Alcohol

“In this cohort study of 19887 participants from the Health and Retirement Study, with a mean follow-up of 9.1 years, when compared with never drinking, low to moderate drinking was associated with significantly better trajectories of higher cognition scores for mental status, word recall, and vocabulary and with lower rates of decline in each of these cognition domains.” - JAMA

“While the church has more to offer an addict, even many Christians turn to 12-step programs (like Alcoholics Anonymous). Why? According to Dunnington, one reason is that churches aren’t calling people to confess their sins or admit they are sinners” - TGC

“In addition to identifying a steep increase in the rate of alcohol-related deaths, the study’s authors also presented other findings showing an increase in the annual number of alcohol-related injuries.

“I am not a prohibitionist. I believe that efforts to classify wine in the Bible as grape juice border on the silly. People drank alcoholic beverages and the Bible does not call that sin.” - I Hate Alcohol

“The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released statistics showing that death from suicide, alcohol, and drugs hit their highest level since the federal government started recording data in 1999.” - Christian Headlines

“One hundred years ago today, the Eighteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution was ratified, prohibiting “intoxicating liquors” in the United States and launching the era known as Prohibition. Here are nine things you should about Prohibition and how the religiously inspired temperance movement transformed America.” - TGC

“The data… show that alcohol-related deaths have climbed steadily from the 19,469 deaths recorded in 1999. Deaths from misusing alcohol did not decline at any time since that period, and they included not only alcohol poisonings but also alcoholic liver disease and cirrhosis.

“While 41 percent of Protestant churchgoers say they consume alcohol, 59 percent say they do not. That’s a slight shift from 10 years ago, according to the LifeWay Research survey, which was conducted Aug. 22-30, 2017.” - BP News

“The most important substance we should be looking at is alcohol, because it leads to some many things, including physical abuse and rape, that shouldn’t happen. We need to stop accepting that there isn’t anything we can do about it.”

Because the debate about alcohol consumption tends to be binary—consumption is acceptable/consumption is unacceptable—it rarely moves to considerations of how much consumption is acceptable.