I believe I first became familiar with the term ‘cafeteria Catholic’ during the year and a half I spent at Saint Michael’s College in Vermont. It’s a pejorative, of course. The phrase refers to someone who has a cafeteria approach to Catholicism, picking and choosing what is easy, while ignoring what is hard.

To a certain extent, being a perennialist implies a cafeteria approach to all religions. Ideally, one tries to pick and choose what is universally true while ignoring what is culturally specific. However, our capacity for self-delusion is endless; certainly, it is in my case. So, there’s a risk of merely ignoring what is hard.

Still, a perennialist approach makes the most sense to me, and that’s what I bring to thinking about Jesus’ pronouncement about the sheep and the goats in the Gospel of Matthew. For those like me who aren’t overly familiar with the Bible, Jesus tells a story in which the Son of Man presides over a final judgment.

Here’s how the New International Version describes it: “All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.” This represents the separation of good people and the bad.

The Son of Man explains what makes the good people worthy of divine reward by saying, “I was hungry, and you gave me food to eat. I was thirsty, and you gave me drink. I was a stranger, and you took me in. I was naked, and you clothed me. I was sick, and you visited me. I was in prison, and you came to me.”

In contrast, the Son of Man tells the bad people they will suffer divine sanction because whatever they did not do for the least of his sisters and brothers, they did not do for him. The Son of Man then welcomes the good people to eternal life and condemns the bad people to an everlasting, fiery punishment.

What are we to make of this pronouncement, reading it in the present day? First of all, as I’ve noted previously, my understanding of the scholarship is very little can be said with certainty about the historical Jesus, aside from the fact he was first-century Jewish preacher who was crucified. Everything else is debated.

Academics can’t agree about the meaning of key terms, like the Son of Man. If Jesus was referring to himself, it could imply a variety of Christologies. However, it’s a mainstream perspective. Jesus saw the Son of Man as a forthcoming cosmic judge, and it was only after his death Jesus’ followers decided this had been him.

The choice of sheep and goats as metaphors is strange, particularly to me as an animal activist. Why does one represent good people and the other represent bad people? Cornelius a Lapide, a Flemish Catholic priest, believed this was because sheep were comparatively docile, while goats were more quarrelsome and smelly.

Further, the New International Version presents what sounds to me like a classical description of hell. Whether this is Biblically accurate, I don’t know. I’ve read universalist writers who argue otherwise. But I can’t square the possibility of eternal separation from the divine with the idea of a loving God or a God that is literally love.

So, as a perennialist, I ignore all the stuff about the Son of Man, the sheep and goats, and everlasting torment. To me, these are all culturally-specific details which aren’t important to the underlying, universal truth. That truth is perennialism, basically. The divine is present in everyone and everything, including the most vulnerable.

God lives in the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick and the imprisoned. Jesus may not have included animals in this category, but, again, that would be a culturally-specific limitation, attributable to his time and place in history. How we treat others, including our fellow creatures, is how we treat the divine.

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I’m the author of a number of books of animal-rights history. As a journalist, I’ve written for The San Francisco Chronicle, The Lake Placid News, Slate, The Plattsburgh Press Republican, The Adirondack Daily Enterprise, and Splice Today, among many other publications. Visit it Blog Here