Clearly scheduled to give vegetarians and vegans ammunition to shame carnivorous family members around the Easter and Passover dinner table, this passionate but unpersuasive documentary argues that Jesus was probably a vegetarian. Ultimately, the theory gets largely traced back to the apocryphal Gospel of the Ebionites, a text that’s been around since the second century; director Kip Andersen, however, makes a whole song and dance out of “discovering” this notion in a roundabout way, making for an entertainingly barmy quest. By the end, we’re informed that scientists have found the supposedly “happiest human on Earth”: a vegan Buddhist monk named Matthieu Ricard who spends most of his time meditating on compassion and has “high-amplitude gamma activity” in his brain which means it “fires on the highest levels”.
This particular mishmash of pseudoscientific buzz words is delivered via a montage of rostrum shots showing visually highlighted bits of text while an awestruck voiceover from Andersen himself synthesises the ideas. Before we can even absorb this information, the film skittishly moves on to the next notion that all the greatest thinkers in history were vegetarian. Leonardo da Vinci supposedly bought up all the chickens in his local market and then released them into the woods, which would have made the local foxes happy if no one else.
The whole movie is like this: a steady feed of assertions about famous dead people with scant textual support mixed with wide-eyed gormless naivety. In an early section Andersen and his co-director Kameron Waters appear genuinely surprised to find that many of the Christian ministers they interview, especially from the Southern Baptist Convention, are actively against vegetarianism. That might have something to do, they timidly suggest, with all the money that flows into churches from the agricultural industry and the likes of Christian companies such as Chick-fil-A and In-N-Out Burger. Likewise, it turns out that killing animals in both kosher and halal fashion doesn’t spare the animal from much suffering. Who knew!
Luckily, Andersen and Waters travel by map from the US to Israel and Oxford and on to India to learn more factoids from former slaughterhouse employees, theologians and historians, animal rights activists and the Guardian’s own George Monbiot; the latter at least says perfectly sensible things about the relationship between the meat-industrial complex and the climate crisis. Aside from him and a few other sensible contributors who may not have realised what they were signing on for, the rest of this is tosh, albeit entertaining.
• Christspiracy: The Spirituality Secret is in UK cinemas from 20 March
• This article was amended on 19 March 2024 to correct the spelling of Matthieu Ricard.
