Hannah Spencer says parliament has a drink problem. So does the Church

Something unusual is happening in pubs, at parties, and on social media. Young people are choosing not to drink.

Not because they have hit rock bottom, or because a doctor told them to. Simply because they have started to wonder whether alcohol actually delivers what it promises.

This is the ‘sober curious’ movement, a term coined by Ruby Warrington in her 2018 book of the same title. But the shift goes deeper than a trend. A recent NHS survey found that hazardous drinking among 16 to 24-year-olds has halved over the past two decades. Nearly four in ten young adults now do not drink at all. Two-thirds say they worry about alcohol’s emotional impact on their lives.

That last figure is the one worth sitting with. This is not a generation counting calories. It is a generation asking whether the way it has been taught to socialise is actually making it more connected, or less. And that is a question the Church should recognise.

Habits of desire form gradually and quietly, orienting us toward things that promise what only God can supply

Here is what makes this more than a cultural footnote. The same generation stepping back from alcohol is also the loneliest, most anxious one on record. Recent ONS data found that nearly a third of 16 to 29-year-olds report feeling lonely “often or always”. NHS figures show that almost a quarter of 17 to 19-year-olds now meet the threshold for a probable mental disorder, more than double the rate a decade ago.

When young people say they are stepping back from alcohol because they want more authentic connection and a clearer inner life, they are describing, in secular language, something the Christian tradition has always taken seriously. They are not talking about wellness. They are talking about desire. About what we are actually made for.

Am I the stumbling block?

The Church should have something to say here. The question is whether it has been paying enough attention to notice. There is a harder edge to this, and it sits closer to home than many of us might like to admit. The Drinkaware Monitor found that middle-aged drinkers are most likely to drink to unwind and escape, where younger drinkers drink primarily for social confidence. These are different drinking cultures, sitting in the same congregation.

In Romans 14:13, Paul says: “Make up your mind not to put any stumbling block or obstacle in the way of a brother or sister.” He is not prescribing abstinence for all, but he is insisting that the freedom of the strong must never come at the cost of the formation of the weak.

These are different drinking cultures, sitting in the same congregation

If younger people are consciously stepping back from alcohol and find themselves in church communities - of all places - where that choice is quietly countercultural; where the post-service pint and the parish dinner treat drinking as an unremarkable norm, something needs examining. Not because drinking is sinful. But because the habits that are comfortable to one generation may be shaping the environment in which another is trying to form their faith.

It is a discipleship question as much as a pastoral one.

The philosopher Kent Dunnington argues that addictive behaviours flourish in modern life because they fill a vacuum. They provide a sense of belonging in a world that has quietly stopped supplying it through other means. The person who gives up alcohol and starts looking for something more genuine is, perhaps without knowing it, enacting a kind of cultural prophecy.

The sober curious movement is full of people doing exactly that. They have sensed that something is wrong. They are looking for something more real.

But the movement cannot, by itself, name what it is looking for. It frames everything in therapeutic language. Mindfulness. Intentional living. Presence. These are not nothing. But they have no grammar for original sin, no account of grace and no destination beyond personal flourishing.

An honest search

Augustine understood the restlessness this generation is living. The human will be not simply broken, he argued. It is misdirected. Habits of desire form gradually and quietly, orienting us toward things that promise what only God can supply. A generation sensing that alcohol-centred community is not delivering what it promises is at the beginning of a longer journey. Secular frameworks can diagnose the symptoms, but they cannot name the destination.

The Church holds what this search requires. Practices of honest self-examination. Communities of genuine accountability. A theological account of desire and what it is actually for. That is not a programme or a policy. It is simply what the Church is supposed to be.

How much of our ordinary social life, including our church social life, has quietly come to rely on borrowed belonging - a togetherness built around something external (alcohol) rather than something genuine? The unspoken assumption that this is just how community works? None of it is necessarily wrong. But it is worth asking whether we have been as attentive to what we are building as we could have been.

A generation is searching, in largely secular terms, for a theology it has not yet found. The question is whether the communities it stumbles across, including ours, turn out to be genuinely worth finding.