"The days of home-cooked chicken, fresh vegetables from the backyard garden and bake-sale fundraisers have given way to the Sam's-Clubization of the house of worship. "

In The Beginning &
Sometime around the age of seven, I became a member, in good standing, of the Good News Club. This esteemed body was a neighborhood faith-based organization that was one part Sunday school, one part Boys and Girls Club and one part surrogate family. The operation was run by a saintly older woman and her angelic twenty-something daughter who, despite my age, struck me as radiantly beautiful.

The kids in my neighborhood were like most kids in that we much preferred spending Sunday mornings chasing rabbits through the nearby cotton fields than sitting trussed up in starched shirts and bowties in Sunday school. The proprietors of the Good News Club were well aware of our proclivity for unstructured activity and so, provided an irresistible incentive. The bait was a box of Barnum's Animal Crackers, which was handed out to each departing child at the close of Sunday school. Readers of a certain age may recall that these crackers came in a small box designed to look like a car from a traveling circus caravan. Inside was a menagerie of slightly sweetened biscuits shaped to look like animals.

Most of us kids came from families that were terminally poor, so having our own box of animal crackers represented a level of wealth beyond the boundaries of childhood imagination. The frequency with which we received this gift waxed and waned in parallel with our benefactor's financial fortunes. When fate was kind, we were weekly blessed with an endowment of crackers, our uncommon and treasured treat.

The End Times
Things have changed. Today, sweets are as much a part of a child's life, as breathing. We've all heard and complained about the typical day in the life of a child, a day filled with presweetened cereals, soda and juices, cookies, candy, etc. Parents and schools have shouldered much of the blame for the thickening of our children's waistlines. Having sold out to Big Industry, much of that blame is justified, but there is one area, one sacrosanct zone in the life of a child that is at least as guilty, yet has gone unchallenged & until now.

Brothers and sisters, let's go to church.

It has long been a taboo subject to point out the failings of the church with respect to children, but like the tides and the tax man, that time has come. To put it bluntly, things have gone horribly wrong, nutritionally speaking, within the hallowed confines of our churches. The days of home-cooked chicken, fresh vegetables from the backyard garden and bake-sale fundraisers have given way to the Sam's-Clubization of the house of worship. The result is an enormous quantity of junk food, purchased at bulk food prices and doled out in biblical proportions. Church has become the real-life candy house of Hansel and Gretel fame. How bad is it? Consider these tales from the pulpit and be afraid.

Let He Who Is Without Sin Cast The First Honey Bun
A Sunday school teacher was drilling her charges on various bits of Bible trivia. She fired questions at the group like a feverish game show host in the lightening round. As an incentive, she doled out edible prizes. These were no loaves and fishes, but Frisbee-sized honey buns, faithfully purchased at Sam's Club. In fact, these buns were by some accounts, aerodynamically superior to Frisbees, a point proven by her method of distribution. There they were, alien invaders of the body, sailing across the room like the second coming of Orwell's War of the Worlds. My daughter took down one of these buns-of-diabetes before it could be launched from the mother ship by preemptively declining to accept it.

Wandering In The Wilderness
Another account involved a project where the children were assigned the task of building a compass. The foundation of the 'compass' was an obnoxiously large, sugar cookie. Atop this cookie, icing and candy sprinkles were applied to achieve the effect of a compass. Perhaps the object of this exercise was to tie into a lesson on finding salvation, but what children really learn from repeated projects like this is how to plot a course to adult obesity.

A Diet Left Behind
A lesson involving Mount Sinai required that students build their own mountain. Clay might have been a good choice for building material, but apparently, Sam's Club was all out, so a Goliath-sized muffin was used instead. Each student received their own and was challenged with seeing who could build the biggest mountain. Whipped crème, icing, sprinkles, etc were employed for the task. In short order, obscene mounds of High Fructose Corn Syrup rose like towers of Babel in front of each child. I won't even pretend to understand what the purpose behind this exercise in confectionery excess was. Maybe the teacher was in the last throes of a diet and just needed an excuse to go berserk with pastry.

Church Gone Wild
One of my favorite examples of Church Gone Wild was a well-meaning program designed as a finishing school for teenage girls. The program itself was fine. The problem was that doughnuts were served for breakfast, every morning they met and even on the day they discussed nutrition. At the end of the program, the now finished girls were treated to lunch at a popular all-you-can-stomach restaurant. Whatever happened to pot-lucks? Presumably the lesson here was that a breakfast of doughnuts, cheap food and the abandonment of cooking, one of life's most basic skills, are all a young woman needs to prepare for adulthood. You Go (straight to the obesity clinic) Girl!

The Exorcism
The most egregious example of church sponsored sugar-peddling was an ice cream soiree at an event for children. The planned activity was for each kid to create his or her on dessert with ice cream as the foundation. There were candy sprinkles, M&Ms, cookies and other goodies provided for the task. If you're imagining young empire builders, tastefully attired in summer whites, fashioning ice cream sundaes in dainty paper cups, think again. The ice cream was purchased in five-gallon drums from, you guessed it, Sam's Club and unceremoniously shoveled into large stainless steel trays & the kind one typically sees in soup kitchens.

Children were encouraged to decorate the several cubic feet of ice cream in whatever manner their artistic and gustatory predilections lead them. It must have required the patience of Job for some to resist the temptation to simply dive, face-first into that massive pile of ice cream. When the decorating was done--now here's the best part--they were directed to help themselves &. directly from the trays, paper cups and sanitation be damned. The scene, as described to me, painted a picture of a feeding frenzy at the pig trough. The ensuing chaos of kids, hog-wild and high on sugar, brought to mind the story from the book of Mark, where pigs beset by a legion of demons drowned themselves.

Today our children are drowning in greater numbers from diabetes, a corrosive disorder that while less cinematic than demon possession, is far more deadly & judging by the comparative statistics.

A Revelation
It doesn't end here. Church has become the new dumping ground for leftover Halloween candy that parents don't want lying around the house. Day old donuts, bought on the cheap and peddled on Sunday as a source of fundraising has become a common affair. Some church workers make a weekly pilgrimage to the bulk food warehouse, actually laying up a storehouse of junk treats as rewards (or bribes) for the children in their charge. They do this because like most of us, they are possessed with the misguided idea that plying children with junk food is 'normal' and 'OK'. And why not, that's what the prophets of nutrition say, "Eat garbage, in moderation," as they profit from our ignorance. That advice, by the way, is garbage.

In an environment where we're inundated with cheap, available junk food, moderation is infeasible. In a country where a business-friendly government has allowed corporate profiteers to rape organic food standards, co-opt science and pillage the public trust, constraint is impossible. In a nation where two-thirds of us are either overweight or obese and a record-breaking national debt stands as a bloated metaphor for our excess, temperance is a false promise. If one truly believes the body to be a gift from God and a vessel for the soul, then the abandonment of our bodies, our health, to McDonald's and Dunkin Donuts is an affront to the Creator and a desecration of the corporeal temple. In most places, this would be called hypocrisy. Open your eyes... "And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."

Some questions come to mind upon the reflection of this situation. Why must we 'reward' children with sweet foods or any food? When did we lose the desire and the ability to cook our own food and most important, is the worship of Sam's Club a new religion, a cargo cult for the obese?

Maybe a better approach is to simply try to figure out where we go from here. Perhaps educating your church's staff about the need to set a good nutritional example is a good place to start. Maybe explaining that healthy people are happy people who are better educated, make more money and give more to their church.

At the very least, instruct your children in how to navigate a world where sugar pushers are more ubiquitous than drug pushers. Teach them that even in church, one must gird oneself with knowledge against the legions of nutritional ignorance.

Read, think and learn.