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I recently had my first experience with designated drinkers–the opposite of designated drivers–who are assigned to drink heavily on behalf of someone who cannot or will not use alcohol.

This happened to me on a recent trip to China. I was leading a delegation from my university to meet and negotiate partnerships with several Chinese universities. The Chinese firm that we were working with warned us that one of the university presidents–who insisted on taking us to dinner–was a notorious drinker and expected his guests to drink heavily as a sign of respect. I told them that I don’t drink, and this became a huge issue.

The other delegates agreed to be my designated drinkers–they were told that they would be expected to drink twice as much to make up for my inability to drink. The young Chinese women accompanying us also felt increased pressure to drink more, even though they preferred not to. I later discovered that they did not want to drink at all, but felt that, as employees of a recruiting firm, they had no choice.



The evening unfolded as we expected. The host brought a large amount of liquor, filled everybody’s glass and urged us to drink. I told him that I didn’t drink, and he could not understand why (religiously based behavior codes are just not a thing in China). But he looked at my colleagues and said (through an interpreter), “you will have to do all his drinking.” And they did.

I held to my “values” and did not give into the standards of “the world.” I did what every lesson manual, Youth Conference role playing scenario, and New Era short story suggested I should do. And I felt like an awful, horrible, no good scumbag. I knew that it was only possible because I was the boss, because I was the consumer, and people had to defer to my requests. When one of the young Chinese translators told me that she wished she could just say “no” and not drink, my head almost exploded. What had my vaunted moral purity cost others? How complicit had I been in depriving other people of their right to determine what goes into their bodies?

I don’t have a good answer to these questions, nor do I have any idea how I would handle the same situation if it occurred again. But it has made me seriously reconsider my understanding of the Word of Wisdom and of the way that we often use it as a proxy for moral character. In my reptile brain, I cannot think of a worse thing I could do than take a drink of alcohol. In my actual moral imagination, I realize that there are many, many things worse than having a glass of wine–and that one of them may well be sitting by passively while other people are compelled to drink so that I don’t have to.

Why the difference? Why does my rational mind understand that lying and gossiping and misusing power are greater sins than drinking wine or coffee, but my visceral reaction tells me that I can get away with those other things with a little light repentance, but drinking alcohol would make me an irredeemably bad person and would condemn me to Outer Darkness for all of eternity.



The gap, I suspect, lies in the fact that the Word of Wisdom has become, with the law of chastity, one of the two primary determiners of “worthiness” in our culture. These are the two things that can prevent someone from being baptized, that can prevent a person from going on a mission or going to the temple. They are virtually the only examples of “sin” contained in our talks and lessons. For a great part of my life, I was virtually incapable of thinking of a serious moral failing that did not involve sex, alcohol, tobacco, coffee, or tea.

Organizationally, I understand why this happens. I spend a lot of time with student assessment, and I know that you can only assess things that can be measured. “How many times have you mourned with those who mourn?” is a bad interview question, as it involves a lot of definitional messiness. “Have you ever had alcohol?” (or “tobacco” or “sex”) is a great question. It can be clearly defined, precisely measured, and turned into a bar graph. This makes assessing worthiness fairly easy. In any enterprise that requires objective measures, those things that can be qualified will always become more important than those things that cannot. If it can’t be counted, it doesn’t count.

This logic leads to very good Latter-day Saints who may also be very bad Christians, since almost everything that Christ actually cared about falls into that “can’t really be counted” category. Loving one’s neighbor as oneself is definitionally messy. Doing unto others as you would have them do unto you doesn’t graph very well.

The idea that a handful of easily trackable behavioral choices constitutes “worthiness” is institutionally satisfying but morally absurd. Morality is a lot messier than that. The fact that I have never had a drink of alcohol, or even coffee, cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, measure my moral character. It can, though, measure my loyalty to an institution. Unlike morality, loyalty can (and must) be clearly delineated and easily measured. You are either loyal to an institution or you are not, and if you are not, the institution must expel you or force you to the margins. This is how institutions work. I get that. There always have to be ways to tell who is in and who is out.

But what I learned in China was that there are some hills that I am willing to die on (or, at least, willing to make other people drink on), and these may not be the right hills. I was able to avoid drinking and maintain my purity because I had enormous privilege. Would I have exercised that privilege to show charity when it was unpopular to do so? Or to take food from the restaurant and give it to a hungry person? Probably not. When it comes right down to it, the moral decisions I feel the most strongly about making are the ones that show loyalty to a culture. And I am not convinced that this is a good thing.

Perhaps the most important thing that we have been assigned to do in this life is to learn how to make moral choices–in all of their messiness and unmeasurable glory. This is hard. It is supposed to be hard. And we do a disservice to our moral development when we imagine them to be easy–or when we mistake what is essentially a marker of cultural distinctiveness and display of loyalty for the far more important status of being a good person.