Chapter X - Religious Conversion as a Cure, part 1

Chapter X - Religious Conversion as a Cure, part 1

What drives someone to seek a life without alcohol? This chapter from *The Psychology of Alcoholism* by George Barton Cutten takes you right into the early 20th‑century debate about whether alcoholism is a sin, a disease, or something in between. Read in a measured, old-school style, the episode looks at how attitudes shifted from blaming drunkards for moral failure to viewing alcoholism as "a disease of body and mind".

Cutten focuses on one controversial idea of the time: that religious conversion could act as a powerful cure for chronic drinking. You’ll hear striking claims from doctors and mission workers who insisted that "the only reformed drunkards of whom [they] had knowledge were those who had been saved, not through medical but through religious influence." Missions in New York are used as case studies, with figures suggesting that over 60% of men who experienced conversion stayed sober, sometimes for decades.

The chapter breaks down why religious change might help so many: it sparks a genuine desire for reform, creates new social circles away from pubs and saloons, and offers an emotional substitute for the thrill of drinking. As Cutten puts it, religious life may not match alcohol in intensity, but it can far exceed it in how much of a person’s life it touches.

There’s also a psychological angle: conversion is framed as a sudden break from a "lower self" to a "higher self", often after a period of inner conflict, misery, and self‑division. The text questions whether drunkards truly feel a "sense of sin" or simply want relief from suffering, raising issues that still echo in modern recovery conversations.

If you’re curious how older ideas about faith, habit change, and craving still shape recovery debates today, this chapter might leave you asking: how different are we, really, from those early mission halls?