2. Are you a Christian? (Chicago: City On The Make…Nelson Algren, 1951)

Nelson Algren's "City on the Make"

Chicago: City On The Make

by Nelson Algren, 1951

transcribed by Jack M Silverstein

2. Are you a Christian?

      It’s still an outlaw’s capital—but of an outlawry whose colors, once crimson as the old Sauganash whiskey-dye, have been washed down, by many prairie rains, to the colorless grey of the self-made executive type playing the percentages from the inside. Under the pale fluorescent glow.

We’ve abandoned the neighborliness of the Middle Border while sharpening its competitiveness—to lend it a bloodier, more legal edge than the Middle Border ever knew.

For in the time that Dwight L. Moody went about these streets straight-arming strangers with the simple and terrible question, “Are you a Christian?” the answer was simpler and less terrible than now.