That maketh glad the heart

A toast to Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council for arguing that drinking a beer while watching the Super Bowl is "substance abuse."

Perkins is upset because the NFL told Fall Creek Baptist Church in Indianapolis that they weren't allowed to charge admission for their Super Bowl party featuring the big game on a giant projection screen. (Here's the AP story, and a nice Slate explainer, "Is My Super Bowl Party Illegal?")

The NFL explained to Fall Creek that you can't charge admission to game broadcasts used "in connection with events that promote a message, no matter the content." Perkins calls this a "contradiction" because:

… the league allows businesses such as sports bars to broadcast the game to crowds in an environment that encourages alcohol consumption. Obviously, the NFL is more comfortable promoting substance abuse …

So for Perkins, "alcohol consumption" = "substance abuse."

Perkins and the FRC are among those supposedly "conservative" Christians who insist that they, unlike the evil liberals, read the Bible literally. This is an example of how they don't mean "literally" literally.

Thus wherever the word "wine" appears in the Bible — which is a lot — these folks read it as "grape juice." But then they get to a passage like Ephesians 5:18, "Do not get drunk on wine," and suddenly decide that the same exact word they have insisted should not be read as "wine" now means "wine" after all.

There are a lot of words that might be used to describe this kind of culture-conformed eisegesis, but "literal" is not one of them. Neither is "conservative."

There's some fairly intricate self-trickery involved in such readings. The initial step is the easy part — deciding that when the text says X you'd prefer it to mean Y. The difficult part comes in convincing yourself that this substituting of Y for X is a "literal" reading.

The teetotalism of American evangelicals is in itself a relatively minor quirk, a vestigial remnant of the 19th-century "temperance" movement. It exists today as merely the kind of arbitrary symbolic gesture that wholly conformed and assimilated religious groups tend to make as a desperate attempt to distinguish themselves from their otherwise indistinguishable neighbors.

So even though Perkins sounds like he wants to re-establish Prohibition, he doesn't really. If the rest of the country stopped drinking, or dancing, then he and his people would have to find some other symbolic characteristic to set themselves apart. They'd have to prohibit sugar or carpeting or something else, devising some way of reading this prohibition back into the Bible and then tricking themselves all over again into believing that it was something they found there instead of something they inserted into the text, Y for X.