Chick-fil-A and the Christian Infiltration-Weekly Standard
Even the headline of the short essay in the New Yorker was meant to offend, and it did: “Chick-fil-A’s Creepy Infiltration of New York City.” The piece, by Dan Piepenbring, has been read, attacked, defended, and ridiculed by far more people than ordinarily read the New Yorker. If the editors’ goal was to attract online readers, they succeeded.Piepenbring makes no effort to veil his contempt for the famously clean and friendly fast-food restaurant, of which there are now four in Manhattan. He visited the grand opening of the largest and most recently built one, on Fulton Street in Lower Manhattan. “The air smelled fried,” he writes. And yetNew York has taken to Chick-fil-A. One of the Manhattan locations estimates that it sells a sandwich every six seconds, and the company has announced plans to open as many as a dozen more storefronts in the city. And yet the brand’s arrival here feels like an infiltration, in no small part because of its pervasive Christian traditionalism. Its headquarters, in Atlanta, are adorned with Bible verses and a statue of Jesus washing a disciple’s feet. Its stores close on Sundays. Its C.E.O., Dan Cathy, has been accused of bigotry for using the company’s charitable wing to fund anti-gay causes, including groups that oppose same-sex marriage. The company has since reaffirmed its intention to “treat every person with honor, dignity and respect,” but it has quietly continued to donate to anti-L.G.B.T. groups.
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