In praise of meat-free Fridays for Lent

The bishop of Norwich, the Right Reverend Graham Usher, has suggested that Anglicans might like to abstain from eating meat on Fridays during Lent. We could eat fish instead, he says, in keeping with the tradition that is still observed by many Catholics, and was semi-observed by most Brits until about fifty years ago.

The point of the old tradition was to encourage remembrance of the events of Good Friday, through a minor piece of abstinence. The bishop is doubtless all for the remembrance of Christ’s suffering, but he emphasises a more practical purpose. Such a practice would help to reduce climate change. If Anglicans opted for meat-free Fridays all year, there would be a reduction of 40,00 tonnes of CO2, equivalent to 60,00 return flights to New York.

Such an intervention is easily criticised as conceptually muddled. Is the bishop urging us to remember Christ, or is he urging us to reduce our carbon emissions? Is he trying to recycle an old ritual tradition for the sake of an essentially secular goal?

But the bishop should ignore such criticism, and stick to his guns. So what if there’s a mix of motives? It could be seen as the killing of two birds with one stone: the revival of a ritual tradition, and a potentially major move to slow climate change.

In fact he should be bolder. He should try to launch an Anglican movement that changes the way we consume meat. Imagine if a large chunk of Anglicans chose to abstain from meat from Monday to Thursday, then ate fish on Fridays, and meat on weekends. It could have the effect of making meat-eating special, something that people look forward to doing together. If this took off, religion would suddenly look culturally interesting, and politically relevant. 

The problem, perhaps, is that such a movement would seem to be proposing a new ‘law’. And Anglicans are wary of religious rules. To guard against this, the bishop would have to make it clear that such rules make no claim to official authority, but are just rules that some Anglicans choose to abide by. In some religious traditions, this would be tricky, because rule-following is closely associated with institutional authority, and its claim to mediate the laws of God.

But Anglicanism is well placed to launch a new culture of ‘voluntary rule-following’. And such a new culture really could be the beginning of the behavioural change that we all know is needed. Instead of being a grim negative thing, consuming less and being constrained in our choices could be part of something positive: a sense of communal purpose, shared identity, festive fish-pie on Friday night, and Saturday barbecues.