Health Doesn’t Fit a Culture of Death

By JC

My friend and WRN partner David Gornoski put it in two sentences: “The MAHA movement cannot succeed while being attached to the politics of wars, surveillance, militarism, and destruction. Health doesn’t fit a culture of death.”

It’s a short post. It’s also hard to argue with once you think about it.

Make America Healthy Again started with something most of us already sensed. Our food is full of things we can’t pronounce. Our kids are sicker than we were. And a lot of the systems built to care for us look more interested in managing us. People of every political stripe signed on. Moms reading labels, farmers, doctors who were tired of being ignored, and guys like me who just wanted to know what’s in the vitamins.

Health is a simple idea. It’s about life: protecting it, feeding it, letting it grow.

So it’s strange when a health movement gets folded into a politics that spends trillions on bombs, watches its own citizens, and treats war like a permanent line item. You can’t tell a mother to take seed oils out of her pantry while cheering for missiles landing on someone else’s mother. Well, you can. It just doesn’t hold together.

Jesus didn’t split life into categories. He healed the sick and told Peter to put the sword away in the same night. The kingdom He described doesn’t run on scapegoats and enemies. It runs on mercy. A culture that’s really for health has to be for life all the way through: in the grocery store, in the hospital, and on the battlefield we’d rather not think about.

Some will say this is mixing issues. Defense is defense, and nutrition is nutrition. Others will point out that a strong country needs a strong military, and a movement needs political allies wherever it can find them, even imperfect ones. Those are fair points, and people who make them aren’t villains. Coalitions are messy. I’ve been in bands, so I know.

But David’s point goes deeper than coalition math. A movement is shaped by what it tolerates. If MAHA makes peace with the machinery of death so it can keep a seat at the table, it’ll eventually look like the table. The same mindset that sees people as collateral damage overseas will see them as acceptable losses at home.

Health isn’t only about what goes into our bodies. It’s also about what we’re willing to destroy. A healthy people can’t be built on a sick conscience.

So read the labels, sure. Grow a garden if you can. I’m still working on keeping a houseplant alive. But also ask the bigger question. What kind of culture are we feeding?

Life or death. Moses put the choice plainly a long time ago, and it hasn’t gotten more complicated.

“I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live.”

Deuteronomy 30:19