Letter to Georgetown Mayor

Dear Mayor,

Not only did your minister friends deceive the city council on 1 December, but they have, in all likelihood, been deceiving you for all of your life. The alcohol is evil mentality espoused by the Southern Baptist Convention is the result of an appeasement to pro-temperance forces of the late 19th Century, coupled with private interests in keeping taxes and legitimate competition away from bootleg liquor and justified with an heretical, or false, teaching based on a deliberate misinterpretation of scripture.

I’ll work this backwards, because it is explained easier that way. The heresy is in teaching that the wine mentioned in the Bible is non-alcoholic. In the Hebrew, Greek, and Chaldean languages, the words used in scripture then are the same words used today. Today, as in times past, those words for wine meant a fermented, alcoholic beverage. There is no difference; if one goes to Greece or Israel and finds a product with any of the scriptural words, one will find an alcoholic beverage. The “new” wine argument is equally heretical, as “new” means now, as it did then, only that the wine has not aged, not that it is unfermented. The semantic play that biblical wine was grape juice doesn’t hold up to any reasoned analysis; there were ancient words for grape juice, and those words are not in the scriptures used to justify the anti-alcohol heresy. One last comment on this; It may be said that the “wine” isn’t the same, because yeast wasn’t added. This is partly true, but only in a misdirected manner. The grapes of the Mediterranean area are naturally coated with an external growth of yeast, so it is not necessary to add any for fermentation. Grapes for direct consumption (from the bunch), such as the Concord varieties, have been selected and bred so as not to produce this otherwise naturally occurring yeast.

Post Civil War, temperance societies sprung up across the US and the world, though internationally they were less prevalent. Many ministries joined in the movement under pressure from more conservative members of their congregations. There was also, in the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction South an impetus, not just from conservative church members, but from those profiting off illegal liquor trade. By joining the temperance call, these groups were able to claim non-alcoholic communities, some very few of which were so in fact, relieving bootleggers from two sources of concern: competition and taxation.

The issue of non-alcoholism first came before the Southern Baptist Convention around 1870, but did not become an Article of Faith until 1896. This means that the current Southern Baptist mentality and teaching on alcohol has only existed for 112 years of the nearly four hundred years of the Baptist faith. Remember, Elijah Craig, the famed developer of Bourbon was more famous in his time as a Baptist minister. The hypocrisy of the teaching is evident in the general informal ministers’ guidelines of the “two hour” and “no one sees” rules.

So, in short, the anti-alcohol Southern Baptist teaching is itself heresy and forms a cover for criminal activity. It is also being abandoned by many member churches of the Southern Baptist Community.

As for the obvious attempt by those ministers who spoke at the city council meeting on 1 December to influence government, the Southern Baptist Convention Position Statement on Church and State reads thus:  “We stand for a free church in a free state. Neither one should control the affairs of the other. We support the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, with its "establishment" and "free exercise" clauses.”

You once claimed ethical high ground in talking with me; in allowing and, quite possibly, sponsoring these ministers to posit a denominationally-specific religious view supported by bogus “facts” in an attempt to stifle a measure beneficial to the community as a whole, I must question your ethics.