Slacktivist critiques evangelical teetotalers

Biblical literalists often aren't:

Thus wherever the word "wine" appears in the Bible -- which is a lot -- these folks read it as "grape juice." But then they get to a passage like Ephesians 5:18, "Do not get drunk on wine," and suddenly decide that the same exact word they have insisted should not be read as "wine" now means "wine" after all.

And Slacktivist doesn't take their abstention very seriously:

The teetotalism of American evangelicals is in itself a relatively minor quirk, a vestigial remnant of the 19th-century "temperance" movement. It exists today as merely the kind of arbitrary symbolic gesture that wholly conformed and assimilated religious groups tend to make as a desperate attempt to distinguish themselves from their otherwise indistinguishable neighbors.

So even though Perkins sounds like he wants to re-establish Prohibition, he doesn't really. If the rest of the country stopped drinking, or dancing, then he and his people would have to find some other symbolic characteristic to set themselves apart. They'd have to prohibit sugar or carpeting or something else, devising some way of reading this prohibition back into the Bible and then tricking themselves all over again into believing that it was something they found there instead of something they inserted into the text, Y for X.