Christian Comedian Reveals How God ‘Rescued’ Him From Alcoholism
By Movieguide® Contributor
Christian comedian Jeff Allen is opening up about how finding God helped him beat his alcohol and cocaine addictions.
He details his story in his new book “Are We There Yet?”
“Jeff Allen shares the inspirational and at times laugh-out-loud story of how God rescued him from alcoholism and despair through the book of Ecclesiastes. At times, his story is tragic and even tear-jerking—but in the end, it demonstrates that God takes a customized approach to reaching each of His children,” a synopsis of the book reads.
Allen opened up about his childhood faith with CBS.
“I was a child. I just said, ‘Tell me what I need to do.’ They said, ‘Pray.’ And I said, ‘To what?’ I didn’t believe in God. I did those prayers. I did the serenity prayer. I did the third step prayer, not even knowing who or what I was praying to,” he confessed.
He got his start in comedy in 1978 and eventually found himself struggling with substance abuse.
“I started comedy in 1978 and by 1980 there were more comedy clubs than comedians in the country — so I was able to travel, make money and be bad at it,” Allen told Fox News in 2019. “And I think I moved back home with my folks for about three months — that was because of alcohol and drugs. I just had gotten so bad, that I needed to clean up and I called my dad one day and said, ‘I can’t stop, so you need to come and get me.’ And he drove out to where I was and brought me home. I got clean and sober for a while.”
As he began his sobriety journey, he turned to self-help books and philosophy before he found the Bible. Now, with 36 years of sobriety, the comedian felt God call him to share his story.
“It started me on the path to does God exist, and if he does, what does it look like? For me, it was through self-help. It was through new age Buddhism. I mean, I exhausted a lot of different things until I met a man who put the Bible in my hands. It’s 37 years later. I was 30 to 38 when we went through what we went through, my wife and I,” Allen explained. “And I thought it would be a good time to reach out to the millennial population who have now gone through college. They’ve gotten the jobs. They’ve gotten what they thought in life would bring them to some point of meaning. And they’re sitting there going, ‘Is this it? Is this the rest of my life?’ It’s exactly the questions I had asked and answered.”
Allen travels the country doing stand-up comedy and then sharing his book and his life story.
“Most churches that I work, they just want their congregation to laugh. There are such healing benefits to that,” he added.
Movieguide® previously reported on Allen:
Feeling like his marriage was broken beyond repair, he turned on one of the Bible tapes. What he heard changed his life forever.
“It was Ecclesiastes. And when I heard meaningless, meaningless, all in life is meaningless, I knew that,” he said. “That was my conclusion—nothing mattered. I was a full-blown nihilist, nothing mattered.”
“What I really got out of that first sermon that I heard was life without God will have no meaning, and without meaning, there’s no purpose – and in a life without purpose, you might as well kill yourself,” he told Fox News. “And that summed up my eight-year search. I personally really couldn’t find anything that gave me any lasting peace or joy…
“Jesus said, ‘Don’t worry about this life, I’ll give you a new counselor in the form of the Holy Spirit,’” Allen said. “That’s the new way of looking at things with a new view of the world. Now, it fights with my nature, believe me. Paul talks about it all the time, you know, killing off your nature. But everyday there is something in me.”
