Another Look at Abstinence

EDITORIALS

The most destructive drug in general use today is the one whose massively harmful effects are least noticed.

“You can worry all you want about any future addiction to narcotics among our population,” says one survey, “yet it will never be more than a small fraction of the problem we already have with addiction to alcohol.”

Government officials call alcoholism the nation’s number-one health problem, and it is getting worse. Researchers at George Washington University say there now may be as many as nine million persons in America who are alcoholics (nearly one in twenty!), and many millions more on the verge of a serious drinking problem. The World Health Organization says the United States has the highest rate of alcoholism in the world. American industry alone loses an estimated $2 billion a year from the effects of alcohol; the cost of crime spawned by alcohol undoubtedly eclipses that figure.

The most appalling effect is the great loss of innocent life. Alcohol is a causal factor in some 25,000 traffic deaths and 200,000 injuries each year. Forty-four per cent of all drivers at fault in two-car accidents are legally drunk, says the Utica Mutual Insurance Company. One driver out of every fifty, according to a recent U. S. Department of Transportation study, is drunk.

The saddest part of the problem is that virtually nothing is being done about it. Hardly anyone seems to care. Why?

The notoriety of prohibition threw temperance forces into a tailspin, and they have been reeling ever since. After repeal, alcoholic beverages took on an attractively naughty kind of respectability. The industry spends nearly $200 million a year on advertising to add glamor to the image.

An increasing number of Christians, most of whom don’t bother to examine the sordid side, are yielding to the trend. Many simply assume that abstinence is an old cultural carryover and one that can be discarded without serious repercussions. Even Carl McIntire fails to say much about the evils of alcohol any more.

Some Christians, unfortunately, begin to imbibe out of social pressure or sheer pride or rebellion. There is a certain appeal in the cry to break the shackles of so-called legalism, and there is a desire not to be thought of as an obscurantist, which any association with the anti-liquor lobby is apt to bring about. More serious is the situation in which the Christian begins to drink to relieve tension, forget worries, or escape from reality. Those who drink to escape, say Washington researchers, are most likely to get into trouble.

Evangelicals in North America need to examine the alcohol problem anew. Intimidated by the fallout from prohibition, they have looked the other way too long. Meanwhile, thousands die and millions suffer.

Many Christians, for their own reasons, will argue against promotion of abstinence as an answer to the alcohol problem. Their opposition, however, tends to be along pragmatic lines. Most would agree that abstinence is in fact a good solution. The argument for abstinence, if considered dispassionately, can be persuasive.

Abstinence commends itself primarily because, like preventive medicine, it allays a great many risks. In principle, the use of alcohol is not unlike Russian roulette: a substantial proportion of those who intend to confine themselves to occasional use of alcohol are automatically hooked into habitual use, with all the attendant evils. The only remedy is to try to get off the bottle altogether. Authorities agree that for such people, moderation is impossible.

But there is more than risk involved in the use of alcohol. There is inevitable harm, to oneself and to others. Recent research shows that brain cells die when alcohol is introduced into the bloodstream, and that the heart, liver, and kidneys also are affected. Tests made at medical schools show that even a small amount takes its toll. Colman McCarthy of the Washington Post, in an intensive analysis of the alcohol problem, declared: “Many social drinkers, particularly those with a sophisticated self-image, laugh off the effects of alcohol. Yet even one mild drink hampers both intelligence and efficiency.”

Reduced intellectual capacity entails a diminished moral capacity. The person who subjects himself to the influence of alcohol invites an assortment of new temptations unnecessarily. And from a biblical standpoint, that is a decidedly indefensible act.

The Christian who uses alcohol sets a poor example. Not only are “weaker brethren” caused to stumble, but money spent on alcohol amounts to poor stewardship. The alcoholic-beverage industry in the United States grosses $12 billion a year, which is nearly four times the current budget of the much-maligned NASA.

In the face of all this, are there good reasons to favor the use of alcohol? Christ’s turning water into wine is no argument at all, because in his day few nonalcoholic beverages were available, and wine was probably the safest thing to drink. In our day wine and particularly distilled beverages are typically much stronger, and their adverse social consequences are infinitely greater. Paul’s advice to use wine as a medical measure may suggest that even in the first century its use was not habitual. Today we have hundreds of better alternatives in beverages as well as in medicine. Abstinence cannot be defended as a direct biblical injunction, but as in the matters of slavery and polygamy, a good case can be built on a deductive basis from biblical principles. In our day abstinence is at least a sensible biblical option.

Beyond this, Christians should be involved in working for the enactment and enforcement of laws that curb the activities of those who drink. Alcoholics are unfit to drive cars, for example, and ought not to be allowed to retain licenses. Today’s manner of living is complicated enough without the added problem of irresponsible behavior on the part of those who have lost control of their faculties. Similar restrictions should hold true for those who use other drugs, whether they be opiates, stimulants, psychedelics, or depressants.

Not By (Episcopal) Bread Alone

Just before the sixty-third General Convention of the Episcopal Church in Houston, Texas, last month (see News, page 43), a small delegation of students from the University of Texas “disrupted” the church’s Executive Council meeting and rebuked its members for aiding student strikes across the nation. The council last May had recommended that offerings be taken to support student strikes.

The council later repealed the strike resolution, not in response to the University of Texas students but because church lawyers feared the council’s tax-exempt status might be endangered.

The uninvited students, led by Episcopalian Mike Wilson, also struck at the council’s policy of making grants to militant minority groups, saying that “lump sums” are the most depersonalizing form of assistance.

Wilson called “hogwash” the contentions of several Episcopal bishops that student agitators are calling for a return to Christian values. “It is our conviction that … the radical student leaders on the campuses are not representative of America’s young people, and you are hurting those who stand up against the violent disrupters by supporting the minority you do,” Wilson said.

Wilson then had the audacity to add that if the church wished to be relevant to students, it should take them the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Despite that, Wilson was wasting his breath; the council ignored his plea. It’s interesting to speculate what the council would have done had Wilson and company been radicals. Very likely, radicals would have gotten bread, whereas Wilson got a stone for his trouble.

The Episcopal Church has been making headlines lately for throwing open its doors to hear the discordant voices of youth, minorities, the deprived, and the dispossessed. Commendable concern. But we think it may be almost too late already for the church to heed other voices in time to save itself from being dismantled by agitators and wrecked by those whose real purpose is to seize control for political and economic power.

We urge the Episcopal Church to heed those voices—they may still be a majority—asking the church to provide the spiritual food that Jesus alone can bestow.

Radicals On The Rampage

Some political leaders such as Senator Fulbright apparently would have us believe that Communism presents no substantial threat to the world and that time has changed its revolutionary thrust to one of peaceful coexistence. Recently Senator McGovern (D.-S.D.) advocated admission of Red China to the United Nations as the first step in abandoning an “obsession with Communism.” China, he said, “is hardly a monolith ready to threaten the world.” The lion has become a lamb, according to this view; those who question it are accused of having a paranoid streak that compels them to look for a Communist under every bush.

But world events continue to refute the thesis that Communism is a peaceful political system, that it is not working for the death of democracy and the overthrow of non-Communist governments. Witness the terrorist activities of the Quebec Liberation Front (FLQ) in Canada, whose members kidnapped a British diplomat and the Quebec labor minister, used them as hostages for ransom and a one-way trip to Cuba, and then committed murder. Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, declaring that a state of insurrection existed, called out troops to protect the government and to arrest hundreds of the conspirators. According to the Christian Science Monitor, a highly respected newspaper not given to fanciful speculation, there is adequate evidence for the claim that leading members of the FLQ were trained in Cuba and Algeria, Soviet outposts of aggression. It is ironic that at the very time Canada recognized the Communist regime of Red China, it was faced with the problem of whether to break off diplomatic relations with another Communist state, Cuba, an obvious source of much of its present unrest and rebellion.

Meanwhile, in the United States a wave of bombings has shown all too clearly that the threat of left-wing radicals to bring down the government is not be taken lightly. The murder of a California judge in the attempted escape of the so-called Soledad Brothers, and the suspected involvement of Communist-party member Angela Davis, recently apprehended by the FBI, is a case in point.

It makes little difference whether bombings and insurrections bear a “made in Moscow” or a “made in Cuba”—or Algeria or China—label. It also makes little difference whether one can point to a planned conspiracy with juridical precision. The indisputable fact is that the Western democracies are under siege, and that the sources of much of the impetus for violence, insurrection, and revolution are plain.

Although there is no cause for panic, there are good reasons to be aware of the problem, concerned over its spread, and determined that the current rash of terrorism must be stopped. The proper response to the depredations of the left, however, is not to turn to the extreme right, which is no less totalitarian than Communism.

It’s high time for the democracies to set their houses in order and to use whatever force is necessary to quell these disturbances and put the revolutionaries behind bars, where they belong.

Which Way Chile?

Salvador Allende (Gossens) became Chile’s president—and the first freely elected Communist president in history—by a minuscule plurality. He polled 36 per cent of the vote against 35 per cent and 28 per cent for the other two candidates, and the Chilean congress had to decide whether he would receive the office.

That he was a minority choice clearly says that the Chileans are by no means committed to Communism. But the big question is whether the country can survive as a democracy. For a democracy to function, there must be at least two political parties, and free elections in which candidates represent at least two parties. But a Communist “people’s democracy” is a one-party affair; a second party is no longer necessary, Communists say, once the proletariat has secured control. Everyone who thinks right will belong to the one party. Anyone who thinks otherwise displays the bourgeois mentality and shows himself to be against the people’s democracy—and this cannot be permitted.

No Communist, be it Allende, Castro, Brezhnev, or Mao, can remain true to Communist tenets and yet allow for two parties and free elections. To do so would be an act of treason against traditional doctrine.

The future of democracy in Chile looks grim.

Fat Thoughts

If Julius Caesar were to appear in the twentieth century, he might fare best among evangelicals. “Let me have men about me that are fat,” Shakespeare had him say:

Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look;

He thinks too much; such men are dangerous.

Obesity is no gauge of orthodoxy, of course. But a glimpse from the rear of an evangelical gathering tends to nurture the notion that many who relish heavenly citizenship take exceeding great pleasure in a certain aspect of earthly existence—that, in other words, Christians who carefully abstain from six of the deadly sins may come within a gulp of committing gluttony.

Perhaps they consider eating a safe pastime. St. Jerome, for one, thought it an insubstantial one. “A fat paunch,” he said, “never breeds fine thoughts.” Those who crave the mind of Christ, who “hunger and thirst for righteousness,” need to feed on the fruit of the Spirit. If overfed Christians ate less, they could give more thought—and action—to fattening the Kingdom of God.

That Women’S Rights Amendment

The Congress of the United States has acted injudiciously—one is tempted to say stupidly—in its consideration of a constitutional amendment to assure women of equal rights with men before the law. Use of the archaic device of the filibuster and the senseless tacking on of unrelated amendments guaranteed that members of the Senate would not pass the bill before returning home to the political hustings. Few observers hold out any hope for the bill after the election when a lame-duck Congress convenes for a few short weeks.

But although the amendment itself may be dead, the issue is very much alive, as it should be. Some states have archaic laws limiting the rights of women: in California, for example, women must obtain a court order to start an independent business; in eight states, women cannot contract or sign leases until age twenty-one, whereas for men the age is eighteen. Everywhere women doing the same work as men are paid lower wages. This state of affairs should not be allowed to continue.

Some say that the road to equality for women lies in the judicial rather than the legislative processes, via the fourteenth amendment. But this might take a long, long time. The better and the quicker way seems to be a constitutional amendment. Simple justice calls for action. And the least the legislative branch can do is give the states the opportunity to decide whether the Constitution should be amended. When the new Congress convenes next January, the women’s rights amendment should be given high priority.

Radio’S Niche

Commercial radio broadcasting which began fifty years ago this month and underwent a transformation in format with the advent of TV, is today enjoying unparalleled prosperity. The Radio Advertising Bureau estimates there are now 58 per cent more radios than people in the United States!

Two facts about the radio audience should be of special interest to the Church. One is that more people listen between 7 and 9 A.M. than during any other two-hour period. This is also the most effective time to reach people, because the problems and other distractions of the day have not yet gotten to them. Christian programming should focus on these early hours.

Second, teen-agers listen to radio more than any other age group. For the Church this is the most crucial period, because the drop-out rate is highest during these years. Are we not overdue for development of Christian outreaches to teen-agers via radio?

Series Sequel?

Major-league baseball took a long time to accept black players. It took even longer to accept black umpires, and not until this year did one get the chance to work a World Series.

Like so many blacks in other professions, the talented Emmett Ashford had a wait problem while umpiring in the minors. He was not promoted to the majors until he was fifty, and now he is at the mandatory retirement age of fifty-five. Had the 1970 World Series gone six games, Ashford would have been behind the plate, but the Baltimore Orioles’ dismantlement of the “Big Red Machine” from Cincinnati precluded that possibility (the umpires themselves almost deprived Ashford of his big chance by staging a brief strike for more money).

Whites can never make up for what they have denied blacks in the past, but this seems to be one small area where a gesture of restitution would be appropriate. Baseball executives might well consider inviting Ashford to work another year and another World Series. The negative exceptions made against the blacks are a blot on the American conscience. Surely a positive exception would be in order.

Halfway Help

What happens to a prisoner after he has served his term and is released? Having “learned his lesson” and “paid his debt to society,” does he settle down and earn an honest living, pay taxes, and join the rest of us in complaining about war, inflation, and pollution? We all know that the answer is, unfortunately, no. The present penal system, suffering from inadequate funding and poorly qualified personnel, is simply not accomplishing the task we set for it. Instead of combining punishment with correction and rehabilitation, it tends to confirm a prisoner in his anti-social behavior.

Since many people from poor backgrounds do not enter into a life of crime, those who do cannot shift all the blame to their circumstances. However, it should not surprise us when an ex-convict who has had little or no help in acquiring a useful trade and in adjusting to society in a non-criminal way finds himself once again engaging in the pattern of life to which he formerly was accustomed. The parole system is supposed to ease the transition. But excessive case loads and poor funding make its effectiveness minimal.

What is needed are more “halfway houses” where a released prisoner, living in the company of others who want to break out of criminal patterns, can avoid the companionship of those who will cajole him once more into wrongdoing. Ideally, the halfway house would provide psychological counseling, both individual and group, to help him gain insight into what has motivated his behavior and how to alter it. It would also assist him in finding and holding a suitable job.

Over the centuries, Christians have pioneered in founding institutions, such as schools, hospitals, and orphanages, that society as a whole has come to value and to provide. The halfway house for released prisoners is the kind of institution that needs pioneering in our time. The costs would be high, but not nearly so high as the cost of crime—including apprehending, prosecuting, and imprisoning the criminal.

Moreover, Christian-sponsored halfway houses, like Christian rescue missions, afford an excellent opportunity to proclaim the good news of divine forgiveness for even the worst of crimes. Those who know they are pardoned sinners in the sight of God should be in the forefront of attempts to reclaim others from a life of crime.

Delicious Morsels, Deadly Poison

Two verses in the Book of Proverbs are exactly alike: “The words of a whisperer are like delicious morsels; they go down into the inner parts of the body” (18:8, 26:22). A “whisperer” is, of course, a talebearer, a gossip, one who passes along to others what he should keep to himself.

It is always wrong to gossip about things we know to be untrue. This is lying. It is equally wrong to gossip about things of which we are not certain. This is pawning the truth. And it is also wrong to spread damaging information that we know to be true, unless there are compelling reasons for doing so. Once such information is circulated, the damage is irrevocably done.

The story is told of a peasant who slandered a friend. Upon discovering that what he had said was untrue, he went to the village monk for help. The monk told him to take a bag of feathers and to place one feather on each doorstep of his community. This he did, and then he returned to the monk, announcing that he had completed the penance for his sin. But the monk sternly ordered him to take his bag and pick up each feather he had dropped. When the man replied that by this time the wind had blown the feathers away and they were irrecoverable, the monk reminded him that words are like feathers: once they are dropped, and that easily, it is impossible to get them back.

Talebearing is a sin belonging to the tongue, which James describes as an unruly member that stains the whole body, sets on fire the cycle of nature, and is itself set on fire by hell. It is, he says, “a restless evil, full of deadly poison.” Taming the tongue is a most difficult undertaking—but a necessary one. One who cannot control his tongue is liable to wound others deeply, perhaps leaving lasting scars. A good day’s-end question for each of us is: Have I hurt anyone today by saying something untrue, unkind, or unnecessary?

Diabolical Didactics

Satan looked through lazy smoke-ribbons at his subordinate, Fireball, and said, “You bring a report from earth?”

“Affirmative, Majesty,” said Fireball. “Things are going great for us. Business is booming. Crime in America alone has zoomed 99 per cent since 1960. Drug addiction is growing like wild. The city streets are dangerous. I walk about my assigned territory, the United States, and say with one of their own, ‘How sweet it is!’ ”

“Is the Enemy making any successful resistance?”

Fireball chuckled: “I have observed nothing to get us uptight. Lots of talk—committee meetings, dialogues, resolutions, that sort of thing. Now and then, of course, someone manages to toss in a Molotov cocktail. I mean, there’s always someone around who doesn’t like sin. But all in all, things are going nicely.

Satan frowned. “It might be well to stir up a few more to preach against sin.”

“I beg your pardon, Majesty?”

“Against overt sin, that is. Rape, robbery, murder, even the Mafia. This will help detract them from their real problem.”

“Will you elaborate, sir?”

Satan grinned a crooked grin. “You’ve been with me all this time and still don’t understand? Man’s real problems are not war, theft, and things like that. Take war, for instance. Man has always had it—and always he has talked about peace. But the more he talks, the further he seems to get from realizing peace.”

“I see. What’s important is what causes wars and other things.”

“Correct. We must remember why man is bedeviled by so many things.”

Fireball chortled. “You put it admirably, sir—‘bedeviled!’ ”

“Man must be prevented from really examining his disease,” said the devil. “We have to keep him from making a proper diagnosis—keep him forever looking at symptoms.”

“Even if man is offered a remedy for his condition,” said Fireball brightly, “without a proper diagnosis he will not so much as try the remedy!”

“Right,” Satan growled. “He’ll keep on trying one futile corrective after another. He will preach mightily, teach brilliantly, engage in powerful action, stir up revolutions, change systems, claim victories—but he will never really win. His very struggle to be free will contribute to our cause.”

“Fabulous!” breathed Fireball.

Smoke drifted across Satan’s sudden frown. “But we’ve got to keep an eye on those who do know the right diagnosis. Remember that there are more of them around than just Billy Graham! They know what man’s trouble really is—‘sin in the heart’ they call it. We have to watch them closely.”

“Our chief task, then, is to keep men away from themselves—right, Majesty?”

“Well said. They must keep trying to save others while they themselves are not saved.”

“Keep the blind leading the blind—that’s our thing, isn’t it?” asked Fireball.

Satan grimaced. “Much as I dislike your earth jargon, yes. For millennia we have worked this thing. You would have thought they’d have caught on by now. But they haven’t. Their disease is curable, but not without the true diagnosis. Note how the Enemy when he was on earth did not preach much on what man now emphasizes. Oh, he knew! He knew the only way to end war and racial strife and bad politics. The heart, he told them. That’s where it all begins. Just make mankind blind to that one thing and we are ahead of the game.”

“Why has it been so easy for us to keep men away from themselves?” asked the underling.

“Little brother, long ago we made the human heart a rebel against the Creator. We have kept man a rebel. We see that he does not face the fact of the Enemy’s sovereignty. We see that he hangs on to his pride.”

“You mean we make him like us?” asked Fireball.

Satan glowered. “Just remember: Attract man by any kind of goings-on outside himself. Let him be moral, pious, Bible-minded, even theologically conservative. But never let him see his real need. Don’t let that Spirit get in him who marched those first believers across the world! Never let men understand that happening! Give them a Pentecost Sunday, allow them to preach on the theme—but never let them have such an experience!”

“Never!” exclaimed Fireball.

“Steer man from grace by making him self-sufficient. A thousand things ought to make him humble—his inability to set his world in order, his repetition of stupid operations, the way he clutters up his earthly spaceship with ridiculous trash, the manner in which he drives himself toward the gulf of despair. But we must keep him proud. Keep him on his feet and off his knees! Make him feel like a god—even when global ruin stares him in the face because of his failures. To repeat: Keep him away from himself!”

“I dig you!” cried Fireball enthusiastically.

The devil snorted. “You and your twentieth-century slang! Return to your post and remember: The battle is ours as long as we can keep man from taking that long hard look at his own inner being. Without that look he will keep thinking he can survive without help from another World—and so he will never come to the end of his tunnel.”

“How sweet it is!” exulted Fireball.—LON WOODRUM, author and evangelist, Hastings, Michigan.

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