Where there's smoke there should be ire

While public figures, health associations, and the official organization of physicians in America have spoken out against cigarette smoking, one powerful community has remained strangely silent.

Religion.

Because it is a primary teacher of values and morality in our society, the silence of our major religions and religious leaders about this issue is incomprehensible—even reprehensible.

Here and there a denominational journal may speak to the problem, but the major nondenominational journals have been largely mute. To its credit, Christianity Today, the leading evangelical journal, attacked smoking in a December 1986 editorial. Unfortunately, it did so on strictly health grounds, avoiding the moral questions by hoping this would not be seen as a sin-and-righteousness issue.

In a February 9, 1984, editorial, the Christian Century went a step further. Reporting on what it called the "tobacco wars," it argued that smokers and nonsmokers should not be treated as "separate but equal" with respect to smoking in public places. "One willfully pollutes the air and harms both individuals and society. The other is the victim of that harm." The editorial went on to say that smokers should be "made to pay for their vice." The word vice is the closest the editorial got to making a moral judgment on smoking.

Not satisfied with religion's simple silence regarding its products, the tobacco industry has used its financial resources to procure religion's implicit endorsement. Citing an article in the New York State Journal of Medicine entitled "How Tobacco Companies Have Found Religion," the Christian Century reported that Philip Morris, Inc., "the nation's largest cigarette manufacturer, 'attached itself to the prestige and influence of the Vatican' when it sponsored the first United States tour of the Vatican art collections in 1983." Sometime later Philip Morris also "sponsored the national tour . . . 'The Precious Legacy,' an exhibit of Jewish artwork confiscated from individuals killed in the Holocaust." 2 In addition, in recent years notable religious organizations, such as the National Conference of Christians and Jews, have hosted dinners honoring tobacco executives.

This coziness with the tobacco industry is going on at the same time that the Catholic Press will not advertise cigarettes, the North Carolina Council of Churches wants the state's tobacco farmers to switch to other crops for "moral reasons," and the Southern Baptist Convention urges Baptists who grow tobacco to develop alternative crops.

More than a decade ago I read an article by a Roman Catholic priest who asked whether the time had come for the church to acknowledge that smoking is a critical moral issue. After all, he reasoned, the ignoring of preventable conditions that cause suffering and death must be regarded as inherently unprincipled. He wanted to use the force of moral obligation to dissuade people—especially believers—from smoking. It seems to me he was right.

Think about it.

To begin with, the doctrines of creation and resurrection make it clear that the body is good, a gift from God that is necessary to conscious existence. We are psychophysical unities whose mental, emotional, and spiritual health depends in part on the health of our bodies.

Second, as John Donne said, we are not islands to ourselves. Each of us exists within a network of people who count on our being there for them. I heard a radio spot in which a lung cancer victim broke down when he mentioned the fact that because he would not quit smoking his two packs a day, his wife and children will be prematurely denied his emotional and financial support for the rest of their lives. In his own way he was saying that he had been selfish all those years, that if he had truly loved his family and friends, he would have stayed healthy as long as possible.

When we assume responsibility for the health of our bodies, we are being loving spouses, parents, children, and even friends. This is so because we are, as the philosophers are fond of putting it, beings-in-relation.

Third, religion's failure to be more vocal about smoking opens religiously motivated prolife groups and their leaders to charges of hypocrisy. We now know that women who smoke during pregnancy not only risk their own health but also that of their babies. Maternal smoking during pregnancy decreases fetal growth rate, causes pregnancy complications (including those that contribute to premature delivery), and increases the incidence of spontaneous abortion (estimated at 50,000 per year), fetal death, and neonatal death. How then can believers shout about abortion and be silent about smoking?

Like all religious people, I abhor unnecessary death. As I see it, even though the law distinguishes between playing an active and a passive role in someone's death, there is sometimes little moral difference between them. When a death is clearly and easily preventable, those who do nothing may be—morally speaking—accessories to murder. And for sheer numbers of deaths, smoking ranks right up there with abortion, drunk driving, and suicide—issues of major concern to many Jewish and Christian believers.

For these reasons, among others, it seems to me that the religious community does not have the luxury of opting out of this issue. We must all join the North Carolina Council of Churches in condemning tobacco on moral grounds.

Fifty million Americans smoke, a number of them religiously committed Jews and Christians. While such smokers might get angry if their leaders took a strong position against smoking, I believe this is the time for the messengers of God to shed their priestly garments and clothe themselves like prophets. This country needs some Jeremiahs and Isaiahs to summon smokers to repentance.

Is it not time, then, to oppose both the growing of tobacco and the act of smoking on moral grounds? To declare that it is against the will of God? To urge clergy who smoke to stop modeling this behavior before their congregations, especially the young people?

Is it not also time for the religious community to support changes in our national policies on smoking by calling for a ban on all tobacco advertising and a national law prohibiting smoking in public places?

In recent times religion has been courageous about social reforms. Given the dangers smoking imposes on so many—each year 350,000 Americans die from it, seven times the number of Americans who died in the whole Vietnam War—does not religion need to be courageous again?