A Future without Fat? Christian Eschatology and the Violence of Fat Phobia

According to the dominant anti-fat narrative in Euro-America, fat people lack a future. Not only are fat persons more likely to die prematurely or contract life-limiting illness because of their girth, fatness presents as a threat to the future of Western nations, making ‘obesity’ a sizeable threat comparable with Covid and the climate crisis. Governments are committed to eliminating fat with public health policy predicting dystopian futures if fatness is not fixed. Within this narrative, fatness emerges as what critical geographer, Bethan Evans calls a ‘biopolitical problem’ and as a problem that emerges through the futurizing of fatness. According to Evans, the claim that ‘obesity’ poses a threat to the nation ‘requires the future space of the UK to be made “real” in the present’ (2009, 22) and this means bodies matter in the present precisely because of what they stand to become in the future. Such a view of fatness feeds a ‘pre-emptive politics’ of the body, she argues, helping to control and determine behaviour towards fatness in the here and now.       

Of course, Western discourse on fatness insists that the future can only be returned to fat people and to Western nations by taking fat-eradicating action in the here and now. Weight loss drugs like Semaglutide and Ozempic emerge as ‘pre-emptive obesity biopolitics’ (Evans, 2009) because they seek in the present to remove fatness from the future. Governments are under pressure to supply such drugs with the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence only recently approving Semaglutide for use by the NHS in England (NICE, 2023).   

Lurking behind such dreams of a fat-free future is the entrenched fat phobic assumption that fat people are disposable and that fat persons do not have what Judith Butler terms ‘liveable lives’ (Butler, 2004, 39). These assumptions are informed by misogynist and racist ideas about civility and beauty that conspire to frame fatness in contemporary Euro-American culture as the antipode of European femininity. This feminine hegemonic beauty standard of the thin, White, svelte, tall, Anglo-Saxon woman exposes not only the desire to eliminate fat from the future but to de-futurize the bodies of women across multiple sites of intersectional difference. However, such dreams of a fat-free future, I argue in this paper, are also resourced by Western Christian theologies about eschatological bodies that locate paradise ahead of time in a world beyond the present. This theological futurizing of bodies leads some ancient Christian theologians to make statements about fat bodies which would not be out of place in contemporary anti-fat discourse.

Augustine, as a Christian theologian who has had possibly the most profound influence on Western Christian views about embodiment, provides a truly captivating example, discussing eschatological bodies in Book XXII of his City of God. Here, Augustine is clear that there will be no fatness in heaven because all bodies will rise perfect and beautiful without ‘deformities’, defects or ugliness (e.g. 22.19). Informed by Luke 21.18 that says ‘not a hair on your head will perish’, Augustine believes that God will restore all parts of the body, even those bits that have been lost or cut off, ensuring that nothing of the body evades God’s redemptive transformation. At the resurrection, bodies will get back those bits they lost but were always designed to have so that there will be no incompleteness in heaven. For Augustine, fatness will be refashioned by God so that the excess is ‘redistributed throughout the whole body’ while leaving the substance of the body intact (22.19). Just as a potter can remake an object by remoulding the same clay, losing nothing of the original material, so God can remake fat bodies, reintegrating excess fatness into the whole body so that the ugliness is eliminated but nothing of the original body is lost. There will be no fat bodies in heaven because God will make fat bodies into perfectly proportioned beautiful heavenly specimens.

Although Augustine’s theology of fat aligns with the contemporary Euro-American dream of a fat-free future, it provides a sizeable challenge to the pre-emptive (gendered and racialised) politics of anti-fatness. Certainly, it is the case that for Augustine, God’s future is a future without fatness, but he nevertheless struggles to erase fatness from this future. Because fat bodies do not lose any of their corporeality but rise beautifully proportioned like all resurrected bodies, it seems that fat bodies will rise thin/ner but without losing any of their heft or weight. Also, interestingly, it seems that in Augustine’s schema any fatness/excess lost through slimming will be restored and regained at the resurrection, even if it is magically redistributed. ‘Must not everything be restored that was sacrificed to personal appearance?’ (22.12), he asks. Thus, if everything natural to the body that is lost from the body will be returned to it, then it follows that any bulk that has been eliminated will return even if this excess is magically restructured in the body. Fat-eliminating actions in the present like dieting and the use of weight loss drugs, it would seem, are pointless! Indeed, Augustine cannot ‘get rid’ of fat despite his best efforts. Fatness lingers in his depiction of resurrection bodies, invading the boundaries of perfection as a materiality that continues in the redemptive future, now disguised by the unfathomable mystery of redistribution, perhaps like rolls of fat skilfully hidden under a loose-fitting outfit! If, as Augustine suggests, heavenly bodies will move with ‘unimaginable beauty’ and will celebrate the beauty of God and of one another’s bodies with ‘unwearying praise’ (22.30), then reading back from the future to the present need not promote fat-eliminating measures. Instead, I argue that this might suggest a vision of a fatter future that resources alternative possibilities to the present misogynist and racialised politics of fat hatred. If there is fatness in heaven, and heavenly bodies are, as Augustine contends, indescribable and unimaginable in their beauty, then this futurizing of fat incentivises a hearty celebration of fat bodies as bodies with a future and as bodies that contrary to Western cultural anti-fat discourse, are not always already known. In this sense fat liberation can be cast in Christian eschatological terms as a ‘liberation of the future’ that leads to ‘a new opening up of history, with its alternative possibilities to the present’ (Moltmann, 1999, 196).