Promoting Ahimsa on Thanksgiving Day 2021 By Dr. Christopher Patrick Miller
Christopher Patrick Miller completed his Ph.D. in the Study of Religion at the University of California, Davis. He now serves as the Bhagwan Mallinath Assistant Professor of Jainism at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. He is a chairman of JAINA’s newly formed “Thanksgiving Meals and Fasting Committee”. (Christopher.Miller@lmu.edu) As we are all well aware, millions of Americans once again feasted on the bodies of nearly 50 million slaughtered turkeys and millions of other animals and their secretions last year on Thanksgiving. Though I am already vegan, I chose to fast that day, in what was for me at the time a silent protest of the unnecessary violence and racist, colonial settler roots of this national holiday as well as the speciesist, anthropocentric ideology undergirding the factory farming system more generally. Deep inside, I silently wished that I could fast with others, to share the experience with a similarly motivated collective that also understood the multiple layers of violence of the Thanksgiving holiday.
Turkey Factory Farm
On Thanksgiving 2020, I had a zoom call with Dr. Sulekh Jain. I disclosed that I had been fasting after he said “Happy Thanksgiving” to me. A few days later in an unrelated zoom webinar, Dr. Jain publicly announced to a global audience that I had done so. I had not intended for this to be public news, though I was happy when the global Jain community responded to his announcement with great enthusiasm by sending me private and public
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messages in the webinar chat indicating their desire to organize a community fast for Thanksgiving 2021. My silent wish was coming true. In the days that followed, I received several emails from members of JAINA’s executive committee and was nominated to chair a committee for a global fast and an animal-free meal service for those in need on Thanksgiving 2021. JAINA’s President Mahesh Wadher named this committee the “Thanksgiving Meals and Fasting Committee” and along with other members of the executive committee proposed that we commit 1,000 people to fast. In addition, the committee also simultaneously proposed that the global Jain community serve 100,000 animal-free meals to those without food on Thanksgiving 2021. I am honored to accept the nomination to chair this all-too-important committee and cause, which demonstrates the Jain community’s ongoing commitment to propagate non-violence as well as its proactive approach to charity. To be perfectly honest, as a Filipino-EuropeanAmerican who grew up in America, I was raised with a dietary ethos that tended to foster an ideology of human dominion over nature, animals, and all of god’s creation. Turkey was a staple part of every Thanksgiving meal, as was pig. On a regular basis, our family ate meat 2-3 times per day, drank milk at almost every meal, and never questioned where our Sunday morning bacon, egg, and cheese omelets came from. Nevertheless, all of this changed when I was 21 years old when my worldview and concomitant dietary habits were exposed for the first time. A student at Loyola Marymount University, I enrolled in Dr. Christopher Chapple’s “Religions of India” upper division undergraduate course where I was introduced to the Jain ideas of ahiṃsā (nonviolence) and the notion that humans are not necessarily the only beings possessing consciousness and a soul (jīva). In fact, as we learned, everything from humans down to the smallest microorganism has a transmigrating, embodied soul which, furthermore, does not wish to experience pain.
