Here is a preacher whom I have suspected of cowardice for years because he never deviated by a hair’s breadth from the economic prejudices of his wealthy congregation. I thought he knew better but was simply afraid to speak out and seek to qualify the arch-conservatism of his complacent crowd with a little Christian idealism. But I was mistaken. I have just heard that he recently included in his sermon a tirade against women who smoke cigarettes and lost almost a hundred of his fashionable parishioners. He is evidently not lacking courage in matters upon which he has deep convictions. Nobody, for that matter, lacks courage when convictions are strong. Courage is simply the rigorous devotion to one set of values against other values and interests.
Protestantism’s present impotence in qualifying the economic and social life of the nation is due not so much to the pusillanimity of the clerical leaders as to its individualistic traditions. The church honestly regards it of greater moment to prevent women from smoking cigarettes than to establish more Christian standards in industrial enterprise. A minister who tries to prevent fashionable women from smoking cigarettes is simply trying to enforce a code of personal habit established in the middle classes of the nineteenth century upon the plutocratic classes of the twentieth century. The effort is not only vain but has little to do with essential Christianity.
I would not deny that some real values may be at stake in such questions of personal habits. But they affect the dominant motives which determine the spirituality or sensuality of character but slightly. The church does not seem to realize how unethical a conventionally respectable life may be.