I challenge you to show me where the saloon has ever helped business, education, church, morals or anything we hold dear.

Billy Sunday (1862–1935), a former professional baseball player turned evangelist, became one of the most prominent revival preachers of the early 20th century. He was a leading public voice for the temperance and Prohibition movements, regularly denouncing the “saloon” as a social and moral menace tied to poverty, crime, and family breakdown. This challenge-style line reflects his characteristic, combative oratory aimed at mobilizing civic leaders and churchgoers against alcohol. Sunday delivered similar anti-saloon arguments repeatedly in sermons and speeches during the height of the national Prohibition campaign (roughly the 1900s–1910s), often framing the issue as a direct threat to institutions Americans “hold dear.”

The quote is a rhetorical dare: Sunday asserts that alcohol-serving saloons produce no genuine public good and invites opponents to prove otherwise. By listing “business, education, church, morals,” he casts the saloon as an enemy of both economic productivity and the moral-spiritual order, collapsing private vice into public harm. The phrasing also reveals his persuasive strategy—turning a complex social debate into a stark moral binary—so that neutrality becomes difficult. In effect, Sunday argues that the saloon’s costs are so pervasive that it cannot be reconciled with any valued civic institution, thereby justifying aggressive reform and, ultimately, legal prohibition.