Weighing teachings on gluttony

Boston often lands on lists of America's healthiest cities. So perhaps the Rev. Daniel Harrell didn't have to worry about hordes of flabby faithful storming his Park Street Church pulpit last year when he preached against overeating.

''At its rotten core, gluttony is fixated self-love that impedes love of God and of neighbor," he declared. ''Gluttony obscures your vision toward the needs of others by distorting your perception of your own needs."

In an era in which reports about the two-thirds of Americans who are overweight saturate the media, should spiritual leaders remind their flocks that religions deem gluttony not just unhealthy, but sinful?

It's important to remember that obesity isn't always caused by overeating and that gluttony can be practiced by skinny people. That said, pigging out is condemned by religious traditions East to West.

Christian thinkers famously lumped gluttony among the seven deadly sins. ''Consort not with winebibbers, nor with those who eat meat to excess; for the drunkard and the glutton come to poverty, and torpor clothes a man in rags," warns the Book of Proverbs, while Deuteronomy orders the parents of a ''stubborn and unruly son" to denounce him as ''a glutton and a drunkard."

According to Beliefnet.com, a religion website, Buddha included food in his warnings against attachment to things of this world. The Koran prescribes fasting ''as it was prescribed to those before you, that ye may learn self-restraint." And a Hindu text denounces ''the thoughtless glutton who gorges himself beyond his digestive fire's limits."

But now the beginnings of a backlash have some critics decrying what they call misguided moralizing.

In his book, ''The Obesity Myth," University of Colorado law professor Paul Campos says that health concerns about weight are spurious science, stemming from a ''moral panic" akin to the Salem witch scare or Communist-hunting during the Cold War.

Moralists believe that obese people could purge their pounds with self-control, when in fact most dieters gain their weight back and yo-yo unhealthily between heavy and thin, Campos argues.

''The Jewish tradition does believe people can have a significant degree of self-control over their eating habits," even if hectoring them to diet is not the best way to go about it, counters Solomon Schimmel, professor of Jewish education and psychology at Hebrew College in Newton and author of a book on the deadly sins. (His theology includes a dash of personal experience. Schimmel says he lost 55 pounds three decades ago and has kept more than half of that off since.)

Kevin Ryan, founder and former director of Boston University's Center for the Advancement of Ethics and Character, argues that overeating is worse than just selfish consumption.

His own Catholic faith and other traditions hold that those who jeopardize their health disregard their responsibility to loved ones.

''It's a violation of my obligation to my family if I just become a big, fat couch potato," he says.

Many religions stress that the motive behind overeating is crucial to deciding its sinfulness.

''I could be eating a lot because I'm famished and haven't eaten in a week," says Harrell, a Congregationalist, ''or I live in an Italian family and it's part of the social way in which we gather together."

He doesn't consider that immoral, unlike, say, eating because of boredom.

''For the Christian, the idea [is] that if you have all this time on your hands, why not be productive with that in a way that would help other people," rather than ''downing a pint of Ben & Jerry's."

Of course, eating is part of fellowship in many religious traditions. (Ironically, the amounts eaten at Jewish rituals have some rabbis complaining about gluttonous worshipers, Schimmel says.)

And food is one of life's basic pleasures, after all. Is it so wrong to enjoy hearty eating if you're not otherwise self-absorbed and if you exercise all those calories off?

Schimmel agrees that a person who fits that profile ''would be very low on the scale of sinfulness."

Theologians also caution that condemning gluttony must not cross a line into other sins, such as cruelty to heavy people or fostering an environment that encourages eating disorders.

The religious ideal is for people to self-criticize and question their own habits.

''What about the time and money and effort that people spend on food?" asks Schimmel. ''A lot of that can go to better causes."

Does that mean that celebrity chefs and their followers who lavish time on culinary pursuits are sinners?

''Don't ask me about Julia Child," Schimmel says. ''Ask me about the amount of intellectual resources that go into advertising food that is either unnecessary or unhealthy or wasteful."

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