An Evangelical case against alcohol

Magazines like to publish articles that present something in a different light. So when Christianity Today, the flagship evangelical periodical, published its June issue with these words on the cover: “The Case for an Alcohol-Free Life,” the underlying assumption was that most evangelicals use alcohol. Or at least a significant enough number of them do to make being alcohol-free new and different. Times have changed.

The writer of the article, called “Why I Gave Up Alcohol,” is D.L. Mayfield, a 30-year-old Evangelical woman who with her family serves with InnerCHANGE, a Christian order among the poor.

She grew up in a pastor’s home where alcohol was a nonissue. As a young adult, she became “an occasional drinker, a social imbiber, free to live my life in a way that glorifies God.”

Then she and her husband joined a Christian order among the poor. “Our first shock when we moved into our low-income apartment in a Midwestern inner city,” she writes, “was the amount of substance abuse that surrounded us.” She describes the abuse in detail.

Spiritual discipline: After a year of living there, she writes, “I gradually just … stopped. I dreaded going to the liquor store, imagining the faces I would see there.” Eventually she realized she could abstain from alcohol entirely, and this became a spiritual discipline for her.

Mayfield goes on to reflect on Christians of previous centuries who stood against alcohol’s effects. “Temperance movements,” she writes, “often founded and organized by women, were a direct reaction to the perceived social evils of alcohol in the 1800s and 1900s.”

In the 19th century, alcohol was tied to spouse and child abuse, and women had little to no rights in regard to property and possession. Thus women, especially Christian women, writes Mayfield, “started to organize and lobby against alcohol, starting from within their homes and gradually moving into the political sphere.” The temperance movement, while focusing on alcohol, became associated with women’s rights, including suffrage.

Mayfield sees that movement as a model for us today. She writes: “Just as we currently have no problem denouncing slavery, prostitution and, to a lesser extent, gambling—all for the ways they harm persons and communities—we’d be wise to reconsider the valid and pressing reasons why so many Christians before us chose to give up alcohol completely.”

Clearly, she is providing a different reason for giving up alcohol than was used in previous decades for Evangelicals, to be unstained by the sin of the world. She notes that many Christians view drinking as a rite of passage out of “the perceived fundamentalism of our past.”

She sees young people and women in particular embracing alcohol as a sign of liberation. And many of her peers celebrate drinking. She wonders, “Isn’t anyone friends with alcoholics?”

Given that about 1 in 6 Americans has a drinking problem (defined as excessive drinking or alcoholism), they probably do know someone who has a drinking problem.

Evils of the world: Mayfield’s argument is less about purity than about justice. “I didn’t give up alcohol because I wanted to flee the evils of the world,” she writes. “I gave up alcohol as a way of engaging the evils of the world.”

Who we relate to affects our perspective on this issue, Mayfield writes. She has been changed by her neighborhood.

“I am not calling on everyone to become teetotalers,” she writes. “But I am asking us to consider temperance as a valid and thoughtful option.”

Echoing the Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 8, she says we are free not to drink because of our relationships with those who struggle, when “love tempers our actions.”