"God Almighty never intended that the devil should triumph over the Church. He never intended that the saloons should walk rough-shod over Christianity"
About this Quote
Billy Sunday hurls a battle cry that blends providence with reform. God is cast as the guarantor of the Church’s endurance, while the devil is identified with institutions of vice, especially the saloon. The moral world is not a gray landscape of competing appetites but a field of combat with a foreknown victor. By insisting that God never intended the Church to be overrun, he gives his listeners theological certainty; by naming saloons as trampling Christianity, he gives them a concrete enemy and a political task.
The language is muscular and populist, true to Sunday’s persona as a former baseball star turned revivalist who filled temporary tabernacles across America in the 1900s and 1910s. Phrases like “walk rough-shod” turn social critique into vivid theater. The devil is not an abstraction but a force with addresses on Main Street, serving drinks after payday and luring men into debt, violence, and neglect. For Sunday and his allies in the Anti-Saloon League, the saloon symbolized a nexus of alcoholism, family breakdown, urban machine politics, and immigrant vice districts. To oppose it was to defend hearth, church, nation, and God’s order.
The line functions as both reassurance and mobilization. Providence promises victory, but it does not eliminate duty; believers must align law and civic life with divine intent. In the Progressive Era, that meant crusading for local option votes, dry counties, and ultimately the 18th Amendment. Sunday’s rhetoric sanctified public policy: prohibition became not just prudent reform but obedience to God’s will.
There is an absolutist edge here, a confidence that moral clarity can be legislated and that social ills have a single root. Later disillusionment with Prohibition would expose the complexities he compressed into a battle slogan. Yet the power of the statement lies in its fusion of eschatological hope with practical activism, assuring listeners that their struggle against vice was not only righteous but cosmically destined to prevail.
The language is muscular and populist, true to Sunday’s persona as a former baseball star turned revivalist who filled temporary tabernacles across America in the 1900s and 1910s. Phrases like “walk rough-shod” turn social critique into vivid theater. The devil is not an abstraction but a force with addresses on Main Street, serving drinks after payday and luring men into debt, violence, and neglect. For Sunday and his allies in the Anti-Saloon League, the saloon symbolized a nexus of alcoholism, family breakdown, urban machine politics, and immigrant vice districts. To oppose it was to defend hearth, church, nation, and God’s order.
The line functions as both reassurance and mobilization. Providence promises victory, but it does not eliminate duty; believers must align law and civic life with divine intent. In the Progressive Era, that meant crusading for local option votes, dry counties, and ultimately the 18th Amendment. Sunday’s rhetoric sanctified public policy: prohibition became not just prudent reform but obedience to God’s will.
There is an absolutist edge here, a confidence that moral clarity can be legislated and that social ills have a single root. Later disillusionment with Prohibition would expose the complexities he compressed into a battle slogan. Yet the power of the statement lies in its fusion of eschatological hope with practical activism, assuring listeners that their struggle against vice was not only righteous but cosmically destined to prevail.
Quote Details
| Topic | God |
|---|
More Quotes by Billy
Add to List
