Evangelical Christians of the 1820’s may have pushed for more vigorous federal enforcement actions against “demon rum,” but that is hardly the same thing as the progressives' “living Constitution.”
Secondly, the Constitution reserves the police powers to local government and the states: the Constitution does not forbid prohibitions against alcohol at the local level.
The Constitution is designed to ensure that the federal government is a limited government, that it can only engage in those activities laid out for it in the Constitution.
The idea of the federal government as a limited government is what the progressives wanted to undermine, and what they have achieved. Christian evangelicals of the 1820’s didn't want to create a leviathan, and to attribute that motive to them is nothing but ideologically-driven scholarship.
Chapman has long been associated with the Disciples of Christ, a mainstream Protestant denomination generally hostile to evangelical Christianity and which now is embracing homosexual marriage and homosexual clergy.
Amen to your post #5!