In Freely Sober: Rethinking Alcohol Through the Lens of Faith, Ericka Andersen has written a book for people like her: evangelical Christian women struggling in secret with a dysfunctional relationship to alcohol. Why read this when I could read other Christian recovery books, like Ian Cron’s The Fix or John Ortberg’s Steps, which (re)embrace the 12 steps as a kind of holiness-for-dummies?
After all, the most famous recovery program in the world, Alcoholics Anonymous, arose from the Christian revivalist Oxford Group. Prior to the rise of this movement, the smartest pastors didn’t have any more insight into what to do with addiction than anyone else, including the world’s best doctors and psychologists. But Christians who had experienced addiction did, and after a few rounds of trial and error, AA was founded. (Part of that trial and error was the conscious choice to focus on God but not any specific religious tradition.) Carl Jung himself expressed amazement at its results.
So when Andersen seemed to complain that AA was started by men for men, I was rankled. There are plenty of women’s AA meetings today; in fact, AA membership is about 40% female. It isn’t 1935 anymore, after all. But I have to admit that she won me over. Andersen isn’t hostile to AA at all, often citing it positively. Instead, she’s talking to an audience that may need AA’s insights without even dreaming they qualify for membership.
Her argument is that “gray area drinking” can be very destructive long before the term “alcoholic” would seem appropriate. And this is particularly true for women, who are more likely to surprise themselves by becoming “problem” drinkers later in life as new stresses arise; to realize a problem earlier because of challenges like trying to stop drinking during pregnancy; or to realize it earlier just because of our smaller bodies and the way the health effects hit us faster.
Andersen herself bears all the signs of a full-blown alcoholic, from a history of blackouts in her younger years to a constant obsession with drinking—or not drinking—haunting her years as a young mom. But even she had to convince her husband that it really was a problem. Without any major consequences (yet), it just wasn’t obvious to outsiders how much alcohol was affecting her life. And she believes that many women in the church are having the same experience.
I believe Andersen, because this is a common refrain in women’s AA meetings, too. So they’ve got a bottle stashed behind the washing machine and, yes, they think about the witching hour when they’ll run down to take a pull … but they pick up their kids from school every day, keep the family calendar going, and run the PTA. They’re not exactly the town drunk. Many of those women introduce their stories by explaining how hard it was for them to believe they needed to be there. Imagine how much harder that might be for an avid churchgoer who does quiet times and teaches Sunday school.
Andersen is also right to point out that there are other struggles with the addiction diagnosis in these circles. Historically, evangelicals were often tied up in temperance movements run by women with a mission to reform society. The effects of the overuse of alcohol can be so bad—everything from domestic abuse, to poverty, to institutionalization, prison, or death—that they concluded that any use of alcohol must be a sin. And while most churches have loosened up on this approach, the question of how alcoholism is related to sin is still a conundrum for many Christians, long after the language of alcoholism as a disease entered the secular lexicon.
Andersen isn’t a theologian and doesn’t attempt a systematic take on this question. But for this context, her encouragement to adopt a nuanced view is helpful. All the bad things in the world are ultimately caused by sin, even when suffering them is no fault of one’s own, like leukemia or type 1 diabetes. On the other hand, all our overtly sinful choices can also be traced to our fear, the lack of trust in God that leads us to grasp for control, self-aggrandizement, and compulsion. The relationship between childhood trauma, which is not our fault, and the fear that trauma can instill in us can complicate how we understand our sinful patterns. There’s also good evidence for the vulnerability to addiction based on genetic factors as well. What’s more, once we’re in the habit of drinking, it changes our brains, creating a genuine bodily sensation of need, just like the one all of us have for food.
So rather than write a treatise on how to understand one’s dysfunctional drinking in terms of sin, Andersen simply asks the reader not to think of it only in such terms. By acknowledging other contributors, such as trauma, a highly anxious personality, and rewired neural pathways, one can do a better job of taking responsibility for one’s decisions by dealing with root causes.
Andersen doesn’t entertain the idea that alcohol consumption is sinful in itself. She mentions the shift at places like Moody Bible Institute to take care not to go beyond what Scripture requires, not to take a legalistic stance. (Let’s see how much longer Southern Baptist Theological Seminary holds out.) There are just too many biblical references, and she cites them, to wine as a good and beautiful thing. For those holdouts reading this, I’ll just snarkily cite the fact that every fundamentalist preacher who ever told me that alcohol is a sin was obese. For most things, the issue isn’t the substance; it’s the compulsion.
But she does go hard on the health implications of drinking often or binge-drinking, which has turned out to be a lot worse than we originally thought. The famous study recommending wine for heart health turned out to be funded by… the wine lobby. Besides the obvious consequences of overuse, such as liver disease and death by accident, there are lots of comorbidities with even regular, controlled drinking, particularly for women. There are notable differences in breast cancer rates, heart problems, and mental health issues for regular drinkers. And I had no idea that, at least prior to the very recent dip in overall alcohol use, women’s alcohol-related deaths actually doubled in the 2010s.
The tone of the book is important here. Andersen wants to take the pressure off. She’s not making a case one way or the other, either for or against alcohol, or for or against the reader’s decision to keep drinking, moderate, or stop. Rather, she’s giving information, sharing her own story, asking her readers questions, and asking them to ask themselves some questions. The assumption is that her reader is a person of deep biblical faith who’s concerned about her drinking but doesn’t know how to think it through clearly or what to do next.
The end of each chapter reads a bit like the sorts of questions AA sponsors might have sponsees answer to perform their first step, which is to admit they are powerless over alcohol and that their life has become unmanageable. Like this one: “Do I often feel physically drained, mentally foggy, or unable to be fully present because of drinking? If so, how does that affect me in practical ways?” In other questions, she sounds more like a Christian mentor: “Does my drinking help me display the fruits of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control, or does it undermine them?”
Understanding the purpose of the book—a sort of Christian approach to the first step—helped me to appreciate Andersen’s method. In the latter part of the book, she shares lots of tips and tricks for staying away from that first drink. Some of them are familiar from AA, others from church. Telling someone your concerns, using memorized prayers or scriptures that can be called easily to mind under pressure, giving yourself a small treat instead of taking a drink, thinking through to how it feels after the high wears off, and the like. Others go a bit deeper, such as becoming willing to look at things in your past that you may be running from or that may have formed you to be more compulsive than the usual person, or even grieving the loss of alcohol and its easy escape.
Andersen does say quite a bit about surrender, which recovering alcoholics will recognize as step 3: “Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God.” I was still initially concerned, however, that we weren’t hearing more about deeper spiritual disciplines found across both recovery and spiritual formation groups: taking (and sharing with someone else) our moral inventory, assessing character defects, making amends to those we’d harmed, and adopting a meditation practice. It’s this deeper work that addresses many of the reasons we were drinking in the first place.
One of the most valuable things about the 12-step program is that it’s a program. Christians can talk all day long about repentance, making things right with one another, or disciplines like solitude and silence. But on what random Tuesday do we decide to do these things? Often enough we believe in them as great ideas but rarely carry them out. Perhaps we don’t because we’re disobedient, but I’m more inclined to say that many of us fail because we simply lack a practical plan.
In the end I think Andersen accomplishes what she needs to in Freely Sober. Like a tugboat that carries you to your ocean liner, she’s just getting you started on the journey. She reassures women in the church that they can work through some of these questions to truly assess where they’re at with drinking. She removes the shame and stigma that keeps women silent, not by downplaying the evils of alcohol abuse but by playing up the grace of God and the shared struggle with others. She admits that the line between a “normie” who can take it or leave it and a full-blown alcoholic may be a lot blurrier than we sometimes think, and that there’s much to be done for those residing in the gray zone.
For many women in the church, this book may very well fill a gap that we’ve left void by being too focused on the more dramatic forms that addiction can take, thereby missing real suffering happening right in our midst. I hope it finds its way into the right hands.
