Nicknamed “Jesus chicken” by jaded secular fans and embraced by evangelical Christians, Chick-fil-A is among only a handful of large American companies with conservative religion built into its corporate ethos.
But recently its ethos has run smack into the gay rights movement. A Pennsylvania outlet’s sponsorship of a February marriage seminar by one of that state’s most outspoken groups against homosexuality lit up gay blogs around the country. Students at some universities also have begun trying to get the chain removed from campuses.
“If you’re eating Chick-fil-A, you’re eating anti-gay,” one headline read. The issue spread into Christian media circles, too.
The outcry moved the company’s president, Dan Cathy, to post a video on the company’s Facebook fan page to “communicate from the heart that we serve and value all people and treat everyone with honor, dignity and respect,” said a company spokesman, Don Perry.
Providing sandwiches and brownies for a local seminar is not an endorsement or a political stance, Cathy said in the video. But he added that marriage has long been a focus of the chain, which S. Truett Cathy, his deeply religious father, began in 1967.
The donation has some fans cheering and others forcing themselves to balance their food desires against their personal beliefs.
“Does loving Chick-fil-A make you a bad gay?” asked Rachel Anderson of Berkeley.
Anderson has been with her partner for 15 years. They married in California during the brief period when same-sex marriage was legal in 2008. They have 7-year-old twins. A visit to her spouse’s family in North Carolina always includes a trip to the chicken chain. But as she learns more about the company, Anderson is wavering about where to eat when they travel to Charlotte in April. On the other hand, Rhonda Cline, a dental hygienist in Atlanta and a devout Christian, has gotten more outspoken in her support. She was one of nearly a thousand people who logged onto the Chick-fil-A Face-book page to comment on the issue.
“I applaud a company that in this climate today will step out on a limb the way the Constitution allows them to,” Cline said.
Chick-fil-A runs 1,530 restaurants in 39 states, but it still feels like a hometown restaurant to fans in Georgia, which has 189 outlets. Sales figures for 2010 will most likely be over $3.5 billion, a spokesman said.
S. Truett Cathy, the founder, is an 89-year-old, Harley-riding Southern Baptist who opened a small diner near the Atlanta airport in 1946. Because the company remains privately held – his two sons run it – it can easily keep its faith-based principles intact. The company’s corporate purpose is, in part, “to glorify God by being a faithful steward of all that is entrusted to us.”
With its near-national reach and its transparent conservative Christian underpinnings, Chick-fil-A is a trailblazer of sorts, said Lake Lambert, the author of “Spirituality, Inc.” and dean of the college of liberal arts at Mercer University, where he teaches Christianity.
“They’re going in a direction we haven’t seen in faith-based businesses before, and that is to a much broader marketing of themselves and their products,” he said. The sandwiches that will feed people who attend a February seminar, called “The Art of Marriage: Getting to the Heart of God’s Design,” in Harrisburg, Pa., are but a tiny donation.
Over the years, the company’s operators, its WinShape Foundation and the Cathy family have given millions of dollars to a variety of causes and programs, including scholarships that require a pledge to follow Christian values, a string of Christian-based foster homes and groups working to defeat same-sex marriage initiatives.
For organizations like Georgia Equality, the state’s largest advocacy group for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender issues, the free sandwiches offer an opportunity for organizing.
On a petition posted on the website Change.org , it asks the company to stop supporting groups perceived as anti-gay, including Focus on the Family, an international nonprofit that teamed up with Chick-fil-A a few years ago to give away CDs of its Bible-based “Adventures in Odyssey” radio show with every kid’s meal.
As of early Saturday, it had 25,000 signatures.
WHAT THEY’RE SAYING
“If you’re eating Chick-fil-A, you’re eating anti-gay.” – headline on a gay blog “We serve and value all people and treat everyone with honor, dignity and respect.” – Don Perry, spokesman for Chick-fil-A 
