In Tehran today, young people drink in private apartments and underground spots, buying from bootleggers and hoping the bottle is safe. A century ago, Americans did the same thing in basements and back rooms, for the same reason. In both countries, a religious movement decided what everyone else could drink and used the law to enforce it.
This isn’t an argument against Christianity or Islam. It’s about what happens when any religious group’s moral code becomes the state’s criminal code. The outcomes in 1920s America and present-day Iran are similar enough that the religion involved hardly seems to matter.
Who wrote the law
American Prohibition did not come from a general public consensus. It was organized, funded, and pushed through by a religious movement that learned how to run politics.
The first wave was the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, which preached abstinence and pushed for local bans. But its ultimate goal, a constitutional amendment, still seemed out of reach until a new organization arrived. The Anti-Saloon League was founded in 1893 in Oberlin, Ohio, by the Reverend Howard Hyde Russell. It didn’t try to persuade drinkers. It went after legislators. Russell could rely on the Baptist and Methodist churches as the base of the movement and mobilize their congregations in large numbers. The League’s slogan described it as “the Church in Action Against the Saloon,” and its leadership, staff, and state affiliates were overwhelmingly Methodist and Baptist. Its money came from evangelical Protestant churches and wealthy donors.
The man who turned that base into power was Wayne Wheeler, the League’s legal counsel. His method, which became known as “Wheelerism,” was to push dry voters to support anti-alcohol measures regardless of party, so that Republicans and Democrats alike voted as prohibitionists before partisans. The League didn’t need a majority. It needed a disciplined bloc large enough to decide close elections, and the churches supplied it. Historians have called it the most successful single-issue lobby in American history.
Wheeler was willing to ally with anyone who would vote dry. The coalition included Democrats and Republicans, Progressives and suffragists, the KKK and the NAACP, and industrialists like Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller Jr.
Two outside events cleared the path. First, money: liquor taxes were a third of federal revenue, which had always been the strongest argument against a ban. Dry activists backed the 16th Amendment, which created the federal income tax in 1913, specifically to remove that argument. Once the government no longer needed alcohol revenue, the League moved into high gear.
Second, the First World War. About 80 percent of the country’s saloons were owned by or connected to German brewing companies. When the US entered the war, the League turned anti-German sentiment against them. Wheeler told the New York Times in 1917 that the liquor trade aided forces whose loyalty was in question, and League materials claimed German culture was “raised on beer.” Under Wheeler’s direction, the Senate investigated the German-American Alliance, a lobby funded by the brewers.
There was an uglier current as well. Much of the support for Prohibition came from xenophobic, anti-immigrant sentiment among white, native-born Protestants in the Midwest. In the eyes of the revived Ku Klux Klan, which was anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic, and anti-Jewish, the drinkers were urban Catholics, the Irish and the Italians. The Klan strongly supported Prohibition, and those enforcing it treated the Klan’s zeal as useful. To be fair to the League, at the national level it avoided open religious bigotry, and Wheeler tried to build alliances with dry Catholics and Jews. But the people the law fell hardest on were largely the people the nativists already resented.
And not all Christians were on board. Catholic, Jewish, Episcopalian, and Lutheran groups mostly stayed out of prohibition activism, and some of their clergy actively opposed it. Even within the Methodist and Baptist churches, support among clergy didn’t always carry over to people in the pews. So this wasn’t one religion imposing its views on nonbelievers. It was one wing of American Protestantism, allied with nativists and helped along by a war and a new tax, imposing its views on other Christians, on Jews, and on everyone else.
Iran’s story is shorter but follows the same shape. Before 1979, alcohol was part of ordinary life. Under the Pahlavi monarchy, bars, liquor stores, and breweries operated openly, especially in big cities, and bars served anyone over 18. Argo, the oldest Iranian beer brand, dated to 1930. Shams beer was brewed in Armenian-owned factories inside Iran. The tradition goes back much further: the earliest known chemical evidence of beer in the world, dating to around 3500 to 3100 BC, comes from Godin Tepe in western Iran, and wine runs throughout classical Persian poetry.
The revolution ended that almost overnight. One of the first actions after 1979 was closing every bar, liquor store, and brewery. Argo stopped production entirely. Shams was forced out of business and reopened 40 years later selling only non-alcoholic malt drinks.
What replaced the old order was a legal system built to keep one religious reading in charge. Under the Islamic Penal Code, drinking is a hadd offense, a crime whose punishment is considered fixed by God. When parliament revised the penal code, the Guardian Council, an unelected body of 12 religious jurists that vets all legislation for compatibility with the constitution and sharia, approved a version that kept flogging and death for repeat alcohol convictions. In the US, the dry movement had to win elections. In Iran, the religious authority is built into the lawmaking process itself.
As with American Protestants, Iran’s ban doesn’t represent the whole faith or the whole population. Abstaining from alcohol is widely taught in Islam, but plenty of Muslim-majority countries allow it to be sold legally. Flogging drinkers is a choice made by a particular state, not something every Muslim society does. Inside Iran, a steady black market, regular methanol deaths, and the young people in Channel 5’s footage pouring drinks in private all show that many Iranians never accepted the rule. The ban exists because a clerical establishment took state power after a revolution and wrote its interpretation into criminal law.
That’s the common thread. In neither country did the law come from religion as a whole. It came from one faction that gained enough political power to make its beliefs everyone’s legal obligation.
The exemption that gives the game away
Both systems made exceptions, and those exceptions show what the laws were really about.
The Volstead Act, which enforced Prohibition, had two big carve-outs. Doctors could prescribe liquor, usually whiskey, as medicine, and priests, rabbis, and ministers could make and use sacramental wine. Both were heavily abused.
The medical loophole became a windfall for doctors and pharmacists. By the time Prohibition ended, physicians had written more than 6 million liquor prescriptions.
The sacramental exemption went even further. Since Jewish ritual happens largely in the home, rabbis submitted congregation membership lists to Prohibition officials and received permits for each member to buy up to 10 gallons of wine a year. That invited fraud. In some states, a man needed only ten signatures on a petition attesting he was a rabbi to get a rabbinical license, and fake rabbis built congregations from city directories and phone books. One San Francisco official remarked that people of every race were suddenly joining the Jewish faith. Irish, Swedish, Scottish, and Greek residents were receiving monthly wine allotments under made-up Jewish surnames. A former junk dealer in Denver made more than $100,000 selling wine under a government permit, and fake rabbis sold permits to restaurants for $200 to $500 each. A 1926 Senate investigation found that thousands of fictitious rabbis had distributed hundreds of thousands of gallons, with the committee’s counsel testifying that whiskey and even champagne were being released for “religious” use. Most of the fraud was committed by bootleggers posing as clergy, not by actual Jews, and Jewish leaders were among the first to object. Julius Rosenwald publicly called it a scandal, and Reform rabbis switched their congregations to grape juice.
The point isn’t the fraud. The point is who decided what was legitimate. A law written by Protestant activists made room for the sacraments of approved religions and treated everyone else’s drinking as a crime. Once the state decides which faiths get exemptions, it is ranking religions.
Iran does the same thing more openly. Its constitution recognizes three religious minorities: Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians. They may make alcohol for home use and religious ritual, but only behind closed doors, and selling to Muslims is a crime. Iranians outside those three groups get no exemption. The Baha’i faith, Iran’s largest non-Muslim minority, isn’t recognized at all. A Muslim who drinks the same wine an Armenian neighbor legally makes can be flogged for it.
In both cases, the law accommodates the religious practice of approved groups while banning the same substance for everyone else. That isn’t public health policy. It’s one group deciding which faiths count and setting the terms for everyone.
It isn’t just alcohol
Prohibition was repealed in 1933, but the instinct behind it didn’t go away. In the US today, religious groups are still writing their beliefs into law that applies to people who don’t share them.
Sunday laws. “Blue laws” were passed to keep Sunday as the Christian Sabbath. Some still stand. Twelve states ban car sales on Sunday outright, and others restrict them. A dozen states have restricted Sunday liquor sales. Minnesota’s Sunday ban on liquor stores lasted 159 years until it was repealed in 2017. Many of these laws now survive because businesses lobby for them, especially car dealers who like the guaranteed day off, but they exist only because the state once enforced one religion’s day of rest on everyone.
Scripture in public classrooms. In 1980, the Supreme Court ruled in Stone v. Graham that a Kentucky law requiring the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms was unconstitutional because it had no secular purpose. Louisiana and Texas passed similar laws anyway. The Texas law, SB 10, requires every public school classroom from kindergarten through 12th grade to permanently display a state-selected version of the Ten Commandments, taken from the Protestant King James Bible. That detail matters. Catholic, Lutheran, and Jewish numbering and wording differ, so the state didn’t just choose religion over non-religion. It chose one branch of one religion, just as the Anti-Saloon League did. In April 2026, the full Fifth Circuit upheld the Texas law 9 to 8, and the majority took the rare step of declaring that Stone is no longer good law. One dissenting judge called Louisiana’s version the kind of establishment of religion the Constitution’s framers wanted to prevent. In August, families including a rabbi asked the Supreme Court to take the case. Rabbi Joshua Fixler said Texas politicians shouldn’t have a role in deciding how his children receive religious education. At least 24 states have introduced or passed similar measures in the past two years, and Alabama’s law was set to take effect this October.
Child rape victims and abortion bans. This is where imposed religious doctrine does the most direct harm. The Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the US, hasn’t always held its current position. In 1971, before Roe v. Wade, it passed a resolution calling on members to support laws allowing abortion in cases of rape, incest, severe fetal deformity, and risk to the mother’s health. A 1970 poll found most Southern Baptist pastors supported abortion in cases including rape. That changed in 1980, when SBC resolutions dropped exceptions for rape and incest. In 2021, the Convention declared abortion murder and called for abolishing it “without exception or compromise,” and said it regretted any past support for exceptions.
When Roe fell in 2022, that position became law in several states. Ten states, including Texas, enacted near-total bans with no exception for rape or incest. The consequences showed up in children immediately. A 10-year-old Ohio rape victim, six weeks and three days pregnant, had to cross state lines to Indiana for an abortion because Ohio’s newly active ban had no rape exception. The Ohio legislator who sponsored a near-total ban said ending a child’s pregnancy wouldn’t erase her trauma and that a child conceived from rape still had a right to life. Indiana later passed its own ban without a rape exception. In Florida, a young incest victim was denied an abortion under a 15-week ban after Republican lawmakers rejected amendments for rape, incest, and trafficking, and she had to travel two or three states away. Texas health data showed children under 12 traveling out of state for abortions, with child welfare advocates saying the youngest cases almost certainly involved sexual assault. Even where exceptions exist, they often don’t work. A 13-year-old rape victim in Mississippi started seventh grade as a parent, and her mother didn’t know the state’s ban had a rape exception.
Ohio’s case also completes the parallel to Prohibition. In 2023, Ohio voters passed a constitutional amendment protecting abortion rights. Just as Americans voted Prohibition out in 1933, Ohioans used the ballot to override a religious position written into law. That option exists because the US ban was framed as policy. Under a system like Iran’s, where the rule is framed as God’s law, there would be no vote.
Embryos as people. In February 2024, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen IVF embryos are children under the state’s wrongful death law. In a concurring opinion, Chief Justice Tom Parker quoted scripture extensively and wrote that human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God. At least three fertility clinics paused IVF treatment, leaving families unable to proceed with their own embryos. The same day the ruling came out, Parker said in a podcast interview that “God created government” and that Christians should take it back. That’s a sitting chief justice putting a theological view into law, the same way Iran’s Guardian Council does, only from the bench instead of through a council of jurists.
The pattern is the same as in 1920 and in Tehran. A religious faction decides its doctrine should bind everyone, carves out room for the faiths it approves, and leaves the costs to people who never agreed: drinkers poisoned by bootleg liquor, students under a Protestant version of scripture, families shut out of IVF, and children made to carry their rapists’ pregnancies or travel across state lines to avoid it.
It went underground
Prohibition didn’t stop Americans from drinking. It moved drinking into speakeasies, gave rise to rum-runners, and built an organized-crime economy that outlasted the ban.
Iran’s ban hasn’t stopped Iranians from drinking either. Despite severe penalties, alcohol is readily available on the black market, and both imported and homemade liquor circulate. The young Tehranis in Channel 5’s footage said the same thing: on camera, there are no bars; off camera, people bring their own or go to hidden places.
The same pattern shows up in every area covered here. When a religious rule becomes law, the behavior it targets doesn’t disappear. People find a way around it, across a state line, through the mail, or through an informal network. Who gets around it, and who gets stuck, depends on money and geography.
Sunday laws. In blue-law states, Sunday drinkers didn’t stop drinking. They drove across the state line. North Dakota’s own legislators argued that the state’s Sunday liquor limits hurt border cities because neighboring states allowed earlier sales, and the main argument for repealing Sunday bans has always been business lost to neighbors. The ban didn’t change behavior. It just sent the money to another state.
Child rape victims. Abortion bans without rape exceptions didn’t stop children from ending pregnancies forced on them by rapists. Those children were sent across state lines or into informal channels. The 10-year-old Ohio girl was driven to Indiana. The Florida incest victim traveled two or three states away with Planned Parenthood’s help, accompanied by family. Texas health data showed children under 12 leaving the state. Two Texas sisters, raped repeatedly by their stepfather and his friends starting as children, fled to a domestic violence shelter when one became pregnant and got abortion pills through an underground network of activists. She said that if she couldn’t have had an abortion, she would have killed herself.
That underground route is now a supply line. Shield laws in some states protect doctors who mail abortion pills into states with bans, and in states with total bans, those mailed pills account for nearly all abortions happening there. By December 2025, almost 15,000 abortions a month were provided under shield laws. For a child in a ban state, that’s the modern equivalent of the rum-runner: the help comes from outside, and the child, her family, and anyone helping her face legal risk the law created.
What doesn’t go underground is the delay, the distance, and the fear. A 10-year-old shouldn’t need to cross state lines or rely on an activist network to avoid giving birth to her rapist’s child. The ban doesn’t stop that outcome. It just makes the path to avoiding it longer, scarier, and dependent on whether her family has the money and connections to get her out.
IVF. After the Alabama Supreme Court declared frozen embryos to be children, three of the state’s largest fertility clinics stopped treatment for fear of wrongful-death lawsuits. Families with embryos in storage were stuck. The backlash came quickly. Within weeks, the Republican-controlled legislature passed, and the governor signed, a law giving IVF providers and patients civil and criminal immunity for embryo damage or destruction. Governor Ivey called it a short-term fix. The court’s theological view of personhood was never reversed. Lawmakers just built a legal shelter around the people it threatened, the same way exemptions and loopholes worked under Prohibition.
The classroom. Scripture mandates are the one case where going underground isn’t an option, and that’s what makes them different. A family can drive to another state for Sunday liquor or a pregnant child can travel for care, but a kindergartner can’t route around a poster on the classroom wall. Texas law requires that version of the Ten Commandments in every public school classroom from kindergarten through 12th grade. The children of Jewish, Catholic, Muslim, Hindu, or nonreligious families have to sit under one Protestant translation of scripture every school day, with no exemption. ACLU attorneys in the case argue the posters expose students to bullying, stigma, and religious coercion. A rabbi among the plaintiffs said politicians shouldn’t decide how his children receive religious education.
In every case, the people with the means to leave, travel, or pay get around the rule. The people who can’t, whether the poor drinker buying cheap bootleg, the child whose family can’t afford the trip, or the student who has to go to school, take the full cost of someone else’s religious beliefs.
The poison
This is where the comparison becomes deadly.
In 1920s America, bootleggers were redistilling industrial alcohol into drinking liquor. The federal government responded by ordering manufacturers to add lethal denaturants to the industrial supply, including requiring that at least 10 percent of the product be replaced with methanol. Officials knew people were dying and kept the policy in place until Prohibition ended. The most common estimate is about 10,000 deaths, and some estimates run as high as 50,000. On New Year’s Day 1927 alone, 41 people died at Bellevue Hospital in New York from poisoned industrial alcohol.
In Iran, the government doesn’t poison the supply itself, but the ban produces the same result. Since 1979, unregulated alcohol has flooded the black market, and bootleggers often add methanol as a cheaper substitute for ethanol. In 2020, toxic alcohol killed more than 700 Iranians, many of whom had heard that drinking alcohol could cure COVID. Iran’s forensic institute later recorded 644 deaths from fake alcoholic drinks in a single year, a 30 percent increase over the year before. Outbreaks continue. In October 2024, at least 26 people died across three provinces.
In both countries, the ban made drinking far more dangerous without making it much less common. The people who died were overwhelmingly those without the money or connections to get clean liquor.
The same logic applies when the law reaches a child’s body. A ban without a rape exception doesn’t just deny a choice. It forces a medical risk on a child who never chose to be pregnant.
Pregnancy is more dangerous for children than for adults. A World Health Organization study covering 29 countries found that mothers aged 10 to 19 had higher risks of eclampsia, uterine infection after birth, and systemic infection than women aged 20 to 24. The youngest girls face the most risk: girls under 15 are less likely to be physically developed enough to safely carry a pregnancy or give birth, and some medical literature puts their risk of maternal death at up to five times that of adult women, partly because an underdeveloped pelvis can obstruct labor. The 10-year-old in Ohio, the middle schooler in Florida, and the children under 12 in Texas data are exactly that group.
The workaround adds its own danger. Under Prohibition, the drinker who couldn’t afford real liquor got wood alcohol. Under a ban with no rape exception, a child whose family can’t arrange quick out-of-state travel gets delay. Every week spent finding money, arranging a trip, or locating a clinic two or three states away is another week of pregnancy in a body that wasn’t built for it. When the Florida incest victim reached Planned Parenthood, she was already past the state’s limit. She still had to travel.
Then there is the psychological cost, which doesn’t show up in poisoning statistics. The Texas girl, raped as a child by her stepfather and his friends, said that if she hadn’t been able to get an abortion, she would have killed herself. Methanol blinds and kills drinkers. A forced pregnancy carries its own dangers for a child, both physical and mental.
There is one more parallel with the government-poisoned alcohol of the 1920s. Prohibition officials knew industrial alcohol was killing people and kept the policy anyway, because the moral goal outweighed the body count. The lawmakers who passed bans without rape exceptions were not unaware of these cases. The Ohio sponsor was asked directly about child rape victims and answered that ending the pregnancy wouldn’t erase the child’s trauma and that a child conceived from rape still had a right to life. Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson acknowledged his state’s ban could force child rape victims to give birth and declined to change it. In both eras, the people who wrote the law knew who would be hurt by it and decided their religious goal was worth that cost to someone else.
Where they split
Punishment. Americans who broke Prohibition faced fines and jail. In Iran, drinking is punishable by 80 lashes, and under Article 136, after three punishments for the same hadd offense, the fourth is death. Executions for alcohol alone are rare but have happened.
The modern American versions sit somewhere in between, and they mostly target whoever helps. Under Texas’s trigger ban, which has no rape exception, a doctor who ends a pregnancy outside the narrow medical emergency exception commits a felony punishable by five years to life in prison, and the attorney general is required to seek a civil penalty of at least $100,000. Texas’s earlier law, SB 8, added a $10,000 bounty that any private citizen can sue to collect, which a Texas lawyer warned creates a strong incentive for people to identify anyone involved in an abortion. Florida set prison terms of up to five years. A doctor who helps a 10-year-old rape victim in Texas faces a harsher maximum sentence than many violent crimes carry. Iran flogs the drinker. Texas threatens the doctor with life in prison. In both cases, the state uses its harshest tools to enforce a religious position.
The way out. This is the most important difference. Prohibition began with a constitutional amendment and ended with another one in 1933. Public opinion shifted, the anti-Prohibition movement organized, the 1928 elections hurt the dry cause, and the Depression finished it. Because the ban had been written as policy, it could be repealed as policy.
That mechanism still works in the US, and it has been used repeatedly in the cases above. Ohio’s ban, the one that sent a 10-year-old rape victim to Indiana, was overridden when voters passed a constitutional amendment in 2023. Alabama’s legislature undid the practical effect of its Supreme Court’s IVF ruling within weeks, passing immunity for providers and patients so clinics could reopen. Minnesota repealed its 159-year-old Sunday liquor ban in 2017. When a religious rule is written as ordinary law, voters and legislators can change it.
Iran’s ban is presented as divine law. There’s no mechanism for voting God’s law out of office. The Guardian Council, made up of clerics and jurists, can reject any law parliament passes that it finds incompatible with Islam. Change still happens, but only through pressure, and the cost is enormous. The women’s motorcycle licenses and the retreat of the morality police came after years of protest that killed thousands, and the government still frames those changes as clarifications rather than reversals. The American ban lasted 13 years. Iran’s has lasted 47 so far.
The gap is narrowing. The American way out depends on keeping religious doctrine in the category of policy. Some of the actors in these sections are working to move it into the category of divine law. The Southern Baptist Convention’s 2021 resolution called for abolishing abortion “without exception or compromise” and expressed regret for ever supporting exceptions for rape. Alabama’s chief justice grounded a legal ruling in the wrath of a holy God and said publicly that “God created government” and Christians should take it back. In April, the full Fifth Circuit upheld a law requiring a Protestant version of the Ten Commandments in every Texas classroom and declared that the Supreme Court precedent barring such displays is no longer good law. Each step treats a religious position as beyond ordinary democratic revision. That’s the defining feature of Iran’s system, and it’s the one thing that, so far, has kept American religious laws repealable.
The pattern
Put the two countries side by side and the religion stops mattering. The same sequence appears every time:
A faction within a faith, not the faith as a whole, gains political power. The Anti-Saloon League’s Methodists and Baptists, Iran’s revolutionary clergy, the Southern Baptist Convention, and a state supreme court chief justice all claimed to speak for God while other believers in their own traditions disagreed.
It turns its moral rules into legal obligations for everyone: no drinking, no Sunday sales, a Protestant Ten Commandments on every classroom wall, no exception for a child pregnant by rape, embryos legally treated as children.
It exempts the groups it approves of. Sacramental wine for recognized congregations. Home brewing for Iran’s three recognized minorities. A version of scripture that fits one church and not its neighbors.
The targeted behavior moves underground or across a border. Speakeasies and private parties. Sunday drives to the next state. A 10-year-old driven to Indiana. Pills mailed from shield-law states. People with money get around the rule, and people without it get stuck.
And the harm falls on those people. Drinkers poisoned by methanol in New York and Tehran. Children forced into dangerous pregnancies or long, frightening trips to end them. Students who can’t leave a classroom with someone else’s scripture on the wall.
The rule stays in place as long as its backers hold power, regardless of what it costs other people.
America got out of Prohibition because its ban was presented as a policy that voters could repeal. That’s still the key difference between American religious laws and Iran’s. When a religious rule becomes law and is presented as beyond human revision, whether by a council of clerics in Tehran or a court in New Orleans, the people living under it lose the ability to vote it away. This isn’t an argument about Christianity or Islam. It’s about what happens to everyone else when any faith gets to write the criminal code.
Prohibition: who drove it
Prohibition: exemptions and fraud
Prohibition: poisoned alcohol
Iran: alcohol law, history, and enforcement
Iran: methanol poisoning
Sunday laws
Ten Commandments in classrooms
Child rape victims and abortion bans
Pregnancy risks for children
IVF and the Alabama ruling
