I was not prepared for the switchblade.
I had been reading Billy Sunday’s sermons for months — the atonement, the heaven imagery, the careful anti-moralism arguments — and I thought I had a reasonable handle on the man. Earnest. Urgent. Theologically sharper than his reputation. Then I hit a passage where he turned on his critics, and I actually laughed out loud in my study.
“You little two-by-four whisky-soaked fellows who can’t earn $10 a week and turn up your nose at religion. It is beneath you to be a Christian. It would lower your manhood. You are a fool.”
That’s not pastoral. That’s not even particularly civil. That is a man who has been called a vulgarian so many times that he has decided to demonstrate exactly what vulgarity looks like when it is aimed at the right target. And his critics — the educated, the respectable, the comfortably pewed — were exactly the right target.
The criticism of Sunday’s language is old and persistent. He talked like a street fighter. He invented words (“foolosopher” remains my personal favorite — philosophy plus fool, a portmanteau that dismisses two thousand years of Western skepticism in four syllables). He called Napoleon, Caesar, and Hannibal “old ginks who used to juggle power and men’s lives.” He described a wife-beater as “whisky-soaked, hog-jowled, weasel-eyed, pug-gut.” He told an old infidel that his ideas could go “to perdition.” He rendered the newsboy’s voice in four consecutive street slang terms without pausing for a breath.
The critics heard all of this and said: undignified. Unbecoming. Unworthy of a pulpit.
They were not entirely wrong. I’ll get to that.
But they were mostly wrong. And the way they were mostly wrong is the more interesting story.
What the Criticism Gets Right
There are moments — I counted them carefully across forty-five sermons — where Sunday reaches for a contempt word in a place where an argument should have gone. When he calls the participants of the 1893 Parliament of Religions “mutts like Hindus, followers of Zoroaster,” he is not engaging with religious pluralism. He is dismissing it. The slang is doing the work the reasoning should do, and the reasoning is absent.
That is a real weakness. The book I’m writing will name it without flinching.
There is also a genuine risk when the compound insult strings get long enough to become funny. “Whisky-soaked, hog-jowled, weasel-eyed, pug-gut” is objectively hilarious. And a sentence that makes the congregation laugh at the image may not be making them feel the gravity behind it. When the rhetoric is entertaining enough to applaud, it is sometimes too entertaining to convict.
Fair point. Conceded. Moving on.
What the Criticism Gets Wrong — Which Is Most of It
Here is what I kept noticing as I worked through the transcripts: Sunday’s slang has a targeting system. The compound insult strings are almost never aimed at the repentant, the struggling, or the socially marginal. They are aimed at the powerful who abuse the vulnerable, at false systems dressed in religious clothing, and at the self-righteous who use respectability as a hedge against grace.
The “whisky-soaked, hog-jowled, weasel-eyed, pug-gut” compound? Applied to a man beating his wife and children while invoking his personal liberty. The contempt tracks the abuse. Sunday’s critics — themselves largely comfortable professionals — heard the language as a class issue. The primary sources suggest it was a moral issue.
Then there is the street dialogue, which his critics consistently conflated with Sunday’s own voice. When the Chicago newsboy delivers four authentic period slang terms in four lines — “Aw, gwan with you, you big mutt” / “not on your tintype” / “Boss, I’m from Missouri, come across with the dough” — Sunday is not preaching in slang. He is reproducing a voice. Any novelist would claim the same distinction. Sunday had been a YMCA street worker in Chicago. He knew what newsboys sounded like. That precision is not vulgarity. It is observation disciplined into art.
And here is the thing about “foolosopher” that I want the critics to reckon with: it is not Sunday’s substitute for an argument against philosophical skepticism. It is the verdict at the end of an argument he has already made — a careful working-through of the internal contradictions of Enlightenment rationalism. The slang is the conclusion. Critics who read it without the preceding argument are reading a partial text and declaring a whole verdict. That is not criticism. That is a setup.
The Critics Themselves
This is where it gets interesting to me personally.
The people who criticized Sunday’s language most loudly were almost entirely drawn from the educated professional class and liberal Protestant clergy — the same people Sunday called out for preaching “deodorized, disinfected sermons” that had removed everything offensive from the gospel, including the offence of the gospel itself.
They heard “foolosopher” and “hog-jowled” from a pulpit and called it vulgarity. Of course they did. Their entire formation had taught them that elevated subjects require elevated language.
Sunday’s actual audiences — factory workers, railroad employees, domestic servants, immigrants still learning English — heard something entirely different. They heard recognition. The street slang was not a barrier between them and the theological content. It was the door through which the content entered.
Sunday was not preaching to the educated class and failing. He was preaching to everyone else and succeeding. That distinction matters enormously when you are evaluating whether a rhetorical choice was a failure of decorum or a brilliant act of pastoral intelligence.
The Passage I Can’t Shake
In “I Find No Fault in Him,” Sunday paraphrases Matthew 23 — Jesus’ scorched-earth denunciation of the Pharisees — in period vernacular:
“You miserable old lobster. You’re a fine bunch of guys, the way you skin widows. You sanctimonious rascals, you’re like a sepulchre — nice outside, but inside rotten. The whole bunch of you ought to be in jail.”
Every time I read that I think two things simultaneously. First: that is reckless. Second: that is exactly right.
Matthew 23 is not a pastoral nuance passage. It is white-hot prophetic fury directed at religious respectability weaponized against vulnerable people. Most formal translations preserve the dignity of the target along with the words of the rebuke. Sunday’s vernacular strips the dignity away — which is, arguably, precisely what Jesus was doing.
Is that good homiletics? I’m genuinely not settled on it. What I’m settled on is this: it is not a failure of register. It is a translation decision. And the question worth arguing about is not whether Billy Sunday talked like that — he clearly did — but whether talking like that was, for his specific audience in his specific moment, an act of faithful proclamation.
The trail responses documented across his campaigns suggest it was.
Billy Sunday talked like that. And the people he was talking to — not the critics in the press gallery, but the people in the seats — heard him.
Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862-1935) 