By Lilah Hosni —
Matt Fradd loves Jesus and cigars. His Catholic podcast Pints With Aquinas is blowing up, and his cigar lounge, Chesterton Cigars, in Steubenville, Ohio, is blowing smoke.
Eyebrow raise: What does a good Christian boy have to do with destroying the temple of the Holy Spirit with tobacco? “Our bodies are sacred, we should treat them with respect” Matt acknowledges. So does he puff away? For the pleasure it brings.
The life insurance industry has downgraded the danger of cigars on their actuarial tables. Will the church follow suit?
Cigars have historically held a place in Christianity: Charles Spurgeon, J.R.R.Tolkien, C.S. Lewis all puffed away while impacting the world for Christ.
Now cigars seem to be making a comeback after born-again Christians relegated them to the mortal sin group for more than a 100 years. An array of avid smokers are no longer hiding behind the church to get their nicotine fix.
In fact, there’s a group of cigar aficionados who even evangelize in cigar lounges, said Phil Wyman. Unfortunately for the journalistic point of view, they won’t let themselves be interviewed because of the blowback from the evangelical community.
Phil has passed away, though blaming smoking may be wrong. Phil was the ultimate Christian iconoclast. As a pastor for Foursquare in Salem, Massachusetts, he pioneered outreach to witches and Satanists that centered on love and being non-judgemental.
When his local Foursquare supervisory district witch-hunted him (sorry, couldn’t resist the comparison), Phil doubled-down on his mould-breaking outreach: he reached out to the secularists making their own religion at the the Burning Man festival. Then he visited Stone Henge and continued off-the-radar ministry.
It was Phil who gave word about the cigar-puffing evangelism group and touted its benefits. It turns out, the cigarettes are hurried, where cigars are slow, lending themselves to meaningful and long discussions. So this group, which loves Jesus and cigars, talks to people who don’t know Jesus at cigar lounges.
Now there’s a “Christian” cigar lounge?
Matt Fradd regularly scores more than a million views on his YouTube podcast interviews with the likes of George Farmer (Candace Owen’s husband) and Jordan Peterson.
He opened a cigar lounge named after G.K. Chesterton, the great English writer and thinker from the early 1900s who called the “taboo on tobacco queer” (meaning, odd).
“It was a dream of ours to have a place where people could come together and have a cigar and talk like human beings,” says Matt of his Steubenville establishment. “We have no screens in the lounge, no electric music and we’re seriously considering getting rid of the wi-fi.”
Born-again Christians have traditionally treated smoking like drinking and partying. It’s addictive and damaging to the body. Since 1 Cor. 6:19 says the human body is temple to the Holy Spirit, we should take care of the gift of our bodies.
But the dim view of the damage from tobacco is not being applied consistently. Gluttony, which is almost as much of a danger to your heart health as cigarettes, is the widespread sin of the church. Instead of preaching against gluttony, many (most?) churches treat it as the holy common grounds for joyful fellowship.
“Life is very short – potentially shortened by (cigars) though I actually think that cigars have great health benefits,” says Catholic Michael Knowles, a political commentator. “I think life is too short to smoke bad cigars.”
