CARA president discusses new book
Matthew A. King is the president of the Christian Animal Rights Association, which he co-founded with his wife, Nina. He is the author of I Will Abolish the Bow: Christianity, Personhood, and the End of Animal Exploitation, as well as Meat: The New Cigarette: Patient Advocacy and the Plant-Based Diet. He is also a registered nurse.
SLAUGHTER-FREE AMERICA: What’s your new book about?
MATTHEW A. KING: Pride Goes Before Destruction: Human Vanity, Animal Agriculture, and the New Covenant Solution is the follow-up to I Will Abolish the Bow: Christianity, Personhood, and the End of Animal Exploitation. Pride Goes Before Destruction criticizes factory farming, which is propelled by humanity's conceittowards animals. Fitting to the title, this farm animal cruelty has bled into human affairs, as factory farming is linked to climate change, environmental destruction, antibiotic resistance, and many other issues. I condemn humanity's arrogance and propose a biblical solution to its negative effects: The New Covenant in Jesus Christ. The book is full of credible historical evidence and pensive biblical interpretation, through which I make a persuasive case for including animals within the circle of Christian ethical consideration. This new covenant application can help mend humanity's broken relationship with the planet and also our own health.
SFA: What made you want to write a second book?
MAK: There was a lot of discarded information left over from I Will Abolish the Bow that I still wanted to discuss. This information did not really fit into I Will Abolish the Bow, so I always knew a follow-up was on the horizon. Additionally, I read an article on All-Creatures.org titled “Hosea 2:18: God's New Covenant between Man and Animal” by Martin V. Cisneros. I realized through the essay that the new covenant of Jesus Christ includes animals, and this had been a mostly unexplored component in the Christian argument for animal rights. I also read an article by James Bean titled “Evidence That Jesus and The Original Aramaic Christians Were Vegetarians,” which revealed much extra-biblical evidence that the apostles abstained from consuming meat. They may have recognized a key facet of the new covenant in Christ (Luke 22:20) is bringing peace to animals (Hosea 2:18).
SFA: Has your view of how Christianity and animal rights relate changed since you wrote your first book?
MAK: They are a lot more intertwined than scholars have historically realized. I was unaware of all of the extra-biblical evidence that the apostles abstained from meat consumption and that early church fathers like Saint Jerome and Saint Basil the Great had criticized flesh-eating. There is also a quote from a very early Old Syriac-Aramaic biblical manuscript where Jesus condemns eating meat that is surprisingly not found in the traditional Greek manuscripts.
SFA: What’s the most important message you hope readers take from your new book?
MAK: The most important message in the book is that there is much historical evidence that nonviolence relating to food was a common practice in early Christianity, probably because they followed the Hosea 2:18 new covenant, which I think most likely started shortly after Pentecost (Acts 2:1–13). Collective humanity is seeing so many negative effects to animals, the environment, and human health because we have ignored the Hosea 2:18 covenant. I hope this book helps Christians embrace the Hosea 2:18 new covenant as a solution to these problems.
SFA:Do you have any plans for a third book you can share with us?
MAK: I do! I will promote this book for a while and implement the teachings onto Christian Animal Rights Association’s website and social media (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter). After that, I plan to start working on a third book featuring some ideas I have not quite worked out completely. For instance, I want to discuss the omniscience of God and Jesus, Genesis 18, Elijah being fed meat by God, and the presence of animals in heaven based on Ezekiel and Revelation. Most importantly, I want to dive into what Christian Animal Rights Association’s stance on lab-grown meat consumption might be in the coming years.