My new guilty pleasure is the CBS almost-reality show, The Amazing Race. This week, the remaining dyads made it from Patagonia to St. Petersburg. Each team had a challenge in the latter city: drink a shot of vodka “Cossack-style” (with the glass balanced on the broad side of a sword; I kept wondering how much the troup of “Cossacks” got paid for the gig) or fend off five half-hearted shots from a hockey player.
One of the teams is made of devoted Christians, and they were one of only three teams who chose flying pucks over spirits. Granted, there are good reasons not to drink. A history of alcoholism, or, a weak stomach, say. But their reason – or rather the guy in the couple’s reason; his girlfriend wasn’t so insistent – to choose the slap shots was that they were Christians. And Christians don’t drink. Uh, yeah, and that was Welch’s that Jesus made at Cana.
Again, there are good reasons not to drink alcohol. But I hate to see it when Christianity is used as an all-purpose prohibition, and a way of lifting up standards of morality that may or may not have anything to do with Christian faith.
Or perhaps that my way of getting off the hook: I do confess a tickled (un-Christian?) glee in seeing some contestants turning green in the face of eating a kilogram of second-rate caviar. Where were the blini?