On Sept. 24, the Allied Scholars for Animal Protection at Dartmouth, a College chapter of the national animal rights advocacy organization, hosted an advanced screening of “Christspiracy” in Sarner Underground. The documentary, co-directed by Kip Andersen and Kameron Waters, examines how religious organizations justify the act of killing animals for consumption.
The event drew approximately 12 audience members. After the screening, national ASAP founder Faraz Harsini and Waters, who attended on Zoom, led a presentation on the environmental and public health risks created by the meat industry, followed by a Q&A.
The directors arranged the film’s Dartmouth screening as part of a four-month pre-release tour that is bringing the documentary to 17 universities, according to Harsini. Harsini said he discovered the film at its world premiere in Los Angeles in March and was later contacted by the directors — who hoped to leverage ASAP’s presence on college campuses — to help develop the pre-release tour. ASAP has chapters at peer institutions including Brown University, Harvard University and Yale University, according to its website.
In an interview with The Dartmouth, Andersen said the pre-release college tour aims to teach the next generation of activists and political actors about animal consumption. The documentary also challenges viewers to reflect on their own spiritual beliefs and place them within the context of the film’s findings, Andersen added. The documentary claims that the meat industry may have influenced religious teachings within the past century.
According to Harsini, universities are “the most important place to actually educate people with our limited resources” — making the tour an important avenue to spread ASAP’s messages of animal advocacy.
Following the screening and presentation, Harsini facilitated an open forum discussion where audience members could share their thoughts. Waters was asked about the documentary’s production process and his personal feelings about the meat industry. In response, he said that, while learning about the connections between religion and the meat industry shown in the film was difficult, it strengthened his desire to keep creating the film because he wanted others to experience the shock he had felt.
Co-director Kip Andersen, founder of the Animals United Movement, is responsible for a handful of other documentary films — including “What the Health,” “Seaspiracy” and “Cowspiracy” — that similarly expose and examine social and environmental injustice.
Andersen said “Christspiracy” builds on his previous works about social and environmental injustice, which he felt had omitted the ethical considerations of veganism. He explained that with “Christspiracy,” he wanted to question the ethics of animal consumption. Anderson was also curious about whether there is “an ethical way” to kill an animal and still “call yourself spiritual,” he added.
To prepare for the film, Andersen and Waters interviewed priests, monks and religious followers to understand how each religion approaches the relationship between meat consumption and the lives of the animals, Andersen said. They highlight that despite differences in religious beliefs, people around the world are involved in meat production, Anderson said.
The film poses an ethical question about how these norms of meat production and consumption are instilled and how they can be undone, Harsini said. In the film, Andersen and Waters argue that veganism is a social movement, while speciesism, the assumption of human superiority that they argue results in the exploitation of animals, is an oppressive structure predicated on beliefs of superiority.
With regard to speciesism, Harsini said he believes that slaughterhouses are incompatible with the values of major religions.
“If Jesus [were] alive today and saw that we have these slaughterhouses, these machines and all these factories to raise animals in a confined environment — is this really what [he] would have wanted?” Harsini said.
ASAP member Claire Gates ’27 said she found the film’s message about reconciling religious beliefs with eating animals interesting because she grew up in the Bay Area, where she feels “nobody believes in God.”
“It has been interesting to me that people who act morally — especially if they’re religious — [don’t] really apply [their religious beliefs] to animals … when animals, even though they aren’t humans … still can feel fear and pain,” Gates said.
