A theology of the use and misuse of alcohol
Debates about measures to tackle alcohol problems usually touch sooner or later on questions of rights and responsibilities. Are people who get drunk exercising their legitimate rights or behaving irresponsibly? What of those who become dependent on alcohol? Can they be held to account for what they do, or do not do, while they are under the influence?
Here Professor Christopher Cook introduces the themes explored in his new book ‘Alcohol, Addiction & Christian Ethics’. Professor Cook, as well as being a psychiatrist with a special interest in alcohol problems and a scientific advisor to the Institute of Alcohol Studies, is also an ordained minister of the Church of England.
“Do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived! Fornicators, idolaters, adulterers, male prostitutes, sodomites, thieves, the greedy, drunkards, revellers, robbers— none of these will inherit the kingdom of God.”1
St Paul seemed pretty clear that some things were simply wrong. The lists of vices which he employed in his letters were probably intended to be uncontroversial and so to elicit immediate agreement from his readers. However, times change and some items in his lists now appear much more debatable than they were two millennia ago. They are now interpreted differently, and some attract more public moral opprobrium than others. It is, of course, those statements that are now controversial which attract much public debate. However, having now spent 20 years working with people with alcohol and other drug problems, it is St Paul’s inclusion of drunkenness in a number of these lists2 which has increasingly interested me over recent years.
Moderate alcohol consumption is seen as a normal part of contemporary western lifestyle. But even amongst those who do consider themselves to be Christians, the matter is not at all straightforward. Jesus was apparently accused by his opponents of being a drunkard (see eg Luke 7:34) and on this basis I have heard it suggested in a Sunday sermon that Jesus must himself have been drunk at times – a suggestion which attracted great controversy after the service!
Of course, drunkenness is not the only matter of concern. Whilst alcohol is associated with violence, family disharmony and other forms of antisocial behaviour, alcohol causes or is associated with a wide and diverse range of problems – social, psychological and biological – which may or may not be associated with overt drunkenness. Whilst the misuse of alcohol is recognised as a matter for social concern, our enjoyment of alcohol makes us ambivalent about these associated problems.
When it comes to drunkenness, we might still expect the majority of those who read Paul’s letters today to express disapproval. Amongst those who read the New Testament rarely or not at all, there might be much greater debate. While many still disapprove of drunkenness, it is seen by many others as being another way of having fun, of relaxing, and of getting away from the stresses and problems of today’s world.
It might well be that there is greater agreement about the ethics of drinking very large amounts of alcohol, or about the morality of very serious alcohol related problems. Slight intoxication at home with friends is one thing, but causing a death by drunken driving is quite another. But even amongst those who do consider themselves to be Christians, the matter is not at all straight forward.
Whilst there is much truth in this, it does not answer questions about how much is “too much” or about how likely and how serious problems have to be before they become ethically unacceptable consequences of drinking alcohol. Furthermore, it does not get to the heart of an important way in which our view of the whole subject has changed dramatically since the time of St Paul.
Whatever controversies about drinking and drunkenness there might have been, things changed most significantly in the 19th Century as the concept of “chronic inebriety” was medicalised and increasingly subjected to scientific scrutiny. Prior to this time, it is probably fair to say that drunkenness was not seen very differently from any of the other kinds of vice in St Paul’s lists. Christendom knew that drunkenness, like adultery and theft, was wrong. People shouldn’t do these things – but they did. All people were sinful and all needed forgiveness. All werecalled to amend their lives. Drunkenness was one thing amongst many for which people needed to repent. But the increasing medicalisation of the problem, concurrent with the much wider effects of the enlightenment on public discourse, changed this forever. Drunkenness, and other alcohol-related problems, came to be viewed not so much as primarily ethical issues, and certainly not as theological matters but rather as concerns of public health, public policy and public order.
Whilst the majority of people who get drunk are not in any commonly accepted sense “alcoholics”, perceptions of drunkenness have also been influenced by the development of the concept of “addiction”. This concept, extended to the use of a variety of other drugs and also to various behaviours in which no extrinsic chemical substance is involved at all, hasbeen notoriously elusive of a universally agreed definition. However, it is now scientifically encapsulated in the concept ofthe dependence syndrome. The alcohol dependent person is understood as suffering from a bio-psycho-social disorder which importantly changes and constrains the usual experience of freedom of choice about drinking behaviour. The alcohol dependent person experiences withdrawal symptoms when they stop drinking and they experience a subjective “compulsion” to continue drinking. Because we usually do not consider people to be morally responsible for acts about which they have no freedom of volition, the concept of addiction ordependence introduces an important change in the way that drunkenness – or at least chronic drunkenness or “alcoholism” – is commonly viewed. To the extent that the alcohol dependent person is the subject of this “compulsion” they are not free moral agents, and their responsibility may beunderstood as diminished or removed.
Paradoxically, and perhaps partly because the individual is seen as responsible for their plight, the concept of addiction has not always led to moral sympathy for the addict. Perhaps this is partly because the individual is seen as responsible for their plight. If they hadn’t drunk too much (or perhaps if they hadn’t drunk at all) they would never have become alcohol dependent. However, I think that this lack of sympathy also concerns the emphasis that is placed upon the difference that is perceived between the addict or alcoholic and other people. Instead of being sinful as we are all sinful, the addict comes to be viewed as sinful in a different kind of way, or to a greater degree. In fact, the so called “moral model” has become the subject of much criticism in scientific and medical circles. The more enlightened view is to understand the addict as sick rather than sinful. I would suggest that this view owes more to the enlightenment than to Christian tradition. It is a morality which singles out the other person as different from self, rather than one which understands all human beings as sinful, including oneself. It is a morality which ignores or overlooks one’s own failings and draws attention to those of someone else.
Unfortunately, scientific and theological debate no longer take place in the same forum. Matters of religion are largely relegated by secular society to the private domain. As areas of academic discourse theology and science are discussed in completely different journals, conferences and common rooms, as though they had little to do with each other. The implication is clearly that theology is no longer considered necessary to a proper understanding of matters such as addiction and drunkenness. And yet, spirituality – largely as a result of the work of Alcoholics Anonymous and its sister organisations – is increasingly considered to be vital to provision of holistic treatment, and addictive disorders are viewed by many as being a spiritual problem. Theology has thus been replaced by science, and religion by spirituality. Does Christianity (or any of the world’s other major faith traditions) any longer have anything important to contribute to the debate?
It is my contention that Christian theology does have an important contribution to make to an understanding of addictive disorders – and particularly to an understanding of the ethics of alcohol use and misuse.
However, this contribution is best appreciated not by a narrow focus on scriptural texts making explicit reference to drunkenness, but rather by broader theological reflection on the phenomenon of alcohol dependence and addiction. In my book, Alcohol, Addiction and Christian Ethics, I have taken two Christian texts for detailed study, on the basis that they appear to reflect a phenomenologically similarexperience to that of the subjective compulsion of alcohol dependence. The first of these is St Paul’s discussion of the divided self in Romans 7, and the second is Book 8 of the Confessions of St Augustine of Hippo, both texts which reflect an understanding of the ways in which individuals can struggle within themselves in respect of behaviour to which they aspire.
In Romans 7 (vv15-19), for example, St Paul writes:
“I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. But in fact it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. …….I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.”
And compare this with the experience of an alcohol dependent woman, married to an alcohol dependent husband, whose story was included in the “Big book” of Alcoholics
Anonymous:
“George tried many times to go on the wagon. If I had been sincere in what I thought I wanted more than anything else in life – a sober husband and a happy, contented home – I would have gone on the wagon with him. I did try, for a day or two, but something always would come up that would throw me.
“It would be a little thing; the rugs being crooked, or any silly little thing that I’d think was wrong, and off I’d go, drinking…… I reached a stage where I couldn’t go into my apartment without a drink. It didn’t bother me anymore whether George was drinking or not. I had to have liquor. Sometimes I would lie on the bathroom floor, deathly sick, praying I would die, and praying to God as I always had prayed to Him when I was drinking: “Dear God, get me out of this one and I’ll never do it again.” And then I’d say, “God, don’t pay any attention to me. You know I’ll do it tomorrow, the very same thing.””3
If we are honest, I think that we all have these kinds of experiences. It may not be quite as dramatic, and the implications might not be quite as serious, but we all find ourselves doing things that we know we shouldn’t do and then regretting it. We struggle to stop destructive patterns of behaviour and find ourselves doing the very things that we have decided in our own minds we will not do. We eat more than we know we need; even to the point of prejudicing our own health. We find ourselves sucked back in to particular arguments, or destructive relationships, when we have promised ourselves that we wont go there again. We spend time watching television when we know that work or family commitments require urgent attention. We spend money on things that we know we can’t afford. And so the examples go on – often known only to ourselves or to those closest to us – but all representing the same internal struggle to be the kinds of people that we desperately want ourselves to be.
Looked at in this way, it might be argued that we all have a subjective compulsion to do things that we don’t want to do. Perhaps it is even a characteristically human experience to have such internal struggles and to be aware of having them. It certainly is not unique to the experience of the addict or alcoholic. And even if the atheist or humanist might wish to choose a different language, these struggles have been the concern of theology for many centuries before they came to be a topic of scientific interest. For St Paul, the solution was clear:
“Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!”4
He understood the grace of God in Jesus Christ as being the only way to become free from this struggle – and Augustine of Hippo went on to write in similar vein about the necessity of this grace to set us free from the struggle set up by the division of the human will against itself. A post-modern culture is much less happy to
accept the particularity of this solution, but Alcoholics Anonymous adopted a not dissimilar, albeit not so Christocentric, understanding in the 2nd of its 12 Steps:
“We…. came to believe that a
Power greater than ourselves could
restore us to sanity.”
The necessity of a “Higher Power”, whatever it might be, as a component of a spiritual recovery from alcoholism was to become fundamental to the philosophy of Alcoholics Anonymous, as detailed in the second of its 12 Steps:
“We…..came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.”
For St Paul and St Augustine, faith in Christ was the only pathway to freedom from the divided self.
Many men and women have found freedom from addiction through spiritual and religious experiences – but many continue to struggle despite their faith. On the other hand, secular programmes of treatment with no spiritual or religious component at all continue to benefit many. We must, therefore, be wary of proposing simple solutions such as those that require Christian faith, or exclude such faith, as a means of recovery from addiction. However, in one form or another, it would appear that grace is an important component of recovery, and grace is a theological concept. To separate theology and science in discussion about such matters is, therefore, I would argue, at least a highly impoverishing approach to a proper understanding of the nature of addiction.
To return to the broader problems in society of alcohol use and misuse, I would propose that theology still has important things to say. To imagine that the man or woman with a drinking problem is either the victim of their environment or the agent of their own catastrophe is equally simplistic. We are all both agents and victims, and Western culture fosters various kinds of dependence in various ways. Whilst we need to analyse such systems as matters of public health and public policy, theological models of these systems need to be formulated and articulated in the course of secular debate. Not to do so is to collude with the implicit assumption that such phenomena can be adequately understood within an essentially atheistic framework of understanding.
* A version of this article first appeared in ‘Borderlands’ – produced by St. John’s College, Durham
References
1 Corinthians 6:9-10, NRSV
2 See also Romans 13:13, 1 Corinthians 5:10-11,
Galatians 5:19-21
3 Alcoholics Anonymous, Alcoholics Anonymous World Services Inc, New York, 3rd Edition, 1976, pp324-325
4 Romans 7:24-25.