In my experience, few people are as annoying about sobriety as an adult convert to evangelical Christianity. Conversely, I have yet to find anyone more obnoxious about their love for drinking than someone who grew up and moved away from a religious environment that viewed alcohol consumption as a grave sin. I have experienced the latter, both as an observer and a perpetrator.
I had my first taste of alcohol when I was 23 years old and didn’t begin regularly drinking until I was 25. When I started, it felt like I was making up for lost time.
My church, which I joined when I moved to my current city, had a bit of a reputation when it came to drinking. When I told a coworker where I attended, he replied, “Oh, that’s the church that throws keg parties.”
I was too new to know this wasn’t true and too intrigued to let it scare me away. I had read enough about Jesus to understand that being accused of throwing wild parties wasn’t the worst thing a church could be known for.
It turned out that the “Keg Party Church” was an urban legend, kind of. College students founded our congregation, and for many years, the church consisted almost exclusively of 18 to 22-year-olds. On top of that, several fraternities and sororities would attend en masse, which is likely where the myth originated.
When you see the same large group of people at church that you saw at a keg party just a few hours before, it is not difficult to see how the party could get conflated with the church. This is especially true when some of those people are on stage or teaching Sunday School.
Many of us had grown up in religious environments that presumed total abstinence from alcohol was the only way to please God. This was either because of verses that suggested its prohibition, or that encouraged being mindful of “weaker brothers.” When we discovered this wasn’t a biblical mandate but rather, another way for our elders to exercise control over us, we decided to open the floodgates.
Most of us now, over two decades later, are either casual social drinkers or completely sober. But when we were deconstructing the teachings that had been handed to us about alcohol, we were evangelists for being “Christians who drink.”
I can only now see how insufferable that was in retrospect, and by observing others who are going through now what we went through then.
Something interesting I have also observed, though, is that as the stigma around alcohol has declined, so has its use among younger people. A 2020 study found that 28% of Gen Z respondents reported abstaining from alcohol, up 8% from 2002. The numbers are higher for those who don’t attend college.
I recently compiled a list of my favorite albums and artists of the past few years and noticed something that intrigued me. More than half of the list consists of solo artists or members of bands that are now sober after struggles with unhealthy substance use, misuse or addiction. They included names like BJ Barham of American Aquarium, Waylon Payne, Morgan Wade, Julien Baker and Jason Isbell.
I have attended over a dozen Jason Isbell concerts across the country. Each show is unique except for one constant element. In what is arguably Isbell’s most acclaimed song, “Cover Me Up,” there is a line where he declares his sobriety by singing, “But I sobered up/ I swore off that stuff/ Forever this time.”
After he delivers the line, which is tucked into an obscure corner of the love song, the crowd roars with approval. Many of those cheering are drunk and holding up beer cups or bottles to toast Isbell’s decade of recovery. It is a riveting scene to behold every time.
Isbell has gone on record stating how much he appreciates the moment and also recognizes the dissonance involved in the act. In a recent interview, he said, “I don’t see that as ironic at all…Out of all of those people raising their glass, there’s probably a couple of them that don’t need to have that glass in their hand. And there may be one day when that’s one of the straws that breaks that particular camel’s back.”
Isbell has said elsewhere that some people in the world don’t drink and probably need to start.
What I am mindful of in those moments during the concert is that we are all part of a community. We don’t belong to ourselves and our decisions about things like alcohol are not made in a vacuum. (To wit, “Cover Me Up” is a love song to Isbell’s wife, who was the driving force behind his sobriety.)
This is neither a call to total sobriety nor an encouragement to throw church keg parties. It is a reminder that both can have their place among the community of those who follow Jesus. It is a call to humility and being mindful of the neighbors we are called to love.
Senior Editor at Good Faith Media.
