Evangelist Billy Sunday fused Christian militancy with patriotic warmongering

Evidence

Former professional baseball player Billy Sunday preached this new “muscular Christianity” with unrivaled zeal. Wanting nothing to do with a sissy, lily-livered piety, Sunday preferred to pack his “old muzzle-loading Gospel gun with ipecac, buttermilk, rough on rats, rock salt, and whatever else came in handy,” and let it fly. In the spring of 1917, with America’s entry into the First World War, Sunday’s militancy went beyond metaphor. He had no time for pacifists or draft dodgers (“God-forsaken mutts”), or apparently for nuance of any kind: “In these days all are patriots or traitors, to your country and the cause of Jesus Christ.” An evangelist for war, Sunday was known to leap atop his pulpit waving the American flag. — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 40

Categorization

• CANDY: The ‘muzzle-loading Gospel gun with ipecac, buttermilk, rough on rats’ quote is a vivid, tweetable artifact of muscular Christianity.
• XREF: Echoes of the author’s method: using colorful commercial/popular artifacts to evidence theological shifts.