Common Jeopardy

Month-old Ruth Ann Jeanette was to have portrayed Jesus in a Christmas Eve musical pageant titled "Journey to Bethlehem." She was the youngest of eight in a three-generation family group traveling to the service of the United Methodist Church in Westminster, Maryland. Also in the compact car were her mother, two sisters 18 months old and 3 years old, her 45-year-old grandmother, Martha Proctor, who as director of Christian education for the church was to direct the pageant, and three other Proctor children, Terry, 23, Sheila, 17, and Roger, 14.

The family did not reach "Bethlehem." At about 3:55 p.m. Christmas Eve [1981], a 1969 station wagon with a man later charged with drunken driving at the wheel swerved across the center line into a head-on collision with the car. Five of the eight were killed: Ruth Ann, her sisters Pauline Marie and Rebecca Ann, her uncles, Terry, who was to have portrayed Joseph in the pageant, and Roger. Ruth Ann's mother and grandmother were gravely injured and have needed long hospitalization. Sheila, who had the role of Mary, was injured but not as seriously.

Ruth Ann Jeanette did that day take the part of Jesus. She was thrust into a far deeper identification with him than would have come in the pageant. Jesus was killed by the onslaught of human sin. But he said that he stands with all who are victimized, with the hungry and thirsty, with the homeless and the naked, with the sick and the imprisoned. He is in and behind such victims: "Anything you did not do for one of these, however humble, you did not do for me" (Matthew 25:45). The risen Jesus stands in the closest personal identification with those who suffer, with those who die this day as victims of tyranny and human folly in El Salvador and Guatemala, in Afghanistan and Poland, in South Africa and Lebanon. He was there with those eight in that smashed automobile on Christmas Eve.

But this identification, this shared identity, can move in the other direction too. There were those other infants in Bethlehem and the surrounding area, "all the male children...two years old or under," slaughtered by Herod's soldiers. Those children died what was to have been the death of the Christ before Christ died. A number of times in the New Testament Christians enduring persecution are seen as sharing "in Christ's sufferings" (thus 2 Corinthians 1:5).

Ruth Ann Jeanette did not get to portray Jesus in the prettiness of a pageant. But like her Lord and like those babies in Bethlehem she was an innocent victim of an onslaught of human sin.

Daniel Berrigan, commenting on the order of a later Herod to have John the Baptist beheaded, observed, "It is normal to die at the hands of drunken power because power is normally drunk." There is drunken power, dim-witted, deluded power, in El Salvador, in the Pentagon, in the Kremlin, and in the capitals around the world. A drunken driver at the wheel of a 250-horsepower vehicle is a small-scale intimation of those who with befuddled minds control the delivery vehicles that could bring nuclear death to all children of this planet.

The drunkenness of political power claims its victims and becomes an ever more ominous threat to us all. But day after day literal drunkenness too claims its victims and looms as threat to every one of us.

[Thousands of] Americans are killed each year in highway accidents involving the use of alcohol. These are about half of those killed on the roads.

More than a million others are injured each year in such crashes, and many these are left permanently disabled. For the decade ending in 1990 the National Highway Safety Commission estimate[d] that alcohol on the highways will bring death to 500,000 Americans. The world total would be many times that.

Drunk driving is the number one killer of men and women in their teens. More than 4,000 die in alcohol-related accidents in the United States each year, and another 20,000 are crippled or disfigured for life. Recent roadside surveys have shown that at certain times of the day as many as one out every six drivers has been drinking.

According to the National Council Alcoholism the use of alcohol is involved in 80 per cent of fire deaths, 65 per cent of drownings, 30 per cent of suicides, 65 per cent of murders, 35 per cent of rapes, 55 per cent of assaults in the home, and 60 per cent of cases of child abuse. More than 40 per cent of pilots who have accidents were drinking beforehand. More than 10 million Americans are alcoholics, with all the blighting of their lives and the lives of those around them that alcoholism brings.

In the United States more than 5,000 babies are born each year with the fetal alcohol syndrome -- slow growth before and after birth, small head, malformed organs and limbs, mental retardation. This condition is brought on by the heavy drinking of the mother; the unborn baby is drunk with the mother.

A far larger number of babies each year, though not having this full syndrome as such, suffer from birth defects linked to use of alcohol. Researchers have discovered that pregnant mothers who drink an ounce or less of alcohol a day (found in two 12-ounce glasses of regular beer) have a higher rate of stillbirths or babies that weigh less. These researchers advise women to stay away from alcohol during pregnancy. But even for drinking women who would heed this counsel there is the special problem of the very first weeks of pregnancy when the condition is not yet recognized and the fetus is especially delicate.

The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism has estimated that the total expenses arising from alcohol problems in 1980 in the United States amounted to $68 billion. Another measure of what the consumption of alcohol means in our world has been given by Harvard economist Jean Mayer. He estimates that the grain used each year for the alcoholic beverages consumed just in the United States would be enough to feed 40 to 50 million people. But the cost is best seen when we contemplate the struggles of an alcoholic friend, talk with the battered wife of an alcoholic husband, or ponder the death of someone within our personal horizon who was killed by a drinking driver.

How are disciples of Jesus Christ to respond to all this?

• We need a heightened sense of the vast blighting and crushing of human life caused by the misuse of alcohol.

It is ironic that among people who are most aware of the endangering of human life through hunger, pollution, nuclear weapons, support of Third World dictatorships, there is often a near blindness to the magnitude of the misery caused by alcohol. The temperance issue is commonly seen as outdated, old-fashioned.

This attitude should be identified as one of the most subtle lies dominating contemporary culture. It is true that during earlier decades when temperance was a central concern in many denominations, there was often a smugness about not drinking and an inclination to equate upright Christian behavior with not drinking, smoking, or dancing. There is still some of that around. But such narrowness of outlook cannot justify smugness about drinking or blindness to the enormous range of the destructiveness of alcohol, which we have briefly surveyed.

• Christians should give renewed attention to the total abstinence stand.

When my wife, Ruth, then a college-age volunteer from West Germany, was working with Navajo children in Utah, some of them asked her whether she drank. When she said yes, they were very astonished. But having seen something of the ravages of alcohol in the Navajo context, Ruth promised those children she would not drink from then on. She has held to that promise.

It may be rather obvious that a white Christian missionary among Native Americans would do well to abstain from alcoholic beverages. Not that very limited drinking of such beverages is inherently sinful; but there would be the recognition that in this cultural context misuse of alcohol dominates and devastates the lives of so many. In order to stand in supportive solidarity with persons whose only alternatives seem to be misuse of alcohol or total abstinence, the missionary abstains.

In the wider cultural context the situation is not so extreme as among Native Americans, but is it not grave enough that Christians do well to come to that same conclusion?

In contrast to Islam's Koran, the Bible has no direct imperative forbidding the use of alcoholic beverages. The implication of a number of passages would seem to be that such drinking, when not in excess, is quite acceptable. But 20th-century Western civilization with all its high-powered technologies and atomizing of human existence is far different from first-century Palestine. There is a difference between an alcoholic in a sports car and an alcoholic on a donkey. It is said that within close-knit traditional Jewish communities in our time there is, along with social drinking, very little alcoholism. Jesus moved in that sort of social context. But ours is vibrant with pressures that impel toward alcoholism and has all too little of the communal cohesiveness that keeps social drinking within bounds.

In Romans 14 and 1 Corinthians 8 Paul deals with the question of what foods Christians can rightly eat. There were the Jewish dietary laws and the problem of meat from a slaughter-sacrifice to an idol. Paul writes: "I know and am persuaded in the Lord Jesus that nothing is unclean in itself....If your brother is being injured by what you eat, you are no longer walking in love. Do not let what you eat cause the ruin of one for whom Christ died" (Romans 14:14-15).

I would say for myself that I might feel free to drink socially if I were living in a culture where alcohol was hardly any problem. But I live in a country and in a world where alcohol is causing the ruin of many tens of millions of people for whom Christ died. And Paul's counsel seems very relevant: "In such cases the best course is to abstain from...wine and anything else that would make your brother trip or fall or weaken in any way" (Romans 14:21).

In Paul's terminology I may be stronger. But I act out of concern for those who are weaker. It is estimated that one out of four persons in a time of great stress is not able to limit what otherwise is quite restricted drinking. On that I am not sure whether I am weak or strong. But when I think of myself and those closest to me, I am sure that I would rather have any of us face a time of severe personal crisis without the alcohol component.

Abstinence from alcoholic beverages can be seen for our cultural context as an implication of New Testament teaching. It is not a direct command of Jesus. A case can be made for social drinking by Christians. We need to listen to one another in our divergent conclusions.

• Whether we drink or abstain, we should do so with a keen sense of our common jeopardy because of alcohol.

Any one of us, any one of our loved ones may become a part of those statistics on alcohol-related highway deaths, alcohol-induced assault, rape, murder, or the number of problem drinkers and alcoholics. In the home and in the church there should be extensive teaching, especially of the young, about the dangers of alcohol misuse. Alcohol is the number one drug problem. Social drinking should not be casually accepted nor should it be rigorously dismissed as a prime sin. Christians should ponder together what constitutes faithfulness to Christ in relation to alcohol.

We need to recognize and expose the infernal subtlety of the brainwashing aimed at us by the liquor industry through media advertising and the probably even greater lure to indulging that so often comes in what is portrayed between commercials. In 1979, $570 million was spent to persuade people to drink this or that alcoholic beverage. From the executive heads of distilleries to local bartenders there is prevailing indifference to the devastating impact their wares have on a great many lives.

Profits have to be made. We are confronted here with a dark "principality." Only with weapons of the Spirit can we stand against it.

• We can work to change social structures and laws.

There is in the United States rising sentiment for tougher laws and enforcement with regard to drunken driving. Some good may come out of this. States should lower the legal limit for blood alcohol concentration in tests for driving while intoxicated. Forty-nine states now have 0.10 per cent. For a 150-pound man that is five beers on an empty stomach. Such a driver is six times as likely to cause an accident. Serious impairment comes at 0.05 per cent (after nearly three beers). Norwegians have been realistic enough to have the 0.05 per cent limit for half a century. In general there should be many more road checks for drinking drivers. Offenders need to be far more commonly subject to license suspension (or restriction such as carefully regulated to-and-from work usage only), fines, sentencing to community service work.

Drunken driving that results in fatal accidents is regarded as reprehensible. There may now be developing a needed shift in attitude so that the general public will see driving while under the influence of alcohol as reprehensible in itself, even when it has not yet led to an accident. It is important that people develop a readiness to insist that a friend or relative who has been drinking too much not get in the car and drive. There can be the offer to drive the person home and, if necessary, an insistence to the point of taking away the car keys.

But if there are to be big reductions in the number of persons killed on the highways by alcohol, the most promising approach lies with programs for rehabilitating alcoholics. California studies show that 80 per cent of drinking drivers involved in fatal crashes were identifiable as abusive drinkers before they killed or were killed.

It is crucial that large numbers of such drivers be identified and worked with before they have those crashes. Traffic courts, driver licensing agencies, and medical and social agencies need to work together in this. There needs to be investigation of the person's drinking problem and a combination of treatment, sanctions, and supervision. Only through far more caring about problem drinkers and alcoholics can their destructiveness toward others be reduced.

• We are to be in ministry to those who become victims of the misuse of alcohol.

This may mean coming to the aid of a family that was half wiped out by a drunken driver. It may mean reaching out to that drunken driver. Long hours may need to be spent with an alcoholic friend to help that person into a group like Alcoholics Anonymous, and other long hours with victimized members of the family of that friend.

The millions and millions of alcohol victims need more friendship and support than can be given just by pastors and social workers. We can each ask ourselves: Whom does God give me in this regard as neighbor? In a time when budgets for public programs to aid alcoholics are being cut, there is an even greater need for corporate Christian ministries to alcoholics.

A Christian doesn't know of any "drunks" but only of persons loved by God, under the influence and going still further under. But if we sense the peril and the impinging lostness of the person who is drinking too much, we can be impelled into spiritual struggle against those dark powers.

In the Gospels it was most of all persons who were losing out who gravitated to Jesus. They knew they needed someone to rescue them. In alcoholics the human weakness we all share in comes starkly into view. The desperate need for rescue cannot be credibly denied. There is the suppressed cry, "What must I do to be saved?" Through Christians, through us, the reply must find ways of expression: "Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved" (Acts 16:31).

Dale Aukerman was the author of Darkening Valley Biblical Perspective on Nuclear War when this article appeared.