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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 30, 2024

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those who want to do it again

Fascinatingly, there is still a Prohibition Party in the United States. They've apparently run a Presidential candidate in every election since 1872.

They’ve morphed into a tiny third party for Protestant fundamentalists who think the constitution party isn’t socially conservative enough, though- the last platform of theirs I looked at said to refer to the King James Bible rather than articulate specific policies.

the last platform of theirs I looked at said to refer to the King James Bible rather than articulate specific policies.

So they're open-borders (Leviticus 19:34) gender-neutralist (Galatians 3:28) welfare liberals (Ezekiel 16:49)?

I mean they clearly don't support a little wine for your health, as St Paul recommends elsewhere, so I wouldn't count on it. I suggest you find one of the extremely small number of people who vote for them(I think it's literally double digits) and ask if you're genuinely curious.

And that's why platforms are supposed to 'articulate specific policies', rather than gesture at applause lights.

It has a double digit number of voters. Talking about the prohibition party platform is as meaningful as talking about the transcendental meditation party platform- it can't even work as a spoiler at this point.

I have trouble considering it much of a morph, considering how much Protestant fundamentalism had to do with the Temperance movement from the beginning.

The original prohibition movement was as much of a woman’s movement as anything else, tied up with progressive politics moreso than fundamentalism.

Being a woman's movement and with a relationship to progressive politics was absolutely not mutually exclusive with being an evangelical movement, especially prior to the Civil War.

Protestantism and especially English or Scandinavian inflected Protestantism was heavily correlated with Temperance for a very long time. There's a reason many dry counties left in the South are heavily Protestant even though they're deeply conservative.

An Evangelical movement and a woman's movement is, in the time period we're talking about, fairly plausible to the point of being almost redundant to specify. A fundamentalist movement is, especially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, very much not the same thing as an evangelical movement.

Touche. Strictly, it's meaningless to talk about a fundamentalist movement prior to the early 20th century and the Fundamentalist-Modernist battle. I apologize for carelessly using the terms synonymously.