Vices

In November 2019, Coldplay released their eighth album, Everyday Life. In twenty years of professional music, it was the first time that any of Coldplay’s records came with the famous “Parental Advisory” sticker. The whole of the album’s profanity came from three seemingly random “f-bombs.” Not only had Coldplay never had an explicit content warning on any album before. They had never even featured a single profanity on any of their full-length LPs before Everyday Life.

Less than a year later, Taylor Swift released Folklore. The same exact thing happened. Despite a 15+ year history of recording that featured zero strong profanity, Folklore earned the black and white sticker for featuring multiple uses of the f-word. This started a trend for Swift: Every album released since has the same profanity and the same explicit content warning (as is common in the industry, the albums each have a “clean” version that edits out the harshest words).

Both Coldplay and Taylor Swift have historically appealed to a younger, more sensitive demographic. They have a long and successful history of selling their music without profanity.

Tech writer Samuel D. Jones offers the following observations on the use of profanity by Coldplay, Swift, and other artists:

We live in an era where the combination of authenticity and vice means that we are seeing some examples of performative offense. Performative offense is what happens when people indulge in vice less out of a sincere desire to indulge it, and more out of a desire to sell their image in the public square. It’s because many modern Americans now associate vice with authentic lives that leaders and those who aspire to leadership may flaunt vulgar or antisocial behavior on the grounds that such things make them “real” to the masses.

In other words, it’s cool to be bad. It’s cool to sin a little.

Paul Ford writes in an article on Wired, what happened when he switched his weight loss meds and found a miracle cure. Decades of struggle with an insatiable desire for food, gone in an instant. But his reflection on the experience is less of an advertisement as it is a probing of human nature amid advances in pharmacology. He writes:

This is a technology that will reorder society. I have been the living embodiment of the deadly sin of gluttony, judged as greedy and weak since I was 10 years old — and now the sin is washed away. Baptism by injection. But I have no more virtue than I did a few months ago. I just prefer broccoli to gloopy chicken. Is this who I am?

How long is it before there’s an injection for your appetites, your vices? Maybe they’re not as visible as mine. Would you self-administer a weekly anti-avarice shot? Can Big Pharma cure your sloth, lust, wrath, envy, pride?

On this front, the parallels between Ford’s weight loss drug and every other drug are almost obvious (whether they be coffee, THC, or any fill-in-the-blank name brand). The alluring promise that frailty is simply a matter of chemistry. More interesting is what happens to Ford himself after the one signal pathway is silenced — his brain averts its gaze elsewhere:

Where before my brain had been screaming, screaming, at air-raid volume — there was sudden silence. It was confusing. […] “I urgently need, I thought … Something to fill the silence where food used to be. Every night for weeks I spent four, five hours twisting Moog knobs. Not making music. Just droning, looping, and beep-booping. I needed something to obsess over, to watch YouTube videos about. I needed something to fail at every night to feel normal.

Possible Preaching Angle:

The flesh is never satisfied and cannot be conquered by human will or science. Impeding one of the desires of the flesh simply ignites another. The church of big pharma might provide a kind of cure, but there is no panacea for human nature, except “the washing of new birth and renewal by the Holy Spirit” (Titus 3:5).

"There's an app for that"--yes, even if "that" means each one of the Seven Deadly Sins, the classic vices of Christian moral teaching.

Lust: Tinder

Gluttony: Yelp

Greed: LinkedIn

Sloth: Netflix

Wrath: Twitter

Envy: Facebook

Pride: Instagram

You can view the slide shared at the Mockingbird Festival here.

In their Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Half the Sky, Nicholas Kristof and his wife Sheryl WuDunn report on [the] worldwide slavery [in sex trafficking], telling stories of girls who had been kidnapped or taken from their families on a ruse and then sold as sex slaves. These girls, many under ten years of age, are drugged, beaten, raped, and forced to sell their bodies night after night. It is a slavery even more horrifying than the slavery colonial America practiced, and the numbers are beyond imagination.

Kristof reports that it is far more effective to crack down on the perpetrators than to try to rescue the victims. That is because rescuing the girls from external slavery is the "easy part," but rescuing them from the beast within, such as the drug addictions that cause them to return or the shame they feel, is enormously challenging. They keep returning to their abusers.

Kristof tells of rescuing Momm, a Cambodian teen who had been enslaved for five years. Momm was on the edge of a breakdown—sobbing one moment, laughing hysterically the next. She seized the chance to escape, promising she'd never return. When Kristof drove Momm back to her village, Momm saw her aunt, screamed, and leapt out of the moving car.

A moment later, it seemed as if everybody in the village was shrieking and running up to Momm. Momm's mother was at her stall in the market a mile away when a child ran up to tell her that Momm had returned. Her mother started sprinting back to the village, tears streaming down her cheeks …. It was ninety minutes before the shouting died away and the eyes dried, and then there was an impromptu feast.

Truly it was a great rescue—and there was singing and dancing and celebrating, reminiscent of the singing and dancing of Miriam and the Israelite women when they were rescued out of their slavery in Egypt.

But as with the Israelites, the celebration didn't last long. Early one morning Momm left her father and her mother without a word and returned to her pimp in Poipet. Like many girls in sex slavery, she had been given methamphetamine to keep her compliant. The craving had overwhelmed her. No doubt she thought, I just have to have this or I can't go on. Perhaps she imagined she'd be able to escape after she got it, but even if she didn't, she thought, I have to have this.

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) Struggle against Sin—Use this story to illustrate our personal struggle with sin and how to work out the freedom we have in Christ. (2) Social Justice and Evangelism—This story also provides a powerful way to illustrate the need to work for justice and preach the Gospel. People need justice and compassion, but they also need to hear the good news that sets them free on the inside.

A few years ago there was a fascinating but rather unpleasant story. It had all the qualities of a good mystery. A frantic 911 call brought police to a home. The caller had only been able to communicate that she needed help and was being killed. When police arrived, they found a bloody knife beside her lifeless body on the kitchen floor. Blood was spattered across the room, yet upon examining the body they did not find a single cut or puncture wound … [but] they noticed a trail of blood leading into the next room and followed it. Entering the room they found a large dying boa constrictor.

Apparently the snake had been raised as a pet but on this day the snake had wrapped itself around the woman as she was cooking in the kitchen. For whatever reason, she had allowed the snake to entwine her body in its coils and once it began to constrict its muscular body around her she sensed the danger. In a panic she grabbed a knife and began to slash away at the snake and, while managing to mortally wound it, she was killed herself in the process.

This tragic story is a vivid example of the power of sin in our lives. We often take subtle compromises into our lives as an innocent pet, thinking we can handle them without any real risk, and thus deal with sin flippantly, all the while placing ourselves in great danger.

I imagine you're familiar with the phrase "ship of fools." It was a common medieval motif used in literature and art, especially religious satire. One such satire is Hieronymus Bosch's famous oil painting by the same name, which now hangs in the Louvre in Paris. [See an image of "Ship of Fools."] This marvelous work, which is filled with symbolism, shows ten people aboard a small vessel and two overboard swimming around it. It is a ship without a pilot (captain), and everyone onboard is too busy drinking, feasting, flirting, and singing to know where on earth the waves are pushing them.

They are fools because they are enjoying all the sensual pleasures of this world without knowing where it all leads. Atop the mast hangs a bunch of dangling carrots and a man is climbing up to reach them. Yet above the carrots we find a small but significant detail: a human skull. This is the thirteenth head in the painting, unlucky in every imaginable way. The idea is that these twelve fools, who think all is perfect, are sailing right to their demise. The only pilot on board, the only figure leading the way, is death.

In December of 2009, the Family Research Council released the results of a new study exploring the effects of pornography on marriage, children, and individuals. Because the Family Research Council is a Christian organization dedicated to the promotion of marriage and family, it came as no surprise that the study linked the use of pornography to a wide variety of harmful consequences.

What did come as a bit of a surprise was the study's use of divorce lawyers as a primary source. Citing the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, the study noted that 56 percent of divorce cases involved "one party having an obsessive interest in pornographic websites," while 68 percent of divorce cases involve one spouse conducting an affair with someone they met over the internet.

The study also revealed that, in households where one spouse suffered from an addiction to pornography, both spouses believed that watching pornographic material was tantamount to adultery. And yet in most cases where the marriage ultimately ended in divorce, the addicted spouse remained controlled by his or her addiction.

Reacting to these and other issues uncovered by the study, Dr. Pat Fagan of the Family Research Council said, "The fact that marriage rates are dropping steadily is well known. But the impact of pornography use and its correlation to fractured families has been little discussed. The data show that as pornography sales increase, the marriage rate drops."

Fagan also noted that pornography "corrodes the conscience, promotes distrust between husbands and wives and debases untold thousands of young women." His ultimate conclusion is that pornography is "a quiet family killer."

In his book “Wired for Intimacy,” William M. Struthers writes:

When I was young, I visited a farm that had an old-fashioned water pump. It was centered on a cement slab and would drip long after you stopped pumping. Over the years the dripping water had cut a trough to the edge of the slab. The trough was nearly two inches deep.

So it is with pornography in a man's brain. Because of the way the male brain is wired, it is prone to pick up on sexually relevant cues. These cues trigger arousal and a series of neurological, hormonal, and neurochemical events are set into motion. Memories about how to respond to these cues are set off. As the pattern of arousal and response continues, it deepens the neurological pathway, making it a trough. Each time an unhealthy sexual pattern is repeated, neurological, emotional, and spiritual erosion carves out a channel that will eventually develop into a canyon from which there is no escape.

But if this corrupted pathway can be avoided, a new pathway can be formed. We can establish a healthy sexual pattern where the flow is redirected toward holiness …. That is part of the process of sanctification.

The 2009 economic crisis brought an interesting phrase into the headlines: toxic assets. Toxic assets are one of the factors contributing to the trouble that banks are in now. The assets are loans. Somebody owes the banks money. Normally banks want people to owe them money and pay them interest on the principal. But as the economy now stands, especially with the mortgage foreclosure crisis, many of the loans have actually become liabilities, because the houses that secured the loans have decreased in value below the amount of the loan.

When assets become harmful to your bottom line, they are no longer really assets. They are liabilities. They are toxic.

Toxic assets are not just a banking phenomenon; toxic assets can also be spiritual. A toxic asset is anything we think is an asset but that actually is hurting us spiritually.

Sins of the flesh, such as viewing pornography or taking illegal drugs, are toxic assets. We engage in these pleasures because we think they will benefit us, but the opposite is true.

A house or a car can be a toxic asset when it takes over your life and pushes God to the periphery. A job can be a toxic asset. Money, education, family and friends, physical beauty or handsomeness—all these things can be great assets to you unless you allow them to take God's place in your life, and you live for them or you trust in them. In that case they have become toxic assets.

A priest was coming back to his rectory one evening in the dark when he was accosted by a robber who pulled a gun on him and demanded, "Your money or your life!"

As the priest reached his hand into his coat pocket, the robber saw his Roman collar and said: "I see you're a priest. Never mind, you can go."

The priest, surprised at this unexpected show of piety, tried to reciprocate by offering the robber a candy bar that he remembered was in his pocket.

The robber replied, "No thank you, Father. I don't eat candy during Lent."

In 2008, New York Magazine ran a comprehensive article about research concerning kids and lying. In one study researchers gathered a group of children together and read them a version of The Boy Who Cried Wolf where the little boy is eaten by the wolf because he lies. In a survey of adults taken before the study, most thought the negative consequences in The Boy Who Cried Wolf would lead the children to be more honest in controlled experiments on honesty and deceit. However, after hearing the story, researchers observed that the children continued their usual rate of lying. Researchers then taught the story of George Washington and the cherry tree. In the story George goes to his father and confesses he cut down the tree. His father replies, "Hearing you tell the truth instead of a lie is better than if I had a thousand cherry trees." Researchers found that the story of George Washington and the cherry tree reduced lying by 43 percent. They concluded that the threat of punishment simply teaches children to learn how to lie better. When children learn the worth of honesty, as they did in the story of George Washington, they lie less.

In a study of teenagers regarding degrees of honesty and deceit, researchers found that most parents believe being permissive will encourage openness and honesty from their kids. Parents of teenagers would rather be informed than strict and "in the dark." However, researchers discovered a "no rules" policy simply doesn't work. One researcher noted: "Kids who go wild and get in trouble…have parents who don't set rules or standards. Their parents are loving and accepting no matter what the kids do, but the kids take the lack of rules as a sign their parents don't care—that their parent doesn't really want [the] job of being the parent… Ironically, the type of parents who are actually most consistent in enforcing rules are the same parents who are most warm and have the most conversations with their kids." Though some rules result in arguments between parents and teens, only 23 percent of the teenagers surveyed considered these conflicts harmful to their relationship with their parents.

In a final study, adults were asked to disclose the worst lie they ever told. Surprisingly, many adults disclosed minor childhood lies. Researcher Dr. Bella DePaulo of the University of California, Santa Barbara, comments: "I had to reframe my understanding to consider what it must have been like as a child to have told this lie. For young kids, their lie challenged their self-concept that they were a good child and that they did the right thing." Lies told during childhood affected their behavior later on. If they got caught and felt bad, they vowed never to do it again. But if they were good at it and got away with it, they would lie more often into their teens and adulthood."

I read a story in the L. A. Times a long time ago. A guy goes to the house where he grew up and knocks on the door. Because he hadn't been there for 20 years, he finds himself getting sentimental. He asks the owners if he can walk through the house, and they let him. While in the attic, he finds an old jacket of his. He puts it on, reaches into the pocket, and pulls out a stub. It's a receipt from a shoe repair shop. He realizes he had taken a pair of shoes there twenty years ago, and in the midst of the move, he had never picked them up. On a whim he decides to go to the shoe repair shop. Just to be funny, he takes the receipt out and hands it to the guy behind the desk, saying, "Are my shoes ready?" The guy goes back to the workroom for a minute, comes back to the counter, and says, "Come back a week from Thursday."

That's the mind of the sluggard; they're always saying, "A week from Thursday."

Bella DePaulo, a visiting professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who specializes in studying forms of human deception, asked college students and members of the community-at-large to keep a notebook to tally up the number of lies they told in one week. By the end of the experiment, DePaulo found that the students had lied at least once to 38 percent of the people they came into contact with, while the community-at-large had lied to 30 percent of those with whom they interacted.

Based on her research, DePaulo insists that we all fall into one of two categories of liars:

• Some of us are "self-centered liars"—we lie in order to make ourselves look better to others.
• The rest of us are "other-centered liars"—we lie in order to avoid hurting someone else's feelings.

The experiment also found that the proverbial "white lie" was more often told to strangers; deeper lies were reserved for those the liar loved most.

"In everyday life, people are often telling lies," says DePaulo. "[It's] not to get something concrete that they want, like more money, but for psychological reasons…

"Sometimes in our real lives, our valuing of honesty clashes with something else we also value, like wanting to be gracious or kind or compassionate."

Children will play with virtually anything they get their hands on. It's no surprise, then, that when Dutch children in the town of Barneveld uncovered an unexploded World War II artillery shell, they played with it. In fact, they had games with it for several months.

That shell was still live and contained high explosives. Thankfully, the deadly plaything did not explode in the Barneveld playground as the children tossed it about. Eventually the authorities learned about the shell, confiscated it, and exploded it in a safe place.

Those who are not yet mature often fail to recognize the danger of what they are doing. For children, the world is a playground, and bombs make great toys.

We want to be a saint, but we also want to feel every sensation experienced by sinners; we want to be innocent and pure, but we also want to be experienced and taste all of life; we want to serve the poor and have a simple lifestyle, but we also want all the comforts of the rich; we want to have the depth afforded by solitude, but we also do not want to miss anything; we want to pray, but we also want to watch television, read, talk to friends, and go out.

It's a small wonder that life is often a trying enterprise, and that we are often tired and pathologically overextended.

—Ronald Rolheiser, president of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, Texas

Rabbi Joseph Telushkin, author of Words That Hurt, Words That Heal, has lectured throughout this country on the powerful, and often negative, impact of words. He often asks audiences if they can go 24 hours without saying any unkind words about, or to, another person. Invariably, a small number of listeners raise their hands, signifying "yes." Others laugh, and quite a large number call out, "no!"

Telushkin responds: "Those who can't answer 'yes' must recognize that you have a serious problem. If you cannot go 24 hours without drinking liquor, you are addicted to alcohol. If you cannot go 24 hours without smoking, you are addicted to nicotine. Similarly, if you cannot go 24 hours without saying unkind words about others, then you have lost control over your tongue."

As of 2006, the stock market boasts 150 mutual funds that designate themselves as "socially responsible." This means that investments are only made in companies that meet the ethical standards of fund managers.

But back in 2002, a new investment vehicle quietly surfaced: the Vice Fund. The prospectus of the Vice Fund claims that it favors "products or services often considered socially irresponsible." Investments have been made by various managers in companies linked to alcohol, tobacco, gambling, and military contracts.

This fund and another, the Gaming and Casino fund, both rest on a certain approach: Stocks that exploit the dark side of human nature are a natural for Wall Street, particularly during economic downturns.

Dan Ahrens, former manager of the Vice Fund who moved to start the Gaming and Casino fund, expands on this philosophy in his book Investing in Vice. He believes that bad habits don't change, even through bad economic times. People still indulge in vices regardless of what happens in the stock market; smoking, drinking, gambling. There's financial profit in war.

And, so far, those philosophies have produced results. The Vice Fund has returned positive monetary gains, some reaching beyond 20 percent over five years.

Editor’s Update (2023):

The Fund has reported fairly steady annual total returns, with dividends consistently contributing to the Fund’s overall return. As of June 30, 2022, the Investor Class has a five-year annualized return of 0.74%, and a 10-year annualized return of 6.79%.

Through June 30, 2022, it reports an annualized return since inception of 7.82% versus the benchmark set at 8.32% by the MSCI All Country World Index.3 As of Sept. 9, 2022, it has a dividend yield of 0%.

As of Sept. 9, 2022, the Vice Global Fund had total assets under management of $79.2 million. As of June 30, 2022, top holdings in the Fund included Galaxy Entertainment, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon Technologies, and Philip Morris International.

Thomas Costain's book The Three Edwards describes the life of Raynald III, a 14th-century duke in what is now Belgium. Grossly overweight, Raynald was commonly called by his Latin nickname, Crassus, which means fat.

After a violent quarrel, Raynald's younger brother Edward led a successful revolt against him. Edward captured Raynald, but did not kill him. Instead, he built a room around Raynald in the Nieuwkerk castle and promised him he could regain his title and property as soon as he was able to leave the room. This would not have been difficult for most people, since the room had several windows and a door of near-normal size—none of which were locked or barred. The problem was Raynald's size. To regain his freedom, he needed to lose weight.

But Edward knew his older brother. Each day he sent a variety of delicious foods into the room. Instead of dieting his way out of prison, Raynald grew fatter. When Duke Edward was accused of cruelty, he had a ready answer: "My brother is not a prisoner. He may leave when he so wills." Raynald stayed in that room for 10 years and wasn't released until after Edward died in battle. By then his health was so ruined that he died within a year—a prisoner of his own appetite.

The act of confession is now an artistic expression. During the first half of 2006, two performing artists named Laura Barnett and Sandra Spannan created an exhibit in a storefront in Manhattan that allowed passers-by to alleviate their guilt.

The two women dressed as 19th century washerwomen and sat in the storefront, one of them underlining the words on the glass—"Air your dirty laundry. 100 percent confidential. Anonymous. Free."—the other painting. Onlookers were encouraged to write their deepest secrets on pieces of paper. When they had disappeared from sight, the women collected their confession and displayed it in the window for all to see.

The sins and secrets ranged from slightly humorous to sordid:

"The hermit crab was still alive when I threw it down the trash shoot."

"I want to see SUVs explode. Those people are so selfish."

"My girlfriend and I both think Osama Bin Laden has a sweet-looking face."

"I make fun of this one friend behind her back all the time. She just enrages me! But I get freaked out when I think of what she might say about me—I worry this means we're not really friends? Human relationships are infinitely confusing!"

"I haven't slept with my husband in a year and I am about to start an affair with ______."

"I haven't yet visited my dead parents' grave."

"I am dating a married man and getting financial compensation in exchange for the guilt. I'm 25 and he's a millionaire. It pays to be young."

"New York makes me feel lonely."

Barnett told the New York Times that the women are often overwhelmed by the weight of others' sins: "We go there, and the window is empty, and we're wearing all white. And at the end, the window is full, and we're covered with paint. It's exhausting. Some of those things are really, really sad. And afterwards, I need to take a bath."