It’s the beginning of the year and all over social media the pros and cons of “Dry January” are being discussed. After a season of feasting, a season of fasting is appropriate. I come from a Christian denomination with a history of anti-drinking lobbying, and whose statement of beliefs includes prohibitions on alcohol. I don’t drink myself, though perhaps for different reasons than I was given as I grew up. So, I found myself listening with interest to the latest University of Chicago “Big Brains” podcast on the science against alcohol.
From the ancient world to the present, according to researcher Tim Stockwell, the verdict on alcohol has been mixed. Warnings against its use have been paired with assumptions that some moderate drinking is to be expected and even occasionally beneficial. But in the 1990s, a fascination with Mediterranean (especially French) healthy habits began to include discussion about the positive attributes of red wine. The alcohol industry has heavily funded studies since then that tout its health advantages, but according to Stockwell, these can almost entirely be discarded. Stockwell then lays out the case against the use of alcohol, except in very small quantities.
As a lifelong teetotaler, I found the research gratifying, in the way we all appreciate evidence that supports our personal choices. I especially appreciated it because the timeline of the pro-drinking media paralleled that of my own adulthood and explained a phenomenon that had been slowly developing within my community. Over time, it became more challenging for me to be someone who didn’t drink.
When I was a teenager and young adult, I was educated to resist drinking because it went along with “bad influences” and reflected values that undermined my spiritual health and commitments. I assumed that good Christians did not drink. I expected to need to resist “peer pressure” and to stand out as a bit of a fuddy duddy. I did not find this to be too onerous, had plenty of friends, and in graduate school when the drinking culture increased, still found ways to navigate without feeling ostracized or belittled, even as I learned that very frequently devout Christians do, in fact, drink alcohol.
There’s a history to this, some of which is specific to the United States. Off and on over the centuries, Christians have sometimes eschewed drinking, at least for seasons, even if it hasn’t been a test of faith or part of doctrine for the orthodox. Within the Anglo Chrisitan tradition, Puritans are often falsely accused of outlawing alcohol. Still, their concerns with abstemiousness and their rejection of many of the celebrations and festivals associated with Catholicism did make them more likely to be restrictive in their alcohol use. However, it wasn’t until the nineteenth century that large Christian (almost entirely Protestant) organizations developed around getting people to sign temperance pledges and to raise awareness of the challenges posed by widespread drinking. These reform movements are associated with the stream of Protestantism we know as “evangelical” and the temperance organizations were deeply connected with other conversion efforts. It was also in this era that Protestant missionary movements spread around the world, and the ones from the United States often took the prohibitions on alcohol with them as they spread the gospel.
As a Seventh-day Adventist, my tradition is smack in the middle of this history. While we aren’t really evangelical by 20th century standards, our alliance with the temperance movement of the nineteenth century was strong. And being educated and raised surround by Southern evangelicals, I felt right at home with lots of Christians who didn’t drink.
Starting in the early 2000s, however, as social media expanded and as I became part of more Christian communities where folks were throwing off their fundamentalist backgrounds, it became harder to remain alcohol free without seeming like a killjoy or a legalist. Part of this was indeed the reports about the healthy attributes of alcohol, the pivot among progressive folks toward touting the lifestyles of Europeans, and part of it was the mommy blogger culture featuring memes like “The most expensive part of having kids is all the wine you have to drink” or “Powered by love. Fueled by coffee. Sustained by wine.” Suddenly it felt like the middle-aged women in my life were all claiming that the primary good thing they had to look forward to was alcohol consumption, often in the form of rosé.
Tim Stockwell would argue that there were lots of capitalist reasons for this, with an industry-fueled marketing campaign to remind folks of how vital drinking was for their fun and their health. In the meantime, I had gradually moved in my beliefs from assuming there are biblical prohibitions against drinking of any kind to one that focused more on the principles of continence and my own self-knowledge as the basis for my teetotal principles. Still, I could also see how devout Christians might make different choices than I did—and increasingly in ex-evangelical circles, they were doing so with some gusto. So why did I find myself feeling defensive?
Mark Lawrence Schrad’s Smashing the Liquor Machine: A Global History of Prohibition provides some of the context for how and why teetotalers have felt like the killjoys of history, the foolish conservatives who are judging those who don’t fit their middle class values. Schrad links the prohibition of alcohol to broader reform movements advocating for those who suffer from the freedom of others to act as they will. He notes that scholars as well as popular media often belittled the women who fought against alcohol use as “hysterical” or assume that those Black and Native folks who were against it were weak and couldn’t hold their ‘manliness.’ Shrad insists we should see these temperance warriors as advocates for liberty.
Smashing the Liquor Machine asserts that scholars have painted prohibitionists as cranks or irrational or conservative. Schrad argues that we are told prohibitionism is about intolerance and evangelicalism but it was often a force for fighting against unbridled capitalism and the oppression of people. He tells the story of temperance movements in, Russia, India, Southern Africa, the British isles and the Austro-German states. He points that that in the US it was advocated by progressives such as William Lloyd Garrison, Susan B Anthony, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frederick Douglas, William Jennings Bryan, and Abraham Lincoln. He argues that temperance movements had more in common with the anti-opium trade, anti-tobacco, and anti-big pharma movements than they do modern fundamentalism.
When Schrad’s book is connected with other recent works such as Brendan J. Payne’s Gin, Jesus, and Jim Crow and Thomas Lappas’s In League Against King Alcohol, we can see how Christian communities among Black and Native groups often saw prohibition in more complicated ways. Sometimes, yes, of course middle class temperance workers viewed immigrants and poor folks as befuddled and lacking the ability to make their own choices, including how to live out their Christianity. But also, frequently Black and Brown folks and poor whites realized the challenges for alcohol in their communities and wanted to resist the capitalist agenda in making money from their misery.
More recently on this very blog, Daniel K. Williams has mounted a thorough argument for the social justice roots of Temperance, and compared it to the fight against the gun lobby. I highly recommend his excellent history of the conservative Christian movement away from social justice alongside the embrace of alcohol, without confusing correlation and causation.
So, what can a Christian teetotaler learn from Dry January resolutions? Clearly Christians can in good faith drink alcohol or reject it. However, there are more ways of thinking about the prohibitionary tendency than simply looking at it through the lens of fundamentalism. Anti-alcohol movements could be anti-capitalist, health/science forward, and socially and theologically progressive. They might not always be, but they were sometimes and can still be seen in that light. And a small fast from something that’s an indulgence has been known to benefit us all. So to those keeping a Dry January—Cheers to you!
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