If Dallas goes wet next month, none of us should be surprised. The surprise, in fact, will be that a wet vote won’t be that big of a deal.

Time was, and it wasn’t that long ago, that private clubs, beer refrigerators and the other accouterments of Dallas’ mostly dry existence were accepted as completely normal. Summers are hot, the Cowboys are America’s Team, and you can’t buy a six-pack in most of the city. And, to be honest, none of this really seemed to bother anyone.

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In fact, when I started reporting this story in the spring, I thought the drys would offer fierce resistance to going wet, the wets would be mostly indifferent, and that the election would be decided by the drys’ enthusiasm. In fact, the drys have apparently been as indifferent as the wets, and this election has generated almost no controversy at all. Which, considering Dallas has been mostly dry for almost 100 years, is hard to believe.

Or is it? I’m struck by something that George Mason, the pastor at Wilshire Baptist, told me when we chatted about the election. Dallas, he said, is not the same city it was two and three decades ago. We’re bigger, we’re more diverse, and we’re less insular, thanks to being bigger and more diverse. It’s not just that our population has grown by 50 percent since 1980, but that so many of us are from somewhere else. By one estimate, half of us were born elsewhere and moved to Dallas.

Cover story: A Dallas wet-dry election primer

Given that, it’s not surprising that so many people don’t see wet-dry the way people in Dallas have always seen it. To the newcomers, it’s not part of their heritage, like hot summers and the Cowboys. It’s inconvenient, and it can be changed.

Religion, and especially the influence that traditional Christian churches have had with their congregations, is always cited as the reason why Dallas is so dry. And, 40 or 50 years ago, that might have been true. Oak Cliff allowed beer and wine sales until 1956, when it voted itself dry.

That election was spearheaded by the neighborhood’s churches, and they delivered almost 53 percent of the vote in the face of serious opposition from the Dallas business community, led by former mayor James Temple. The churches also beat back attempts to make Oak Cliff wet again in 1957 and 1960, winning by even larger margins than in 1956.

Hence the assumption that Dallas is less religious than it used to be. Why else would the wets stand such a good chance of winning?

Yet that may not be true, either. It’s not so much that Dallas is less religious than it used to be. Rather, it’s religious in a different way. The mainstream Christian churches, like the Baptists and the Methodists, that have traditionally been opposed to alcohol are not only not as adamant about it, several officials told me, but they aren’t as influential with their members as they used to be.  They have lost members and influence to the non-denominational Christian mega-churches that have sprung up in the past couple of decades, and where the focus is more on family life — marriage, fidelity, child rearing and the like. In those churches, demon rum isn’t the demon that it used to be.

Something I found amazing: Stephen Reeves of the Texas Baptist Christian Life Commission, which helps communities fight wet-dry elections, said no one from Dallas had contacted his group just two and a half months before the election. In fact, he said, he didn’t even know Dallas was having a wet-dry election.

And, regardless of what happens in the election, that may be the biggest surprise of all.