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#Post#: 35563--------------------------------------------------
Re: ADDICTION - Drugs, Alcohol & AA's Twelve Steps
By: patrick jane Date: November 6, 2021, 7:49 pm
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[img]
HTML https://www-images.christianitytoday.com/images/126255.jpg?h=528&w=940[/img]
HTML https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2021/november-web-only/mark-schrad-smashing-global-liquor-machine-prohibition.html
Prohibition: A Movement of Prudish Killjoys or Righteous
Revolutionaries?
A new book reenvisions temperance as a global struggle on behalf
of the oppressed and exploited.
Now that cool pastors drink craft beer, American Protestants’
erstwhile obsession with banning booze can seem downright weird.
Or maybe just quaint? Was the nation’s brief experiment with
Prohibition an instance of no-fun church folks run amok, one of
the last gasps of an overweening Puritan superego?
That’s what the true villains of the story would want you to
think, or so Mark Lawrence Schrad argues in his new book,
Smashing the Liquor Machine: A Global History of Prohibition.
Taking aim at the widespread perception that temperance
movements were all about “moralizing ‘thou shalt nots,’” he
proclaims that they were, on the contrary, “a progressive shield
for marginalized, suffering, and oppressed peoples to defend
themselves from further exploitation.”
Crucially, in Schrad’s telling, prohibition was never about
raining on the individual drinker’s parade. Rather, it was a
tactic to combat predatory liquor traffickers and the empires
that benefited from their nefarious work. It is only because the
capitalists and imperialists so often prevailed in these
struggles, Schrad suggests, that we remember temperance
activists as prudish killjoys rather than righteous
revolutionaries.
Resisting ‘alco-subjugation’
United States historians have tended to reinforce such
misconceptions, Schrad contends, because they have usually
failed to view American temperance movements in wider world
context. To be sure, this is not easy to do. For Schrad it meant
tracking down leads in 70 different archives housed in 17
different countries and strewn across five continents. But the
payoff of that hard work is tremendous: a story that is, as the
subtitle promises, truly global.
One of its central themes is that alcohol—and especially
distilled liquor—functioned as a powerful tool of empire. This
was in no small part because the sale of spirits kept the ruling
class’s coffers full. In Tsarist Russia, Schrad observes, “the
vodka monopoly was the largest source of imperial finance.” But
booze was more than just a moneymaker. It also facilitated what
he calls the “alco-subjugation” of the world’s peoples, many of
whom had no prior exposure to “industrial alcohols.” Everywhere
distilled liquor was introduced, epidemics of intoxication and
addiction followed, rendering entire societies ripe for
conquest. In this sense, “colonialism in Africa, Asia and North
America was achieved with bottles as much as bullets,” Schrad
states.
Little wonder that, across the globe, temperance and
anti-imperialism activism were so often of a piece. In the years
just before Ireland’s Great Famine, Father Theobald Matthew
traveled the countryside and collected an astounding 5.5 million
temperance pledges, building a movement that became closely
associated with the fight for Irish independence. In
early-20th-century Russia, Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks
urged the masses to abstain from vodka in a bid to starve the
regime of revenue. South Africans registered their objections to
colonial rule in the 1920s and 1930s by boycotting beer halls,
while in India, for Hindu and Muslim dissenters from the British
Raj, “abstinence became synonymous with patriotism.”
Notably, Schrad goes on to argue, the United States was not an
exception to this global rule. Here, too, temperance movements
were powered not by stern divines and dour church matrons but by
staunch defenders of the poor and the oppressed. Indigenous
leaders led the charge, with the Choctaw, Cherokee, Chickasaw,
Creek, and Seminole tribes, for example, agreeing to “cooperate
in suppressing the sale of strong drink.” Similarly committed to
the cause were abolitionists, women’s rights activists, social
gospelers, and more. Indeed, Frederick Douglass’s line, “All
great reforms go together,” is one of Schrad’s favorite mantras.
He supports this claim by underscoring the temperance
credentials of not only Douglass but also the likes of William
Lloyd Garrison, Susan B. Anthony, and Abraham Lincoln. “These
are the heroes of American history, not its villains,” Schrad
declares.
There is no doubt that he has a point. Smashing the Liquor
Machine’s provocative reframing of temperance and Prohibition as
“part of a long-term people’s movement to strengthen
international norms in defense of human rights, human dignity,
and human equality” represents a persuasive challenge to
conventional wisdom. It should change the way that historians
think and write about these subjects going forward. But one
wishes that Schrad had not been content to flip an unsatisfying
script. What if temperance activists were neither heroes nor
villains, but rather finite, fallible humans, fighting for what
they understood to be right, even as they were caught up—in ways
that they did not fully recognize—in deeper-seated social sin?
One of the great tragedies of American history is that, whatever
Douglass’s noble aspirations, all great reforms have not in fact
gone together. One finds some evidence of this in Schrad’s book,
notwithstanding his assertions to the contrary. In a chapter on
the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), he discusses how
the organization’s leaders sought to navigate the racism that
was so pervasive among its white rank-and-file members, and also
how the WCTU leadership was itself hardly immune. Longtime
president Frances Willard loved to tout her abolitionist
heritage and “Do Everything” reform philosophy; but while she
championed the causes of women’s suffrage and labor reform, one
thing she refused to do was support Ida B. Wells’s courageous
campaign to mobilize white Christians against the scourge of
lynching.
Willard’s failings on this front were hardly unique. Another of
Schrad’s temperance heroes, William Jennings Bryan—or the “Great
Commoner,” as he liked to be called—was a fierce defender of
white farmers and workers at home, and a ferocious critic of
American imperialism abroad. But when President Theodore
Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington to the White House for
dinner, Bryan declared it “unfortunate, to say the least.”
Walter Rauschenbusch, one of the great theoreticians of the
social gospel, provides yet another case in point. As Schrad
underscores, in addition to propounding temperance,
Rauschenbusch wrote voluminously about the threat of spiraling
economic inequality. Yet he said next to nothing about the
rising tide of mob violence and anti-Black racism. As he
reflected in the final decade of his life, “the problem of the
two races in the South has seemed to me so tragic, so insoluble,
that I have never yet ventured to discuss it in public.”
A daring argument
The issue is not only that many temperance reformers fell short
of heroism when it came to other causes. It is also that the
temperance fight itself was more morally complex than Schrad
allows. There was unmistakable synergy, for one, between
campaigns against “the liquor power” and others targeting
Catholics, immigrants, and labor radicals. The Germans who
participated in Chicago’s Lager Beer Riot of 1855—sparked by a
nativist mayor’s decision to close taverns on Sundays and to
raise the fee for liquor licenses—felt this viscerally, but the
perspective of working-class immigrants like them is largely
absent from Schrad’s narrative.
Also missing are the important ways in which the brunt of
temperance activism fell not only on “the man who sells” but
also on countless ordinary people. The heyday of temperance
reform was, not coincidentally, also the heyday of “scientific
charity,” whose proponents often saw anyone who frequented the
saloon as unworthy of material aid.
Saloons themselves were more complicated than Schrad lets on.
Waving off the suggestion that they might have had redeeming
features, he insists that they must be understood as “an actual,
real blight on the local community.” At points his description
sounds a lot like what one might find in a late-19th-century
temperance pamphlet. “They were dark and smoky,” Schrad writes,
“with overflowing spittoons and sticky floors.”
Saloons were certainly not above reproach. Yet historians have
found overwhelming evidence that they served a wide variety of
social roles, not all of which were objectionable. They were
places where information was exchanged and public questions
debated; where immigrants created space that they could call
their own; and where the poor found shelter from the streets, a
free lunch to fill their bellies, and sometimes even access to
prohibitively expensive technologies such as the telephone.
Schrad is a political scientist, and in his introduction he
clarifies that Smashing the Liquor Machine is “not a history
book” but rather “a work of comparative politics.” His treatment
of the saloon is one of the points where it shows.
But Schrad’s disciplinary expertise is also the source of
extraordinary insight. Crisscrossing the globe and assimilating
vast evidence along the way, he advances a daring argument, one
that historians will be reckoning with for years to come. This
book deserves a wider audience, too. It is a fun read, thanks to
Schrad’s eye for colorful characters such as William “Pussyfoot”
Johnson, who lost one of his eyes while on mission preaching the
temperance gospel in England. During a melee between law
enforcement and college students—who were, predictably, none too
excited about his message—a rock hit him square in the face. He
was good-natured about it afterwards, telling a group of
remorseful student well-wishers who visited him in the hospital,
“You had a good time; I had a good time. I have no complaints.
But if you want some real fun, get into the game against the
greatest enemy of the human race—drink.”
Cheers to a book that offers a new and sharper sense of that
game, including what, exactly, was at stake and why so many
millions once poured their lives into playing.
Heath W. Carter is associate professor of American Christianity
at Princeton Theological Seminary. He is the author of Union
Made: Working People and the Rise of Social Christianity in
Chicago.
#Post#: 35781--------------------------------------------------
Re: ADDICTION - Drugs, Alcohol & AA's Twelve Steps
By: patrick jane Date: November 19, 2021, 4:30 pm
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[img]
HTML https://www-images.christianitytoday.com/images/126409.jpg?h=528&w=940[/img]
HTML https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/podcasts/quick-to-listen/opioid-crisis-fentaynl-church-christians-podcast.html
There’s No Good Plan to Stop 100,000 Opioid Deaths a Year
The Christian call to hard friendship in a national emergency.
100,000 Americans died from April 2020 to April 2021 due to
opioids, according to numbers released this week from the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The majority of the
deaths have come via fentanyl, which accounted for more than 75
percent of all fatalities. Most of the time fentanyl has been
used in combination with drugs like methamphetamine or cocaine.
Who were those who lost their lives? According to The New York
Times:
The vast majority of these deaths, about 70 percent, were among
men between the ages of 25 and 54. And while the opioid crisis
has been characterized as one primarily impacting white
Americans, a growing number of Black Americans have been
affected as well.
There were regional variations in the death counts, with the
largest year-over-year increases — exceeding 50 percent — in
California, Tennessee, Louisiana, Mississippi, West Virginia and
Kentucky. Vermont’s toll was small, but increased by 85 percent
during the reporting period.
This week on Quick to Listen, we wanted to talk about the opioid
crisis. What is our response as Christians who are in
relationship with those affected? What is our responsibility
when we are far away?
Andrea “Andi” Clements is professor and assistant chair of the
psychology department at East Tennessee State University and is
cofounder of Uplift Appalachia, which helps churches care for
addicted people. She is on the leadership team of the Strong
BRAIN Institute, which studies childhood resilience.
Clements joined global media manager Morgan Lee and executive
editor Ted Olsen to discuss when she first realized that opioid
addiction had entered her community, why churches are part of
the solution to the crisis, and how being in relationship with
the addicted has changed her faith.
What is Quick to Listen? Read more.
Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts
Follow the podcast on Twitter
Follow this week's hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen
Read Ted's Precious Moments article: What Steadfast Looks Like
in a Revolution
Music by Sweeps
Quick to Listen is produced Morgan Lee and Matt Linder
The transcript is edited by Faith Ndlovu
#Post#: 37805--------------------------------------------------
Re: ADDICTION - Drugs, Alcohol & AA's Twelve Steps
By: patrick jane Date: March 8, 2022, 5:08 pm
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HTML https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCxfIoD1MXg
#Post#: 39074--------------------------------------------------
Re: ADDICTION - Drugs, Alcohol & AA's Twelve Steps
By: patrick jane Date: April 26, 2022, 10:57 pm
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Oh Lord in heaven, I long for being with you into eternity and
the blessing of heaven, where there is no death, no suffering,
no pain, no persecution and no sadness. Dear Lord, there will be
no addictions either, no need for alcohol, no need for
cigarettes or any other drug. In heaven our addictions will be
no more.
#Post#: 41079--------------------------------------------------
Re: ADDICTION - Drugs, Alcohol & AA's Twelve Steps
By: patrick jane Date: July 24, 2022, 11:30 pm
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HTML https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibQTDnEmI2E
#Post#: 41737--------------------------------------------------
Re: ADDICTION - Drugs, Alcohol & AA's Twelve Steps
By: patrick jane Date: August 19, 2022, 3:18 pm
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HTML [url]http://The Submerging Church Revisited: How the Enemy is
Still Infiltrating the Church
On today's broadcast we discuss how many of the disturbing
topics discussed in our critically acclaimed documentary, The
Submerging Church, are still major issues in the church today.
We welcome special guest Nick Pinneri to the program to discuss
these issues and how they personally affected him at his most
recent ministry position at a local Christian organization.
55 minutes
HTML https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V15Rt0R7p2M[/url]
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