~ Especially for Young People ~

What's Wrong With Dancing?

More than two hundred merry-makers died in a dance hall at Natchez, Mississippi, where flames swept through the moss-draped converted blacksmith shop, described as the worst fire trap imaginable. Physicians said that most of the dead had been suffocated by the thick smoke in the hall or crushed in the stampede to escape. The fire lasted only fifteen minutes. Spiritually speaking, all dance halls are like that an eternal fire trap that suffocates modesty, propriety, and virtue. The chances of escape from its fascination and thralldom are few.

Then, to think of it, they are teaching dancing in the public schools under the guise of physical culture and wholesome amusement, although leading physicians claim that it is a harmful exercise for both sexes. It robs its devotees of sleep, the employer of a day's work, the husband and wife of their companionship, the girls of their modesty, and the boys of their propriety. It should have no place in our public schools.

Children of godly parents have been persecuted for refusing to dance. Do not complain later on if your children go to the public dance if you allow them dancing instructions in the school. What is going to be the result of a nation that educates its young people for the dance hall?

Not every dancer is immoral, but every dance is a provocation to immorality and sensuality. Dancing would not be so popular and fascinating if women danced together. No dance hall would be able to keep its doors open very long. Its appeal is sexual and immoral.

The dance floor is a place of immodest liberty and suggestive motions of the body. The passionate embracing, nudity, and familiarity are commonplace there. And, think of it! Married women allow men to take liberties on the dance floor which would be considered criminal if attempted on the street or in the home. At the dance proper standards of behavior are forgotten. Surely it is no place for a Christian, though many professing Christians dance, but remember they are just professors. First Timothy 5:6 tells us, "But she that liveth in pleasure is dead while she liveth."

Beatrice Lewis, while practicing dance steps at the top of a 520 foot cliff near the Pacific Ocean, plunged to her death on a highway below. Ocean beach sightseers, who had been watching her as she postured and swayed, saw the blond dancer slip and hurl to her death. Spiritually speaking, every dancer is at the edge of a precipice. The next step may take them into eternal death and the lake of fire.

Dancing is immoral and leads to irreverence and sacrilege. In Dallas, Texas, irate farmers threatened vigilante action to halt wild parties in a community church and graveyard. Fun-loving youths of the Dallas High School set wrecked the old church, lugged its pulpit into the yard, and stacked the pews in a corner. Flat tombstones in the adjoining 75-year-old graveyard were ripped up and laid side by side for a dance floor.

Churchmen, lying in wait for the youngsters, said the youths knocked over the gravestones, cursed and shouted, and tore boards off the church to build bonfires. Then they dragged the tombstones together and danced on them.

The dance is spiritually binding our youth, but Jesus said in John 8:36, "If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed."

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