10 Sermon Illustrations on Temperance

That chronic alcoholism among the Russians may explain, in part, at least, some of the results of the war in Manchuria, is the editorial opinion of _American Medicine_. Says this paper:

On the Japanese side the reports are all of one tenor, and depict an almost universal abstinence. What drinking is done is in extreme moderation. Upon the Russian side we hear of immense stores of vodka, champagne by carload lots, and orgies innumerable. The Russian officer is notorious, by general report, of course, for the large quantities of alcohol he daily consumes, and it is impossible for any brain to submit to such insults without undergoing the changes long known to take place in heavy drinkers. It is not remarkable then that the older officers, who are managing the campaign, are constantly outwitted by the healthy-minded Japanese. (Text.)

The importance of being sober:

Michael Keaton's movie, "Clean and Sober," ends with him standing at a podium. Everything he owns has been blown on cocaine. Leaflets in his neighborhood announce that he is a murderer because a young woman overdosed on dope he gave her. He has embezzled tens of thousands of dollars from his company, and asked for understanding. They understood: they fired him. Through the whole wrenching experience he gained only one thing - sobriety. So he stands at the podium to share his story, and get a cheap 30-day "chip."

#2609

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Evangelical support of temperance is no cause for embarrassment in our intemperate society.

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If in 1630 someone could have asked godly John Winthrop, first governor of Puritan Massachusetts, what Bible passage best summed up his attitude toward alcoholic beverages, he might have replied, Psalm 104:14-15: "Thou dost cause the grass to grow for the cattle, and plants for man to cultivate, that he may bring forth food from the earth, and wine to gladden the heart of man. ..." If three hundred years later well-known revivalist Billy Sunday had been asked the same question, he may well have replied, Proverbs 20:1: "Wine is a mocker, strong drink a brawler; and whoever is led astray by it is not wise." American Christians have held widely differing attitudes toward strong drink. Most believers before 1800 regarded the moderate use of alcoholic beverages, particularly beer and wine, as a privileged blessing from a gracious God. A significant minority still do. A few believers before 1800 saw drinking as a sinful blight with which no Christian should ever be associated. Now that is the majority opinion.

In the early days of settlement in America, Christians, no less than other colonists, provided themselves with fermented spirits. The persecuted Pilgrims carried with them an ample supply of "hot water," as it was then called, when they arrived aboard the Mayflower in 1620. The pious Reverend Francis Higginson embarked for Massachusetts Bay in 1629 with forty-five casks of beer and twenty gallons of brandy for the use of his family and the wider Puritan community. (You can read about this in the pamphlet by Gerard Carson, "Rum and Reform in Old New England," Old Sturbridge Village, 1966.) By 1670 the cultivation of apples had advanced to the point in New England where hard cider, or applejack, became standard fare at most public gatherings, including the ordination of ministers. When Jonathan Edwards's father was ordained in 1698, for example, provision for the festivities included fourteen pounds of mutton, eighty-eight pounds of beef, four quarts of rum, and eight quarts of wine.

New England did, however, take strong measures against those who overindulged in drink. The punishment was not a night in the city jail to dry out, as now, but time in the stocks or a whipping. The venerable Cotton Mather spoke from the pulpit against the immoderate use of alcohol, particularly the excessive tippling that went on when local militia companies gathered for Training Days. He was also concerned that drunkenness among the Indians made them incapable of receiving the Gospel. Yet Mather, too, looked upon the milder forms of liquor as good gifts of the Creator to the creature. Some historians think it was Mather who coined the old New England proverb: "Wine is from God, but drunkenness from the devil." In short, no one felt any tension between Christianity and the moderate use of alcohol. Of the Scotch-Irish who came to America from Londonderry, Ireland, for example, it was said: "The Derry Presbyterians never gave up a pint [i.e., point] of doctrine, nor a pint of rum."

The ready use of liquor by colonial Christians was due as much to living conditions as to theological convictions. The colonial diet was monotonous; settlers ate great quantities of meat that had been preserved by salting; lives were filled with hardship and disease; liquor was widely thought to be of general medicinal value; and there was no central heating. All of these factors encouraged the use of alcoholic beverages. In addition, the trade in sugar, molasses, and rum had come to be an important part of colonial economic life by the mid-eighteenth century. Venerated patriot leaders such as Sam Adams, John Hancock, and Paul Revere were among the many people who engaged in the illegal, but highly profitable, rum traffic with the West Indies and Africa.

Reaction to the use of alcohol set in with the revival of Christianity at the start of the nineteenth century, known as the Second Great Awakening. One of the leaders of that movement, Lyman Beecher, disgustedly tells of a meeting of Connecticut ministers that was marred by an unseemly use of alcohol: "The sideboard with the spellings of water, and sugar, and liquor, looked and smelled like the bar of a very active grogshop." In Beecher's opinion, such untoward use of alcohol befogged the minds and contaminated the spirits of the Connecticut ministers; it was "nullifying the means of grace."

Beecher was one of the leaders of the Second Awakening, a movement that combined zeal in evangelism with a fervor for social reform. As spiritual revival spread throughout the country, concern for the character of American life spread just as rapidly. Believers labored for the conversion of lost America, and they worked to transform America into a godly land. The perfectarian impulse in American life came to the fore not only in the zealous efforts of the revivalists, but also in the effort to clean up the lives of the people. Not the least of concerns was intemperance.

Beecher himself set out the case against "ardent spirits" in a hard-hitting book first published in 1826. Its title summed up its contents very well: Six Sermons on the Nature, Occasion, Signs, Evils, and Remedy of Intemperance. Beecher condemned beverage alcohol because of the harm it did to "the health and physical energies of a nation," to the "national intellect," to the "military prowess of a nation," to the "patriotism of a nation," to the "national conscience or moral principle," to the "national industry," and to "civil liberty." But Beecher's greatest concern about liquor was "the moral ruin it works in the soul." Very obviously, Beecher saw liquor reform as part of the effort to smooth the way for the Gospel and to improve American society.

At least four problems confronted believers, however, as they began to turn aside from the widespread use of drink. First, should reform be directed toward moderation in the use of alcoholic beverages or total abstinence from them? As early as 1780 American Methodists declared themselves for total abstinence, but the first voluntary temperance society in Connecticut, established at Litchfield in 1789, argued only for moderation. By the 1840s, temperance opinion was coming down on the side of total abstinence, as when Beecher argued in the tenth edition of his Six Sermons: "There is no prudent use of ardent spirits, but when it is used as a medicine."

This point of view did not, to make a bad pun, go down easily, particularly on the frontier. In tiny New Salem, Illinois, in the 1830s, for example, some of the citizens were confirmed teetotalers, including young Abraham Lincoln who had had several disquieting experiences with liquor. But Dr. John Allen, founder of the New Salem temperance society as well as of its debating society and its Sunday school, "found his worst opponents among the church members, most of whom had their barrels of whiskey at home."

Many believers who would have condemned the New Salem whiskey drinkers had their doubts about less intoxicating drinks. When Lyman Beecher first spoke out against the use of liquor, he made no mention of wine or beer because he knew that most Christians considered them acceptable beverages. Yet gradually these milder forms of alcohol fell under condemnation also. So effective was the drive to suppress all forms of liquor that even the White House went "dry" for a few years after the Civil War. "Lemonade Lucy" Hayes (a Methodist) and Mrs. James A. Garfield (of the Disciples of Christ) served no alcohol of any kind at presidential functions. Thus, from 1876 to 1881 the temperance crusade conquered the White House where, in the words of a visiting statesman, "the water flowed like champagne." As an aside, it is important to note that among evangelical immigrants from Europe, particularly from Germany and Holland, the distaste for beer and wine never took hold. To this day hymn-singing and beer-drinking often go hand in hand in Dutch Reformed Grand Rapids or German Lutheran St. Louis.

A third related issue was "the communion question." Would the practice of the Christian centuries be altered to exclude fermented beverage from the Lord's Supper? As teetotalism continued to grow, and as some Bible commentators even interpreted the "wine" of Scripture as an unfermented drink, it was not long before grape juice replaced wine in many Baptist, Presbyterian, Disciples, Mennonite, and other evangelical churches. B. B. Warfield, the defender of biblical inerrancy, was one of a small handful to resist this move. Warfield argued that the integrity of the Bible - which did read "wine" and not "grape juice" - was at stake, but his argument had little effect.

The last issue concerned the public implementation of abstinence. At first reformers relied upon public sentiment. But then they sought legal means to prohibit the sale and use of alcoholic beverages. Maine instituted the first prohibition law in 1846. As the nineteenth century wore on, the Methodist church - with its strong perfectionist bent - spearheaded the drive to outlaw all forms of alcoholic beverage. The Anti-Saloon League and the Women's Christian Temperance Union, under the dynamic leadership of Frances Willard, gave broad public impetus to the drive. These evangelically based organizations were aided, surprisingly enough, by some Roman Catholics who wanted to prove themselves good fellow Americans. The drive for prohibition was also helped by many proponents of the social gospel, who saw the movement as a way to improve the quality of American life.

When the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, prohibiting "the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors," took effect on January 17, 1920, millions of evangelicals heralded the bright dawning of a new day. In Norfolk, Virginia, Billy Sunday staged a funeral service for "John Barleycorn," in which much of the Christian animus against the liquor trade was summed up. "Good-by, John," the revivalist said. "The reign of tears is over.... The slums will soon be only a memory. We will turn our prisons into factories and our jails into storehouses and comcribs. Men will walk uptight now, women will smile, and the children will laugh. Hell will be forever for rent" (Herbert Asbury, The Great Illusion: An Informal History of Prohibition, Greenwood, 1968, pp. 144-145).

Prohibition had praiseworthy aims, and its actual effects seem to have been positive. But it was rejected by the decision-makers of the nation. Evangelicals gradually gave up the effort to outlaw drink, and the Twenty-first Amendment (1933) ended the "noble experiment" itself. Yet the battle against liquor went on. Although more evangelicals probably drink now than in the 1930s, sentiment is still unanimous against the immoderate use of alcohol. And a majority of modern evangelicals probably would still be counted as total abstainers.

This resistance by evangelicals to intemperance is no cause for embarrassment in modem American society. The acknowledged social cost of alcoholism, the carnage done by drunken drivers, the admittedly dangerous effects of alcohol on intellectual capacity, and the increased willingness to recognize alcohol as a mind-altering drug have justified much of the evangelical testimony against intemperance. In spite of an inability to convince the American public about the dangers of drink, evangelicals have made the case against intemperance honestly and competently.

The evangelical crusade against drink has not been without difficulties, however. Some evangelicals have made opinions on liquor more important for fellowship and cooperation than attitudes toward the person of Christ or the nature of salvation. This is particularly unfortunate since the Bible speaks clearly about Christ and salvation, but not about the question of total abstinence. Ardent concern for intemperance has also blinded evangelicals to other abuses in society that need Christian correction and reform. A good number of evangelicals, including many people in the Reformed and Lutheran communions, have continued to enjoy wine, beer, and even moderate amounts of harder spirits as gifts of God, which should suggest that evangelicals frame their arguments against liquor in terms of expedience rather than divine absolutes.

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This article originally appeared in the January 19, 1979 issue of Christianity Today. At the time, Mark A. Noll was a fellow of a National Endowment for the Humanities program at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. He is now the McManis Chair of Christian Thought at Wheaton College and a contributing editor for Christianity Today.

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Themes in Proverbs: Temperance « Leader information shown in this way»

Verses shown are New American Standard version; look at them in your BibleA. Here are some verses on this subject from the book of Proverbs

20:1 Wine is a mocker, strong drink a brawler, And whoever is intoxicated by it is not wise.

21:17 He who loves pleasure will become a poor man; He who loves wine and oil will not become rich.

23:1-3 When you sit down to dine with a ruler, Consider carefully what is before you; And put a knife to your throat, If you are a man of great appetite. Do not desire his delicacies, For it is deceptive food.

23:20 Do not be with heavy drinkers of wine, Or with gluttonous eaters of meat;

23:29-35 Who has woe? Who has sorrow? Who has contentions? Who has complaining? Who has wounds without cause? Who has redness of eyes? Those who linger long over wine, Those who go to taste mixed wine. Do not look on the wine when it is red, When it sparkles in the cup, When it goes down smoothly; At the last it bites like a serpent, And stings like a viper. Your eyes will see strange things, And your mind will utter perverse things. And you will be like one who lies down in the middle of the sea, Or like one who lies down on the top of a mast. “They struck me, but I did not become ill; They beat me, but I did not know it. When shall I awake? I will seek another drink.”

25:16 Have you found honey? Eat only what you need, Lest you have it in excess and vomit it.

31:4-7 It is not for kings, O Lemuel, It is not for kings to drink wine, Or for rulers to desire strong drink, Lest they drink and forget what is decreed, And pervert the rights of all the afflicted. Give strong drink to him who is perishing, And wine to him whose life is bitter. Let him drink and forget his poverty, And remember his trouble no more.

B. these verses in Proverbs teach that

(a) before you can come to the Lord for salvation, you must give up gluttony and drinking alcohol

(b) it is alright to drink alcohol in moderation

(c) a Christian should totally abstain from alcohol

1. « (b) … see Matthew 11:18–19, Romans 14:17 »

C. what areas of intemperance are warned about in these verses?

1. « alcohol (wine, strong drink, etc. » « delicacies »

2. « food (honey, meat » « pleasure »

D. what are some dangers to which intemperance exposes a person

1. « violence 20:1 »

2. « poverty 21:17 »

3. « damage to relationships, reputation, position 23:1–3 »

4. « physical, emotional, intellectual damage to your person; lack of control, substance addiction 23:29–35 »

5. « physical discomfort 25:16 »

6. « loss of judgment 31:4–7 »

E. What do you think about the advice to use alcohol for those who are suffering (31:6–7)?

It’s time to reconsider one of the most ridiculed women in American history.

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Adapted from Smashing the Liquor Machine: A Global History of Prohibition by Mark Lawrence Schrad. © Oxford University Press 2021 and published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.

Kiowa, Kansas, Thursday, June 7, 1900, 8:30 a.m.

For weeks before the vigilante rampage that would make her a household name, 53-year-old Carrie Amelia Nation quietly walked the roadsides near the successful hotel she owned and operated in Medicine Lodge, Kansas. Deep in contemplation, she scoured the ground, picking up palm-sized rocks and brickbats. Purposeful and deliberative, she smuggled home those that had the right feel and heft, wrapping each one in old newsprint to look like innocent parcels.

“I did this until I got quite a pile,” she recalled.

Carrie (later “Carry”) A. Nation was a God-fearing Christian of the purest sort — which brought her into frequent conflict with the organized church. For her, justice, love, and benevolence were not things to be talked about on Sunday and forgotten the rest of the week. At her upscale hotel, she fed, clothed, and lodged the downtrodden and destitute — both white folks and Black — in some cases for years at a time. Harboring and defending the undesirables and castoffs of the community irked her more “respectable” fellow parishioners. First, she was expelled from the local Methodist church; then the Episcopal church. When the preacher in the pulpit of the Medicine Lodge Christian Church denounced her neighbor as an “adultress” in the middle of services — based on nothing but the word of the woman’s alcoholic husband — Carrie could not keep quiet. She shouted down the unjust allegation, and the preacher himself, in front of the entire congregation.

Imagine the scene as church elders tried — and failed! — to drag her bodily from the pews. And while they couldn’t physically throw her out of the sanctuary that day, they did later expel her from the parish.

No matter. Carrie still rode the width and breadth of Barber County, Kansas, collecting donations of food and clothing. She pressured storekeepers to donate additional groceries for the needy, lest she step onto the street and publicly denounce them as “thieving gougers of widows and orphans.” They usually complied.

As a volunteer jail evangelist, Carrie also served the penitent — bringing comfort, consolation, and the promise of heavenly salvation. To each inmate, she’d ask, what was the cause of your misery and woe? To a man, the answer came back: “drink.”

This was strange. “Dry” Kansas had been under statewide prohibition for 20 years. If there were no legal saloons anywhere in the state, where did they get their booze? A contrite inmate explained that anyone could get whiskey in the town of Kiowa, on the border with the Oklahoma Territory.

Moved, Carrie pleaded the remorseful man’s case to the bailiff, but the bailiff wasn’t listening. She then went to the county attorney to argue that the ones who should be behind bars are the unscrupulous men in Kiowa, running illegal saloons in open defiance of the law. The attorney “seemed very much annoyed because I asked him to do what he swore he would do,” she recalled: He was oath-bound to arrest these illegal “jointers” and “dive-keepers.” But he refused, even after Carrie filled his desktop with samples of the contraband whiskey she’d procured from Kiowa herself.

Determined, she took the train to Topeka and besought the state attorney general, also to no avail. The governor too “would not do his duty.” Having exhausted every legal remedy, Nation rightly concluded that the government of “Kansas was in the power of the bitter foe to the constitution” — the liquor business — that paid bribes and kickbacks at all levels of local, state, and federal government to keep its illicit profits flowing.

As president of the county Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, or WCTU, Nation had already exhausted every nonviolent means of moral suasion against the liquor men: pleading with tavern-keepers, writing letters, signing petitions, organizing temperance marches, and praying in front of illegal saloons. Nothing worked. And since women couldn’t vote, she had no electoral recourse either. Women were legally powerless.

So, on the night of June 6, 1900, Carrie hitched up her buggy and rode the 20 miles south to Kiowa. Early the next morning, she visited the unlicensed, illegal bar of Mr. Dobson, whose own brother was the county sheriff.

“Mr. Dobson, I told you last spring to close this place, you did not do it, now I have come down with another remonstrance,” Carrie said. “Get out of the way, I do not want to strike you, but I am going to break this place up.”

Hard and fast, she hurled bricks and stones at the whiskey bottles, glass mugs and tumblers, and the giant mirror behind the bar. The men — confused and terrified — huddled in the corner. When she ran out of her own projectiles, she grabbed pool balls and billiard cues to smash up the room.

Then she did the same to the saloon across the street.

And then a third.

Carrie was always clear that her attack was not against the booze in those bottles, nor the pitiable addicts getting drunk at 8:30 that Thursday morning, but against the predatory liquor traffic and the government that abetted it. “The smashing in Kansas was intended to strike the head of this nation the hardest blow, for every saloon I smashed in Kansas had a license from the head of this government which made the head of the government more responsible than the dive-keeper,” she wrote. “I broke up three of these dives that day, broke the windows on the outside to prove that the man who rents his house is a partner also with the man who sells.”

The man who sells.

Carrie Nation’s foe was not the drink or the drinker, but “the man who sells.” This is important.

By the time she was done with the third saloon, a sizable crowd had grown in the streets, watching in bewilderment and amusement. The authorities did not know what to do. “I have destroyed three of your places of business,” she declared to the onlookers, “and if I have broken a statute of Kansas, put me in jail; if I am not a lawbreaker your mayor and your councilmen are. You must arrest one of us, for if I am not a criminal, they are.”

The town marshal, mayor, and city attorney huddled up, and ultimately decided against pressing charges. Carrie returned home triumphant. Papers across the nation carried the sensational news, making Carrie Nation an instant celebrity. Back home, the political community was stirred to action. One by one, the unlicensed dives of Barber County, Kansas, were shuttered, their proprietors convicted. Carrie didn’t have to say a word.

Mrs. Nation then set her sights on the illegal saloons of Wichita. At 8 sharp on the morning of Wednesday, Dec. 28, she sauntered into the bar at the Carey Hotel, the most luxurious lodging in the city. “I decided to go to the Carey for several reasons,” she said. “It was the most dangerous, being the finest. The low doggery will take the low and keep them low, but these so-called respectable ones will take the respectable, make them low, then kick them out.”

The drunks fled when Carrie started hurling rocks at the opulent glass mirror, and through a life-size oil painting of a buck-naked Cleopatra across from it. The shellshocked bartender didn’t even move as she brandished an iron rod and smashed all the bottles in the mahogany sideboards. She then set the barflies at the saloon across the street to flight in a similar fashion. By 8:30 a.m., she was behind bars, having done some $3,000 in damage.

Carrie was jailed for three weeks — forced to sleep without a pillow on the concrete floor, as the winter drafts poured in — without ever being charged for a crime. After springing her on a writ of habeas corpus, her cold and loveless second husband of 25 years, David Nation, joked that she could do far more damage with a hatchet than with a rock.

“That is the most sensible thing you have said since I married you,” she laughed. Within a year, David filed for divorce. Carrie donated her entire alimony to found a home for drunkards’ wives in Kansas City — the first domestic violence shelter in the state.

Carrie Nation had no need for wealth, luxury, and status, and no patience for those who pursued them. She lived “as harshly and simply and self-denyingly as Leo Tolstoy,” she said in admiration of the world-famous writer, who was likewise excommunicated for decrying the man who sells liquor.

Now armed with a hatchet that would become her iconic trademark, Nation made her way to Enterprise, Kansas, at the request of women’s groups there. Enterprise saloon-keeper John Schilling knew that chivalry and decorum prevented a man from laying a finger on Mrs. Nation, even as she wrecked his illegal bar, loudly berated him, and shamed his trade from the street corner.

But that didn’t stop his wife, Belle Schilling, from walking up and punching Carrie square in the face. Saying nothing, Carrie staggered to a nearby butcher. She emerged, holding a chunk of raw beef over her swollen black eye, and kept right on preaching. Four prostitutes paid by the Schillings then kicked Nation to the gutter, pulled out her hair, and beat her bloody with sticks and whips.

Nevertheless, she persisted: Over the next 10 years until her death in 1911, Carrie Nation was arrested 32 separate times. Once she was apprehended under the dome of the U.S. Capitol, after haranguing senators for “representing the interests of the brewers and distillers” over their own constituents. At least her Capitol arrest was orderly.

In Kentucky, a barkeeper smashed the 58-year-old grandmother over the head with a chair. In London, she was pelted with rotten eggs. At Coney Island, a hail of peanuts and hot dogs preceded an angry New York lynch mob. It was hardly the only attempt to hang Carrie Nation from the nearest tree. Despite persistent death threats, she fought on, secure in her faith, fully embracing the dangers of her activism. She was ready to die for the cause, and many men wished she would. When a barkeeper sweating red with rage once pushed his pistol into her temple, she brushed him aside: “I am not afraid of your gun. Maybe it would be a good thing for a saloon-keeper to kill Carry Nation.” Much like the abolitionist martyr John Brown, she was certain her murder would prompt the entire nation to rise up and “smash the dives.”

Why Carrie Nation undertook her violent “hatchetations,” as she called them, has been the subject of endless speculation by generations of historians and amateur psychiatrists. She was easy to mock as a Bible-thumping “crank,” “a freak,” “a lunatic,” or a “puritanical killjoy,” with all the baggage each of those terms carries.

In his 1959 article “Crazy Carry the Party Pooper,” David Shaw claimed (allegedly with the full weight of midcentury science to back him) that Nation’s activism stemmed from the “glandular difficulties of the menopause that allowed suppressed forces to erupt violently.” Vaginas and hormones have long been men’s favorite excuses for women who step out of line and defy patriarchal norms. It has the added effect of belittling women’s actual motivations along the way. But it wasn’t just armchair Freuds dropping such misogynist and degrading accusations; the two most influential and widely read biographies blame menopause for Nation’s supposedly “warped” focus on “the dangers of sexual irregularity.” Bestselling author Andrew Sinclair’s Prohibition: The Era of Excess (1962) faulted Nation’s “suppressed sexual desire,” which was “perverted into an itching curiosity about vice, an aggressive prurience which found its outlet in violence, exhibitionism, and self-imposed martyrdom.”

Generations of writers and historians — almost all men — dismissed her as just plain insane: a “demented woman,” “psychotic from an early age,” suffering from a “personal history of disease and convulsion,” and a “well-defined strain of madness.” Unsurprisingly, the chauvinist equation outspoken woman = crazy woman has a long history.

Even Daniel Okrent’s masterful Last Call (2011) — winner of the American Historical Association’s prize for the best book on American history, and basis for the influential Ken Burns/Lynn Novick Prohibition documentary series — trivializes Nation as an ugly, incoherent lunatic. “Carry Amelia Moore Gloyd Nation was 6 feet tall, with the biceps of a stevedore, the face of a prison warden, and the persistence of a toothache. Her mother believed herself to be Queen Victoria,” Okrent writes. “Her religious passions led her to sit on her organ bench and talk to Christ.”

By playing up her eccentricities, mocking her femininity, fundamentally misconstruing her religious beliefs, and laughing off her convictions, historians have made Carrie Nation a paper cutout of the temperance movement: easily crumpled up and thrown away, without ever needing to consider that her grievances actually had merit. Saloon-keepers were acting illegally. Politicians and law enforcement were corrupted by taking bribes to look the other way. Women were marginalized, disenfranchised, and powerless to stop it. A predatory liquor traffic was making money hand over fist by getting men addicted, and then bleeding them and their families to death.

Carrie had experienced all of this firsthand. Her first husband, Dr. Charles Gloyd, was a handsome and decorated Union Army physician. She idolized him. He adored her. They wrote romantic — even salacious — love letters to each other. But it wasn’t to last. Even as a newlywed, Gloyd locked himself up at the tavern or Masonic lodge, drinking till dawn, leaving his forlorn bride “hungry for his caresses and love.” In 1869, after just 16 months of marriage, her beloved died from alcoholism, leaving Carrie with only her sorrow, a new baby, and a disapproving mother-in-law to care for. A widow at the age of 22, she was penniless, hopeless, and powerless before the law. But from those depths of poverty and despair, she became self-reliant, strong, and willing to fight against unjust subjugation on behalf of the subjugated.

So when it came to her motivations, Carrie Nation always declared them clearly and consistently: “You wouldn’t give me the vote, so I had to use a rock!”

What’s strange is that we still refuse to hear her, believe her, or take her seriously.

“She did not pick up her hatchet because she had suddenly gone to some psychological deep end,” writes professor Fran Grace in her Carry A. Nation: Retelling the Life (2001) — the most thorough Nation biography, and notably the only one written by a woman. She was not a “cranky, insane woman traumatized by menopausal changes.” Rather than a rampaging fundamentalist, she gave everything of herself to those who had none, and worked tirelessly to defend those who could not defend themselves.

When Nation toured the United Kingdom in 1908 to 1909, many Brits were shocked that the woman they met “was not like any preconceived ideas of the violent and notorious saloon smasher” portrayed in the newspapers. They lauded her “remarkable wit,” her “strenuous vigor,” her “good sense of humor, a wise, general outlook upon life, a kindly, even modest, and unassuming manner,” with “the light of a visionary in her eyes.”

Nor was she some uncompromising puritan, even when it came to booze. Once, when a contrarian physician tried to convince her that alcohol was harmless — maybe even healthful — the prohibitionist Nation took it as a challenge. She began chugging down one bottle of Schlitz Malt after another. Horrified, the doctor begged her to stop, before this supposedly “healthful” drink gave her alcohol poisoning. She made her point. She had no time for apologists and equivocators.

She did make time, however, for empathy and persuasion. Once, following a lecture in Chicago, she headed to the red-light district, itching for a fight. There she was surprised to find her own grandson, Riley White, tending bar.

“Go in and smash it if you want to,” he sheepishly told her.

No. She would not.

Instead, she held a closed-door meeting inside: just Carrie, the saloon-keepers, and a few girls who’d been ensnared into a prostitution ring. “They treated me well and the women called me grandma. Poor women, they are dragged down by devils,” she said. “It was the most remarkable meeting I ever had. Saloon-keepers and harlots have a much better chance of heaven than hypocrites who are in the church. I have no use for women who are afraid they will soil their skirts in trying to lift up their fallen sisters.”

Her fearlessness in leaving the privileged confines of the church to go slumming in the gutters, saloons, theaters, burlesque houses, and other bastions of misogyny certainly invited men’s scorn.

“You poor, deluded, hysterical, half-crazed, religious maniac,” one guy said to her. “I do not believe you are so much to blame for your present state of raving imbecility as the unsexed men [and their] so-called temperance crusades seem to have completely upset the molecules of your brains, that is of course, providing you have any.” This was hardly an isolated incident: Hecklers and newsmen alike portrayed her as old, unattractive, mannish, and “unsexed.” While in reality she stood just over 5 feet tall, even today, she’s frequently depicted “as a hyperthyroid Amazon of nearly six feet, who required ‘policemen seven feet high’ to handle her.” Still, she took every withering slight with remarkable grace.

Carrie was not some Bible-thumping “holy crone on a broomstick” seeking to legislate morality or “discipline” individual behavior. If anything, she was a populist progressive. Rooted in communal consciousness and agrarian self-help, she fought tirelessly for good governance, women’s rights, civil rights, and cleaning the corruption out of the body politic. She matched her words with deeds time and again. In addition to her battered women’s shelter in Kansas City, when she retired to Eureka Springs, Arkansas, she established “Hatchet Hall.” Part rest home for the impoverished elderly, part safe haven for women fleeing abusive husbands, and part home school for their children, Nation built an intergenerational, self-reliant, sister-based commune that was ages ahead of its time.

She did not view drinking as a sin or the drinker as a sinner. Instead, like the prostitute, the prisoner, and the slave, the drinker was the victim, to be forgiven, loved, and nurtured. The true sinner was the enslaver of men: the drink seller. And she would use all means at her disposal from prayer and persuasion to hatchetation to get the man who sells to change his ways.

Nor was her activism some crazy aberration: Disenfranchised and disempowered women had been smashing saloons across the country for decades. In 1855, 15 women were jailed for smashing a saloon in Illinois. The young lawyer who secured their acquittal went by the name of Abraham Lincoln.

Carrie Nation was a devout Christian, but she was not inflexible or dogmatic. A strict sectarian would never be caught exploring the mysteries of rival faiths; Carrie, however, thoughtfully invited the sage counsels of Catholic priests. Around the dinner table, she and the Jewish guests who frequented her hotel grappled with ethical and theological questions late into the night. She came away from such encounters professing a deep admiration for Jewish self-sacrifice, which would have further horrified the evangelicals who’d already thrown her out of every Protestant church in town. From a young age, she scoffed at the self-righteous exclusivism of those claiming to be the one true church, and repeatedly expressed her “contempt for popular preaching.”

Nor was she some racist. As a child in antebellum Kentucky, Carrie’s hardscrabble mother insisted that she live in the slaves’ quarters, where she attended subversive slave meetings about white tyranny and worshipped with them in secret. She “imbibed some of their superstitions,” Nation remembered, as well as their loud expressiveness in church, which further irritated her prairie white churchgoers. She did not discriminate in employing Black people, housing them, or serving them through her charity work, often donating her lecture proceeds to the Black African Methodist Episcopal Church. When she did speak at churches that denied Blacks, she demanded that all be admitted entry. If that made racists uncomfortable, well, then they could leave. And they usually did — just before they’d return with more numbers to run Carrie and her Black acolytes out of town.

And yes, Carrie Nation claimed that God spoke to her and told her to “go to Kiowa” and make war on the saloons, though that does not invalidate her activism. After all, two years prior, in 1898, President William McKinley claimed that God spoke to him and commanded him to make war on Spain, take their colonial possessions, “and civilize and Christianize them,” but we don’t teach that the Spanish-American War was due to McKinley’s supposed insanity or menopausal hot flashes.

Carrie Nation wasn’t “crazy.” She was a fierce and impassioned warrior-mother, who saw no inconsistency between those roles. She was Wonder Woman in a frock. A trailblazing social activist, she was the embodiment of the feminist empowerment mantra that “well-behaved women seldom make history.” Perhaps we should start recognizing her as such.