What does it mean for Christians to pray, “Give us this day our daily bread”? In this thought-provoking reflection, Professor David Clough explores the profound ethical implications of this familiar petition. Drawing on scripture, theology, and contemporary food justice concerns, he challenges us to consider how our food choices impact our human and non-human neighbours.
The Lord’s Prayer, which most Christians pray on at least a weekly basis, includes a very basic request. When we pray, we ask God for our daily bread: the sustenance we need to survive from today until tomorrow. This is a fundamental reminder of what it means to be a living creature of God. Like all God’s other living creatures, we humans are radically dependent on God and the world around us for our survival. Our bodies are vulnerable: we can survive very little time without oxygen, only short periods without water, and not very long without food. The Psalmist observes that all creatures look to God to give them food and praises God that ‘when you open your hand, they are filled with good things’ (Ps. 104:27–28).
We live in a time when there is sufficient food for everyone on the planet, but many people don’t have access to healthy food, both in poorer and wealthier countries. In such a context, this petition to God is not only a reminder of our dependence, but also of our responsibility to ensure we don’t consume food or other resources in such a way that others don’t have the means to feed themselves. We know that the God to whom we pray wills that no one is left hungry. Jesus’ parable of the Last Judgement makes clear that in feeding the hungry we minister to Jesus himself (Matt. 25:31–46). When we pray to God for our daily bread, then, we are praying that we receive the means to sustain ourselves in a way that is compatible with our neighbours receiving their daily bread, too.
The quotation from Psalm 104 is a reminder that God’s concern does not end with human creatures. The God we address in the Lord’s Prayer is the God of all creatures. Jesus reassures his followers that they can be confident of God’s care for them because they know that God cares even for a single sparrow (Mt. 10:29; Lk. 12:6). So, just as we should not expect an answer to our prayer for daily bread that prevents our neighbours from receiving theirs, we should also not expect that the God we worship provides us with food in a way that unnecessarily prevents the flourishing of fellow non-human creatures.
If the petition to God for our daily bread in the Lord’s Prayer has implications for what we could understand as an answer to our prayer, the Lord’s Prayer has implications for Christian food ethics. If we can’t understand the food we consume as an answer to this prayer, if we can’t offer thanks to God for what we’re eating, then we shouldn’t be eating it at all. We couldn’t consider food we’ve stolen from a hungry neighbour, for example, as an answer to a prayer to God for our daily bread.
The problem is much wider than food stolen from our neighbours, however. There are major systemic problems with how we produce food globally. To put it bluntly, the way we produce food is killing humans, killing vast numbers of domesticated and wild animals, and killing our shared environment. Worsening human health and disease, human food insecurity, human water insecurity, injustice to food workers, environmental racism, farmed animal suffering, wild animal extinction, air and water pollution, and weather extremes from a changing climate all follow from food business as usual. And food business as usual will continue until citizens demand something different.
In this context, to pray ‘Give us this day our daily bread’ is a regular encouragement to rethink our participation in food systems that imperil the lives of our human and more-than-human neighbours. Resolving the problems with global food systems to shape them into something more just and sustainable will take a great deal of work on an international basis, but local churches can make changes in the right direction by consuming fewer animal products, because the vast majority of these come from factory farms that operate in ways that are bad for human health, bad for farmed animals, destroy wild animal habitats, and are a major cause of carbon emissions. CreatureKind’s DefaultVeg programme has some great ideas for how to get started.
David Clough is Chair in Theology and Applied Sciences at the University of Aberdeen and a leading scholar in Christian ethics, particularly regarding animals and food systems. His work includes the two-volume monograph On Animals (vol. 1 Systematic Theology, 2012, vol. 2 Theological Ethics 2019) and the Christian Ethics of Farmed Animal Welfare (CEFAW) project, and he is the co-founder of CreatureKind, a US non-profit engaging churches with concern for farmed animals and the need for dietary change.
