Jesus And Gin

Jesus and Gin is a rollicking tour of the roaring twenties and the barn- burning preachers who led the temperance movement—the anti-abortion crusade of the Jazz Age. Along the way, we meet a host of colorful characters: a Baptist minister who commits adultery in the White House; media star preachers caught in massive scandals; a presidential election hinging on a religious issue; and fundamentalists and liberals slugging it out in the culture war of the day. The religious roar of that decade was a prologue to the last three decades. With the religious right in disarray today after its long ascendancy, Jesus and Gin is a timely look at a parallel age when preachers held sway and politicians answered to the pulpit.

Two heroes. One has made his name in the cold, while the other has spent a lifetime twisting unseen forces. They want the same thing, but they’re on opposite sides. Can a teleportation accident help them find what they’ve each been missing all along? Gin got his code name because his namesake liquor lives in the freezer, just like him. He can control ice to an extent never seen before, and he uses that power to help keep the world safe from those who would use their power for evil. He knows he’s got a tremendous ability to destroy, and it’s important to keep himself rigidly under control at all times. His work in Alter Enforcement brings him into direct conflict with vigilante alters, who may want to help people but refuse to be accountable in how they go about it. Smoke doesn’t trust “authority figures” and he definitely doesn’t trust the government. He didn’t trust them before the terrorist attacks that created Alters in the first place, and he sure doesn’t trust them now. He’s not going to let government Alters stop him from taking out dangerous super-villains in the name of procedure. Sometimes that means he has to fight people who should be on his side, but that’s the way the cookie crumbles. When Gin’s team and Smoke’s team trip over each other trying to take out a notorious super villain, disaster follows. A teleportation accident strands Gin and Smoke together far away from each of their teams. They have to rely on each other for safety ... and maybe more.

In Gin, Jesus, and Jim Crow, Brendan J. J. Payne reveals how prohibition helped realign the racial and religious order in the South by linking restrictions on alcohol with political preaching and the disfranchisement of Black voters. While both sides invoked Christianity, prohibitionists redefined churches’ doctrines, practices, and political engagement. White prohibitionists initially courted Black voters in the 1880s but soon dismissed them as hopelessly wet and sought to disfranchise them, stoking fears of drunken Black men defiling white women in their efforts to reframe alcohol restriction as a means of racial control. Later, as the alcohol industry grew desperate, it turned to Black voters, many of whom joined the brewers to preserve their voting rights and maintain personal liberties. Tracking southern debates about alcohol from the 1880s through the 1930s, Payne shows that prohibition only retreated from the region once the racial and religious order it helped enshrine had been secured.

The 1920s saw one of the most striking revolutions in manners and morals to have marked North American society, affecting almost every aspect of life, from dress and drink to sex and salvation. Protestant Christianity was being torn apart by a heated controversy between traditionalists and the modernists, as they sought to determine how much their beliefs and practices should be altered by scientific study and more secular attitudes. Out of the controversy arose the Fundamentalist movement, which has become a powerful force in twentieth-century America. During this decade, hundreds (and perhaps thousands) of young girl preachers, some not even school age, joined the conservative Christian cause, proclaiming traditional values and condemning modern experiments with the new morality. Some of the girls drew crowds into the thousands. But the stage these girls gained went far beyond the revivalist platform. The girl evangelist phenomenon was recognized in the wider society as well, and the contrast to the flapper worked well for the press and the public. Girl evangelists stood out as the counter-type of the flapper, who had come to define the modern girl. The striking contrast these girls offered to the racy flapper and to modern culture generally made girl evangelists a convenient and effective tool for conservative and revivalist Christianity, a tool which was used by their adherents in the clash of cultures that marked the 1920s.

Offers a series of images, inspired by historic war posters, that encourage the American people to conserve energy, take more interest in foreign affairs, and advance the War on Terrorism, and provides supporting arguments.