Selling Out

The Sun Magazine's theme of the month of November is "selling out." I wrote this and sent it in in the spring and it was published! In fact it's the first one published in the "Readers Write" section! Now you can read it on their site. When I saw the theme at first I couldn't think of anything worth writing about, and then this flash:

I went to a conservative Baptist college in Tennessee mostly because it was cheap. There I was taught it was wrong for any Christian to drink. My parents weren't against drinking. Dad often had a beer with supper on hot summer evenings. Though I'd never tasted alcohol, I wondered why my instructors felt it should be banned. Could something God had created be essentially evil? Hadn't Jesus's first miracle been changing water into wine?

So I decided to write an essay for English on whether or not good Christians should drink. I would wait until after I'd done my research before making up my mind as to alcohol's morality or immorality.

Our professor said we would need to present a thesis statement before we began. When it was my turn to read my thesis for the class, I said I would "study the stance Christians should take toward alcohol." The professor assumed this meant I would write an essay on why Christians should not drink.

I didn't correct him.

Although I found more scriptural evidence supporting the consumption of alcohol than opposed to it, I focused on the verses that could, if interpreted a certain way, make drinking alcohol seem immoral.

I got an A.



This is the edited version that will be published. I think I actually like the version the magazine editor came up with better than my own. It is more toned-down and less negative. Perhaps I'll post the original later on so that you can weigh in on which one you like best. The only part that I wish they'd kept is that I had originally ended it with "But now I drink," which I think is much more fun. Oh well.

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