I began this essay months ago with the best intentions to keep it succinct. This did not happen. When I bumped my head on the 10,000-word mark, it became clear that I needed to break apart the empire or run down to Office Depot and have them bind it into a booklet. I chose the former because I am cheap. Because I am still a little peeved at myself for making me piece this out, I will not bother making each one a well-balanced post with an introduction, body, and conclusion. It is a small act of rebellion, but it will keep me sane and I’m sure the reader will be thankful.
Introduction
Raising his cup at the last supper, Jesus drank a toast to the world he came to save. The dawn of his death was hours away, and he had eagerly desired to share this meal with his closest friends. Set upon the cramped table in the upper room, the accouterments of the Seder meal waited patiently: wine, unleavened bread, bitter herbs, perhaps a lamb hastily eaten, all seasoned with centuries of symbolism.
These archetypes and symbols commissioned by their Creator had been hurtling down through history, hurrying through centuries of meals, giving alluring hints, foreshadowing, promising, always giddy to reveal their secrets. They had a meeting with their their Maker in the upper room where they would finally be able to shout what they had always only whispered.
The New Covenant, the pivot of history, the point of history, was about to be sealed. For this occasion, Jesus chose a souvenir for his disciples to remember Him. This was not a snow globe of the Temple shrouded in plastic precipitation; it was not a golden cross dangling on a delicate chain; neither was it a screenplay for reenacting the events of his death. It was a simple, living drama for each believer to act out. Each prop was chosen by him to symbolize a spiritual reality that was far beyond human comprehension and stuffed into the most basic and ubiquitous of substances: bread and wine.
Christian mystics and theologians for the entirety of church history wrote tomes on the sacraments, with the brightest of them able to gape and motion at their profundity. Eighteen hundred years after Jesus’s eager instructions, one of the symbols was swapped for a look-alike: wine was decommissioned and replaced with its sterilized form, grape juice. Today, in America, most Protestant churches maintain this young tradition of grape juice for communion.
Not until the middle of the nineteenth century was the switch to grape juice considered. Thorough reasoning for this swap seems unburdened with wisdom or cautious Biblical exegesis. But it was a change made nonetheless and there are few you would find on the street who could tell you when, why, or how this change was made.
The great grape juice swap is one of several discoveries I have made in my adult life which have left me scratching my head in places that never before itched. These are not the novel discoveries of new worlds or gospel cousins or hidden doctrines- that is the stuff of heresy. But the discoveries of ancient ruins grown over with vines, magnificent structures inhabited for centuries with evidence of once bustling life, now silent. It leaves the pondering mind wondering why they were abandoned, and what strange fate justified their hasty desertion?
My aim is to recount the history of this change, revisit the meaning of wine as a symbol, and make the case that the grape juice swap was a symbol in its own right. Then I would like to suggest we shelf the Welch’s and, once again, pop the cork.
Brief History of TEmperance
Puritan values infused the nascent America in the 17th and early 18th centuries. Anyone who has read any Puritan literature can see how they effervesced with a desire to enjoy Christ and his gifts. Among these was fermented drink. Fermented drink played an important role in colonial life, and was considered useful for medicinal and occupational needs. It killed pain, quelled fevers, and acted as a bromide for dyspeptic stomachs. It also played an important part in social conviviality such as barn raising, harvesting, and communal celebrations.
Availability was coupled with responsibility. Drunkenness was condemned, not primarily for any social disturbance, but because it was an abuse of a good gift of God. Public drunkenness was punished by flogging, stocks, and banishment. Municipal governments legislated the amounts of drink available, who could sell it, and the hours that drinking was allowed. A man could mosey down to the local tavern, where he would be met with conversation, salutation, and moderation. The tavern keeper saw to it that no one got rowdy, and the strong moral center of the imbiber obviated any need for his involvement. Culture condemned the drunkard and social stigma plucked the weeds of debauchery when they were the size of thumbnails.
The several decades straddling the 18th and 19th centuries saw an exponential growth in the population and with it a watering down of the moral fiber that kept sins like debauchery at bay. Puritan values of moderation and the social stigma that dampened deeds of the flesh were drowned by the influx of immigrants who did not share the affection for the gifts God gave. The Industrial Revolution with its aggregated upheaval of family life also pulled at the loose ends of the social fabric.
Along with the drink came all the fractious behaviors that attend debauchery, such as failed responsibility, poor parenting, economic hardship, and absent fathers. By the end of the 18th century, it was completely out of hand. John Adams lamented,
I was fired with a zeal amounting to an enthusiasm, against ardent spirits, the multiplication of taverns, retailers and dram shops and tippling houses. Grieved to the heart to see the number of idlers, thieves, sots and consumptive patients made for the use of physicians in these infamous seminaries, I applied to the court of sessions, procured a committee of inspection and inquiry, reduced the number of licensed houses, etc. But I only acquired the reputation of a hypocrite and an ambitious demagogue by it. The number of licensed houses was soon reinstated, drams, grogs, and setting were not diminished, and remain to this day as deplorable as ever.
John Adams, personal correspondence to Benjamin Rush
The first thing to note is the use of the word “tippling”, which means the drinking of alcohol, is an adorable word and I will add it to my vocabulary forthwith. The other thing to notice is that the abuse of the drink had gone all the way to the top. Thomas Jefferson also bemoaned its ubiquity, and vowed that if he were to “commence my administration again, with the knowledge that from experience I have acquired, the first question that I would ask with regard to every candidate for office would be, ‘Is he addicted to the use of ardent spirits.”
Fermented drink was democratized and soaked the land. People drank more and with less oversight and control. Historians Paul Aaron and David Musto noted, “During the first decades of the 1800s, as people drank more and more in places specifically and exclusively designed to cater to consumption of alcohol and as laws governing operating hours or sales to minors were regularly ignored, public drunkenness grew to be defined as a social problem.”
Benjamin Rush, physician, and signer of the Declaration of Independence, in response to this growing problem, wrote a pamphlet dethroning the medicinal and social benefits of alcohol as well as warning of its disposition to spoil physical and social health. Intemperance was like a soft spot in an apple, a social rot spreading across the skin of the country and working inward to the core.
When the Second Great Awakening (1790-1830) caught fire in the Northwest, it had in its sights not only the saving of souls but the social reform that ought to accompany it. Abolitionism, women’s suffrage, and the Temperance movements were a few of the social causes that were fueled by this eruption of religious fervor.
It is impossible to understand movements like Temperance and its connection to our communion investigation without understanding the Second Great Awakening (2GA). Lamentably, there is no space to explore the profundity of how it changed America. If I were to stuff it all into an unsatisfying tagline, I would say the 2GA transformed Christianity into American Christianity.
Charles Finney, one of the headliners of the 2GA, was an Arminian and kinda-sorta a bit of a Pelagian. The former belief puts the impetus and maintenance of salvation into man’s hands, and the latter denies original sin and believes man has the power to live a sinless life. With their powers combined, it created a self-reliant nougat that saw mankind and society as perfectible. This was then mixed with a belief that the return of Christ would happen once mankind got his bees in a bunch, and there you have the makings of some fantastic moral movements.
A focus on improving conduct led to the creation of organizations aimed at changing society’s trajectory away from tenacious sins like alcoholism. Much-needed moral improvements saw the inertia of the revivalism and hitched their desire for social change to its juggernaut power. The Temperance movement, more than any other, saw in the 2GA a wet towel heavy enough to finally quench the fire of alcohol abuse in the nation. The Bible became sort of a proof text for social reform rather than a rubric to guide it.
Temperance movements began sprouting up all over America, beginning with the men behind the pulpits. Catholics, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Methodists all found solidarity in this cause. At its height, the Temperance movement boasted well over 1.5 million members in various chapters and organizations. The jewel in the crown of this movement would not come for some decades later in the form of the Prohibition of 1920, which was also the fertilization for organized crime in America.
One of the prime movers of Temperance was Congregationalist minister Lyman Beecher. Beecher saw this revivalism of the 2GA as a powerful force for social change. He was brilliant, motivated, and indefatigable. Apart from the half dozen societies he founded, he is most famous for penning “Six Sermons on Intemperance”. He was influenced by Finney, and also denied that mankind is inherently sinful and thus morally perfectible. Both men focused more on man’s need for moral change rather than his need for repentance and reliance on Christ.
At its inception, Temperance cautioned against the abuse of fermented drink and championed moderation in consumption – a noble, biblical aim. It did not take long, however, for Temperance itself to ferment and sour into a push for abstinence and a declaration of alcohol’s inherent sinfulness. Those who initially sided with the Temperance movement, even to the point of abstention, soon found the goalposts pushed further out into the fields of moralism. New Christian converts were told that to qualify they needed to not only abstain from any alcohol themselves but confess that it was inherently evil.
Personal preferences of the masses sought to reformulate church constitutions. In 1859, a motion came before the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America asking that those who disagreed with alcohol’s inherent sinfulness be banned from taking communion altogether. Thankfully, older Presbyterians who had their wits about them shot down the motion.
Nevertheless, Temperance made its intentions clear
That the tendency of all intoxicating drinks to derange the bodily functions, to lead to drunkenness, to harden the heart, sear the conscience, destroy domestic peace, excite to the commission of crime, waste human life, and destroy souls; and the rebukes and warnings of God in his word in relation to them, in connection with every law of self-preservation and of love, imposed upon all men a solemn moral obligation to cease forever from their manufacture, sale and use, as a beverage, and so unitedly call upon us as men and Christians, not to pause in our work until such manufacture, sale and use, shall be universally abandoned.
National Temperance Convention, Saratoga, July, 1841
In 1873, The Women’s Christian Temperance Union was formed. The tactics of the WCTU are well-known to history. Dressed to the nines, they would enter saloons on Friday nights and, amidst the smoked-out and inebriated men, sing songs like “Lips that Touch Liquor Shall Never Touch Mine.” Dozens of “temperance hymns” were penned, and hundreds of pamphlets circulated that the devil dwelt in the booze and gained entry to humans through the drink.
The logical next step was the elimination of wine in the Lord’s Supper. This brought up the obvious question of Jesus’s interaction with wine. Clearly, if alcohol was sinful, and Jesus participated in wine-making and drinking, then this had very serious implications. To avoid this unpleasant scenario, the Temperance movement applied a strange logic: Jesus was sinless. Fermented drink is sinful. Therefore, the wine Jesus drank was not fermented. Classic “No True Scotsman” fallacy for those of you schooled in logical fallacies.
To justify this claim, the “Two-Wine Theory” was developed, which took all scriptures that negatively talked about wine to mean the fermented kind, and those places where wine was spoken of in a positive light to mean the unfermented kind. Those who had their wits about them noted that there was zero evidence for such a claim, and those verses cited to prove the case were demonstrably false.
Apart from this textual misconstruing, Two Wine opponents asked the very obvious question of how the ancient Jews and those of Jesus’s day could have kept the grapes from fermenting in the first place? Hypotheses to this challenge were attempted, all speculative and feeble. Temperance acolyte and Two Wine theorist Eliphanet Nott conceded that, perhaps, there was just the teeniest weeniest bit of fermentation in the grapes when Jesus imbibed. But instead of backing off the whole alcohol is inherently wicked thing, he doubled down, concluding that the law of Christian love demanded the need to “wholly to abstain from the use of vinous beverage of every sort.”
Thankfully, for the Temperance movement, Louis Pasteur had just discovered that yeast caused the fermentation in juice, and his “pasteurization” process which would delay it. Several Temperance advocates noted the providential timing of pasteurization coinciding with the sudden discovery that alcohol had been wicked this whole time, despite eighteen centuries of it being chill.
One enterprising Methodist congregant, a dentist and opportunist, saw the potential afforded by the move from wine to grape juice in communion, and applied Pasteur’s process to grapes, providing a sin-free sharing of Christ’s cup. His name: Thomas Welch. Yes, that Welch. He marketed his product as “Dr. Welch’s Unfermented Wine.” This discovery cured the problem of communion wine and sent many churches into a trajectory of juice-use that continues today.
Welch’s knew the power of sensual advertising, running ads picturing a full-lipped filly sipping Welch’s juice, inviting with the temperance hymn spin-off “The lips that touch Welch’s are all that touch mine.” Sex sells.
The 2GA and all its attending social pork eventually mutated into the Social Gospel and theological liberalism, an oily stain on church history.
So the move from fermented wine to grape juice was not a product of careful biblical exegesis, but from an a priori belief that wine is inherently sinful. Temperance was a reactionary moralism that made the ancient mistake of placing the onus of sin on a thing rather than the depraved heart of man. Man-made taboos replaced God’s law and attached personal righteousness to adherence to the taboos. You may recognize this by its proper name, legalism.
The Temperance movement, though alive, has atrophied. Prohibition is gonzo. Alcoholism took zero seconds to become an issue again and continues to rage. The most lasting successes of the entire temperance movement was the removal of wine from the sacraments and making Welch’s into a household name.
Part 2 to follow
Thought Butter 