Word of Wisdom: So That My Brother May Live I recently spoke with a young co-worker about why he had left the LDS Church. He came from generations of pioneer ancestry and had received a mission call to the other side of the world, but he chose not to go. As we talked, I was reminded that people leave organized religion for very different reasons. Some cannot honestly accept its truth claims. Some have been wounded by people who claimed to represent God. Others find themselves spiritually hungry, or alienated by a church’s culture and politics. But this young man acknowledged another reason: he wanted to drink. He wanted a freedom his religion would not permit. So we talked about alcohol, and I gave him the argument I have come to believe is the heart of the Word of Wisdom. Set the health claims aside. Forget the liver and the lungs. Put ten men in a room. Give all ten permission to drink. Eight of them will be fine. They will have a beer on Friday and a glass of wine at a wedding and die old in their beds. Two of them will not be fine. Two of them will become drunks. They will lose their wives and their children and their work. They will die early, and they will take other people down with them on the way out. Everyone who has lived long enough knows the two. Most of us have buried one. Here is the question. Should the other eight give up alcohol so that the two may live? My answer is yes. Absolutely yes. The eight should set the thing down, not because it would hurt them, but because it will kill their brother, and no one can tell in advance which of the ten is the brother. That is the whole argument. The commandment is not written for the eight. It is written for the two, and the eight keep it so that the two are never alone in keeping it. The revelation says this about itself. It is given, in its own words, for the weak and the weakest of all saints. It does not claim to be a diet. It is a fence built around the one man who cannot climb back over it, and everyone else walks the long way around for his sake. That is what Christianity is. Sometimes you give up a thing you enjoy so that your brother may have life. Not because the thing is evil. Because he is your brother. He disagreed. He said it simply. Why should I have to give up alcohol so the other two can live? That question stayed with me. Beneath a disagreement about alcohol was a deeper disagreement about what we owe one another. Is my brother’s vulnerability merely his problem, or does loving him place a claim upon my freedom? Must I personally suffer the consequences of something before I have a reason to give it up? To me, Christianity begins to become real precisely where the answer costs us something, where another person’s good matters enough to interrupt our enjoyment. This young man’s own people knew this in their bones. The pioneers he descends from gave up houses, farms, orchards, the graves of their parents, the country they were born in, and in more than one family their children, so that a people might exist that did not yet exist. They did not ask why should I. When the handcart companies were dying in the snow, men rode out of the valley into the storm for strangers whose names they had never heard. That is his blood. He is being asked to give up a beer. I do not say that to shame him. I say it because the distance between what his fathers gave and what he would not give is the measure of what has happened to the Mormons, and it did not happen to him alone. I think the mission call and the drink were the same question wearing two coats. A mission is two years of your life handed to strangers in a country you will never see again, so that someone there may have life. The Word of Wisdom is one small pleasure handed to a man you will never meet, so that he may have life. He answered both the same way. Why should I. Once you have said it to one, you have already left the faith.