21ST CENTURY CULT

If the Seventh-day Adventist church had been founded in the 21st century, it would have been a cult.

Just imagine a young woman coming forward in contemporary America, a woman prone to “trance” episodes who claims that during some of those trances she is actually transported to heaven to speak with Christ personally.  Imagine that her message is that Christ’s Second Coming is imminent, that when he returns he will save certain people but that God will destroy everyone else, that in order to be saved one needs to believe in her message and to follow certain strict rules regarding personal behavior, including keeping a seventh-day Sabbath in accordance with Jewish tradition.  Imagine further that the young woman, who claims to have been granted the gift of prophecy, warns that just prior to Christ’s Second Coming the faithful will be persecuted by none other than the Roman Catholic church, which, directed by Satan himself, will seek to hunt down, imprison, torture, and even kill the movement’s true followers.  This, in a nutshell, is a synopsis of the original message of the Seventh-day Adventist church.

In the 21st century such a movement might have attracted a small, dedicated cult following of its paranoid, apocalyptic message and arcane set of rules for personal conduct.  But in all likelihood it would have collapsed through exposure by media primed and prepared to sensationalize and then to fact-check and ultimately ridicule the cult's prophecies and practices.

The SDA church was established, however, not in the 21st century, but in the 19th, at a time before there was widespread media coverage, in the absence of which, the SDA movement, begun in the 1840s and formally organized in the 1860s, quickly gained followers.  But just because the SDA church was founded in the more naive, accepting 19th century does not mean that it will survive the 21st.  My sense is that the church is experiencing a slow and painful, but inevitable, death.  

Mainstream Christian faiths have maintained a role in American culture by shifting away from an emphasis on doctrine to a bland, feel-good message that includes a broad promise of salvation—a comforting answer to many individuals’ fears regarding death and nonexistence.  To some extent the SDA church has tried to do the same.  It has quietly eliminated its paranoid attack on the Catholic church and has loosened some of its rigid rules regarding standards for personal conduct, including its earlier stand against meat eating, movie going, dancing, and card playing.  However, the church remains trapped by two of its foundational tenets, the belief that Christ’s Second Coming is near and its insistence on observance of a seventh-day Sabbath.  

The church’s strong insistence on an imminent Second Coming may have seemed plausible a century and a half ago, but the doctrine has become increasingly incredible with each passing year.  In 2013 church leaders admitted that they were disappointed to be celebrating the sect’s 150th year of existence, since that meant that the promise of a Second Coming had not been fulfilled and frankly didn’t seem appreciably closer than 150 years earlier.   Recently, the church subtly but tellingly changed its formal statement of belief about the Second Coming from “Christ’s coming is imminent” to “Christ’s coming is near.”  The stated reason was that “near” is closer to the actual biblical language and is “easier to read.”  But it doesn’t take a linguistic specialist to understand the difference in connotation between “imminent” and “near.” 

The church has also been trapped by its insistence on a seventh-day Sabbath. That insistence was logically premised on a six-day creation story that is simply unsustainable in light of modern science.  Recently, the church formally reiterated its belief in a literal six-day creation.  It really had no alternative.  But this position has forced it to continue to traffic in creationist “science” that is viewed with distain by the legitimate scientific community.  I find it interesting that some creationists have thrown in the towel on some facts, such as a universe that began 13.8 billion years ago and an earth that is 4.6 billion years old, going through contortions of logic to somehow reconcile those facts with the naive Genesis creation story.  But they continue to deny the truth of evolution or of the billions of years that life has existed on earth because they have not figured out a rationale for reconciling those facts with Genesis.

Despite my predictions for the demise of the SDA church, a review of the sect’s membership statistics seems to reveal a different picture.  Based on the the church’s records, worldwide membership has actually increased dramatically, particularly over the past 15 to 20 years.  Recently, it passed the 20 million member mark.  How can that be?  The answer is that nearly all of that increase has come from conversions in Third World countries.  Recently, the church touted the baptism of 100,000 converts in Rwanda, apparently all during a single evangelical campaign in that country in May of last year.  Seriously.  Such events may testify to a robust missionary effort, but they raise obvious questions regarding the legitimacy of such statistics.  By contrast, church membership in developed nations, particularly in Europe, has remained extremely modest.  Why is that?

In the United States stated SDA membership in recent years has increased only slightly, remaining at around one million.  I suspect those figures significantly overstate active, functional membership.

There is a good deal of built-in inertia in church membership. Much of that has to do with the social community that the church offers, and that’s totally understandable.  So there are the older, more conservative members who remain emotionally and intellectually loyal, as well as younger, more progressive members who continue to attend for reasons of social community. The church also has maintained an extensive educational system, second in size only to that of the Catholic church, that has helped it to some extent to retain subsequent generations of members through early indoctrination.  However, based on personal observations of the school that I attended, Battle Creek Academy, that system appears to be failing, as attendance has continued to decline to the point of leaving the school in a precarious financial situation.  I suspect that other schools are facing similar difficulties.

Perhaps the most serious indication of the church’s declining health is the fracturing of the membership along social issues.  As an outsider I am witnessing signs of a deep fissure between, on the one side, a more progressive segment of the membership who are embracing societal changes regarding gender equality and sexual orientation, among others, and, on the other, a socially conservative leadership who are resisting that modern reality.  But even were the church to resolve such a divide, I don’t know how it would overcome the fact that its very raison d’être as a separate sect consists of doctrines that appear increasingly out of touch with contemporary rational thought.


© 2017 John M. Phillips