Everyone is familiar with the impulse to pull others in to whatever lifestyle change is working for you.
Through trial and error and study you discover that abstaining from bread, or dairy, or sugar, or alcohol, or caffeine makes a positive change in your life.
Rather than be content with its effect upon you, you feel compelled to share this effect, backed by all your research and justifications, and convince others to do the same.
Not everyone acts on this impulse, but certainly enough do to make a large portion of online discourse arguments over competing health routines and disciplines. Some of them get quite nasty.
I always assumed this impulse was born out of the evangelical tendency – a desire to see others saved from what you’ve been saved from, and benefit like you are. Bu I came across a comment from CS Lewis that implied something different (paraphrasing):
“There is a certain type of bad man who cannot abstain from something without forcing others to do the same.”
This seems correct in my gut. But what about wanting others to adopt your dietary preferences is bad?
If your are trying to use the force of government, that initiation of violence is easy to identify as bad. If you are being rude or manipulative, that is easy to see as bad.
But there seems to be something bad about this impulse even when not acted on in a way that violates the rights or dignity of others. It seems to reflect a heart condition in the person who has it that is wrong.
I think at least part of it is insecurity, cowardice, and perhaps lack of faith.
If you feel convicted about drink, and heed the inner voice telling you to abstain, the best is to be secure in your decision, not fearing what others think and not wavering in your faith that this is right for you regardless of unpopularity or arguments against it. That is a healthy heart.
A weaker, sicker heart will want to shore up all kinds of external supports so that they can feel in the right, because being in the right is not enough. A weaker mind will constantly doubt their own inner conviction, and even their own positive results, if it makes them different from others. Weakness and badness are not the same thing, but nearly every form of badness comes from weakness.
So Lewis is right. Be wary of the man who cannot simply improve his life with this or that diet or discipline, but must wrap his entire identity around pleading, begging, forcing others to join.
This is not to say joyfully or academically sharing research or results of our own life choices is bad. But when tinged with a need for others to understand, defensiveness, or attacks on other choices, you can bet a bit of badness is festering or will be soon.