thing was an issue in the conversion of Iceland, which does match what I\u2019m seeing about the conversion of Iceland.
This is your regularly scheduled reminder that the European conversion to Christianity was, in parts, at the point of a sword. Like, literally in some cases.
In living memory Catholics practiced “meatless fridays” (fish meat didn’t count and after Vatican II the practice was formally confined to Lent, which is why that’s when McDonalds has the Filet O’ Fish)
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