Dr. Wes Jamison Interview

Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry coming to you from Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston. No Compromise Radio is a program dedicated to the ongoing proclamation of Jesus Christ, based on the theme in Galatians 2, verse 5, where the Apostle Paul said, "'But we did not yield in subjection to them "'for even an hour, so that the truth of the gospel "'would remain with you.'".

In short, if you like smooth, watered-down words to make you simply feel good, this show isn't for you. By purpose, we are first biblical, but we can also be controversial. Stay tuned for the next 25 minutes as we're called by the divine trumpet to summon the troops for the honor and glory of her King.

Here's our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth.

Thinking Biblically About Animals and Pet Idolatry

Welcome to No Compromise Radio ministry. My name is Mike Abendroth, and I'm your host. What we do here at the show is we wanna talk about biblical issues. I wanna talk about them in a provocative way, and as this tagline goes, always biblical, always provocative, always in that order.

And what I wanna do is I wanna talk about biblical topics with people who are savvy when it comes to the Bible, and I want to make you try to think logically, biblically. Christianity is a religion of your mind.

Jesus said, we are to love the Lord our God with our heart, soul, mind, and strength. And so it does us no good if we run by emotions and we don't think properly. And so today, we have a wonderful thinker on the line, a dear friend of mine, Wes Jamison, or maybe I should say Dr. Wesley Jamison.

He's got his PhD. And Wes, welcome to No Compromise Radio ministry.

Mike, it's great to be there, and perhaps I should say Dr. Abendroth. Great to be on the line today.

Wes and I were introduced years ago here in New England when Wes was a professor up in Worcester, and he was a faithful member here. He and his wife, Angela, and many of the kids, and whenever I would have a kid, he'd have to match and have to have a kid too, and back and forth.

Wes was a faithful deacon, then he became a pastor in Florida. And Wes is particularly skilled when it comes to animals, and what does the Bible say about animals, and what does the world try to push off on us, whether it's PETA, or I was just talking to Wes before the show, pet idolatry.

Wes, tell me your credentials for this, and then I want to hear you tell me about pet idolatry for even the Christian.

Okay, Mike, I did my first doctoral dissertation at Oregon State University 20 years ago, examining the animal rights movement and the relationship between animals and humans. And when I started the graduate program, I was not a believer, but God, through his redeeming grace, saved me while in graduate school and gave me a completely new perspective.

Hey, Wes, you know what? I'm gonna interrupt you now, because we're friends and I can do that. I want you to tell the story, the blood story, about how you began to think about your life and your death, and give me your quick testimony with the whole blood deal.

Well, I got out of undergraduate from Auburn University and went to work down in South Florida, Miami area, basically for public relations and consumer relations for a really large grocery firm. And I was in one of their stores one day, and a fellow back in the meat department, a customer out in front of the meat case, fell and hit his head and was going into an epileptic seizure, it looked like.

Had stopped breathing and had bitten and swallowed his tongue and so forth. And so I went over to render first aid, because no one was around. I grabbed a big deli spoon and jammed it into his teeth to get his mouth open.

And I was just about to do mouth-to-mouth when I got his tongue out of the back of his throat. He started breathing and started sputtering saliva and blood everywhere and all over me, and people clapped.

He'd been brought back from the dead. Only then did the paramedics realize he had AIDS. He was really in the last stages of AIDS, and this was the early 80s. So they quarantined the store. It was something out of the Andromeda strain when the sheriff's department came, and they looked at me, and I was covered in the person's blood, and I was covered in his saliva.

And I thought it was a death warrant at the time, and no one really knew how it was transmitted or what would happen other than I was covered in a late-stage AIDS victim's blood and saliva. The person died a couple weeks later of the disease.

But God got my attention. I was a young man in my early 20s, and I realized I was not going to be immortal, at least in this body, in this world, and I could die at any moment. And that was really the first stage in beginning to realize that I would not live forever.

And God got my attention that way and eventually brought me to faith, and then after a decade of AIDS testing, I was cleared.

Well, you must have went to bed every night, Wes, and you must have been thinking about, you know what, I'm a dead man, I'm dead man walking.

Yeah, I really was thinking, this is it, this is, I was living the life of the prophetic sinner, eat, drink, for tomorrow we die, only that I wasn't focusing on the die part. And then when it was brought home to me that you will not live forever, that was really quite shocking, and God began the process of quickening me in the sense that, you know, you're gonna have to give account for not only what you've done, but who you are before a holy and righteous God.

That was kind of a frightening prospect.

Amazing, thank you for letting me interrupt. Now let's go back to Oregon State.

Anyways, I got saved and became a professor and spent many years here and in Europe, in the United States and in Europe, studying the animal-human relationship, and really kind of began to develop my thinking on this over a number of years here and in Europe, and then went back for a second PhD at the University of Florida in public relations.

But the idea of pet idolatry began to dawn on me because we treat one animal, one animal is the center of our hearts, the center of our lives, we treat it as a surrogate child, while another animal is on the center of our plate.

And the science, all the evidence indicates that many of the animals that feed us in the sense of a pig, for instance, is far smarter, far more emotional than is a dog. And yet we treat dogs and cats like children.

And yet when I would talk to Christians around the country, particularly here and in Europe and westernized post-industrial countries, they would get deeply offended at the idea that their dogs are nothing more than some sort of protein unit that two-thirds of the world's population eats for dinner.

When I was in India, I had dog,.

And it tasted pretty good. It was so good. I've been at your house, you've served me some pretty good pork chops, but tell me what dog tastes like. Maybe I've eaten it, I just didn't know.

No, it tastes like horse. I've also had horse, but when you stir-fry a dog with some extra virgin olive oil, it's quite tasty. I just don't want to see them kill it. Well, that's a problem. See? Because death permeates the Bible.

It takes the death of something for us to live. And the very act of killing our food reminds us of the atoning sacrifice of Christ. And so, as I've talked to Christians around this country and in western Europe, they get deeply offended at the idea that their dog is not a family member.

It's nothing more than a protein unit on hooves that has learned to manipulate them to get something it wants. And I'll tell you another story. Our children, you know our children, they asked if they could have pets.

And we told them yes with one provision. We didn't eat them afterwards. Yes, no, at any moment, if the economy turns south, or if I lose my job, we're going to eat them. And so they responded yes. And so even today, when I was talking on a different interview to a woman who owns a dog, I asked her, would she be willing to eat her dog?

And she said, no, that's cannibalism. And so what we've come to see, and people, Christians, tend to view their animals as a relationship light. It gives all the benefits of human relationships without any of the costs.

And really, in many ways, in some of the research we've done, Christians almost view their pets as a surrogate Jesus. They're always there to love you. They're very accepting of you. They never put you in nursing homes when you're old.

They never go off to college. They don't rebel. And so what we found is people are very, very, very attached to their pets. They spend enormous amounts of money on their pets. We interviewed one Christian woman who spent $7 ,000 on a hip replacement for a 14-year-old poodle.

And to me, that's offensive. Now tell me, Wes, would you believe, this is kind of a technical question, do all good dogs go to heaven? That's a very good question. No dogs go to heaven. I'll never forget the time I was here at Bethlehem Bible Church, and who knows, maybe you were even around, and people love their dogs.

And certainly, you wouldn't disagree if we said, Lord, thank you for the pets. Thank you for the food we have. You can thank God for both pets and for food. But I said to this lady, your dog isn't going to go to heaven.

Because we know your dog's been tainted by the fall, because we know dogs die. And if God wants to have dogs in heaven, or horses, he can have them in heaven, but they won't be the same dogs that you had on earth, because they would be sin-tainted.

I thought the person was going to hit me. They didn't want to talk. They didn't want to know. It was kind of like the ears in the, fingers in the ears, and just la, la, la, la, la. We don't want to know.

Is that pretty much the way people think today?

Yeah, especially when you figure, and you can like, when you read a lot of literature, and you begin to interview Christians on this, between the lines, what they're saying is, dogs make better people than people do.

And they believe dogs to be moral, and make choices, and feel love, but they never do anything wrong. In other words, they're an animal that hasn't been tainted by the fall. There's no sin in them. And so therefore, they're really, really wonderful animals.

But yeah, I would concur with you. Oftentimes, people really, really get upset when you start talking about their pets. They're just dogs and cats.

They're not children. Well, I'd like you to establish from the Bible, and from your research, Dr. Jameson, why dogs are actually better than cats, and cats are sub, sub-animal.

Well, I can't really do that from the Bible, Mike, but Cleopatra had cats, that's enough for me. Okay. Great.

We're talking to Wes Jameson on No Compromise Radio, and Wes has got a unique background, a theological background, a background with public relations. Tell me a little bit about this Humane Society issue that's going on that you've been working on lately.

The Humane Society, PETA, and Christian Discernment

Well, the Humane Society of the United States has begun a animals and religion outreach program, where they've got a woman who's running it, who has her Master's of Divinity from a Golden Gate Seminary in San Francisco.

That's Southern Baptist, by the way. No, not the Southern Baptist one, a French, a Franciscan monastery seminary out there. Oh, okay. But basically what they're trying to do, Mike, is they're trying to proof-text the scriptures to try to amplify the guilt, in other words, guilt-trip people, into feeling bad about eating animals from agriculture.

And they will selectively proof-text very, very liberal theologians, and what I'll call less than functional equivalent translations of the Bible, to try to show that God somehow is opposed to animal agriculture.

So the Humane Society is spending an enormous amount of money and resources putting together sermons, sermon notes, talking points, videos. They're even sponsoring a Christian college music tour to go around to Christian colleges around the country, trying to convince people that the Bible teaches that eating animals from animal agriculture is a sin.

Part of their message also is that it points out the hypocrisy among consumers. Most of the people there in your church who are believers and own pets aren't massive hypocrites. They treat one animal as if it was a family member and another animal as cuisine.

They want one animal as family and another animal as food. So the Humane Society's tactical and strategic approach has been to point out that hypocrisy, to make consumers feel guilty, and then to present itself as a form of secular penance, that to assuage and buy off your guilt, you should give money and votes to the Humane Society.

That's their basic strategy, and it's been working. And in our research with what I'll call post-theological Christians who don't understand Orthodox and historical teachings on animals and creation, the message works.

They look at their dog who sits at the table and eats with them, and they look at their pork chop or their hamburger, and they realize, I feel very bad about this. I better give $20 and my vote. That buys off and assuages their guilt.

Is there any redeeming, are there any redeeming qualities to the organization PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals?

The only redeeming quality I would say is that they're less extremist than Al-Qaeda.

Well, I always appreciated you, Wes, because you appreciated theological bluntness from the pulpit from me, and I pay back the compliment because I appreciate your bluntness. Tell people who are listening on VNE and over the internet, how should a Christian think about PETA?

Any organization that claims to be a harbinger of truth, a carrier of truth who makes absolutist statements outside of the Bible is of Satan. And in particular, PETA really, really, really, really distorts the teachings of the Bible as recognized for 2 ,000 years of Orthodox Christianity for their own ideological purposes.

And that's enough to tell any Christian who has discernment, any true believer who has the spirit in dwelling them, that they need to shy away from this organization, whose real agenda is a type of secular millenarian return to a Garden of Eden where, and they'll tell you the lion lays down with the lamb.

They want vegetarianism, and they want a radical vegetarianism where you can't even own pets. And so Christians should use their discernment to realize anyone who misuses the scripture is to be avoided.

Wouldn't they have some big billboards and talk about how Jesus was a vegetarian? And I think they forgot he probably, well, he certainly celebrated Passover and would have to eat the lamb at Passover.

But I guess Jesus is a good figure if you want to try to drive ignorant evangelicals.

Well, I call them evangelifish. And the fact that they more or less go with the prevailing currents in society. They marry the spirit of the age and find themselves a widow pretty quickly. And they really don't have a backbone.

And the idea is that in a post theological age, where all that matters is personal authenticity and feeling, it really makes sense. I mean, who wants to see an animal suffer, Mike? Who wants to really think about the amount of slaughtering and suffering?

But then when you bring to these people's mind the idea of the temple sacrifice and the amount of animals that had to be killed over Passover, they really don't want to hear it. And so yeah, Jesus ate animals.

He killed animals. Really the one I like is those poor 5 ,000 pigs. He cast them out off the cliff, poor pigs. Drowning is a very bad death,.

But Jesus didn't seem to matter. Can you imagine what that sounded like? These pig, one pig on top of another, drowning and the snorting and the squealing. I heard a sermon one time, Wes, true story. And the sermon on that passage of the Bible was called deviled ham.

All right, we're talking to Wes Jamison. See, I like that one. I don't know if you did. It reminds me of the story though, Wes, when I was back in Omaha growing up as a young person and we would have field trips.

You know, you'd go to the flower museum or the butterfly exhibit or the zoo. Well, we had a stockyards in Omaha since there was a lot of cattle there, still are. And we would go for the little field trip down to the stockyards.

But they never brought us over to that little spot where they would jam the, I don't know, red hot poker into the brain of the cow to kill it. We didn't get to see that. Let me ask you this question. Is there any truth to the fact or should Christians somehow look at, well, we want to buy free range chicken because we don't want to have people abuse dogs and leave them out in the hot sun all day or in a hot car.

So there's a compassionate kind of gentleness that comes with Christianity. Should Christians, how should Christians think about free range chicken and where do we buy our food? Cheapest and what do we do?

Well, the way Christians think about it is what does the Bible say? And when it doesn't speak specifically, you have freedom. Guess what, listeners? You want to go buy your chicken at KFC? Do so within the bounties and parameters of Romans 14.

For those of you who don't want to eat meat, Romans 14 says you're weak, but we're to suffer with you and we're to pray for you. And for those of you who want to buy free range organic chicken, you're exhibiting bad stewardship because there's no difference whatsoever in the quality of the meat, the taste of the meat.

All the evidence from the U .S. Department of Agriculture says it's the same animal. And I would make the case that since nature has fallen, the chickens out in free range actually have a much worse life.

They're running for their lives from chicken hawks. They're being attacked by parasites that they would never be attacked with. So you see what's happening here. There's this entire back-to-earth movement in evangelical Christianity that the closer you get to creation, the more godly you are, which is a false doctrine, of course.

But since when has that stopped anybody from feeling better by taking external actions?

Well, isn't it, there's not much difference between the humane society wanting to get $20 a month in your vote versus you assuaging your conscience because you want to go buy some free range chicken. I mean, it's basically the same thing, isn't it?

We're supposed to feel bad because we eat these things.

Yeah, Mike, we not only feel bad because we eat these animals from confinement, but there's something else deeper going on. I think since the 1960s, the world's teaching, the demonic teaching, that nature is normative, that the fall didn't really happen, that there isn't killing and slaughtering out in nature, that nature's a good in and of itself has crept into Christianity to the point where anything that's close to the nature has to be more godly because the fall really didn't affect creation, it just affected us.

And I think a lot of Christians, when you talk to them at their heart, think that natural is better than man-made. It's really a misanthropic movement that's gotten its way into Christianity, a very poor understanding of creation.

Well, Wes, on that note,.

Tell me how Christians should think even in general about organic food.

Well, organic food in and of itself is no better either theologically or physiologically than most of the food you can buy off of the shelf. Use informed discernment from sources you trust, and that doesn't mean the Ouija board or friends on Facebook, but people with some credibility on the issue.

And you have freedom to buy organic food as you do to buy store-bought processed food, but remember, it is a stewardship issue, that you are given a limited amount of supply of money over the lifespan of your life by God and you're to use it with great stewardship.

And I would make the argument, from my knowledge of agricultural practices, that buying organic and free-range products oftentimes can border on poor stewardship if you can buy the same product with the same attributes for cheaper.

But you have freedom to do so if your conscience is clear,.

Pastoral Leadership, Verse-by-Verse Preaching, and Church Authority

And so I would recommend that. Great, Wes Jameson is on the line with me. Dr. Wes Jameson, we're friends. He was a deacon here at Bethlehem Bible Church for quite some time and then became a pastor down in Florida.

Wes, when you think about being a pastor and ministering the gospel to Christians, whether it's in Florida or Massachusetts, what are some of the issues that you think Christians struggle with the most?

Or maybe I could phrase it this way. When you preach the Bible verse by verse, what kind of pushback do you seem to get when you're a pastor ministering the gospel?

Well, the first is it's good to listen to as long as you don't go to meddling. Like Herod, they will receive the word gladly until you say, go and do. Then you begin to get some pushback in the fact that you mean these words that are inked on the page actually are supposed to transform me to the point where I obey?

And number two, I would say is back to the number six, the numbers six problem, the rebellion of Korah. Oftentimes, immature Christians and the non-Christians, the tarrys that come in among them, really, really do not understand the biblical institutions of leadership in the church and those men who are gifted to exposit the word.

This doesn't mean we're secular. I mean, we're Protestant popes. It just means most of them believe that they have equal access, which they do, but also equal understanding of the word of God. And therefore, they won't submit to the teachings of their elders and pastors.

Well, unless they agree with them or unless they vote on that particular doctrine by 75 quorum with Robert's Rules of Orders.

Or unless the wacko online pastors they're listening to, along with the Joel Goldstein book they've read, coincides with what you're telling them. What we see is, what I think, Mike, is what we're seeing is the lack of differentiation between parachurch and church authority.

And many modern members of churches see no distinction between the two. And so therefore, you have this sort of muddled swamp of theological teaching and they leave it up to themselves to discern what's true.

Wes, you've been a lay person before and maybe you're a lay person now at your current church. And you've also been a pastor who has been given the duty to shepherd the flock of God and to preach. We've got a couple minutes left.

Tell our listeners, since most of the listeners would be lay people, how they should assess or be thankful for or understand, submit to, whatever words you want to use, how should they think of God-ordained leadership?

I would say one of the greatest accolades in the New Testament is what Paul gives to the Bereans. Search the scriptures daily. Know the Word of God. Really begin with the fact that you have a hunger for the Word of God.

Search it, come to know it, let it permeate your essence. As you do that, you'll come to see that God ordains men and gifts them to lead and shepherd the flock of God. So really, really read Titus 1 and 1 Timothy 3.

Look for men whose character fulfills those requirements. And then in as much as they teach the scriptures, follow them, listen to them, submit to them so that they may have joy in their leadership of the church.

There's nothing more heartbreaking for a person in leadership than to pour their lives into the congregation and have sheep who don't want to listen. And so I would very much say, know the Word, and the Word will say, follow them in as much as they follow the Word of God.

Make their life joyful because they have to give account before God for how they lead. Well, that's excellent advice.

We're talking to Dr. Wes Jamieson. Wes, now is, what are you doing now? Are you doing any more research?

What's your latest project? I'm an Associate Professor of Communication at Palm Beach Atlantic University, and I'm continuing research on the use and misuse of religion by ideological organizations like the Humane Society to mislead the Evangeli-fish middle into supporting its cause.

I've got about 20 seconds. Tell me in 20 seconds how a Christian should think about Peter Singer.

His teachings contradict the pure teachings and the truthful teachings of the scriptures. There you go. And so when Peter Singer advocates utilitarianism, he's not avoiding the law of cause.

Well, we've had a great time talking with you, Wes. No Compromise Radio, thank you for being on the show. I really appreciate you, your ministry, and your insight. Thank you, Mike. Mike Abendroth, nocompromiseradio .com.

God bless you.

Program Sign-Off and Station Disclaimer

No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Abendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston. Bethlehem Bible Church is a Bible-teaching church firmly committed to unleashing the life-transforming power of God's word through verse-by-verse exposition of the sacred text.

Please come and join us. Our service times are Sunday morning at 1015 and in the evening at six. We're right on route 110 in West Boylston. You can check us out online at bbchurch .org or by phone at 508 -835 -3400.

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