Saturday, August 9, 1997

Mail warns of dancing and aliens

By Clark Morphew

Knight-Ridder Newspapers

(KRT)

I had two very shocking experiences this week, and one of them may have proved me wrong.

Let's start with the possibility that I may have erred. A diligent reader responded to a column I wrote recently asking the theological question, "Is dancing a sin?" In a reckless attempt to give people a little freedom from judgment, I insinuated that dancing probably is not sinful.

But a reader sent me a tract, a billfold-size publication that evangelical and fundamentalist Christians often use to subtly nudge nonbelievers.

The little tract, written by self-described nerve doctor E.S. Sonners, said that dancing is a "reversion to savagery." So if you go out on the town and get caught up in a two-step, you have for those few moments, become an animal - a bloodthirsty predator. At least one could interpret the tract that way, if one had a mind bent in that direction.

Further, the good doctor Sonners says that "dancing's charm is based entirely upon sex appeal." This may not be a revelation to you, but I was surprised because of the many times I have seen people engaged in a dance of spiritual joy.

But for the average person, Sonners believed that dancing must be seen as a black-and-white issue - it is about sex pure and simple. There are no excuses anymore - you savages are dancing for one reason. Now we all know the truth.

Sonners also says that a "young girl enjoys the dance because she is drugged by suggestive music and emotional over-stimulation into a drunkenness, a frenzy that takes her back nearer to the beast." Mercy, the things we blame on young girls. Where were the young boys during these dances? Reading the Bible out in back of the school?

This tract is published by Osterhus Publishing House in Minneapolis, which has been cranking out tracts since 1910, when Grandfather Osterhus, a Lutheran missionary, decided the world needed printed gospel messages. Since then, two generations of the Osterhus family have run the business. Currently, 55-year-old Dan is the proprietor.

Dan Osterhus says the dancing tract is not a big seller. "That tract was printed 40 or more years ago," Osterhus said. "My records show we haven't reprinted that tract for nine years. I can't really defend it at all."

Well, that's a relief. For a minute there I thought millions of people were dancing in sin. I mean, Sonners even says a good man "does not willingly dance the modern dance with a woman he truly loves ..." So if you were forced at gunpoint into dancing with your wife - that might be excusable. Otherwise, brother, stop moving those feet.

Sonners, who was probably the life of the party back in those days, says in the tract that he is "no prig, or prude" and that he is writing on the basis of scientific principle.

"We doctors know there are mysterious currents, affinities that seem almost chemical ... and so I tell you frankly," Sonners wrote, "it is not safe to subject even the strongest men and women to the subtle temptations of the dance."

My second shock this week was a mailing from Bob Larson, a Christian radio talk-show host from Denver who believes that aliens will soon land on our planet and take it over.

The thing that worries Larson is that there are more people who believe aliens have landed on Earth than have had a born-again experience.

Larson says the aliens that keep showing up in movies and fantasy books are really "demons in disguise and their spaceships are living, satanic creatures." And he backs that assertion up with the news that he had a close encounter with a spaceship full of aliens while he was trying to cast a demon out of some person.

Talk about your bad days.

(Clark Morphew is an ordained clergyman and is religion writer for the Saint Paul Pioneer Press. Write to him at the Saint Paul Pioneer Press, 345 Cedar St., St. Paul MN 55101.)