February 2026: Black History and the Vegan Church

Shalom, Everyone!

I am starting an original article series on a new blog called The Messianic Vegan Monthly. Since we are now in February, I thought I would begin with two thought-provoking questions about black history and the vegan church. In future articles, God willing, I will address pornography and the vegan church, alcohol and the vegan church, cannabis and the vegan church, LGBTQ issues and the vegan church, and overpopulation and the vegan church, just to name a handful of important topics that warrant careful consideration by vegan church leaders.

But first, let me say a few words about the new Archbishop of Canterbury, confirmed at the end of January, and also about the situation at Creation Care Church (an important 2020s pioneer in this field). 

Archbishop Mullally - now arguably the highest-ranking woman in the world church - is not vegan or vegetarian, accordingly to publicly available information. PETA UK is asking Mullally to modernize the Church of England. She has an extensive background in nursing and public health, so perhaps this won't be too much of a stretch. Let's keep Archbishop Mullally in our vegan evangelism prayers. She may be even more imminently important to the paradigm-shifting "ancient future" of Christian veganism than Pope Leo XIV.

As far as Creation Care Church (CCC) is concerned, I hope to see this church succeed, regardless of its formal name and logo, but there is a discrepancy between the information available on the old and new websites that makes it difficult to know what to think and how to tithe. I never reached the point of regular tithing to CCC back when I was a member, because I live on a modest fixed income and couldn't decide which vegan Christian organizations to support and which ones not to. I've been in touch with both sides of the CCC dispute, and as far as I can tell, they are both acting in good faith - at least towards me! This looks like it could be a case where a strong but polarized vegan church nucleus was ready to divide into two new churches so that a wider diversity of members could eventually be called into the fold. Please keep everyone associated with both the old and new CCC websites in your prayers.

Now let's consider two provocative questions about black history and the vegan church.  

Taking us all the way back to the beginning of black history and the vegan church, the first question I have in mind is whether Adam and Eve were likely to have been black vegans in an African Eden? On one hand, many scientifically oriented vegan Christians may lean toward an out-of-Africa evolutionary hypothesis. According to this view, Adam and Eve were black hunters and gatherers and the veganism of Eden is a part of the Bible best understood as epic myth. On the other hand, many faith-based vegans believe in the literal reality of a vegan Eden, albeit one that exists on a higher spiritual plane than we can detect with our sin-obstructed senses. The general trend of thought among Edenic literalists, such as Ken Ham, is that Adam and Eve and their descendants were proto-racial "middle brown" human beings until ethnic diversity emerged after the Tower of Babel. Ham explicitly rejects the idea that Noah's curse on Canaan had anything to do with skin color. There is also a third way, advocated by African American vegan medical doctor and Seventh-Day Adventist Milton Mills, that combines belief in a literal Eden with belief in a black vegan version of human evolution. According to Mills, human anatomy shows clear evidence of primary adaptation to a plant-based black African diet. What's your take on this? Do you think we need to center one of these views, a different view altogether, or a healthy pluralism of views at the heart of the 21st century vegan church?

The second question I'd like to pose this month is whether we have a strong shared sense within the 21st century vegan church that we are carrying forward the integral liberation theology of Sojourner Truth and subsequent black American emancipation prophets like Dr. Christopher Carter? According to the framework of these black vegan church prophets, the only way forward for society is through the "Red Sea," a process of decolonization from the racism, class slavery, and speciesism of the plantation logic at the core of the industrial food system. Actually, in addition to Carter's triple logic of plantation oppression, Sojourner Truth would certainly add sexism as a fourth oppression. Both would call the intersectional process of decolonization from this oppression a human and animal Exodus from Egypt. But in contrast to Sojourner Truth's emphasis on a physical Exodus to the Promised Land, Dr. Carter would say that we are now talking about a spiritual Exodus to a "new way of being" within the land we already have. 

This of course boils down geopolitically in February of 2026 to the midterm elections in America, and whether the vegan Christian electorate - small but powerful block that we are! - ultimately decides we will move closer to this "new way of being" under Democratic or Republican leadership in Congress.

With this in mind, let me conclude by highlighting a potential problem with Dr. Carter's framework. The work of several scholars suggests that Dr. Carter places too much blame on the West, and not enough blame on human sin and fallen systems of oppression as they exist and have developed outside the West, including, ironically, in the Egyptian slave society of ancient North Africa. In geopolitical terms, Dr. Carter has potentially aligned himself too much with the radical anti-American, anti-corporate, anti-mainstream left to be our pragmatic centrist Moses this election time around. Dr. Carter is a leading prophetic voice within the vegan church, to be sure, but we'd be happy if Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries would just go vegan because it makes such good moral sense, taking seriously the liberation of people of color from future climate injustice. 

Leader Jeffries doesn't have to follow Dr. Carter deep into the radical left by suggesting the present US Constitution - post-Civil War amendments and all - is a system of plantation logic at its core!

Or does he? Perhaps we need a new Constitution, not just a minimalist set of well-conceived 21st century "integral Exodus" amendments. What do you think about all of this, and about the general theme of black history and the vegan church?

Please feel free to comment here on the blog or send me a private email. I look forward to your insights.

Until March, God bless.