There is a wealth of religious history to people being vegan or strict vegetarian including (but not limited to) Jains, Buddhists, Taoists, Krishna Consciousness...and...wait for it....early Christians. YES! In Genesis, we were all Created to be vegans and no one ate animals before the Fall of Man, in fact the Dead Sea Scrolls explain that humans were taught to "harass, molest, annoy, consume" animals by demons in the Books of Enoch (that's what the most recent Noah is about, just FYI, Aronofsky is atheist, but he was raised very Jewish and he addresses vegetarianism/animal rights via Noah and environmentalism/climate change via Mother! with a religious angle he terms as his Jewish heritage or ancestral mythos...Mother! makes a hell of a lot more sense if you have read the Bible).
Also, many 7th Day Adventists are vegan by default, or at least vegetarian. Many of the oldest "faux meat" or "meat analogue" companies are 7th Day Adventist, and we owe them a wealth of gratitude for popularizing breakfast cereal via Kellogg's and items like veggie burgers and veggie dogs through old corps like Loma Linda and Morning Star Farms which were thriving long before Follow Your Heart, Just foods, and Gardein.
I am totally okay with there being a vegan church, in fact I encourage it whole heartedly. One of my fave YouTube vegans goes by Ghost Vegan or Ghost, and though he's atheist he's made arguments for vegans being granted religious protection in the West, due to the rampant humanism that invades post-modern Western culture. He says there's not a real way animals can get rights without vegan humans having rights first, that the animals will have rights through us, in the context of our society, like Muslims or any other minority group.
