Article

Creed

Eating

Seven Deadly Sins

Sin

21 August 2023

7 min read

Gluttony’s unconscious self-image of emptiness

In the seventh of a series on the Seven Deadly Sins, Graham Tomlin digests gluttony’s distorting obsession with food.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A recent report highlighted the problem of obesity in our society. The percentage of British adults who are overweight has risen by 11 per cent since 1993 to a whopping 64 per cent of the population, with almost one in four British adults classified as obese. In the USA it is even worse with 36 per cent of people classified as obese. And that has a knock-on effect on an already creaking NHS and healthcare systems elsewhere in the western world. The bill for the taxpayer for obesity is rising to unsustainable levels.

There are many causes of obesity, some of them physiological, some genetic, some economic, with poverty often linked to poor diet. Eating healthily costs. Yet Christianity has always seen a spiritual side to the problem, relating to our relationship with food. As part of this diagnosis, Christian moralists have typically called out the sin of gluttony.

Strange though it may seem, in the earliest lists of the deadly sins, gluttony used to head the list as the worst of them all. Pope Gregory in the sixth century wrote: “unless we first tame the enemy dwelling within us, namely our gluttonous appetite, we have not even stood up to engage in the spiritual combat.”

Later assessment of the rank of gluttony in the list of deadly sins has taken a kinder view. Thomas Aquinas was easier on gluttons, because, for him, like lust, overeating mainly concerns the body rather than the soul, and as we have to feed ourselves anyway, it is understandable and less serious than the other sins. When Dante’s pilgrim arrives in hell, he finds the gluttons in the third circle of upper hell, not far from the top, tantalisingly within sight of the most succulent tree whose “crop of tempting fruit ambrosial odours spread”, but unable to climb to taste them. For him, gluttons are certainly better than the prideful, the envious, wrathful, slothful or covetous. The only sin that seems less harmful to him is lust.

Obsessive dieting can be just as much a sign of gluttony as overeating.

Our image-conscious society tends to look down on people who are overweight. Yet gluttony denies a simple rule that the fat are sinful and the thin are virtuous. When we think of gluttony, we maybe think of stuffing food into our mouths with no thought of tomorrow, over-indulgence to a huge degree. Yet the sin of gluttony has always been seen as wider than that, including that fastidiousness about food that obsesses over what you can and cannot eat. C.S. Lewis writes about the kind of old lady who simply asks for ‘a cup of tea, weak but not too weak, the teeniest, weeniest bit of really crisp toast’, adding, ‘Because what she wants is smaller and less costly than what has been set before her, she never recognises as gluttony her determination to get what she wants, however troublesome it is to others.’ Obsessive dieting can be just as much a sign of gluttony as overeating.

Gluttony then is an inordinate obsession with food, drink or plain consumption. It is allowing food to take up a distorted place in our lives, just as lust is allowing sex to become an unhealthy obsession.

We have a fascination with food. A TV advert lingers slowly over a picture of a chocolate sponge, soaked in brandy, with rich cream being poured over it, all with a soft, seductive voiceover describing the scene – a culinary striptease. The cookbook section of my local bookshop is far larger than the religious section – who had ever heard of celebrity chefs thirty years ago? Now they are everywhere. The politics of food is also an area of tricky choices and legislation. Fine food and wine costs both time and money, and poorer families tend to eat less healthily. Should they be banned from doing so for their own good? Should we replace chips and hamburgers with healthy salads in school canteens despite what the kids and their parents want? Where does the health of the nation override personal freedom to eat what you feel like?

There is one story in the Bible that sheds some light on gluttony. It is the one where Jesus was tempted by the devil. During the temptations, Jesus deliberately goes without food. One of the enticements of the devil is to persuade Jesus to feed himself by the magic trick of turning the desert stones around him into bread. After all, that should be no problem to the Son of God, and it would of course demonstrate his true identity by a display of miraculous power. Jesus replies with some words from the Old Testament:

“It is written: ‘Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.’”

The point is that when food becomes a god it becomes dangerous. Food, like sex, has the ability to skew things, and so it must be kept in its proper place, and the evidence of that is all around. The irony of our western problem with obesity is that it occurs at a time when still half the world, three billion people can't afford a healthy diet. one in ten people worldwide go to bed hungry at night and nearly half the deaths of children across the world under 5 are related to undernutrition. In 2006, for the first time, the number of overweight people in the world (1 billion) overtook the number of malnourished people (800 million). First world gluttony is anomalous when related to third world poverty and hunger.

Gluttony is trying to fill a spiritual vacuum with a physical remedy. It is like taking penicillin for a broken heart.

But overeating is not the only way of abusing food. Obsessing about quantities is also a sign of bad soul health. Bulimia and Anorexia are not as common as obesity, but they still blight the lives of around 10 per cent of college-age girls in the USA, and in the UK, more young people than ever before are receiving treatment for eating disorders. Suffering from Anorexia, Bulimia or a Compulsive Eating Disorder are not sins, but they are an indicator of something that has gone wrong. Food is not a neutral thing, and in a complex way, our attitudes to food are all bound up with our spiritual and emotional health.

This begins to point us to the reasons why Christianity has found gluttony a sin. Why do people overeat, or starve themselves? Many studies suggest that these disorders often emerge from a sense of lack of worth. We all know the pattern of comfort eating. When you feel a bit low, a slice of chocolate cake or apple pie can make you feel a whole lot better. Ten pints of lager or a couple of stiff whiskies can help you forget why you felt bad in the first place. Similarly, anorexia or bulimia often emerge out of patterns of unhappiness or self-dislike. The Eating Disorder Association says that such patterns of self-abuse are usually caused by such things as “low self-esteem, family relationships, problems with friends, the death of someone special, problems at work, college or at university, lack of confidence, sexual or emotional abuse. Many people talk about simply feeling ‘too fat’ or ‘not good enough’”.

Now these of course are extreme cases. Yet they point to the ease with which we use food and drink to fill something missing in our lives, to comfort us when we feel lonely, to satisfy us when we are not just physically, but also spiritually hungry.

The Ethicist Peter Kreeft puts it well:

“The motivation for gluttony is the unconscious self-image of emptiness: I must fill myself because I am empty, ghostlike, worthless.”

Gluttony is trying to fill a spiritual vacuum with a physical remedy. It is like taking penicillin for a broken heart – there’s nothing wrong with penicillin, but it doesn’t do much good for a restless soul, and too much of it can lead to all kinds of problems.

Gluttony strikes when the connection between food and its proper purpose is broken. Food is given to sustain the body, to enrich our communal life and to give pleasure to the taste. It is not there to comfort the isolated and lonely, to bolster a fragile self-image or to substitute for mediation or prayer. If you begin to recognise that you are regularly eating alone for spurious reasons, for reasons that seem different from the purpose of food itself, that may be when you need to watch out for the place of food in your life, or to get some help.

Gluttony rears its head when we begin to get food out of proportion. They key issue here is control. The overeater loses control over how much she eats. She is unable to stop herself taking the extra large Coke, the extra cream on the pudding, to finish off the packet of biscuits rather than stop at one. She believes the lie that it is impossible for her to control his eating. For the anorexic or bulimic, the issue is the other way round. For many sufferers from such diseases, or those who might have a tendency in that direction, the problem is too tight a control over what they eat, and their very identity becomes bound up with their illness. So here, the remedy is to learn to give up control, to re-form their identity around something other than eating habits, so that food can take its normal place as something to be enjoyed.

If the abuse of food often comes from a deep sense of dis-ease, a loss of self-worth, then the Christian answer to finding a true sense of being worth something can come only from the source of life himself, the one described in the Bible as the ‘bread of life’ - the one who gives food for the soul. Speaking of the emptiness that gluttony tries to fill with food, Peter Kreeft goes on to give the Christian answer to that emptiness:

“Only a knowledge of God’s love for me can fill that emptiness, make me a solid self, give me ultimate worth.”

When our desperate search for love is met by the deepest and most satisfying love of all, the love of a God who is Love, these deepest hurts can begin to be healed.

Interview

Creed

Mental Health

Trauma

21 August 2025

17 min read

When the answers run out: Kate Bowler on faith, fragility, and the beauty of uncertainty

Kate Bowler in conversation with Graham Tomlin.

Nick Jones

Nick is the senior editor of Seen & Unseen.

A woman sits and smiles in front of her bookcase.

This interview is an edited transcript of the Seen & Unseen Live event.

Graham

Kate Bowler is a four-time New York Times bestselling author. She's an award-winning podcast host and also an associate professor of American religious history at Duke University. She's the author of a number of books, including Blessed, a history of the American Prosperity Gospel. And they're wonderfully titled - The Preacher's Wife; The Precarious Power of Evangelical Women Celebrities.

And you may know something of Kate's story, she was unexpectedly diagnosed with stage 4 cancer at the age of 35. And then out of that, wrote the New York Times, bestselling memoir. Everything Happens for a Reason and Other Lies That I've Loved, and her latest book, Have A Beautiful, Terrible Day. Daily Meditations for the Ups, Downs, And in Betweens. Kate hosts, the award-winning podcast Everything Happens.

We were just talking about students and teaching. What do you teach your students? You say American religious history? Is there a kind of theme? And how do you go about teaching your students? How does that work in your setting?

Kate
Sometimes they make me do the Puritans to Trump sort of lectures which I enjoy, but I think the heart of what I love is to talk about American religious myth making. What stories animate their accounts of how to live a good life. Most American stories end up being iterations of that and some pretty classic themes of righteous individualism, of wanting only good things because God is good, a sense that all things can be conquerable. So, it's got this intense agency to it.

I end up doing a history of American theodicies, explanations of evil. It mostly ends up being storytelling about whether people believe that they deserve the lives they got. It's a privilege to do it, especially at a divinity school. These are going to be people who are in the forefront of helping people interpret and explain their pain.

And I guess that's something about America, isn't it? Because America was born out of this hopeful sense of people leaving the terrible strictures of Europe, and going off to this free new land, and so on. So, I suppose it had sort of hopefulness and positivity built right into the beginning, didn't it?

It does. I also really just enjoy civic virtues, in general Canadian civic virtues. The Americans ones are, of course, the pursuit of happiness. Canadians have peace, order, and good governance as their primary civic virtues, which always makes me laugh. It's just so polite and so reasonable. But Americans are hoping fundamentally that they can become. The kinds of people that can conquer a fickle market, who can overcome any sort of structural evil, can be winners in a culture that doesn't ever really try to explain away inequality. It attempts to create the kind of people who can navigate it.

And you started out by studying the prosperity gospel, didn't you? And particularly within the United States. Is that right? The kind of idea that God wanted good things for you. You've been talking about that already, and when you did that study, what did you expect to find? And what did you find when you did that research?

Well, the very first time I bumped into the prosperity gospel I was in my hometown of Winnipeg, Manitoba, which is right in the middle of Canada, and we have only one fast road, and they had put up a traffic light. So, I was in a terrible mood. Then I saw all these people pouring out from what I thought was a factory that was running on Sunday morning, and then I thought, oh, no, I believe these are churchgoers. Oh, no, that factory is a church, and it turns out that was Canada's largest megachurch that was run by a man named Leon Fontaine, who had just been given a motorcycle by his congregants, and then rode it around on stage, and I thought, no, that is for Americans. I was so insistent on the idea that a story of health, wealth, and happiness was exclusive to an American cultural narrative.

I think I was 18, maybe 20 when I first bumped into it, and then I spent my entire twenties wasting my youth interviewing televangelists in Canada and the United States, trying to understand why it was so deeply American, and also why it was so infinitely exportable and ultimately discovered that there was something very deeply humbling about studying a movement of infinite spiritual expectation. It taught me that we all want to be able to comb through our own biography, to know whether we have any evidence of God's love, special appreciation connection to us, but also that even when we think that we don't have a prosperity gospel in our own lives. We probably do.

You're talking there about the the kind of desire can control outcomes a little bit. It struck me that I think the very first reflection you got in your book, which is called Have A Beautiful, Terrible Day, which is whenever everything is out of control, is that the sort of big theme that you found with it - the desire to control? And I guess that's something you've experienced in your own life, that sense of not being able to control things?
And one of the books I've been reading recently is this one by Hartmut Rosa, called the The Uncontrollability of the World talks about how a world in which everything has been planned and controlled would be a dead world. It's the uncontrollable things that kind of make life kind of interesting, when snow falls and you can't control it, or a sports game that you can't predict the outcome of. Do you think there's something in that? That we try to resist?

I am committed to resisting. I mean, if I could arrange some sort of consumer feedback to our Lord and Saviour, I would suggest that I would be given more control over my circumstances. I guess it's been a question that is really at the heart of so much of my both academic and spiritual interest is, what do we do now, when we feel ourselves confronted by all the things we can't control. Typically, the things that we can't control can do two awful things. One, they seem to preach the story of a God who is cruel and and just doesn't care. That can't possibly care enough to want to confront the evil that overwhelms. Because suffering isn't just like cosmetic change. It's just an avalanche that that sweeps everything away. And then in the face of that we don't know how to say what my friend Tom Long, who is a wonderful preaching professor at Princeton, says. He likes to say there's always two preachers at a funeral. There's the body. But what can tell a story that is bigger than death? So, I think that's the first thing - that suffering, of all the things that are uncertain seems to tell us something about God that isn't true.

I think the other thing, and maybe this is just especially the marketing for women. But when I began to be an unlucky person, I began to feel the sting of a very distinct kind of shame. I felt that it was not just circumstances, that there was something about me, something about my failure, something about my unlovedness. One of the first thoughts I had when I got my diagnosis was, well, of course it's me.

And that is an awful lie that buries itself somewhere in our hearts. But I think uncertainty can have this effect - we end up holding the blade on the wrong side, and it just it always feels like uncertainty. We sort of plunge it right into our chest. So, I think I think uncertainty in general, it's every wave and we have to learn to navigate, but mostly it feels like an affront on our essential goodness.

And how did you learn to manage that uncontrollability? There's a tendency in many of us to try to control everything, and we want to have everything sorted and ordered. And then you kind of get to the point where you realize can't do that. Then the temptation is to be just overwhelmed by it, and to feel there's nothing I can do at all. How do you navigate that sense of being out of control?

One of the American cultural diseases, she can say lovingly, is, they are high on what I like to consider is ‘everything is possibleism’. And so then, in the face of uncertainty, or confusion, or despair, or undoing, then the great fear is that you swing right into ‘nothing is possibleism’ and a kind of despair and nihilism. And I'm very interested in every, especially religious tradition that that helps us cultivate an experience of limited agency like, how do you find that space, spiritually, emotionally, communally, of what is possible today? And I've really, I've really struggled with this over the various intellectual and sort of seasons of illness in my life. In Have a Beautiful, Terrible Day I wrote these little snack size reflections, because I was in a period of so much chronic pain that I really just didn't even have brain space for more than an hour and a half a day. So that became an exercise in trying to still allow myself the joy of creation. Because isn't it so wonderful when your brain goes somewhere, and pain is so boring. And I mean talking about pain is so boring, telling it to your friend for the 200th time, like we are all over it.

So, I just was trying to practice the experience of limited agency, even if for the other six hours I would have to lie in the bath and take pain meds. But I've realized over and over again that trying to find that soft space is a place where I can re-experience, humanity, love, and really just the weird, wild gifts that God gives us. Even when life falls apart.

If anyone's watching this and hasn't found a book yet, I really do recommend it. It's a wonderful thing. It's got lots of different kind of poems and meditations and prayers, and it's got titles for when things are falling apart, when you screwed up, when you're in pain, when life feels incomplete, things like that.

I'm a huge bummer, Graham. Thank you. I think it's so funny. I think it's because we grew up Mennonite, and we love our version of like Saily Bread, and like the tiny little booklets, and all of them were very sweet and very precious moments. And then in my version, it's like, when you're worried you want to eat your own arm, you hate your life so much. So, I do kind of prefer them for the rawer times.

Coming on to how Christian faith helps you navigate those, one thing that struck me as I was reading through it is there's a difference between, one of the common approaches to suffering you get in the modern world, which is the stoic idea that you just sort of grit your teeth, you can't control what's going to happen to you, but you can control your own emotions.

That's such crap, isn't it?

It’s pretty common, isn't it? You get that sort of sense of stoicism, these days there are stoic podcasts and books. What do you see is the difference between that and what Christian faith says to on how you navigate these really difficult periods of life?

I want to say specifically that what I truly believe is crap is the phrase, the argument, ‘you might not be able to control but you can control how you respond.’ I mean, anyone who's been unexpectedly stabbed with a needle knows that that is fundamentally not true. And the reason why I am so sensitive to it is, you know, as somebody who’s had a public cancer diagnosis, I see how quickly the cultural narrative is so intense, I've seen every single person who suffers is lined up to give that response, because what everybody wants to know is, well, just tell me that there's an escape hatch on the other side of it.

Modern stoicism is - and when I say modern it did not have a Renaissance until the 2010s, which is wild - in part a result of an incomplete theology of masculinity that has been available, and it has become a way to explain specifically to men that there's an almost natural impassivity that is theirs should they claim it, And that in the face of chaos, global and personal, that there's a higher path. Stoicism is always, of course, stripped of its original cosmology, refitted with self-help techniques. But what I really object to, which is at the core, is a story about control.

Emotional management is, of course, a therapeutic good. But, man, we're 50 years into the therapeutic paradigm. It makes me want to add the word dude at the end of that sentence. We are 50 years into the therapeutic paradigm, and we have not yet found a way to control our emotions, and that is because, as spiritual creatures we are always, we have this ache, we have this soul-cry that Augustine named so beautifully. We have a spiritual restlessness that no kind of emotional management strategy can overcome, and because it it is meant to be satisfied fundamentally by our love, our love of God, our love of others, and frankly, an unsolvability that tells us that we are an incomplete story. If we could be a complete story, I don't know if we really should be religious at all. Frankly, I really would. I would probably do other things with my time.

It does seem to be something about desire at the heart of this. The Stoic response is to just slightly repress your desires, keep your desires under control. It is offering a sort of sense of control. Or Christian faith is actually about redirecting your desires to something that is bigger than yourself and more powerful and beautiful than you are. And so whereas sort of stoicism seems to say, just control your desires, Christianity in some ways almost says let your desire for God grow as you go through this.

But I was wondering a little bit about prayer, and how prayer works for you in times of real struggle? I often seems to me that when you go through really difficult times, the time when you kind of feel you need to pray, is often the time it's hardest to do so. Do you find that? What role prayer plays for you in moments of uncontrollability, of the sufferings and struggles of life. What role does prayer play for you in that?

This stoicism to prayer thoroughfare is a perfect continuity of the argument. Stoicism, and I mean just living inside of the precarity of this world, reminds us again and again that life requires so much more courage than we thought. Maybe we were convinced along the way that prayer also doesn't require courage just to get to that place of spiritual honesty again, I mean especially if you feel like your prayer was supposed to follow a different template. Whether it was always supposed to very quickly move from brief needs, long descriptions, great thankfulness. That's the classic three-parter, but most often are our honesty requires us to be incomplete before God. I mean utterly, or angry or unknowing. Maybe this gets back to your certainty comments at the start about like, how do we manage such enormous uncertainty? Do we imagine prayer as a strategy for certainty? And if we're hoping it's that, we might be we might be unsatisfied. I just know that when I pray honestly that when I'm in a really terrible season, my prayers sound more like it's 2am. And I'm the sort of self who is buying things on Amazon and wishes I could call people and say things and cannot be trusted. Those prayers sound something like, help me! Help me! Save me, make them come back. Make this stop! Those are necessary, deep, guttural cries.

My 2pm prayers, I've got Trinitarian round-outs. I've got sophisticated nuanced theology. I'm quoting here and there.

Both are reflections of how much we're not even entirely known to ourselves, except that we find ourselves unfolded by our circumstances.

Pressing into how you deal with enduring pain. You talk very movingly about what it's like to go through really quite searing pain that just doesn't go away. And you have to kind of deal with it. Here in the UK we've been having a debate over the last few months about assisted dying. Which is a route out of pain for some people towards the end of life. Did you ever experience the temptation to that? Or has your experience helped you reflect upon that kind of route that our society is offering people at the moment? Can you end this by ending it all.

Canada's been having similar and terrible debates with terrible consequences. I think one of the great worries, especially with North American theologies of the self, is that the suffering, those who suffer are inherently less valuable because we are not the worker self. We're not the productive self. We're simply the the feeling and the limited and the precarious self.

What really worries me, especially with some of these exit interview for people who apply for euthanasia in Canada, is is quotes like ‘It's not that I don't want to die it’s that I can't afford to live’, because so many of the things that relieve pain are frankly so expensive and so off insurance. Any discussion about pain and assisted suicide are also just always, at least in North American context, conversations about who is valuable and whose pain is insurable.

I know that one of the major differences that I've had in my own life between a self that was in so much pain I could barely function to this version, is that I could pay for my own treatment. I feel overwhelming compassion for all those who feel like they will suffer without end because there are no social services to alleviate it.

I've been in a situation where I'm so desperate to live that I have not fundamentally experienced despair that has a telos to it. I've experienced despair at times in which I feel my own helplessness.

I had a lovely interview with Dr. Catherine Mannix. She developed a cognitive behavioural therapy therapeutic approach inside of palliative care in the NHS. And it was really it ended up being a way to talk about how do you experience control inside of that much suffering. Her books are about people who thought that they would want to die in that much pain. In these little case studies, I found her description to be so deeply Christian. What she was arguing was that even in the midst of deafening pain, that helping people find a small, soft place of narrow choice and meaning-making could reinfuse their lives with such purpose that otherwise our culture would erase. I just wish that everybody that inside of our conversation about when pain is too much, had a little bit more of that place of gentle possibility.

One of the phrases that that really struck me as I was reading your book is that ‘we are united by our fragility.’ The implications seem to be that that's actually what we have in common. The fact that we are fragile or incomplete, in your language from earlier on. It got me thinking about how that might change the way we think about each other and community and relationships, and maybe even church. What that difference would it make if we actually thought that was the centre of what we have in common, our fragility. Do you have any thoughts on that?

At heart, I'm an anti-culture warrior. In this time of increasing binaries our democratic structures or any kind are fragile, especially in the United States, the big tent umbrellas of denominationally or otherwise. I do think it is important for us to sort of spiritually land on what we think makes us all deeply the same. I know that when I started down this path there was a lot of humiliation because I was treated as disposable by the healthcare industry. I was truly humbled by it. In suffering you are laid low and there's a little key in that that I found that I've never wanted to give up. IT is that the second I knew I suffering, I could see it so much more easily in other people. And that I could know that a broken heart is an open heart. If you can keep that at the at the centre of of a story about our difference Ihave just found it easier, easier on Facebook, easier at family gatherings, just easier. We have a contingency that we're all grappling with, and we can't always see it on each other's faces. But if we know that we all are so worried that we're wearing a sweater and someone's going to pull a thread and then there we are, naked to the world. I think I know that it inculcates a deep feeling of humanity in me.

There’s something about approaching another person with that thought of I'm fragile and kind of so are you. Especially it's not that terrible if you see my fragility, and maybe I begin to look for the fragility and the other person, and that makes that person that much more approachable somehow, and a bit more human. This militates against the idea of going to everybody else and trying to give to give out this image of being complete, and I've got everything sorted, and I know all the answers. The kind of image we try to present of ourselves.

I think I think invulnerability is exhausting, and we could just cut ourselves some slack.

Find out more about Kate

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