Here’s a thought that won’t be of any help at all.
Due to my remarkable decrepitude, I can remember all the way back to the 1950s (it occurred to me recently that, since I was born in 1950, and 1950 was technically part of the decade of the 1940s, I was actually born in the ’40s. That’s cool. It explains that whole Bogart vibe I give off) and I remember when the culture war was very different.
When I was a kid, there was essentially only one pressure group trying to keep people from smoking. That was evangelical Christians. We considered smoking a sin, second only to the mortal sin of drinking. Or maybe dancing.
If you weren’t around back then, you can judge what I say by looking at old movies. Everybody smoked back then. Mothers smoked while feeding their babies. Waitresses smoked while serving meals. Business offices were as smoky as Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh was as smoky as Vesuvius on a bad day. Considering how dangerous they tell second hand smoke is nowadays, it must be a sign of God’s favor that any Boomers are still alive at all.
When I went to a Christian college, it was the Bible thumpers who opposed smoking. All (and I mean all) the liberals smoked (tobacco and other things). It was an act of cultural rebellion, a sort of revolutionary cockade in their subculture.
Then we Christians got reasonable. “The Bible doesn’t say anything about smoking,” we realized. “Let’s concentrate on real sins.” So we lightened up.
At the precise moment we began to move that way, secular society began to turn pitilessly on the smokers. Today health activists have suppressed smoking with fascistic thoroughness we never dreamed of.
So maybe the secret is for us to just give up. If we stop talking about abortion or homosexual marriage, maybe the seculars will suddenly turn on those practices too, and stomp them out. We’ll see abortionists prosecuted for racist genocide, and homosexuals herded into concentrations camps after the pattern of Castro’s.
The only problem I can see with this program (aside from the fact that it would be harsher on the abortionists and homosexuals than we ever intended) is that it would involve all of us lying consistently about what we believe.
And we don’t do that.
Ah well. Back to the drawing board.
Well Lars, there’s a big problem with your scenario; smoking has really nothing to do with mankind’s favorite sins. (Spurgeon was a big smoker as I recall.) No; smoking is just a cultural fad; while adultery, homosexuality, etc. are true sins. The PC agenda favors allowing sin, while attacking non sin.
– p.s. speaking of cigarettes and growing up; I was raised in a very remote farming community… the only person I knew who smoked favored a brand (here in canuck land) called ‘Sportsman’ cigarettes. The package was a work of art, and featured various (famous) fishing flies. I was entranced by the packages and the artwork.
So maybe the secret is for us to just give up. If we stop talking about abortion or homosexual marriage, maybe the seculars will suddenly turn on those practices too, and stomp them out.
No, but after three generations there won’t be that many seculars around anyway.
I was reared in a church that concentrated on condemning drinking, dancing, and Catholicism. I can’t ever remember hearing a sermon against smoking, and I can remember some men in the congregation slipping out of the auditorium (it was never called a sanctuary) for a mid-sermon smoke. I left it by the time I was 16, and it was 12 years before I found my way back to a different church. Needless to say, there are sins aplenty for us to worry about in the 21st Century; drinking, dancing and Catholics seem positively quaint.
I grew up in Southern Baptist land as a high-church Anglo-Catholic myself (having since swum the Tiber to have done with half measures). I had more than a few amusing moments as a teenager watching some of my peers struggle with such prohibitions…and see, now, how many of them it disillusioned and drove away from Church later on.
I was amused a couple of years ago while reading the Pepys diaries to discover that the topic of extemporaneous prayer was once a Big Deal in theological circles–it seems that prayers made up on the fly were considered to be dangerous, promoting egoism, unbalanced enthusiasm, and other evils in the souls of those who indulged.
I have even been known to pray extemporaneously while smoking. Not much hope for my kind, I suppose.