Faith & Spirit Quote by Edwin Louis Cole

Cole draws a bright, moral line between two practices that can look identical from the outside: not eating. His intent is theological triage. “Fast” is framed as obedience, an act of surrender that assumes God’s sovereignty and our need for correction. “Hunger strike,” by contrast, is painted as coercion: a tactic that leverages bodily suffering to force an outcome. The symmetry of the sentence is the point; he builds a clean antithesis and then sharpens it into a provocation about motive. Same empty stomach, radically different posture.

The subtext is a warning aimed inward at believers more than outward at activists. Cole is suspicious of spiritual practices that quietly become transactional: I’ll deprive myself, so You’ll deliver what I want. By calling that a hunger strike, he exposes a religious version of consumer leverage, where God is treated like an institution that can be pressured by optics and pain. The line “makes God submit” is intentionally scandalous; it casts manipulation as a form of blasphemy, not merely bad etiquette in prayer.

Context matters: Cole wrote as an evangelical men’s ministry voice in a late-20th-century culture where “fasting” circulated as both devotional discipline and self-help technique. His distinction pushes back against a results-driven spirituality and, indirectly, against political readings of self-denial. It’s less about calories than control: who is sovereign, who is bargaining, and whether suffering is offered as worship or weaponized as a demand.