Sin of Omission

How long can religious conservatives go on about protecting kids from dangerous drugs without saying anything about smoking?

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Several years ago, Forest Jones, the youth minister at the First Assembly of God in Raleigh, North Carolina, joined a local campaign against teen smoking. He counseled his young flock about the temptations of tobacco, enlisting the teens to lobby local merchants to stop selling cigarettes to kids. “The tobacco industry started taking note,” Jones recalls. Soon afterward, when he moved to a church five counties away, Jones got a creepy phone call from the local officer of a tobacco company. “It was somebody in management,” the minister remembers. “He wanted to know if I was here to pastor, or was I going to start any trouble?”

Similar questions confront a growing number of conservative Christian clergy and political activists as they grapple with the contradiction between their beliefs about the sanctity of life and the Christian right’s conspicuous silence about the tobacco industry. Successive revelations about smoking-induced death and disease, the marketing of cigarettes to children, and the manipulation of nicotine to encourage addiction are gradually reducing cigarette purveyors from the status of honest businesspeople to that of pushers, pimps, and pornographers. Yet the industry provides the Christian right with a vast grassroots base and a staunch Republican ally. Will religious conservatives continue to accept tobacco’s support in exchange for their silence? Or will they start making trouble?

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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