Conservatives and Liberals United: Teetotalism Across the Wesleyan Denominational Landscape
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In the midst of a cacophony of voices today in the United Methodist Church crying out for change, with revisionists and traditionalists throwing verbal brickbats at one another, it is surprising to learn there are yet a few places in which there is ongoing and unflinching agreement, namely, in the general area of Codes of Conduct, specifically in terms of the denominational stance on alcohol. Though critics of the current United Methodist leadership have maintained that the denomination has been co-opted by broad North American cultural trends, making the freedom of the individual will, with its circus of desires, the center; nevertheless The Book of Discipline of the UMC tells a much different story. At its founding in 1968, when The Methodist Church joined hands with the Evangelical United Brethren to form the United Methodist Church, the newly established body declared: “The manufacture, sale and use of intoxicating liquors as beverage…(is) strictly prohibited.”
What’s so fascinating about this Code of Conduct is that it not only connects both revisionists and traditionalists within the UMC today (see the 2016 Book of Discipline), but it also unites all North American Wesleyans across the denominational landscape. To illustrate, as far back as 1817 the African Methodist Episcopal Church employed similar language in its own Discipline and referred to the offering and retailing of “spirituous liquors” as immoral. Later at its founding in 1843, the Wesleyan Church banned the use of intoxicating liquors, and subsequently, the Free Methodist Church (established in 1860) employed almost the exact same language in its 1919 Discipline that is used by the UMC today. That is, it banned the use and sale of “intoxicating liquor as a beverage” (emphasis added throughout citations). In 1918 the Methodist Episcopal Church, South used similar language and required its members to abstain from “the manufacture or sale of intoxicating liquors to be used as a beverage.” For its part, the Church of the Nazarene weighed in the following year and condemned “the use, as a beverage, of intoxicating drinks.” In short, the historic demand for total abstinence across American Wesleyan denominations is abundantly clear. But just how did this happen?
Though all of these North American denominations from the African Methodist Episcopal Church to the United Methodist Church today like to appeal in some fashion to the teaching of John Wesley as justification for this policy of teetotalism or total abstinence, John Wesley was actually no teetotaler. Admittedly, the General Rules of the United Societies (1743) did indeed prohibit “buying or selling spiritous liquors or drinking them, unless in cases of extreme necessity.” Nevertheless, both Wesley and the Methodist Conference made a distinction between spiritous liquors or drams (what we would call hard liquor today) and other alcoholic beverages such as wine, beer, and ale. The former were prohibited, the latter were not. To illustrate this last point, Wesley wrote a letter to the Bishop of London, Edmund Gibson, in 1747 and maintained that Christianity does not require “abstaining from wine.” In fact, John Wesley not only recorded in his journal on July 31, 1753 that he had lived “a day and an half on claret and water,” but also, much later in 1790, he wrote a letter to a customs official because the gift of two dozen bottles of French claret, which he had received from a certain Mr. Ireland, had been confiscated by the authorities and Wesley wanted these bottles back. The drinking of such, as he put it, would be useful for “my present weakness.” Add to this that Wesley referred to wine as “one of the noblest cordials in nature,” as well as his counsel that after preaching it was helpful to “take a little lemonade, mild ale, or candied orange-peel,” and a clear picture has now emerged. So then, if the requirement of total abstinence did not come from John Wesley or British Methodism, then just exactly where did it come from?
To start out it’s helpful to think of these denominational codes of conduct as DNA. Tracking down the ancestry, the various strains of teetotalism, will take us not to England but to America and not to the eighteenth century but to the early nineteenth century, that is, well before the rise of any of the holiness denominations themselves. To illustrate, after the passage of the First Amendment made an established federal church unconstitutional in 1791, the Protestant cultural leaders at the time, according to Robert Handy, set about to create a de facto Christian America in which the faith would be culturally re-established by other means. These Protestant cultural leaders were aided in this Christianization of the country through the rise of the Second Great Awakening at the turn of the nineteenth century and through the various benevolent societies that emerged it its wake, many of them arising before 1830 as the following list reveals:
American Bible Society 1816
American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions 1810
American Home Missionary Society 1826
American Sunday School Union 1824
American Temperance Society 1826
American Tract Society 1825
American Anti-Slavery Society 1833
This entire complex of societies has been referred to as a “benevolent empire,” and the American Temperance Society played an important role within it, not only by addressing some of the social ills of the nation but also by aiding the quest for ongoing Protestant cultural power. Moreover, although the American Temperance Society started out simply with a pledge to abstain from distilled liquor, in which drinking wine and beer were still allowed, it eventually adopted a teetotaler position which rendered a number of Americans the “other,” namely, those Irish and German beer-drinking Catholics whose numbers would swell during the 1840’s through the 1870’s. So influential was this reforming society that before the Civil War, “A total of sixteen states and territories had taken some kind of action in restricting liquor traffic” (A Christian America: Protestant Hopes and Historical Realities).
Methodists, in particular, found the temperance movement congenial to their own interests, and when concerns about alcohol were wedded to the preservation of the Sabbath, with its various blue laws, these American heirs of Wesley found suitable vehicles for their own rising cultural power. Indeed, before Bishop Matthew Simpson was hobnobbing with President Lincoln at the White House he had been the editor of the Western Christian Advocate which, during his tenure from 1848 to 1852, had strongly advocated for temperance, which in this setting actually meant total abstinence.
Though this ongoing temperance concern united Methodists across the theological landscape, other issues reflective of social class (such as theater attendance and modes of worship, for example) divided them such that the rhetoric of “Nazarite and Regency” parties within Methodism began to emerge. Indeed, social class antagonisms were so prominent within nineteenth century Methodism (even though all were in agreement in terms of abstinence) that no serious Christian today would tolerate them if the same larger social and theological vision that generated them was expressed not in terms of class, as it often was in the nineteenth century, but in terms of race. Indeed, the divisiveness as well as the lack of catholicity of such rhetoric would then be abundantly clear.
Emboldened by the favorable climate against the ills of the liquor traffic in the early nineteenth century, a large number of women, both conservative and progressive, took up this reforming cause in order to address the chaos and violence in the home that aberrant alcohol consumption had left in its wake. Organized in 1873, years before it was formally founded a decade later, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union elected Frances Willard, an energetic Methodist, as its second president in 1879. Not only was the WCTU the largest women's organization at the time but also through the efforts of Willard and others it helped to establish a climate in the nation in which other reformers, gathering much support from the local churches, established the Anti-Saloon League in 1895 which had legal prohibition across the land as its chief goal. These were heady times, to be sure, and conservatives as well as progressives joined hands to help pass the 18th Amendment to the Constitution in 1919. As Richey, Rowe, and Schmidt point out in their Methodist Experience in America, “Prohibition represent(ed) in our judgment, the high-water mark of Methodist national influence.”
Around this same time many Wesleyan denominations added the language of legal prohibition to denominational statements, if it was not already there. For example, in 1911 the Wesleyan Church employed the phrase, “We believe that law must be an adjunct of moral means in order to suppress the traffic side of this evil.” Beyond this, the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, during this same year encouraged its members to challenge the “dispensary law authorizing the sale of intoxicating liquor by the state, county or municipality.” In 1919, the Free Methodist Discipline, for its part, declared, “As Christians we are bound to do all we can to prohibit by law this nefarious traffic.” But perhaps the most forceful language of all, championing the cause of prohibition by universal legal enactment, was to be found in the Church of the Nazarene 1919 Manual which stated, “Total abstinence from all intoxicants is the Christian rule for the individual, and total prohibition of the traffic is the duty of all civil government.”
It is one thing for an earnest Christian to take up a counsel of perfection and freely forsake the drinking of all alcoholic beverages. It is quite another thing, however, to make such total abstinence identical with the heart of the Christian faith such that it has now become a requirement for church membership itself. Again, John Wesley was no teetotaler and neither, as a good Jew, was Jesus. Perhaps the problem then is not alcohol itself but drunkenness, or what today is referred to as alcohol abuse in the psychological community. Again, it is one thing to pass Codes of Conduct to guide and govern church membership. It is quite another thing, however, to have all Americans, Christian or not, to live under such codes. The passage of the 18th Amendment, then, was not principally about sanctity, though holiness scripts were vigorously employed to champion the cause. Rather its enactment had very much to do with an early strain of the social and cultural DNA that had united the Christian, more specifically Protestant, denominations as far back as the 1830’s. What was that strain? It was the old quest for a Christian America through denominational overreach that would dramatically collapse with the revocation of the 18th Amendment by the 21st Amendment in 1933.
Though many in the church today will claim that this reforming movement had actually been about holiness all along, nevertheless it refused to acknowledge the wine drinking and wine creating of Jesus, the Jew, who was ever holy. Instead, this movement had very much to do with power both within the church and well beyond its walls. In the end the exercise of such power was one of the more important factors that led to the increasing secularization of America. A very strong reaction had clearly set in by the 1930’s. So much for spreading scriptural holiness across the land!
Dr. Kenneth J. Collins is Professor of Historical Theology and Wesley Studies at Asbury Theological Seminary, a member of Firebrand’s Editorial Board, and author of the new book Jesus the Stranger: The Man from Galilee and the Light of the World.