Issue 032 PDF Version - Christian Ethics Today

Two Cultural Addictions: Tobacco and Prayer
© 2000
By Dwight A. Moody, Dean of the Chapel
Georgetown College, Georgetown, KY
It is not easy being a minister in a tobacco state. A month
after I became the pastor of a west Kentucky church, a well
meaning member sidled up to me and said, “Be careful what
you say about tobacco; we have some prominent tobacco
farmers in our church.”
Such warnings give pause; they slow down a preacher’s
headlong pursuit of the prophet’s mantle.
The truth of the matter is this: churches in Kentucky are
addicted to tobacco, tobacco money, that is. I grew up in
such a church. Tithes and offerings from the sale of tobacco
funded the budget that included my father’s salary. While
youth leaders lectured us about smoking, and lighting up was
certainly taboo in our youth group, the congregation as a
whole went right on preaching and singing, building and
borrowing based on the substantial flow of money from the
sale of tobacco.
It wasn’t just the growers. It was landowners who rented
ground, warehousers who hosted sales, investors who bought
stock, and merchants who stocked shelves. It was night clerks
at convenient stores eking out a living selling packs and cartons
to one and all. Banks loaning money, governments collecting
taxes, hospitals treating tobacco addicted patients and
billing insurance companies and Medicare: it touched every
arena of life.
The entire economy, the whole of our culture is addicted,
in this sense, to tobacco.
The public sign of sickness is, of course, smoking. And
smoking, as we know, is pervasive; it is an epidemic. Every
year, in Kentucky and Indiana, 52,000 children and
teenagers begin smoking. Every year, 18,000 residents of
Kentucky and Indiana die from tobacco related causes.
Public health officials contend it is one of the chief preventable
causes of illness and death in America.
What can we do?
Our strategy has been shame. Years ago, it was shaming
the individual, pointing a finger and speaking of the
immorality of the smokers life. “Your body is the temple of
God; do not desecrate it with the deadly poison.”
These days, it is shaming the companies who market the
stuff, holding press conferences or launching law suits to say,
“You are deceiving the children and filling the earth with
death.”
There is nothing wrong with such shame; and speaking to
these two groups (individual smokers and tobacco compa-
14 • FEBRUARY 2001 • CHRISTIAN ETHICS TODAY
nies) is entirely appropriate. But they represent only a small
percentage of the American public that is caught up in this
web of addiction.
One reason this two-pronged campaign of shame has
failed is because it leaves out so much of this cultural web. In
the middle are all those who profit from the sale of tobacco,
from churches and their consecrated and disciplined members,
to governments and their noble and necessary projects
for the public good.
A second reason the campaign of shame has failed is that
it features the pure, the righteous, the morally indignant
pointing fingers at the unclean, the sinner, the moral reprobate.
Little in our experience, and nothing in our spirit, leads
us to believe such tactics will succeed in effecting the conversion
for which we pray.
Remember the old song, “not the preacher, not the deacon,
but it’s me O Lord, standing in the need of prayer”?
Conversion begins in the soul of the addict, at the point
of desperation, when all else fails. Isn’t this the miracle
method of that great book of the century, Alcoholics
Anonymous? Isn’t this number one on that twelve step path to
recovery, and wholeness, and salvation? “My name is Joe and
I am an alcoholic.”
The institutions, corporations, and organizations of our
good land need a new confession: “My name is First Baptist
church, and I am addicted to tobacco. My name is Kroger,
and I am addicted to tobacco. My name is Memorial County
hospital, and I am addicted to tobacco. My name is the
Commonwealth of Kentucky, and I am addicted to tobacco.”
It is not a strategy of shame, but of rejecting the centuries
of denial, of refusing to blame others for our own responsibility,
of refusing to name as scapegoats those who are most
vulnerable, most visible, or most able to cough up big money.
We are all in this together, and until we sing some version of
that old spiritual, there will be no answer to our prayers for a
drug free society.
One Hell of a Prayer
All the talk about prayer, high school football, and the
Supreme Court reminds me of my own episode with
such things thirty-two years ago. The year was 1968 and I
was an 18 year-old senior at Hazelwood High School in suburban
St. Louis. It was, they told us, the largest high school in
the state.