Christspiracy — My Honest Review of This Explosive Documentary

The shocking secret about Jesus, suppressed by the Church for 2000 years

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We almost missed the screening of Christspiracy at Liverpool’s Everyman Cinema. Despite setting out in good time so we wouldn’t be rushed, we went to the Everyman Theatre instead, then had to make a dash across town to get to the right place before the scheduled 8pm start.

We needn’t have worried. There were endless ads before the documentary actually started, giving us ample time to appreciate the rather plush setting. The screening was in a small, intimate auditorium with rows of comfortably cushioned two-seater sofas. We could almost have been in a large cosy living room. We hadn’t come here for an enjoyable night out, but it was a nice touch nevertheless.

The film itself, though, was anything but comfortable.

Christspiracy is the latest film by Kip Anderson, maker of Cowspiracy, Seaspiracy and What the Health. He is joined on his journey of discovery by Kam Waters whose question, “Is there a spiritual way to kill an animal?” began the entire 7-year-long project.

As a devout Christian from America’s bible belt, Kam had long been seeking an answer to the query, “How would Jesus kill an animal?”

Within Kam’s Christian community, the phrase “What would Jesus do?” was commonly spoken as a source of guidance in everyday life, yet it appeared to Kam there were some huge contradictions between the image of an infinitely loving, gentle, kind and compassionate Jesus and many of his modern-day followers — hunters and farmers for whom slaughter and bloodshed were an everyday occurrence.

This contradiction — some might call it hypocrisy — is highlighted by various interviews with pastors and church leaders. In particular, the so-called ‘Daniel Diet’ comes under the spotlight.

In Daniel 1, the Bible tells us that Daniel’s God-ordained diet of vegetables (or pulses, according to the King James Bible) and water proved far healthier, ‘cleaner’ and more vibrant than the meat and wine of the King. Yet when Kip and Kam check out a church website recommending the ‘Daniel Diet’ they find it filled with recipes for meat dishes.

Despite numerous phone calls, they are pretty much stonewalled by the church representatives, who can not (or will not) explain this glaring contradiction.

It turns out this is just the tip of a gigantic iceberg — an apparent cover-up that goes back over 2,000 years.

Throughout the documentary, we get to hear interviews with various theologians and biblical scholars. It turns out there is ample evidence in various scriptures explicitly indicating that several of Jesus’ disciples, as well as his brother James, were vegetarian and ate no meat.

To be honest, this wasn’t new information for me. I’ve written about this before (see link here). In that article I talk about how, in Jesus’ time, there were three main Jewish sects: the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and Essenes. No mention is made in the Bible as to which sect Jesus belonged, but for various reasons, many people believe he was an Essene.

I was disappointed that Christspiracy didn’t make more of this. In fact, I only heard the word ‘Essene’ mentioned once, in passing, by an interviewee, and no explanation was given as to what the word means or its significance.

Yet, throughout the documentary, we are repeatedly shown an image of Leonardo da Vinci’s famous painting of The Last Supper, where the bible tells us Jesus broke bread and shared wine with the disciples. Our attention is drawn repeatedly to the glaringly empty plate at the very centre of the table in da Vinci’s painting — the plate where, presumably, we might expect to see a sacrificial lamb if this was the Passover meal of any other Jewish sect except the Essenes.

The Essenes differed in a significant way from the other Jewish sects of the day in that they were vegetarians and didn’t consume lamb at Passover. Instead, they consumed… yep, you guessed it: bread.

As I said, I found it disappointing that the documentary failed to pick up on this. Instead, it focused largely on Jesus’ expulsion of the merchants and money-changers from the Temple of Jerusalem just days before he was crucified.

The film goes into a lot of depth about how the temple at that time was basically one huge slaughterhouse, with extensive drainage channels for the vast amounts of blood from over a million animals a day that were slaughtered there under the banner of religion.

Whilst modern translations of the story invariably have Jesus calling the temple a ‘den of thieves’ or ‘den of robbers’, it turns out that the actual word used in the original scripture — as one scholar is shocked to realise when asked to translate it — is not ‘thieves’ but is more accurately translated as ‘violent ones’ or ‘murderers’.

It would suggest that, like many modern-day vegans, Jesus’ interpretation of God’s first commandment “Thou shalt not kill” was not only limited to killing humans, but all God’s creatures.

Even in Jesus’ time, this was not a new concept. The documentary tells us that 500 years previously, Pythagoras had been teaching much the same thing. Gautama Buddha, too, was also teaching this at around the same time as Pythagoras.

In fact, a lot of the documentary is spent on examining other religions for parallels. Various Buddhist monks are interviewed about the absolute prohibition in Buddhism of killing any animals. Yet when pressed, they also show a disturbing hypocrisy in eating animal flesh.

Perhaps the most shocking part of the film, at least for me, was the investigation into the treatment, by Hindus, of India’s sacred cows. This included even more overt hypocrisy.

Whilst many Hindus abstain from eating flesh, they will drink cows’ milk. In the West, unwanted male dairy calves are slaughtered for veal. The Hindu decree against killing these ‘holy animals’ prevents this from happening on many farms in India, but this doesn’t mean the unfortunate babies are spared, or get to live a good life. Instead, they are separated from their mothers, tied up, and left to stave to death. Hypocrisy at its finest.

But it got worse. Kip and Kam joined Indian animal activists to infiltrate a shocking and blood-soaked Hindu festival where thousands of supposedly sacred cows, too spent to produce profitable milk yields, were illegally shipped in cattle trucks by the notorious ‘meat mafia’ to a cruel and grisly end, while the police and army turned a blind eye.

On a signal from some Hindu holy men, the entire mob of thousands fell into a berserk frenzy of killing and hacking at the trusting, docile and totally vulnerable animals. When the bloodbath was over, Kip’s drone footage revealed a vast plain of hacked and dismembered corpses.

One of the Hindu guys at the festival justified his actions by claiming the shield of ‘tradition’, pointing out the comparison with America’s annual slaughter of millions of turkeys — also for nothing more than ‘tradition’.

But two wrongs, as they say, don’t make a right. You cannot justify an atrocity by pointing out that someone else is also committing an atrocity.

An underlying theme of Christspiracy is that although religions around the world appear to be founded a basic principles of compassion, nonviolence or non-killing, the adherents of all these religions have largely distorted the original messages of their founders to justify the mass slaughter of countless sentient beings.

The documentary suggests that Jesus was crucified, and many of his disciples, plus his brother, were killed for their acts of radical compassion and their opposition to the ritualistic sacrifice of animals by the powerful establishment. To what extent this is true might be debatable, but Christspiracy puts a fairly persuasive, if incomplete, argument in favour of this theory.

The film draws to a close with the rousing and optimistic message that things are changing, despite some examples of the modern-day establishment’s oppressive persecution of compassionate and nonviolent animal activists. We are shown mass actions of civil disobedience and open rescue by activist groups living the principles of nonviolence and radical compassion which so many religious groups have failed to put into practice.

In a rousing call to action, we are reminded that the future depends on us all — that we are all saviours and we all have our part to play in the emancipation of our non-human brothers and sisters. We are urged to help ensure that Christspiracy is seen by as many people as possible around the world in order to finally blow the lid off this millennia-long global cover-up.

And it must be worth watching, because here I am sharing it with you now, urging you to watch it for yourself and make up your own mind. I believe this will prove to be an important and paradigm-shifting documentary for a lot of people, but only if enough people view it. There are vested interests going all-out to keep these facts hidden from the public eye. Let’s make sure they don’t win.

To find out how you can watch Christspiracy, and to watch a trailer, visit Christspiracy.com

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