I once read a quip as a tag line on the bottom of someone’s email that was really quite profound — it said that if your pastor says that the wine in the Bible was really grape juice, then how can you believe anything he says?
Whenever someone stubbornly clings to foolish and thrice-disproven notions, it casts a shadow over everything else he says. Now I am not talking about the kind of mistakes we all make — I am talking about ideological commitments that are impervious to every form of evidence. This kind of thing contaminates everything else.
I say all this because the food fads that are circulating through the Christian world are so obviously bogus that it should cause us to question the soundness of everything else. Now of course I am not setting this up as my very own ideological litmus test. If someone teaches, simultaneously, that Jesus is Lord, and that a box of corn flakes shaken over your digestive tract will heal your constipation, the clear falsehood of the latter will not trump the former. But what it does mean is that you should not really be entrusting the care of your soul, and the souls of your family, to someone who clearly does not know how to think.
When it comes to our dietary habits and the rules of evidence, I have seen multiple examples of thought processes that were on the very same level with some shaman throwing chicken bones in the air to heal that pesky rash that you asked him to look at. And this from Christians. And there are pastors out there who teach this stuff, or encourage it, or go along with it, or fail to rebuke it.
These pastors either don’t know any better, in which case they cannot be trusted to handle the sacred text of Scripture, or they do know better but are afraid of the coterie of health ladies in the church who are propagating this kind of nonsense, in which case their cowardice disqualifies them.