ABIGAIL KABANDULA
“BEERS, Bros and Bible this Thursday” is a regular announcement at the church I attend.
Now, I hear it without surprise. It passes as casually as any notice about choir practice or Sunday volunteers. But there was a time when such words would have unsettled me completely. Teenage me would have been appalled.
I grew up believing that alcohol belonged firmly on the wrong side of righteousness. To drink was to flirt with sin; to step into a pub was to step away from heaven. In some circles, even now, the idea of a church promoting an event centered on beer would be scandalous. What kind of church is this? One can almost hear the question. What kind of believers?
And yet belief, like identity, is malleable.
My mother understood this long before I did. She was a devoted Christian, disciplined in her faith and conservative in many ways, yet she saw no immorality in alcohol itself. Her view was practical. “There is nothing wrong with drinking, but there is everything wrong with drunkenness.” She would rant. It was a distinction that seemed too subtle to me then but entirely sensible now.
Around us, however, the social rules were less balanced. My sisters grew up under the quiet pressure that respectable women should abstain or at least appear to. Even when no one explicitly forbade it, expectations were understood. Men, meanwhile, were granted more room to indulge. My brothers were hardly judged by the same standard. Society had long made peace with male drinking in ways it never quite did with women.
That double standard was not unique to where I was raised. Across many cultures, men are permitted appetites that women are asked to discipline. Even in places that imagine themselves modern, the old permissions and restrictions remain surprisingly durable.
There is some irony in this. In my own extended family, the women often outdrink the men with remarkable ease. Such realities tend to puzzle those still attached to rigid ideas about masculinity and femininity. Life, as usual, is less tidy than ideology.
I remain moderate in temperament and capacity. One or two glasses suffice, especially with food. Scots, confident with whisky, often find my modest limits amusing. I take no offense; restraint can be a personality.
Still, the larger transformation is not about alcohol at all. It is about what happens when a person moves across worlds and begins to absorb new ways of thinking without entirely surrendering the old ones. Parts of me remain deeply rooted in African sensibilities. Other parts have been shaped by Western habits, institutions, and freedoms.
What emerges is not confusion, but composition: a self-formed through blending.
South Africa was where that composition first became visible to me.
As a graduate student at the University of Cape Town, I entered a world that felt expansive in every sense. There I learned to appreciate the small rituals of cultivated adulthood: cheese, crackers, and wine shared after long days of study. Among my peers, these were less luxuries than a language of fellowship.
What startled me most, however, was church life. My pastor in Rondebosch thought nothing of bringing wine to dinners or church gatherings, and neither did anyone else. At first, I was quietly scandalized. Drinking at a church event? Had the boundary between sacred and sinful dissolved without consulting me?
But Cape Town had its own logic. Wine was woven into the culture, ordinary rather than forbidden. A decent bottle was affordable, and for graduate students with limited means and large ambitions, that mattered. With enough crackers, enough conversation, and one bottle saved for later, life felt rich. We were happy, intellectually alive, and convinced we might change the world.
In many ways, that season changed me. At the University of Cape Town, I was challenged as a scholar and strengthened as a woman. I began to trust my own mind, my own worth, and my ability to contribute meaningfully to questions larger than myself. That confidence has outlasted the campus.
Then came America.
Arriving in Massachusetts to begin doctoral studies was the fulfillment of a dream. And as always, one of my first priorities was to find a church. Faith, whatever else had changed, remained part of the structure of my life.
Previous experience in Connecticut had taught me that not every church style suited me. Baptist congregations, with their exuberance and improvisation, left me disoriented. I could never tell when the service had begun, when it might end, or what exactly was happening in between. Their energy was sincere, but for a graduate student guarding every hour, sincerity was not enough.
This time, I found refuge among Presbyterians in Somerville.
They were everything I had hoped for: orderly, structured, efficient. Every element of the service was planned and printed in a program. One always knew where one was and what came next. The sermon was intellectually serious and, just as importantly, reliably thirty minutes. It was a liturgical discipline suited to doctoral life.
The minister—let us call him John—was a heavily bearded man with the kind of rustic warmth. The congregation was entirely white, which did not surprise me. New England has its own histories, and churches often reflect them.
What did surprise me, at least initially, was where John preferred to meet congregants: the Irish pub on the corner of Elm Street.
By then, however, I had changed enough not to confuse location with morality.
So, when I now hear “Beers, Bros and Bible this Thursday,” it does not offend my faith or shake the foundations of my being. It registers simply as one more way communities gather. A church announcement. A social ritual. An institution of its own kind.
And yet even here, the story is not uncomplicated.
The phrase itself reveals what progress often leaves untouched. “Beers, Bros and Bible” is for men. There is no equivalent gathering named with equal confidence for women. Women still tend to meet in homes, in quieter and less public spaces. They may drink if they wish, of course, and some do. But men continue to occupy social spaces more naturally, including those shaped around leisure and belonging.
The old hierarchies do not disappear all at once. They adapt. They soften at the edges. They rename themselves.
Perhaps that is the larger lesson. Change does happen—personally, socially, spiritually—but unevenly. It is shaped by upbringing, travel, experience, and the willingness to question what once seemed fixed. To live abroad is to encounter these shifts repeatedly, in churches and pubs, in language and habit, in others and in oneself.
Sometimes growth arrives not through grand revelations, but through the quiet realization that the things which once shocked you no longer do.
The author holds joint fellowship appointments at the Josef Korbel School of Global and Public Affairs, University of Denver and University of Edinburgh Law School.
