In Defense of Teetotalers
Revitalized Christian Alcohol Culture is Not a Pure Good
Update: This post does reasonably well as a standalone piece, and I meant it to be readable that way. However, if you find yourself saying, “Wait, why is he talking about this thing here? What is he going on about?” it may be that I’m replying to something in the article above, to which this post is a threaded reply.
This morning, I had the time to read Benjamin Sledge’s piece “the curious case of Christians and alcohol.” It’s an interesting discussion of the complicated relationship between alcohol and Christian piety. The summary of his view can be found in the opening section, when he says:
It wouldn’t be until age 27 (having gone through absurd amounts of binge drinking and blackouts) that I became a Christian, learned the tenets of moderation, and discovered the truth: the North American church had ruined 1800 years of tradition, and their view of alcohol was intellectually dishonest towards the history of the Christian church. It had been used as a method to control (or for profit) and, to this day, has continued to damage, condemn, or enforce absurdly strange practices in the name of fake piety.
Benjamin rightly notes that virtually all Christians throughout all time have condemned drunkenness, and that the large majority of Christians in most times and places have approved of drinking in moderation. But I think he misrepresents the religious place of spiritual abstention, and greatly overstates the benefits of alcohol.
Let me introduce myself, religiously-speaking. My regular readers know I’m an economist, a demographer, an agriculture and textile expert, a conservative, a non-drinker, and a Christian, but most won’t know the details. I was raised in a theologically Wesleyan household, attended a conservative nondenominational megachurch while growing up, and, as an adult, have come to rest in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. This means, over the course of my life, I have transitioned from the very most extreme end of anti-alcohol views in Wesleyan “holiness movement” teetotaling, to the Christian denomination that, hands down, is most in love with alcohol. I went from a world where my Seminary professor father could have been fired for having alcohol in the house (and where the local college forbade dancing of all kinds, Footloose-style), to a world where our church centrally supplies the beer for church festivities like Octoberfest. Yes, we have a church Octoberfest party, with kegs.
By all rights, I should feel about alcohol the way Benjamin does: I saw how it made people, young and old, sneak their drinking. I saw how blanket prohibitions of drinking create shame, and engineer a feeling of guilt in people when they’ve done nothing wrong. Benjamin rightly points to the comments of church fathers who condemn the condemnation of alcohol, but I would simply appeal to scripture, in Romans 14:
One person has faith that he may eat all things, but he who is weak eats vegetables only. 3 The one who eats is not to regard with contempt the one who does not eat, and the one who does not eat is not to judge the one who eats, for God has accepted him. 4 Who are you to judge the servant of another? To his own master he stands or falls; and he will stand, for the Lord is able to make him stand.
5 One person regards one day above another, another regards every day alike. Each person must be fully convinced in his own mind. 6 He who observes the day, observes it for the Lord, and he who eats, does so for the Lord, for he gives thanks to God; and he who eats not, for the Lord he does not eat, and gives thanks to God. 7 For not one of us lives for himself, and not one dies for himself; 8 for if we live, we live for the Lord, or if we die, we die for the Lord; therefore whether we live or die, we are the Lord’s. 9 For to this end Christ died and lived again, that He might be Lord both of the dead and of the living.
10 But you, why do you judge your brother? Or you again, why do you regard your brother with contempt? For we will all stand before the judgment seat of God. 11 For it is written,
“As I live, says the Lord, every knee shall bow to Me,
And every tongue shall give praise to God.”12 So then each one of us will give an account of himself to God.
As a good Lutheran, there are few things I loathe more than the erection of human walls between man and the grace of Jesus Christ. To engineer new burdens of conscience on believers or nonbelievers is shameful and wrong, and indeed, in my own life, it causes me great sadness when my non-drinking causes others to feel I condemn their consumption. Precisely to alleviate that fear, I make a point of poking fun at my non-drinking, and have also learned a vast amount of alcohol history, trivia, and information, as a way of communicating that I do not view moderate drinking as a thing to be ashamed of. I also usually buy and supply alcohol for events, again, because I fear that especially non-Christians will view me, a publicly confessing Christian and non-drinker, as communicating that alcohol is incompatible with faith; I fear for my own soul if I should cause a nonbeliever to harden their heart against grace because I have falsely caused them to believe it is a sin to consume alcohol.
You can find evidence that I am not some ignorant booze-hater in many places in my life, but the easiest course of action would just be to listen to my podcast, where I did an entire 3-part-series on the history of bourbon. Being from Kentucky, I have a deep love of bourbon heritage and culture.
And yet, I do not drink. Not just that, for me, to drink would be a sin.
Jeremiah 35 contains a remarkable story. This is near the end of Judah’s existence as a state, during a period of extraordinary apostasy, abysmal puppet-kings, and generalized awfulness. There is starvation, poverty, sieges, everything is bad for the Judaeans, to whom Jeremiah is ministering and prophesying. This is the story as Jeremiah tells it:
3 So I went to see Jaazaniah son of Jeremiah and grandson of Habazziniah and all his brothers and sons — representing all the Recabite families. 4 I took them to the Temple, and we went into the room assigned to the sons of Hanan son of Igdaliah, a man of God. This room was located next to the one used by the Temple officials, directly above the room of Maaseiah son of Shallum, the Temple gatekeeper.
5 I set cups and jugs of wine before them and invited them to have a drink, 6 but they refused. “No,” they said, “we don’t drink wine, because our ancestor Jehonadab son of Recab gave us this command: ‘You and your descendants must never drink wine. 7 And do not build houses or plant crops or vineyards, but always live in tents. If you follow these commands, you will live long, good lives in the land.’ 8 So we have obeyed him in all these things. We have never had a drink of wine to this day, nor have our wives, our sons, or our daughters. 9 We haven’t built houses or owned vineyards or farms or planted crops. 10 We have lived in tents and have fully obeyed all the commands of Jehonadab, our ancestor. 11 But when King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon attacked this country, we were afraid of the Babylonian and Syrian armies. So we decided to move to Jerusalem. That is why we are here.”
12 Then the Lord gave this message to Jeremiah: 13 “This is what the Lordof Heaven’s Armies, the God of Israel, says: Go and say to the people in Judah and Jerusalem, ‘Come and learn a lesson about how to obey me.14 The Recabites do not drink wine to this day because their ancestor Jehonadab told them not to. But I have spoken to you again and again, and you refuse to obey me.
The Recabites are inheritors of an oath and a tradition; they have received a practice of religious piety, not of their own volition, but because it is an oath that is binding to future generations. More broadly, I take the view of Alasdair MacIntyre that virtually the whole foundation of ethics comes from participation in an ethical tradition; that is, we cannot simply define what we think is virtuous, then act that way, as then everyone could and would define their own behavior as virtuous. Instead, insofar as “virtue” has any meaning at all, it must mean abolishing our own individual will and conforming to some external, received standard over which we can have little control or influence. As an economist, I would call religious affiliation a kind of “commitment mechanism,” creating costs for deviation from a standard of behavior. But crucially, as I believe in a living God, I do not believe that we freely choose which “commitment mechanism” to be beholden to. Rather, God chooses us, and either our will dies and grace abounds in our lives, or else we resist and reject this grace, continuing to assert our own will, our own right to decide what is good.
How does this relate to alcohol? Simple — I have received the tradition of abstention. It is not, as Benjamin repeatedly asserts, about “personal choice.” Samson had no say in his parents declaring him a Nazirite, compelling a life of abstention from alcohol. The Recabites followed their vow in costly fashion, even though it made no sense to them sometimes. Also, full disclosure: the Recabite vow probably originates in a vow by Jehonadab, who, along with the general Jehu, participated in the mass murder of the entire royal family and pagan priesthood of the northern kingdom of Israel some generations earlier. Jehonadab was evidently something of a YHWH-ist fanatic, though we do not know if his vow began before the slaughter of the priests of Baal, and so was symptomatic of his fanaticism, or after, as a form of penitence. The point is, the tradition the Recabites inherited was…mixed. There was difficulty in it. “Why do you not drink?” “Because of an arbitrary vow our ancestor took.” “Who was your ancestor?” “A mass-murdering religious fanatic.” “Oh. Why obey his vow?” “Because.” My point here is not to say that every single inherited moral idea must be obeyed without exception; this discussion is explicitly within the context of, and limited to, a debate about a practice that is certainly adiaphora: drinking. An inherited tradition of, say, human sacrifice, is probably worth abandoning. We may abandon inherited ethical traditions because of their content, but should not simply because of their historical context.
The Recabites’ arbitrary, irrational, problematic, counter-cultural lifestyle, however, is ultimately used as a signpost for Judah. “Come and learn a lesson about how to obey me,” says the Lord.
I can imagine no more awesome thing to be said about one’s religious practice than for God to have a prophet say to your whole country, “See these guys over here who have had this weirdo religious practice all these years? They are the example I will hold up.”
My family has not taken some oath-unto-the-20th-generation. But nonetheless, this alcohol thing… there’s something to it. There is value in visible and uncomfortable markers of faith: ashen foreheads, sprite during a toast, New Year’s celebrations in early December, unassumingness in dress, wishing people “Merry Christmas.” When we mark ourselves, we make our nonbelieving neighbors into accountability partners. They hold us to a better standard than we would if we could simply blend in. And, for me, now that I am part of this tradition and a recipient of this way of living, to simply turn about and assert that I will live under some other code and, oh, how convenient, now I get to drink… it is not so simple for me. We modern-day Recabites don’t always understand why we have to live the way we do, but we trust that there was a reason at the time, and that, one day, God will honor every sacrifice and difficulty. Every job lost because you couldn’t network at the bar the same way will get its eternal reward. To abandon that view would be a kind of personalized faithlessness. Not for everyone, but for me.
Historically, the social role of alcohol has varied widely. Benjamin actually, if anything, understates the extent of the role of alcohol in pre-modern Christian or Israelite societies. Archaeologists believe that alcoholic beverages may have made up between 25% and 50% of the dietary intake of late Bronze/Early iron age sedentary Israelite settlements in the highlands of Ephraim, Benjamin, Manasseh, and Judah. They were literally surviving on alcohol. The soil simply could not produce enough nutrients to support the population on unrefined crops available at the time, so caloric multipliers were a necessity of survival, hence, fermentation!
The same goes for many societies, especially in their urban centers, where the water was not reliably drinkable: alcohol was comparatively clean and sanitary, so people consumed alcohol.
Throughout history, then, on some level a blanket condemnation of alcohol would have fundamentally damaged a huge number of social outcomes. Starvation and disease could have resulted from society-wide abstention.
But even then, it’s not like Christians of the past said “Drink for sanitary and caloric reasons, but never for fun!” No, they drank for fun too! Scripture is full of verses referencing the gladdening effects of alcohol, and Christian history is not short of jolly consumption.
But we need to remember something about pre-modern alcohol consumption, and indeed pre-modern life generally. Most people lived in small, rural communities with tight constraints on real resources like time, agricultural surplus, and cash. Few people earned cash incomes that then yielded them a surplus for use on discretionary consumption, and most people were consuming largely from household or community production.
In other words, access to alcohol in the quantities necessary for drunken-ness could be inconsistent. Now look, I’m not saying people didn’t get drunk; they did! And the sheer volume of consumption suggests that probably most people were at least a little buzzed most of the time in many societies (sidenote: and you wondered why history was violent!). But the point is that if you wanted to get drunk every night, you would have had to be quite rich, or an exceptionally efficient beer-maker. In other words, binge-drinking as we think of it today was probably less common, as alcohol had a primarily food-related role, consumption for pleasure was probably mostly in social or communal settings where consequences may have been lower, and frequent binge-drinking was probably logistically challenging.
This probably began to change with growing urbanization and rising living standards after the Bubonic Plague and then the Renaissance. But it definitely made a massive change once the Industrial Revolution moved a rapidly-growing share of the population away from subsistence or communitarian agriculture with household production towards a cash-wage system. It turns out that, given money, people will often spend it on addictive substances like alcohol. See, for a neglectful farmer-father to feed himself he had to grow crops, and growing crops for himself usually meant for his family too, if only due to efficiency and fixed costs. But for a neglectful worker-father, cash wages earned essentially alone could be redeployed essentially alone for individual preferences: alcohol!
But, again, this isn’t necessarily a huge problem because wages really were not that high, and old norms take a long time to kill, and, besides, beer and wine are just not that alcoholic.
Distillation of alcoholic beverages was invented in Europe in the 1100s, and grew into real popularity in the 1300s and 1400s. But no scientific guides to distillation would be written until the 1500s and 1600s, and early distilling techniques were cumbersome, making it hard to produce large volumes at a time. So distilled spirits were expensive, even as incomes in the pre-industrial societies of historical Christianity were low.
It was not until the 1700s, then, that distillation technology had improved sufficiently to produce highly alcoholic, pleasant-to-drink beverages in large quantities at prices low enough for rising worker incomes to be able to afford large quantities. In other words, after the industrialization of society in the 1700s and 1800s, producing large quantities of very high-proof alcohol became much easier, and many more people were able to afford that alcohol, vastly expanding opportunities for excessive alcohol consumption.
In his article, Benjamin notes that temperance movements in the US were associated with women’s suffrage movements. He made little effort to explain why this was. The reason is fairly straightforward: women and children were often the victims of an increasingly terrible alcohol culture.
Over the late 1700s and early 1800s, huge advances were made not just in making alcohol cheaper, but also in making it better tasting, especially for distilled beverages. Bourbon began to be produced in the 1770s, but didn’t really get serious attention to distillation for taste until the 1830s, and even that took a while to perfect.
Is it any wonder that people who lacked many legal protections, lacked political voice, and lacked the liberty to lead a fully independent life joined a protest movement against alcohol? How many times does your drunk factory-worker husband have to wander home from the saloon and beat you or your kids before you decide alcohol is a problem? American and European alcoholism of the Industrial Revolution was unlike anything that has ever been before or, I pray, ever will be again. In 1830, Americans consumed, on average, between 4 and 7 gallons of alcohol per year. Today, we consume, on average, about 2 gallons of alcohol per year. The hardest-drinking country on earth, Belarus, consumes between 4 and 5 gallons a year, and it causes huge health and welfare problems. The hardest-drinking country in modern Europe, Portugal, consumes about 3.5 gallons a year. All of that to say, American consumption before the Civil War was as high or higher than anything else in the entire world today and, spoiler: many countries today do have serious alcohol problems.
No wonder people of conscience, the same people who were busy working to abolish slavery and get women the right to vote, tried to put legal restrictions on alcohol and discourage consumption of it. And, to be honest, we should heap shame on those people and communities that idly tolerated this level of self-destruction, offering nothing but platitudes against excess, and meanwhile taking no action to try and repair families being crushed under the weight of unbelievably high alcohol consumption.
The temperance movement succeeded in greatly reducing the amount of alcohol Americans consume through a mixture of changed social mores and political action, although changing economics helped quite a bit too. And they made mistakes too: banning alcohol under Prohibition was a grievous mistake as it empowered criminals, crippled local government funding, destroyed many vibrant local economies, and also banned something that has a valid, legitimate place in society.
But from 1897 on, another threat has reared its head: drunk driving. Indeed, the advent of the automobile and the increasing suburbanization of America has made alcohol more lethal than it was in the past, giving even more reason to be cautious of it, and to worry about its social effects.
Today, we live in a society where alcohol is cheap and varieties abundant, the opportunities for alcohol to cause severe social ills are numerous, and where millions of Americans struggle with alcoholism. Moreover, a large number of Americans say that alcohol has damaged their families. At the same time, binge-drinking is rising. And that gets to a key problem in Benjamin’s analysis.
Binge drinking, or having a large number of drinks in a narrow period of time, usually for the express purpose of achieving drunkenness, is nearly universally viewed as bad. It is one of the primary culprits behind drunk driving, abusive behavior, and many of the other social ills of alcohol.
Benjamin argues that the judgmental rigor of groups like Southern Baptists serves to increase binge drinking. I think that’s nonsense.
Here’s a map of the prevalence of binge drinking, from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation:
Well, well, well. Looks like areas associated with religious opposition to drinking, like Mormon-land and the south, have lower rates of binge-drinking, while areas associated with more permissive religious traditions, like Lutheranism, have much higher rates of binge-drinking.
Let’s be clear. Religious condemnation of drinking does not cause binge drinking. It reduces binge drinking. It is nonsensical to think that strong social mores and norms opposed to alcohol would cause more alcoholic consumption. It’s the same kind of ridiculous reasoning that leads people to say you shouldn’t tell your kids “no” to things because then they want to break the rule: sure, some people do have that reaction. But the vast majority of adults aren’t the comically evil supervillains that children are, and they understand that violating social norms has consequences, and that, usually, there are reasons for social norms.
By the way, here’s a map of the rate of change of binge drinking:
Hello Kentucky!
This should explain some of the reason why I, personally, choose not to drink: because I live in a place where alcoholism is getting worse, and fast. Now, notably, there is probably some survey error here: it doesn’t make sense that there would be such a sharp break for Virginia and Kentucky, but the general trend is probably correct.
So What’s Your Point?
Benjamin argues that (1) Alcohol consumption is the norm in Christian history, (2) Alcohol consumption for pleasure is a normative good, (3) We should stridently defend the right to consume in moderation, (4) Advocates of reduced consumption or nonconsumption do serious damage, even causing binge drinking, (5) We should all feel fine, religiously speaking, about drinking as much as we please, as long as we’re not alcoholics.
I agree with (1), though I would also note that passionate, principled, spiritually-motivated nonconsumption has also been normative for a minority of Christians effectively forever, and certainly ever since clean water became widely available. I agree with (2), though I also note that scripture frequently identifies problems associated with even non-drunken consumption of alcohol, though usually for prudential caution, not moral restriction. I more-or-less agree with (3), though, again, we must hedge noting that nonconsumption is frequently used by God as a special sign of faithfulness, thus nonconsumption is itself laudable even as joy in consumption is good as well. I passionately disagree with (4), as it is empirically false that teetotaling causes binge drinking, and as alcohol has in the past and continues to today cause serious social harm. This doesn’t mean we should ban it or tell people who drink it to be ashamed of themselves! It does, however, mean we should be at least as, probably more, strident in condemning alcoholism as we are in critiquing teetotalers. Concern about alcoholism should be the normative mood when considering alcoholic consumption.
And (5) is especially worrisome. Even if alcohol is a good thing to drink, it may be a bad thing to drink.
What? How can that be?
Simple: we are exhorted in scripture not to erect stumbling blocks to others. In the presence of a recovering alcoholic? You should abstain. Scripture also exhorts us, in reference to meat sacrificed to idols, not to consume things our brothers and sisters in Christ view as forbidden, as we should not trouble their conscience. Are you in the presence of someone who views alcohol as sinful (not me, but other more stringent teetotalers) or particularly worrisome and damaging? You should abstain. Do not even ask to store alcohol in their fridge.
Parting Thoughts
This is how Benjamin ended his post:
For myself, I am personally frustrated by the level of condescension towards an ancient and honorable tradition of abstention on display in these two paragraphs. Some people may see the post as permission to drink irresponsibly — because it laid out the argument at one point that violence against teetotalers is acceptable! How do you go from “I worry people will take this too far” to “It might be fine to beat up non-drinkers”!? Seriously?
I’ll go on record here and say I think John Chrysostom was wrong and it’s not fine to use violence against my fellow believer based on his views of what we should eat or not eat, drink or not drink. Cue Romans 14 once again. I know it’s terribly bold of me to disagree with Chrysostom, but then again, he didn’t know what a couple shots of vodka look like behind the wheel. I’ll give the blessed old father a pass on his error here.
Regarding the comparison of coffee-shops and hypothetical church bars, I don’t think it’s fundamentally a terrible idea for a church do serve alcohol. My church provides alcohol at our Octoberfest. It’s not a sin.
But, ya know what? You probably don’t need a beer at 9 in the morning before church. Even the apostles famously didn’t get drunk in the morning, and in our society morning-drinking is usually seen as symptomatic of alcoholism. Furthermore, coffee is provided to help people wake up. Revolutionary, I know. Alcohol, meanwhile, tends to make many people drowsy: not a great idea right before church. I can’t imagine the church fathers being excited at the idea of church leadership deciding to reduce the attentiveness of the congregation. Plus, early Christians often fasted until communion in the morning, so wouldn’t have been drinking a beer before church anyways.
There’s a bigger question of course with both coffee shops and bars in churches: ought the church be engaged in commercial activity? I mean no disrespect to Benjamin Sledge here when I say I found it jarring to hear a justification for opening a church bar being “the money we could raise,” meaning profits earned from parishioners. I know many people have different feelings about this, but I for one have serious concerns about commercial ventures operating within the church.
Finally, let’s just acknowledge the nonsense idea that putting a bar in a church will lead to a modern-day Copernicus or Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard’s Danish Lutheran churches did not have bars in them, oddly enough. And of course, modern Christian innovators and brilliant minds are not hard to find: Francis Collins, Alvin Plantinga, or Cher Wang. Nor has teetotaling seemed to make it hard for anybody to get ahead even in hard-drinking fields like politics, as, for example, neither Bush Jr., Romney, nor Trump drink alcohol. So I’ll be honest that I find the idea of church bars driving some Christian cultural renaissance pretty silly: Christian cultural success is not hard to find already, and the period of Christian super-dominance did not coincide with church bars. It’s just a hyperbolic nonsense-argument.
So yes, enjoy alcohol responsibly and with enthusiasm and zeal for the good gifts God has given! I love alcohol culture despite not drinking because I love how alcohol preserves generations of history, craft, care, expertise, learning, and family. An old brand of bourbon is a time capsule in a way. All these are good things!
But don’t drink with the friend who you all kind of worry drinks too much but nobody has confronted him about it. Don’t invite your Southern Baptist friend over then pour yourself a glass of wine. Don’t put down the concerns of your Wesleyan cousin about alcohol’s effects on society because, ya know what, alcohol kills over 80,000 people every year in the US. And remind yourself while you enjoy the good gifts God has given that when push came to shove for Judah, God looked down and lifted up teetotaling oath-keepers, people who radically followed an antiquated and dubious religious practice, as the signpost of faithfulness to a faithless people. Now, granted, Jeremiah the prophet himself did drink, so it’s not like God was condemning drinking.
I don’t know that I’m actually terribly far off from Benjamin in terms of my view of alcohol, and it is not my intention to be too overly critical of him. I do think he’s unfairly harsh to non-drinking religious traditions and far too optimistic about alcohol’s benefits, but let he who is without fault cast the first stone. I’m sure I’m off-base in places as well.
No human being is perfect. This means we sin, yes, but it also means none of us can experience the fullness of God. We can each only experience slivers of his goodness. I love that my wife experiences the good gift of nice alcohol. It’s been fun in the years I’ve known her to see her tastes change, and I love bringing home a unique bottle when I travel for work. And I also love the experience I have of singled-out-ness, of constant social self-reminding that God demands things of me that I do not understand but must accept. I hope that, as the legacy of traditional Americanized Protestantism fades, we will develop a more balanced view of alcohol, which can celebrate all the various good gifts that God has given.
PS- A few technical notes. Keep in mind much alcohol consumed historically was re-used material and had low alcohol content or poor quality. Saying they drank ale 3 meals a day does not mean they drank a modern ale 3 meals a day. Many historians suspect medieval beer frequently had just 2% ABV. Furthermore, I mention the sanitary use of alcohol, but note this is really exaggerated; historical accounts of widespread water-drinking are very common.
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I’m a native of Wilmore, Kentucky, a graduate of Transylvania University, and also the George Washington University’s Elliott School. My real job is as an economist at USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Service, where I analyze and forecast cotton market conditions. I’m married to a kickass Kentucky woman named Ruth.
My posts are not endorsed by and do not in any way represent the opinions of the United States government or any branch, department, agency, or division of it. My writing represents exclusively my own opinions. I did not receive any financial support or remuneration from any party for this research.
