Why I don’t drink

“Will you a have glass of wine?” asks our host as we are seated at the candlelit table. The black-clad server is drawing a chilled bottle from its silver plated stand.

I’m ready for the slightly awkward moment as we decline the gracious offering. The moment passes quickly of course. Alcoholics Anonymous has made abstinence excusable, if not slightly fashionable.

But without an explanation, the unspoken question “so, why don’t you drink?” does linger for a moment or two.

It lingers because it begs a simple answer. Besides “I’m an alcoholic,” I could have said “I’m on the Atkins Diet” or “I have an ulcer” or “I’m a Muslim” or “I’m a Mormon” or “I’m a Sikh” and my host would be released to smile affirmingly and move on.

But alas, “I’m a Christian” doesn’t work and my answer isn’t simple. And so the unspoken question is condemned to hang in the air and my longish answer with it.

Why don’t I drink? If the question had been asked, I could have explained.

I grew up in a home and culture that frowned on and, where possible, forbade the recreational use of alcohol.

This made perfect sense to me as a child, though I don’t recall being given an explanation. Even in my sheltered world, alcohol had an ugly face. I did not need to be told that my friend’s angry, abusive father and the stack of beer bottles in the kitchen were related.

There was dirty old “Beer Bottle Bill” and his gunnysack of empties staggering down the streets of our community. There were shopping trips into Vancouver that took us to skid row.

And of course there were the cars full of raucous young men careening down the country roads on weekends, leaving a litter of broken glass and battered mailboxes in their wake.

“We don’t drink alcohol” made perfect sense. The proverb “Wine is a mocker and beer a brawler; whoever is led astray by them is not wise” (Proverbs 20:1) was sufficient and self-evident.

But times change and it was not long before I was one of those raucous young men looking for excitement on Saturday night. I remember being baffled that a substance with such capacity for bestowing exhilaration should be condemned. I revelled in the freedom of release from that narrow-minded bondage.

As that phase passed, it was the cultural sophistication of the rites and rituals of the various wines, beers, liquors and the infinite variety of mixed drinks that captured my imagination. If you crave a religious experience with all the trappings of pilgrimage, mysticism and icons without narrow judgmentalism, alcohol offers it. Marx famously called religion the opiate of the masses, but alcohol is a far better candidate. It gives its euphoria in flavours designed for every occasion.

It was not long, however, before the ugly side of alcohol showed its face again. Barely hidden behind its beautiful facade was a world of devastation. The reality of it entered the lives of people we loved.

Worldwide, some two million people die annually from alcohol-related causes¹ compared to 310,000 from wars². These statistics do not include the social wreckage of abuse, violence, broken families, lost employment and the general but non-lethal chaos alcohol use leaves in its wake.

Somewhere along the way I had a revelation. Maybe my parents had been right. Maybe there was solid logic and common sense behind their stance on alcohol consumption. Maybe conventional, sophisticated wisdom was wrong.

Maybe what’s absurd is a culture that declares war on drugs and is outraged by cocaine and methamphetamines, but glorifies an industry that produces death, disease and calamity on a scale that dwarfs all illegal drug use combined. Even tobacco with its measured destruction of the body has been declared a pariah while alcohol with its cancerous attack on body, soul and spirit rises above condemnation.

That is why, when our children were very young, my wife and I made the ancient Rekabite pact (Jeremiah 35) that alcohol would not be consumed for entertainment in our household. It is not based on a biblical proof text but on the principle that “everything is permissible – but not everything is beneficial. Everything is permissible – but not everything is constructive”(1 Corinthians 10:23).

Someday our children will have to decide what they do with that pact. Their faith should not ride on this, but I think it’s a heritage worth passing on.

To honour that household pact, however, even a polite drink in the best of company must be courteously declined.

I know this is a long and somewhat complex answer, but I have yet to hear a good answer, even a complex one, to the obvious follow-up question: “So, why do you drink?”

1. In 1989. worldbank.org
2. In 2000. who.int

James Toews is pastor of Neighbourhood Church, Nanaimo, B.C.