Hatchet Job - Carrie Nation

1846–1911

One of the most aptly named people in history, American Carrie Nation went on a religious crusade and carried the nation into Prohibition. Born Carrie Moore (her father sometimes spelled it Carry), she married a lawyer-minister-editor named David Nation. He was her second husband; her first had died from the effects of alcoholism.

Carrie found her calling as a fierce opponent of alcohol. She started a chapter of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union in Kansas and then worked hard for the enforcement of that state’s laws against drinking. This usually involved vandalism. Sometimes she would lead a group of women to sing hymns inside or outside bars, and sometimes they would heckle the staff and patrons. But there were other times when Carrie would throw rocks through windows. When her husband quipped that she would do better with a hatchet, she replied, “That’s the most sensible thing you have said since I married you”—and that became her new weapon.

With her imposing six-foot frame, her perfect name, and now her hatchet, Carrie Nation became a celebrity. Cartoons mocked her. Bar owners feared and hated her. Audiences flocked to her lectures. Police arrested her but then asked her to speak at civic events. Her husband divorced her, citing abandonment. Churches weren’t quite sure what to do with her. She was disfellowshipped from her Disciples of Christ congregation, yet they gave her a letter of commendation.

Through it all, Carrie felt she was following a call from God, and she seemed to love all the attention, good and bad. Meanwhile the temperance movement was growing—because of her or in spite of her. But at a 1911 rally in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, her career was cut short. Midspeech, Carrie blurted out, “I have done what I could,” and lapsed into a coma. She died five months later, less than a decade before the United States adopted Prohibition.

Nowadays Christians get involved in various social causes. We are often tempted to use the world’s weapons—not just hatchets, but slander, cheating, vandalism, or violence—in order to win. But in the service of Christ, winning isn’t the main thing. Loving is.

We are human, but we don’t wage war as humans do. We use God’s mighty weapons, not worldly weapons, to knock down the strongholds of human reasoning and to destroy false arguments.

2 Corinthians 10:3-4