Rhetorical Analysis Of God's Worst Enemy '

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On January 16, 1920 religious groups and other temperance movement leaders rejoiced as the Eighteenth Amendment went into effect, banning the sale of alcoholic beverages. One of those leaders was Billy Sunday, an Evangelical preacher well-known for speaking at revival meetings and being one of the first preachers to spread their messages through the radio. With this new technology, he spread his beliefs about alcohol to anyone fortunate enough to own a radio. In his infamous sermon, “God’s Worst Enemy,” he uses personification, charged words, and ethical appeal to argue that the sale of alcohol should be prohibited.
In the speech, Sunday portrays saloons as violent, cowardly thieves that will rob everyone of their money and sanity. According to Sunday, the saloon “impoverishes your children, and it brings insanity and suicide.” He goes on to state that saloons will “steal the coffin from a dead child and yank the last crust of bread out of the hand …show more content…

He proclaims that the saloon “has no faith in God, no religion,” and would “close every church in the land… It would close every public school.” He connects alcohol with evil, and therefore sobriety with holiness, so that the audience will be motivated by their religion to turn against alcohol. He reinforces the association by stating “It despises heaven, hates love, scorns virtue.” Later, he claims that liquor
“sent the bullet through the body of Lincoln; it nerved the arm that sent the bullets through Garfield and William McKinley.” In the mind of a listener, alcohol is the indirect cause of violent tragedies such as assassinations, and so it is his/her moral duty to stand up for prohibition, so that the people who would commit such atrocities would never access the drug that pushes them over the edge. By bringing up religion and associating alcohol with acts of violence, Sunday convinces his audience that banning alcohol is the moral thing to

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