About Keith Akers

If your group wants to hear Keith Akers speak, send me e-mail and we can talk.  

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My mailing address is P. O. Box 11240, Englewood, Colorado 80151, U. S. A. Click here to see my speaking schedule.

I’ve written two books, The Lost Religion of Jesus and A Vegetarian Sourcebook (described elsewhere on this web site). By profession I am a computer programmer; for nearly twenty years I pursued a career in information technology, though now I’m semi-retired — devoting my time to writing and being a house husband. I have also been very active in the vegetarian community, serving at various times as President of the Vegetarian Society of D. C., President of the Vegetarian Society of Colorado, and as an officer in the International Vegetarian Union. I'm married to Kate Lawrence, a librarian who has also contributed several items to this web site. Kate and I also play in several old-time string bands in the Colorado Front Range; she plays banjo, I play bass.

My debut in the field of religious controversy was in 1967, when as a high school senior I delivered the "youth sermon" for the First Baptist Church in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. I said that the church was irrelevant to many urgent concerns of the day, and shocked the congregation with the declaration that (based on Matthew 25:31-40) religious belief is irrelevant to salvation. I majored in philosophy in college and even went on to graduate school, but then pursued a happier career in computers.

In the late 1960's and early 1970’s, I became very aware of the environmental crisis fueled by the rampant consumerism in American society and overpopulation. For several years I was a member of a housing co-operative in Austin, Texas. John Kenneth Galbraith’s The New Industrial State made a deep impression on me: he said that if, in 1939, Americans had decided to put their increased productivity into a decreased work load instead of higher pay, in 25 years they could have had the same standard of living (one of the highest in the world, and still higher than that found in most countries today) by working only 20 hours a week.  Surely it was preferable to reduce work than to get more consumer goods.  

The Vietnam War first alerted me to the problem of human violence. Investigating the history and politics of Vietnam at the university library was my first real research project. I became involved in, and then gradually dropped out of radical politics as it, like the church, seemed to be irrelevant to many of the real issues that faced us. There was talk about our materialistic society and overconsumption but not even the radicals could make it a political issue.

It was only after I dropped out of graduate school that I found the "philosophical" focus that I was looking for. I became a vegetarian in 1978 after reading Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation. I became a vegan in 1981. My primary focus for the next 25 years was vegetarianism and the vegetarian movement. I was an active supporter of the local vegetarian group (first in Washington, D. C., and then in Colorado), serving at various different times in practically every capacity possible in both groups — President, Treasurer, Secretary, Newsletter Editor, you name it. I also wrote a series of widely-distributed pamphlets (over 100,000 have been distributed), as well as articles for Vegetarian Times and more recently VegNews.

I believe that the world faces a crisis of the greatest magnitude, which is difficult to exaggerate: we are staring the collapse of industrial civilization right in the face. We need to all pitch in and do the best we can to make the world a better place. There is no central organization or authority on "making the world a better place." My wife and I are both vegans and have chosen not to have children. I have always minimized my use of cars (I did not own a car until I was 38 years old); I have made it a practice to take public transportation or bicycle to work over 95% of the time.

The vegetarian movement is not perfect by any means, and vegetarians are more often than not ignorant of the broader issues that also affect our world. I hope that vegetarians will become aware of this broader perspective, and that nonvegetarians will learn to look compassionately at animals even if we vegetarians are not serving as the best possible example.

Where do we get this larger perspective? For me, though I can’t shed my attraction to Jesus, most of the Christian churches have became largely useless. The central moral issues of our time — consumerism, human violence, massive violence towards animals, destruction of the planet and the environment — go almost completely untouched by the world of religion. I’ve met many others over the years who feel similarly disillusioned with Christianity.

But refreshingly, some churches are addressing these questions, and even relating them to the religion of Jesus. And some individuals outside of the churches see the importance of these questions for the spiritual seeker. So I do not promote any one existing church, nor do I seek to start my own; but I feel kinship with — and support in whatever ways I can — everyone for whom these questions are important in his or her own life.