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Redeeming the Demon Drink: New Zealand Presbyterians and the Question of Alcohol

This article analyses responses to alcohol within the Presbyterian Church in New Zealand over the long period from early European settlement to the present. It focuses on attitudes to alcohol as a moral, political and religious question, especially in relation to Presbyterian policies and practices, and the Church’s role in alcohol campaigning. The article traces the rise of restrictive attitudes and campaigning in the nineteenth-century Church, and subsequent liberalization during the last decades of the twentieth century. The latter more recent period has received curiously little attention in analyses of the social history of alcohol, but has nevertheless been marked by significant transformations. This article argues that the most significant changes in Presbyterian attitudes and behaviour were closely tied to evangelical projects of Christianization. Nineteenth century evangelical activism led to a close alignment between restrictive attitudes towards alcohol and the “conversion” and moralizing of society, as well as the rise of temperance as a kind of mediating religious form. For a variety of reasons, such notions waned in popularity. By the twenty-first century, consumption not only became more acceptable but was also increasingly advocated as a means to promote Christianization.