After years of distance from the Church, a long season of doubt, and what I can only call spiritual exhaustion, I found myself sitting once again in the sanctuary where my faith began. I had returned to a small, quiet Evening Prayer service at a parish I had once belonged to decades before. The liturgy was familiar, the candlelight tender, the prayers soft and rhythmic, almost enough to lull me into peace.
As the service ended and we stepped into the hush of twilight, I passed someone I had sung with in the choir many years ago. They looked older, of course, as did I, and it was clear they didn’t recognize me. As I made my way toward the door, they turned to me and said with all the sincerity in the world, “I’ll pray that God helps you lose a little weight.”
That was it. No greeting. No memory. Just that.
I was stunned, mortified. I turned to leave without a word. They called after me, saying that they weren’t trying to offend me.
Later, I emailed the rector of the parish to let them know what had happened. The response, “…that parishioner doesn’t have social graces and often says things like that. It wasn’t meant to be malicious.”
As if that excused it.
As if that made the shame disappear.
As if a priest defending a personal attack didn’t make it worse.
The “G” Word
The concept of gluttony, as we know it in Christian moral tradition, did not originate with Jesus or the earliest disciples. Its roots reach into the desert fathers and mothers of the fourth century, particularly Evagrius Ponticus, who described “eight evil thoughts” that corrupt the soul. One of these was gastrimargia, an obsessive desire for food. When John Cassian brought these teachings to the West, and Pope Gregory I later reduced them to the “Seven Deadly Sins,” gluttony took its place alongside pride, lust, and wrath as one of the central vices of the Christian life.
But gluttony’s definition began to shift. Medieval theologians like Thomas Aquinas expanded it beyond simple overconsumption of food, describing five ways it could manifest: eating too soon, too expensively, too much, too eagerly, or too daintily. Yet even Aquinas did not tie gluttony to body size. That came later, when Christian moralists (read: Puritans) began to equate physical shape with spiritual condition. As we shall see, this was never a biblical claim—it was a cultural convenience.
The common thread was excess—but over time, the focus narrowed toward bodily size and outward appearance, collapsing a complex spiritual category into a visible condition. The large body became the moral sign of an undisciplined soul.
Shame and the Sanctified Body
This is where gluttony’s history intersects with the culture of shame that many Christians in larger bodies know too well. We inherit a theology in which thinness is associated with holiness—monastic fasting is romanticized, missionary endurance celebrated, ascetic self-denial praised. These spiritual disciplines have value, but they have also been misapplied as tools for body control, where the “ideal” Christian body is disciplined, restrained, and most of all, small.
The irony, of course, is that Scripture offers no such requirement. Jesus himself was accused of being “a glutton and a drunkard” (Luke 7:34) not because of his waistline, but because of his radical hospitality—because he welcomed the wrong people to the table and refused to police the boundaries of who was worthy to eat and drink in his presence.
When we mistake bodily size for moral standing, we commit the very sin the New Testament warns against: “Do not judge by appearances, but judge with right judgment” (John 7:24). We turn a spiritual matter of the heart into a physical metric of worth.
In recent decades, a troubling trend has emerged that reframes “biblical living” as synonymous with physical thinness, often packaging weight loss as a spiritual imperative. Popular books and articles market “The Apostles’ Diet” or “Bible-based weight loss plans” that combine selective scripture, prescriptive meal plans, and intensive prayer regimens, presenting thinness as the godly ideal. These resources frequently draw from verses about fasting or “treating the body as a temple,” stripping them from their historical and theological contexts to reinforce modern diet culture. Rather than honoring the diversity of bodies God created, such works imply that salvation—or at least sanctity—comes through disciplined consumption and visible slenderness. In doing so, they perpetuate the same body hierarchies that the Gospel seeks to dismantle, turning a message of grace into yet another moralized measurement of worth.
When Paul calls the body a “temple,” he invokes sacred space—not sanitized space.
The ancient Temple in Jerusalem was not a pristine white cube. It was alive with texture: blood, oil, incense, bread, song, and sweat. It smelled of animals and offerings. It pulsed with ritual and movement. It was not “clean” in the modern hygienic sense—but it was holy, because it was where God met people. What makes the body holy is not how small it is. What makes the body holy is that God dwells there. Even when it limps. Even when it expands. Even when it can’t get out of bed. Even when it is exhausted, stretched, aging, or sore. Even when it defies social expectations.
Especially then.
Theology of Liberation for Larger Bodies
Fat liberation theology begins with a simple but radical truth: all bodies are made in the image of God (imago Dei). This includes bodies that are large, disabled, scarred, or otherwise outside the narrow “acceptable” range of cultural norms. Genesis 1:31 tells us, “God saw everything they had made: it was supremely good…” That includes me. That includes you.
To speak of liberation is to speak of freedom—not just from unjust systems, but from the internalized shame those systems create. Fat liberation theology asks the Church to confront the ways it has weaponized Scripture and doctrine to uphold thinness as a spiritual ideal, and to reclaim the gospel’s call to radical inclusion.
Saint Paul’s metaphor of the Body of Christ (1 Corinthians 12) is instructive here. The Church is not one kind of body, but many. The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you,” nor should the thin body say to the fat body, “You are less worthy.” Each part belongs, each part is necessary.
Gluttony Reconsidered
If gluttony is not simply about eating “too much” or carrying “too much” weight, what is it about? In its truest sense, gluttony is disordered desire—it is when food or consumption becomes disconnected from gratitude, community, and justice. In the biblical witness, gluttony is less about the size of the eater and more about the absence of love for neighbor. Think of Paul’s rebuke in 1 Corinthians 11, where the wealthy feast while the poor go hungry. This is not a warning about body size, but about selfishness and disregard for others at the table.
Seen this way, a church potluck is not gluttonous because someone takes an extra slice of pie, but because the first in line takes more than their share, leaving little for those at the back. The problem is not abundance, but inequity.
In God’s economy, the problem has never been too much food. It has always been too little compassion.
From Policing to Welcoming
To address gluttony faithfully, the Church must move away from policing bodies and toward cultivating hospitality. We can ask: Are our tables truly open to all? Do our fellowship halls have chairs without arms for those who need them? Do our sermons on “self-control” acknowledge the complexity of food, trauma, and economic access? Do we honor the sacredness of rest rather than idolizing thinness as the sign of discipline?
Fat liberation theology does not dismiss discipline or fasting; it reframes them. Fasting is not a weight-loss tool; it is a spiritual practice of attentiveness and solidarity. Feasting is not a moral failure; it is a foretaste of the heavenly banquet.
Jesus at the Table
At the heart of this is the image of Jesus at the table—a table where tax collectors, prostitutes, and Pharisees all find a place. His table fellowship was scandalous precisely because it refused to conform to purity standards, whether those were about diet, status, or moral standing. When the Church turns the table into a place of scrutiny and shame, it betrays the host who welcomed the world.
In the vision of the kingdom of God, the banquet is abundant, the chairs are sturdy, and there is room for everyone. Our task as Christians is not to enforce the world’s standards of beauty and health, but to embody the radical hospitality of Christ.
A Word to the Church
If we are to be faithful to the gospel, we must repent of the ways we have conflated gluttony with size, health with holiness, and thinness with worthiness. We must teach our children that their bodies are not moral scorecards. We must preach sermons that call for justice at the table—not calorie counting at the potluck.
As theologian Anastasia Kidd writes in Fat Church, “The gospel is fat with grace.” That grace is abundant enough to cover the whole of our embodied lives—our hunger, our joy, our rest, and our feasting. The good news is that we are not measured in pounds, but in love.
Trent Pcenicni is a fiber artist, YouTube creator, preacher, church musician, and college professor at Western Carolina University who finds inspiration at the intersection of creativity and faith. Rooted in a deep love of Christ, Trent’s work—whether at the loom, in the classroom, or in worship—seeks to weave beauty, meaning, and community together. Trent advocates for the full inclusion of all underrepresented people in the body of Christ, including queer individuals, people in larger bodies, those with diverse abilities, and people of every race, ethnicity, and background. Through teaching, artmaking, and ministry, Trent strives to create spaces where all can experience dignity, belonging, and the transformative love of God.
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