Demon Rum on the Run

A recent advertisement in Time magazine caught my eye. The headline shouted: “Miller Introduces New Brew With Breakthrough Taste.” The ad pictured a bottle and full glass, looking for all the world like beer. But then I read the text: “A new brewing process gives beer drinkers across the country real beer taste in a nonalcoholic brew.”

So here it is: nonalcoholic beer. Something called “Sharp’s” joins Kingsbury, Kaliber, and Moussy in a soon-to-be-crowded market of malt-based drinks that supposedly taste like beer but are not intoxicating. It has “the breakthrough taste that lets you keep your edge”—whatever that means.

When breweries start bringing out beer substitutes, you know things are changing. This is but the latest sign of a gradual shift in U.S. attitudes about drinking alcoholic beverages.

Consider the facts: Per-capita consumption of alcohol dropped significantly over the last decade. According to a story in the New York Times, from 1980 to 1987 beer drinking was down 7 percent; wine, 14 percent; and distilled spirits, 23 percent. Impact, an industry source, projects that these trends will continue past the end of the century. A 1989 Gallup poll indicated that the percentage of Americans who occasionally drink alcohol fell from 63 percent in 1987 to 56 percent now. Baseball stadiums are increasingly restricting the sale of beer—and most fans approve.

The reasons for this shift are not hard to find. The changing attitudes are part of larger trends toward more healthful living and concern for the social environment. Today one can make a reasonable case against alcohol consumption from several different angles: personal health; concern for others, particularly youth; concern with highway safety; resistance to harmful addictions; safeguard of the unborn; concern about pure and safe foods and beverages. Put these together and you have a recipe for attitudes that discourage drinking. Maybe we are finally beginning to see what Harry Emerson Fosdick predicted in the third year after Prohibition ended: “Once more we face that traffic, everywhere anti-social, not to say criminal in its consequences.… as sure as history repeats itself a revolt is due, a change of public attitude born out of disgust with and fear of the intolerable estate we now are in.”

The Battle Is Not Over

This is hardly to suggest, however, that the battle with Demon Rum is over. Consumption and abuse of alcoholic beverages is still high, and the proalcohol lobbies are filthy rich and working overtime. Surveys show most Americans still think occasional drinking is fine. Though college students drink more moderately than most people think, according to a recent survey reported in Psychology Today, 62 percent of undergraduates polled said getting drunk occasionally is okay as long as it does not interfere with other activities.

Although the tide has begun to turn against alcohol consumption, drinking and its effects still represent one of the most vicious crimes against society. Alcoholism is the third-largest health problem in the United States. One out of three American families (according to the Gallup Poll) reports problems arising from alcohol. Every year over 10,000 Americans under age 25 are killed in alcohol-related traffic accidents.

Recently it has been shown that a father’s drinking can have adverse prenatal effects on his children. Rita Robinson, writing in the June 1988 issue of Health, reports on a University of Michigan study: “A father’s drinking during the month of conception may play a more significant role in decreased infant birth weight than the mother’s.” According to the study, she says, “babies born to fathers who drank regularly during the month before conception were an average of 6.4 ounces lighter than those who were born to occasional drinkers” (compared to an average 2.2 ounces below normal in the case of drinking mothers).

Such data fuel the trend against alcohol. Dr. David F. Musto, professor of psychiatry and the history of medicine at the Yale School of Medicine, notes in the Charlotte Observer: “Overall we are experiencing a trend against chemical aids to energy, happiness and insight. Americans, at least the middle class, are searching for health through pesticide-free foods, pure water, clean air and exercise. Cholesterol is a dirty word.” Will alcohol also become a dirty word? Musto says, “These changes in our national approach to alcohol reflect the most significant shift against alcohol since Prohibition’s repeal in 1933.”

Prohibition By The Inch?

What is the Christian’s role in this scene? Are there helpful alternatives between the extremes of prohibition and passivity? Or is the time ripe for a new “creeping prohibitionism,” prohibition by the inch?

An obvious response might be: Do nothing! Protestant Christians in the U.S. have long argued the evils of alcohol abuse; isn’t the proper response simply to say we have been right all along and continue on the same course? Yes and no. Christians oppose alcohol abuse first of all for theological, not just pragmatic or humanistic, reasons: Our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit and we don’t want to dishonor God by desecrating or enslaving them. This is sound and should continue to be stressed. But the growing antialcohol mood (which could change) provides Christians with new opportunities for witness and social engagement.

Given the diversity of U.S. public opinion—even of Christian opinion—it would be futile to propose a single unified strategy for chasing Demon Rum out of the country. A medley of strategies is probably better. Here are six points for consideration.

1. Christians should incorporate the new scientific data about alcohol into their moral teachings. The personal and social ill effects of alcohol—and of even “moderate” drinking (generally defined as one to two drinks a day with an occasional binge)—are now clear. The evidence from the scientific community is consistent. Christian teaching needs to be buttressed and clarified by this evidence.

2. Christians should build on the current trend to cement a national consensus that is increasingly antialcohol and prohealth. The goal is to push the trend further so that it will take root as a cultural value rather than be a passing fad. Public opinion is notoriously fickle.

The best strategy may be to underscore the link between alcohol and other harmful substances. As Musto has noted, Americans are coming to see “alcohol as a toxin or poison that has no minimum safe limit,” and as one among many harmful drugs. We are seeing “a gradual amalgamation of alcohol into the ranks of other drugs that have aroused American fear” and have increased concerns about control.

Encouraging this tendency has the obvious advantage of undercutting the perception of being narrowly focused on one or two issues. Alcohol is, in fact, a toxin, no matter how diluted it is. That, combined with its addictive character, makes beverage alcohol irredeemably harmful. While Christians may never fully agree on the issue of abstinence versus moderation, one can hope for consensus on the harmful effects of consuming alcohol.

3. We should certainly press the argument that the producers and abusers of alcohol should at least be taxed to pay the cost of the damage it causes. This is simple justice and appeals to a sense of fairness.

The key issue here is awareness. Most people are simply unaware of the sheer economic costs—to say nothing of human suffering—due to alcohol abuse. It totals in the billions of dollars annually. Add up the cost of lost time at work; decreased industrial productivity; increased health costs; damage to property, including vehicles in accidents; court and legal costs; the cost of maintaining and caring for those who are unemployed and/or homeless due to alcoholism; the social and related economic costs of broken homes, abused children and spouses, and otherwise fractured relationships—all this comes to a sizable share of the national economy.

Among the facts needed are simply the size and clout of the liquor industry complex—breweries and distilleries, distributors, advertisers, political lobbies, and industry “front” organizations such as the Beer Institute (a trade association “dedicated to responsible consumption of … fine quality beers,”according to a magazine advertisement) and Beer Drinkers of America, nominally headed by Stan Musial.

The data are increasingly available. It remains for writers to assemble them and make them known in graphic language. The public should know, for example, that reducing alcohol consumption is a key to the continued economic health of a nation. Mikhail Gorbachev early perceived that fact in the Soviet Union and made reducing alcohol consumption a key element of perestroika.

Today’s changing drinking and smoking habits have come about less because of regulation than because of growing public perception of the adverse effects, personally and nationally, of alcohol and tobacco. If anything, regulation follows a shift in public perceptions and patterns rather than causes them. This would seem to suggest the need not for a new Prohibition, but for increased public awareness. Prohibition works only if supported by a vast majority of the public. Any prohibition enforced by a bare voting majority would be so divisive that it would probably do more harm than good.

4. Some forms of political activism may be called for to bring this issue more fully to public attention. The key here is to pick dramatic and highly symbolic targets that grab national or regional attention.

It should be possible to build a coalition of sports figures who would take a stand against alcohol abuse, putting their names and reputations on the line. Sports events have become the backbone of media promotion of alcohol, especially beer. Well-known sports figures who claim to be Christians should be challenged to stand up against this alliance. The inconsistency and hypocrisy of claiming to favor sports and liquor at the same time needs to be shown for what it is—and who can better do that than the stars who often benefit hugely, if indirectly, from alcohol promotion? Their stand could be costly, but effective.

5. Today’s new awareness of alcohol’s effects strengthens the case for total abstinence—not as a moralistic legalism, but as a sensible discipline for those who want to follow Jesus with all their powers. Responsible Christian living seeks health in all areas, from our bodies to world affairs, and abstinence contributes to this health.

We may think of abstinence as a positive addiction. It is never destructive (though legalistic attitudes about it may be); rather, it is a good habit that makes for health. Abstinence is a sensible protest against alcohol abuse. The question is not why one should abstain; it is why anyone should drink in the first place. It is sick society, not our Christian faith, that tells us to drink. We do not need a multitude of reasons for avoiding something that does no positive good.

6. More basically, Christians should take the lead in developing a genuinely prolife, prohealth theology and practice. It is natural and simpler to focus on one or two specific issues, but we need a broad theological base for a doctrine of wholeness that grows naturally out of a biblical doctrine of holiness. A “prolife” theology should entail a comprehensively biblical view of life and not be limited to abortion or euthanasia.

The biblical starting point is human creation in the image of God. This provides an ethic based at once in creation, redemption (the restoration of God’s image by being transformed into the image of Jesus Christ), and the eschatological life in the Spirit (2 Cor. 3:12–18). Here is an ethic that is Trinitarian; that is both individual and communal; and that respects “all creatures, great and small,” because all life comes from God. Yet it is an ethic that takes seriously human sinfulness and the need for righteousness and holiness as the foundation for healthful living.

Christians should be hammering out such an ethic in their congregations and small groups, as well as in their denominational structures and educational institutions. Each generation presents the church with new questions—questions that should drive us back to Scripture seeking new light for the meaning of biblical faithfulness in our current age. Perhaps this is how God works: using society’s questions and problems to prod the church to refind itself and its life in the Word through the Spirit. The challenge is always to shape the world by the Word, rather than the other way around.

In the end, what happens regarding alcohol in America will largely reflect the public attitude, or the composite of varying public opinions. But in the final analysis, the problem of alcohol abuse, like any social issue woven into the whole fabric of society, cannot be solved in isolation. Alcohol abuse is too closely interwoven with family life, employment, and similar issues to be solved by itself. For the most part, people with sound, nourishing relationships, and with adequate and meaningful employment, do not drink to excess; and people who understand the real effects of alcohol, and who are part of a vital community where such knowledge and values are shared, drink very little or not at all.

The best solution to alcohol abuse is a healthy family life where alcohol consumption is discountenanced, and, even more important, where family members share the natural, joyful, moderate intoxication of friendship, love, good times together, and a rich dose of the presence of the Holy Spirit.

For all the concern with healthy living today, we still live in a sick society. In the United States, the church must learn what it means to live in an addictive, codependent world. The church itself can foster codependence if it does not deal forthrightly with addicted people—whatever their addiction.

The church can learn from Alcoholics Anonymous. The Twelve Steps approach, grounded in committed community, has proved a viable model not only for helping alcoholics, but for a range of addictions, including sexual bondage and overeating. This may be a fitting model for organizing church life at the end of the twentieth century. Everyone is addicted in some sense—to sin generally, and to sin in its specific forms. The church is called to be a community that heals people from immoral and unhealthy addictions—not by creating new pathological dependencies, but by helping believers find real maturity. The fruit of the Spirit includes self-control (Gal. 5:23; see also 2 Tim. 1:7). But such fruit is brought forth in responsible community.

I can envision churches that are really networks of small covenant groups, each one formed around some version of AA’s Twelve Steps, each restoring people to physical, social, and spiritual health and freeing them for redemptive living in the world.

We may be thankful for the encouraging decline in alcohol consumption, and encourage the trend all we can. But the bottom line is: Let the church be the church.

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