Friends and Alcohol: Recovering a Forgotten Testimony

Friends have expressed strong concerns about the use and abuse of alcohol for more than three hundred years. Nearly all yearly meetings have advices and queries on the subject. For instance, Pacific Yearly Meeting asks Friends: "Are our lives so filled by the Spirit that we are free of the use of tobacco, alcohol, and other drugs, and of excesses of any kind?" Yet many contemporary Friends find such queries quaint at best. In an article in Quaker Life, Sabron R. Newton, a Chicago Friend, wrote that she knows a number of new Quakers who thought that "we laid down our 'temperance testimony' long ago--if not when we put aside the broadbrims and bonnets, then certainly by the time the nation repealed Prohibition."