a friend out in california forwarded the below on to me and i thought it 
was interesting with respect to the ongoing interest in the "other" 
religious cartoons.  and i know danny is a big anti-smoking advocate, so 
maybe i'll get brownie points for that :)

full disclosure - i did not check the references, but the original email 
was sent directly from one of the authors, and most of us have access to 
pubmed so feel free to do some double fact checking...or just take it as 
an interesting read.

alyssa


Dear Public Health Colleagues,

In view of the ongoing international furor over the cartoons published by 
the Danish newspaper, it occurred to me that you might be interested in 
reading the story below from our colleague Elizabeth Emerson, who has been 
a (successful) anti-tobacco activist for many years in California. She 
describes how graphical exploitation of Jesus and his mother Mary by 
tobacco companies galvanized outrage and action among a Brazilian audience 
of health professionals and journalists.  Note also that she's found that 
this exploitation also galvanizes outrage among physicians of a variety of 
faiths, including Egyptian (Muslim) physicians. Elizabeth's story is 
embedded in these paragraphs excerped below from a publication of mine 
three years ago (a rejoinder to an invited paper which appeared on pages 
149-165 of the same issue).


 >From pp. 209-211 of
Oman, D., & Thoresen, C. E. (2003). The many frontiers of spiritual
modeling. The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion,
13, 197-213.

Spiritual Power
       Having argued for the theoretical coherence and empirical viability of
spiritual modeling perspectives, we shall close by urging scientific
colleagues not to under estimate the power of spiritual modeling
influences in popular cultures. This power is vividly illustrated in
a story reported to us by a colleague in public health. Our
colleague Elizabeth Emerson helped rally grassroots support for
recent groundbreaking tobacco-control legislation in California.
Because this legislation is recognized as exemplary, Emerson was
invited to present the California story to a nationwide Brazilian
conference on drug, alcohol, and tobacco addiction attended by
more than 300 health professionals and others. She presented statistics
showing improved public health and reduced health costs from tobacco
control. She also described examples of effective public health
interventions to reduce tobacco usage. A slide of a tobacco industry
advertisement (described briefly by Oman & Thoresen, this issue;
see full description and reproduction in Simpson, 2001) was
then presented. In Emerson's words

"At this point, I showed them a replica of the picture of Mother Mary
  blessing and promoting cigarettes in the Filipino advertisement. I told
  them it was an example of how absolutely cynical the industry is-that
  they would use the Sacred Mother to promote cigarettes in the
  Philippines. At that point, there was such an uproar among the audience
  (in this largely Catholic country) that I literally had to delay the rest
  of my presentation as they were all talking to each other rapidly in
  Portuguese while pointing to the picture on the screen in shock.
  Then a man who I later learned was a well known journalist stood up
  and yelled in broken English, "I came to this conference to write an
  article for my magazine. I thought all of the speakers had gone too far
  and were too fanatical in their stand against tobacco, so I was going
  to write a very skeptical article about all of you. But now that I see
  this picture and what they have done to Maria (their	name for the
  Blessed Mother Mary), I see how evil the tobacco industry is and I will
  expose them for the rest of my life as a journalist." My new public health
  friends told me that gaining that journalist as an ally was a major gift to
  them, because he is widely read. I was surprised at the ad's impact on
  the doctors, but I was utterly amazed that
  even a hard boiled skeptical journalist could be so devout!"
		      (E. Emerson, personal communication, January 17, 2003)

       Emerson also noted that Brazil is not exceptional. In other recent
work with international groups of health professionals, she reported that
"my showing this type of advertising to Egyptian and Russian doctors
causes a cultural wall to drop between me and the physicians. Even the
defensive doctors who smoke decide to become antitobacco activists
when I show them the statistics of the global toll of tobacco
and especially when I show them the ads. The pictures of Jesus and Mary
(there is one with both and one with Mary) seem to cause more outrage and
trigger more antitobacco activism among international groups than any
other tobacco ad" (E. Emerson, personal communication, January 17, 2003).

       We argued earlier that a conscious intention and key function of
traditional religious culture has been to ensure adequate opportunities and
supports for learning from spiritual models. Our colleague's report seems to
remind us that a deep desire to preserve a beneficial culture of spiritual
modeling can remain strong even among persons with extensive exposure
to modern secular culture, including professional education. Might we have
some responsibility as scientists and as citizens of the world to recognize
the influence of spiritually powerful models, and to channel and harness
such influences for the greatest possible global public benefit?

REFERENCE
Simpson, D. (2001). Philippines: Sacred and profane. Tobacco Control, 10,
204-205.