June 27, 2019
Taking on the Tobacco Habit
Tobacco use was discussed about once a year during Christian Standard’s first century of publication. Smoking evidently has always been controversial. All of the articles reviewed for this piece were anti-smoking and anti-tobacco in nature, but it would truly be surprising if no words supportive of tobacco ever appeared in the magazine. On the whole, most writers going back to 1866 referred to the tobacco habit as dirty, costly, and unhealthy. A “Reader’s Forum” writer from Angola, Ind., in 1931 referred to tobacco as “the Devil’s weed,” and criticized Christians who sold it. Here are a trilogy of editorials and
