Drinking and churchgoing: a memoir in part

I’m sure you’ve at least heard of Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life , the religious bestseller with a 40-day program of checklist-spirituality designed for the rationalistic, utilitarian wing of evangelicalism.

When our church divided into small groups to discuss the book, my group met at the rector’s house. I was doubly encouraged – not only did much of my group disagree with the premises of the book, the rector had his full sideboard of liquor available, along with imported beer and red wine. Hallelujah. I took my Rick Warren with scotch on the rocks. I later told my mother that I was drinking liquor while my group was talking about The Purpose Driven Life. She was quiet for a few seconds before replying.

“That’s weird,” she said.

When I went away to college, I was back-and-forth between the drinkers and the churchgoers. In adulthood, it is easy to be both a drinker and a churchgoer – just become Episcopalian. But during my two years at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, an hour south of Asheville in the North Carolina mountains, it was problematic to be both a drinker and a churchgoer.

Of course it had all started in high school. My friends and I reacted to Friendship Christian Schools with drinking and the heavy metal music of the late 1980s. The Raleigh, North Carolina, school was operated by Independent Missionary Baptists who measured the length between the girls’ knees and their hem lines – two inches, max, to the boys’ dismay – and they held a criteria, if a bit vague, by which boys’ haircuts were divided into “Worldly” and “Christian.”

They even went through stages when they wouldn’t allow girls to wear decent slacks to the soccer games, which didn’t make sense to some of the girls, who publicly asked, wouldn’t it be more modest to wear slacks in the bleachers than to have the wind blowing up my skirt the entire game? Unapologetically arch-conservative, it was the kind of place where any kind of alcohol consumption – even moderate drinking by adults as occasionally exhibited by my neo-Pentecostal parents – was considered sinful. Mr. Robinson, my homeroom teacher, taught the ninth grade health class. He invited a guy from a local law enforcement agency to show us how breathalyzers worked, and how little alcohol it took to get a driver into trouble with the law. We later had to write a paper about what the Bible says about alcohol. For my key verse, I chose Proverbs 20:1, “Wine is a mocker and beer a brawler; whoever is led astray by them is not wise.” Having grown up with Christian parents who attended a Passover Seder with Manischewitz Blackberry Wine (of which I received a small portion), and for that matter always had a little wine at home, I decided I couldn’t quite let Mr. Robinson and Friendship Christian Schools get away with their absolutist position. The proverb clearly said whoever is led astray by them. Not whoever drinks them. I thought any dummy could see that. I struggled with how to point it out without getting myself in trouble. I wanted to say something like, “The words ‘led astray’ seem to suggest that it is possible to drink alcohol without being led astray by it.” Could I leave it at that? Would I get away with drawing attention to the obvious phrase?

I lost a little nerve. “Although the words ‘led astray’ seem to suggest that it is possible to drink alcohol without being led astray, it is better not to drink at all so you don’t cause someone who is weaker to stumble.” Safely put, with my main point smuggled in.

* * *

The teachers and administrators were strict enough to send us to the outrageous end of the musical spectrum when we might have otherwise been content with Duran Duran. Although that might depend on your definition of “outrageous.” Put it this way – we liked the big hair-metal bands of the day, the makeup-wearing parental nightmares like Twisted Sister and Motley Cru, along with lesser known bands like Kix and Black ‘n Blue. For us, it was any band that looked like a collection of murdered prostitutes with electric guitars. We liked these outrageous bands, and their highly sexualized view of women, due to a universal law that the school administrators implicitly mocked: The unknown can be frightening or intriguing, but when the unknown is forbidden, it becomes fascinating. That law applied to our view of the girls, and to our view of the bands that were allegedly worshipping the Devil.

Our parties were usually sleep-overs; we’d watch movies until the parents went to sleep and then break out plastic two-liter bottles of Sun Country Wine Coolers supplied by someone’s older brother or fast-food co-worker.

* * *

During our senior year, the big songs on the radio were “With or Without You” by U2 and “Never Say Goodbye” by Bon Jovi. The class of 33 graduating seniors, cliquish and fragmented as any larger group of high schoolers, nonetheless came together in their relief: We were done with Friendship Christian Schools and all the ridiculous rules.

* * *

When I went to Western Carolina University to begin an eight-year and four-college trek to a bachelors degree, willingness to drink socially and fluency in heavy metal music were my only available points of social connection. I had not gone to public schools. I had not been to rock concerts. I had once gone to a public school prom with a friend, reassuring myself that no one had prior knowledge of my lack of dance ability, and relaxing in the fact that so many people were packed onto the gymnasium floor that no one would be able to see my awkward moves. My friends and I had made our forays into naughtiness, but on balance, we were sheltered, practically as well as morally. Heading to WCU, I only had my ability to talk about Ratt, Poison, and Twisted Sister, plus my appreciation for wine coolers. That was my way in.

Actually, that wasn’t all. There was always church. My parents had discovered a church much like their own near my campus, right there in Cullowhee, N.C. Like my parents’ church, it acted like a Pentecostal church while remaining nondenominational. These churches emphasized emotional worship, whirling with upbeat guitars and tambourines, speaking in tongues, and the belief that regular congregants could receive prophecies and visions from God, which they were to share with the others. I had not escaped. Apparently, this off-campus church and my parents’ church back in Raleigh, N.C., were loosely affiliated. It was a familiar church environment, which was both comforting and frustrating, like “With or Without You.” I worried that somehow people at the off-campus church would relay word of any misbehavior back to Raleigh. Full of conflicting motives and desires, I knew I should be going to church and didn’t want to go. I began college as a 17-year-old, because my birthday is September 23rd, which falls about a month into most autumn semesters. I thought the church might be a refuge for me in the face of the new, unfamiliar world of campus. Maybe I would meet my girlfriend there, maybe my wife. But that was all I wanted from church.

Fortunately, my dorm hall had some good guys. I met Joey, a gregarious fellow freshman on my hall from Wilmington, N.C., during my first week. One evening he rounded up a handful of other nervous, twitchy, upbeat guys to go see The Lost Boys at the cinema in nearby Sylva. This would be my second time seeing it, and as we walked from Reynolds dorm at the top of the campus down to the freshman parking on the other side of campus, the fall mountain air and the fellowship of those guys and the lighted windows of the girls’ dorms were exhilarating. I wasn’t completely comfortable because I didn’t know the guys very well. I was a little anxious. Were these guys going to taint me? I wasn’t sure what this new affiliation could be getting me into. At the same time, it felt good to be part of a small crowd. Never mind the sense that I was starting off my first semester of college by going out on a weeknight when I definitely had some intimidating reading assignments.

I felt comfortable hanging out with Joey, but I didn’t really become tight with him or the other guys. At the end of my first week at WCU, after wondering whether I would walk the straight and narrow, after suggesting to myself that I would behave despite how alone and socially inept I felt, I was invited to a P.J. party – not the kind with boys and girls in sleepwear, but the kind with fruit juice and Everclear mixed in a cooler, into which a student would dip his cup. In my state of social anxiety, I may very well have said “yes” before the invitation was completely spoken. I didn’t want to be odd-man-out. So at the end of my first week at WCU, I showed up at the P.J. party, which began with too many people crowed into a single dorm room on my hall. A young woman whose name might have been Melanie was the glowing lantern among the fifteen or so students. She was almost bone-skinny with a small back that dropped into a perfect rear in tight jeans, and a head of impossibly cute curly blonde hair down to her shoulders. I was never really sure why she was hanging with me and the other geeky guys in our group. This was the luck of the first freshman week, I guess – when every freshman is equal, before the social subdivisions set in.

Melanie talked to me and the others like we were normal human beings, and that was probably where we started to feel collegiate and mature. Normal conversations with pretty girls were a departure for us. Normal conversations with girls like Melanie didn’t happen in high school, unless a pretty girl was feeling generous enough to speak to the peasants. Melanie said her favorite song was “Seven Bridges Road” by The Eagles. I really liked it, too, despite all the warnings I heard at Friendship Christian Schools that “Hotel California” had secret backward messages that would hasten my slide into Hell, and despite the belief of my fringe Pentecostal church that listening to such music opened me to the influence of supernatural evil. Later that evening, I remember a half-dozen of us, the remnants of the P.J. party, were sitting on the steps outside my dorm after dark, and a radio-and-television major named Drew was having a casual conversation with Melanie, the rest of us listening in, occasionally chatting, just glad to be with other people. I cannot remember a single sophomore or upperclassman among us. We were still sipping from the opaque plastic cups advised by our resident advisers to conceal alcoholic beverages (I still couldn’t quite believe they had advised us to do that).

As the P.J. party started to wind down, my sense of guilt wobbled in a precarious balance with the feeling that I was more like these people at the party than those at my church and school back home. I felt relieved to be hanging out with someone, to have some semblance of social acceptance. I felt guilty, like I was going to lose God and meet some kind of doom. I quashed the thought, and tried to focus on those around me and enjoy the buzz of the P.J. But the buzz wasn’t buoyant. It was a sedative. I became very tired, feeling like I could go to sleep right there on the steps. My eyes closed for a second, and I could feel the blackness drawing me into dreamless sleep. Is this what people meant by “passing out”? I had not drunk so much, but the end of a stressful week and a decent helping of alcohol were working together to knock me out. It was a fair time to go to bed. We soon disbanded and I went to Room 254 in the Reynolds dormitory — without Melanie, but with a sense that I might survive social life in college.

* * *

I cannot remember what I did the next day, but two mornings later, I went to the off-campus church affiliated with the one back home. When I was 15 years old, an itinerant prophet named Leland Davis visited our church and had prophesied over me, saying, among other things, “Through his wife, a light, oh Lord.” He had also said something about me being a leader of young people, like Joshua. As I approached the off-campus church, I wondered if I would meet the foretold wife. I was less concerned about leading young people.

I walked into a crowded, low-ceiling room, full of people standing and singing in front of steel folding chairs. I found an empty chair. It was much like my home church, with a lot of people lifting their arms into the air and singing upbeat praise-and-worship songs with claps and maybe a little bouncing up and down in a dance. The church met in the first floor of a building in a short business district not far from Cullowhee’s only traffic light, and we met in an open multi-purpose room with a low ceiling. A man in his forties, with a black beard and a countrified solemnity on his face, played the electric guitar during the praise-and-worship time, but he merely plucked single notes, offering none of the power chords found in my cassette collection of “hair metal” bands. I felt at home, yet the familiar music and attitudes reminded me of the peculiar, outsider communities to which I had always belonged.

And, I felt hypocritical and a little dirty. I had been drinking on Friday night, after all, and I hadn’t even turned 18 yet. I was living in two worlds, and as every adult I had known in the churches and Christian schools would say, you cannot really live in two worlds. You belong to one or the other, never mind external appearances at any given moment. Furthermore, there was a nagging fear somewhere inside that one of the churchgoers would get a “word from the Lord” or a prophecy that revealed my misbehavior. What if God told on me? I couldn’t escape the sense that it would be for my own good.

-Colin Foote Burch, adapted from the part of the thesis I wrote for my MFA in creative writing