Ellen White Investigation

Website explores the teachings of Ellen White.

"Welcome to the Ellen White Investigation, a ministry of www.nonsda.org, founded on the Internet in 2007 ...  explore the 2000+ pages of articles and books about Ellen G. White.

Hello friends, this is Brother Anderson, and I was a member of the SDA [Seventh-day Adventist Church] sect for 33 years. In 1998, I launched the Ellen White Investigation on the Internet, and for 23 years we have shared with people the fascinating truth about Ellen White. Since then, over three million visitors have also had the joy of discovering this research about Mrs. White.

This web site represents my personal research library of books, articles, and letters, by over 60 authors from all over the world. It is my utmost desire that you will find this material of interest in your own investigation into whether Ellen White was a true prophet or a false prophet."

https://www.nonsda.org/egw/about.shtml

The History of Fake Meat Starts With the Seventh-Day Adventist Church

Atlas Obscura

By Ernie Smith 

AUGUST 17, 2015

 

Veggie burgers and imitation meat are downright common these days, but it took a long time for meat analogues to earn respect at the table.

But eventually, it happened. These days, fast food chains like Burger King and Subway sell veggie patties. The veggie dog is common in most baseball parks—both minor and major league—and if you're on one of the coasts, it's not too hard to find a restaurant that's willing to sprinkle a little Gardein onto your nachos in lieu of the ground beef. Research by Mintel in 2012 showed that the meat alternatives industry was worth a whopping $553 million in the U.S. alone.

But this whole business of fake meat becoming really popular didn't come out of nowhere. For that, we have 19th-and-20th-century adherents of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church to thank.

The church, a Protestant sect that encourages members to practice vegetarianism, had a prominent adherent in the form of John Harvey Kellogg.

Kellogg, now of supermarket aisle fame, was a well-known health advocate in his hometown of Battle Creek, Michigan. He initially started experimenting with meat analogues as a way to assist local residents in sticking to their vegetarian diets. Kellogg soon opened the Battle Creek Sanitarium, a health resort which emphasized the value of healthy living based on Adventist principles. While experimenting with different kinds of food, he managed to invent the modern form of cereal basically by accident.

John Harvey and his younger brother, Will Keith, discovered that some boiled wheat they left lying around flaked up really well. The older sibling was on the hunt for foods good for chewing, which he considered a way to help indigestion and tooth decay, and decided to offer it to Sanitarium residents. It didn’t even strike the duo, however, that the toasted wheat flakes might be a fitting breakfast food—until, that is, the Sanitarium residents got a hold of it and added milk.

In the process of Toasted Wheat Flakes’ sudden success, John Harvey got into a bitter feud with his more traditional brother—who eventually turned those cereal products into a hugely successful company, minus the heavy focus on health care.

But while the older Kellogg was feeling spurned, he found an opportunity to create a company of his own, the Battle Creek Food Company. This company focused almost entirely on fake meats, with perhaps the best known of the time being something called Protose.

That product—a combination of wheat gluten, peanuts, and soy—was one of the first efforts to create a meat analogue in the modern era. While pure wheat gluten (now known as seitan) and soy bean curd (better known as tofu) have been around for generations, Kellogg's effort proved fairly inspirational in the conception of fake meats as we think of them now.

While John Harvey Kellogg created the seed, it was the work of another group of Seventh-Day Adventists that turned his creation into something resembling burgers and hot dogs. A few fans of Protose in Worthington, Ohio came up with the idea of making the veggie foods more realistic-looking, and using seasonings similar to meat. (One of those innovators, Dr. George Harding, was a relative of Warren G. Harding. It remains unknown whether the former president–or his secret family–ever tasted a fake steak.)

These early efforts led to the creation of Worthington Foods, which released two canned imitation meat products in 1949: Soyloin Steaks and Meatless Wieners. If you want to check out what midcentury veggie meat tasted like, you can still buy a variation of Meatless Wieners today, sold in packs of 20-ounce cans.

After a few decades of Worthington's early work on this front, they ended up selling the company to a firm called Miles Laboratories. That firm launched a sister company whose name you might recognize: Morningstar Farms. Morningstar took the groundwork from Worthington's patents and created a line of products, like the famous Chik Patty, that finally took off in the mass market.

Over the years, Worthington changed hands again multiple times—eventually, coming full circle by falling into the hands of its former blood rival, the Kellogg company. Earlier this year, Kellogg palmed Worthington off on a natural foods company, but held onto the successful Morningstar Farms brand.

While veggie burgers have become a relatively simple way for restaurants to cater to the 3.2 percent of Americans that are vegetarians, it took nearly three-quarters of a century to get them on board.

The groundwork for was laid in 1895, with the founding of "Vegetarian Restaurant No. 1" by New York City's Vegetarian Society. On its first night, the restaurant served fruit soup and Graham bread—the latter being a good fit, due to the fact that Graham crackers were originally invented as a form of vegetarian fare.

But while these efforts grew in earnest, with eateries such as the Schildkraut chain of 15 NYC-based vegetarian restaurants (run by husband and wife team Herman and Sadie Schildkraut) and Chicago's Mortimer Pure Food Café gaining momentum, they ultimately struggled to sell to Middle America.

Reputations were even ruined in the pursuit of making vegetarian food appeal to a crowd that wasn’t ready for it. In the late 1920s, William Childs, a vegetarian who had built one of the country's first national restaurant chains, tried to move his company to an all-vegetarian menu. His aim? To encourage better health for his customers and not burden their wallets in the years leading up to the Great Depression. That plan didn't work out so well for him, and after some disastrous sales, he lost control of the corporation.

Simply put, the broader culture hadn't caught up, not even in New York City, where many adherents of vegetarianism were Jews doing it for religious reasons. During World War II, even The New York Times took jabs at vegetarians, especially around the turkey-stuffed holidays.

"Even the vegetarians are preparing to be bold trenchermen this Thanksgiving, although without the benefit of turkey, stuffed or otherwise, "the newspaper wrote in 1941 about a dinner held by the Vegetarian Society of New York.

Perhaps William Childs and Sadie Schildkraut were simply early to the game. The big turning point came in the early 1960s, when in London, an all-vegetarian restaurant called Cranks launched in 1961.

It proved hugely popular with the public at large and was seen as a major influence in the rise of vegetarianism in the U.K., soon attracting big-name celebrities like Linda McCartney and Princess Diana.

While the restaurant got things moving, it didn't stick around long enough to see the trend all the way through: The chain, which had struggled to shake off its hippie-ish image, mostly closed up shop in 2001 and lives on as a line of boxed sandwiches with colorful names such as Eggstacy and Hey! Pesto.

The problem with veggie food these days is not the abundance of it, but whether those mass-marketed imitation burgers and dogs meet the high levels of health-food consciousness that consumers expect.

Kellogg's is actually seen as sort of the bad guy in this case—now owning Morningstar Farms, the company has taken to using genetically modified organisms in its food a little more aggressively than many of the products you might find at Whole Foods. In 2001, Greenpeace called out the company after it found that some of its soy-based meats had a large percentage of GMOs.

The company said it was an accident, but Greenpeace didn't buy the defense.

"It's very hard to explain 50% of the soy [in a product] being genetically engineered as just a slip up," Greenpeace's Charles Margulis told the Los Angeles Times. "This seems to be a company that just doesn't care."

More recently, a 2014 study from Consumer Reports found that two varieties of Morningstar Farms fake meats tested positive for GMOs, along with a variation of Boca Burgers. If you don't like your foods with GMOs baked inside, your options might be a little more limited.

It's safe to say we've come a long way from John Harvey Kellogg and Protose. Kellogg's itself stopped making Protose back in 2000, around the time that Kellogg purchased Worthington. 

But that hasn't kept some enterprising folks from making their own versions of the seitan, peanut, and soy mash-up. One person who has gone out of their way to create it says it's tasty, but mushy; another was non-plussed about the result the first time around but loved it after trying again.

If you don't want to go to the trouble of mixing your own soy, peanut butter, and gluten together, there is one other option: Another company that traffics in imitation meat, Cedar Lake, produces a food called Proteinut, which is about as close as you're likely to get without traveling in time to stay at the Battle Creek Sanitarium.

It's hard to get the real deal when you're eating fake meat.

http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-history-of-fake-meat-starts-with-the-seventh-day-adventist-church

 

Churches to Russia: We're not leaving

By Kimberly Winston  

2016/07/11

(RNS) Several American-based religious denominations remain defiant in the face of new laws that would ban them from proselytizing in Russia.

The so-called “Yarovaya laws” make it illegal to preach, proselytize or hand out religious materials outside of specially designated places. The laws also give the Russian government wide scope to monitor and record electronic messages and phone calls.

The package of laws, billed as anti-terrorism measures, were passed by the Russian Duma, or parliament, on June 24, and signed by Russian president Vladimir Putin on July 7.

The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, a bipartisan government panel which makes policy recommendations, condemned the new laws.

“These deeply flawed anti-terrorism measures will buttress the Russian government’s war against human rights and religious freedom,” Thomas J. Reese, a Jesuit priest and chair of the commission said after the measures were passed. “They will make it easier for Russian authorities to repress religious communities, stifle peaceful dissent, and detain and imprison people.”

The new laws require a “government permit” to engage in proselytizing activities, and it bans those activities outside any registered religious organization, such as a church. Russia has numerous “house churches” — groups that meet in people’s homes — and those are now illegal under the new law.

Violations of the new laws will result in fines of $780 for an individual, upwards of $15,000 for an organization, and can lead to deportation.

Religious organizations directly affected by the new laws are those with strong evangelization programs in Russia — the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, International Society for Krishna Consciousness, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Seventh-Day Adventists and other Protestant organizations with Baptist, Pentecostal and independent Christian roots.

Only about 1 percent of the Russian population is Protestant; the majority religion is Russian Orthodox Christian.

“The Russian Orthodox church is part of a bulwark of Russian nationalism stirred up by Vladimir Putin,” David Aikman, author of “One Nation Without God,” told Christianity Today. “Everything that undermines that action is a real threat, whether that’s evangelical Protestant missionaries or anything else.”

A spokesman for the LDS Church said the 15.6 million member church has no plans to recall its approximately 30 missionaries currently assigned in seven Russian locations — a low number of Mormon missions for a country Russia’s size.

Members of the Jehovah’s Witnesses have 2,500 congregations in Russia. The Russian government has shut down several Witness organizations since the beginning of the year, most recently shuttering its administrative center in St. Petersburg.

The new law would ban their practice of going door-to-door to preach and hand out tracts.

Witness officials have called the Russian government’s focus on its activities “a deliberate misapplication of Russia’s law on extremist activity.”

Eric Baxter, senior counsel for the Beckett Fund for Religious Liberty, described the law as “very restrictive on its face.” Baxter served on a mission for the LDS Church in St. Petersburg from 1992 to 1994.

“Despite decades of enforced atheism under the U.S.S.R., in my experience the Russian people are people of deep faith,” he said. “Religion inspired their art, their literature and their music and I think that the natural human instinct to share their faith will prevail and Russians will find the freedom to live their faith.”

http://religionnews.com/2016/07/11/u-s-churches-to-russia-were-not-leaving/

 

Schools of millenarianism

How end-of-days beliefs clash with one another, and with art
ERASMUS
The Economist
April 24, 2016

 

THERE are two religious movements, both much concerned with eschatology or the end times for humanity and the earth, which have attracted a spike of interest in recent days: the Seventh-day Adventists and the Jehovah’s Witnesses. That is because Prince, the rock star who died this week, was brought up in the first faith and then converted to the second.

So what’s the difference between the two faiths? Both have much to say about a battle between God and Satan which is already in progress and will come to a head soon. Both have their ultimate origins in the teachings of William Miller, an American preacher who after an intensive study of the Hebrew prophet Daniel concluded that Jesus Christ would make a second coming or “advent” on earth between 1843 and 1844. When this failed to materialise, some followers fell away but others (the forefathers of today's Adventists) insisted that something cosmologically important did happen around that time: the second and final part of Christ’s mission on earth, and a period of judgement for humanity, began, albeit in a way invisible to most people.

It was a man influenced by this ongoing movement, Charles Taze Russell who founded the Jehovah’s Witnesses and moved their base to Brooklyn, New York in 1909. Millions of tracts in all the world's main languages have been issued from that headquarters. Witnesses believe that Armageddon, a final cosmic battle, will occur in the near future, allowing those faithful to God to travel to heaven and rule along with Christ. Generally, the Witnesses, who proselytise relentlessly, are further from the political, social and theological mainstream than are the Adventists. They avoid voting and refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of any governmental authority, believing that all earthly power is of Satan.

Unlike the Witnesses, the Adventists accept the traditional Christian teaching of a God in three Persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. But the two faiths do have some common features; they reject the idea, espoused by some traditionalist Christians, of “eternal torment” for those not saved by God, arguing instead that such people will simply be destroyed.

America’s best-known Adventist is probably the black presidential runner Ben Carson, who pulled out of the Republican race last month. He has said he isn’t sure whether (as many fundamentalists believe) the earth is 6,000 years old, but he is absolutely convinced that the world was created in six days and that the scientific narrative of life’s evolution over hundreds of millions of years is simply wrong. Like Jews but unlike most Christians, Adventists observe Saturday as a holy day with no secular work.

Both Adventists and Witnesses attach huge importance to winkling out the meaning of God’s written word, and hence they have not been much concerned with pursuing meaning or inspiration in music, art or in literature other than the Bible. That's what makes Prince an outlier; he dedicated a song to the Jehovah's Witness belief that Jesus died not on a cross (ie a wooden pole with a crossbeam) but on a single wooden stake. (In ancient Greek, the word stauros was first used in the latter sense but was later applied to the Roman method of crucifixion.)

Although some Adventists have done fine humanitarian work, it is generally true that people focused on the end-times are less concerned with beautifying the world than with escaping it with a handful of fellow believers. All that makes it rather surprising that such beliefs were espoused by a rock singer for whom sensuality itself seemed (in a very broad sense) to be a form of spiritual expression.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/erasmus/2016/04/schools-millenarianism-0

The faith of Prince: Seventh-day Adventist turned Jehovah's Witness

Greg Garrison

AL.COM
April 21, 2016

Prince 

Like fellow pop superstar Michael Jackson, who once went door-to-door with religious tracts in Alabama, Prince was a Jehovah's Witness.

Prince, 57, who died on Thursday, became a Jehovah's Witness in 2001.

"I don't see it really as a conversion," Prince said in an interview with The New Yorker."More, you know, it's a realization. It's like Morpheus and Neo in 'The Matrix.'"

He was raised as a Seventh-day Adventist and showed strong faith even as a child, when he suffered epileptic seizures and declared himself to be healed. "Mom, I'm not going to be sick anymore,'" he hold his mother, according to People magazine. His mother asked why. "Because an angel told me so," he said.

Just as Jackson did, Prince sometimes went door-to-door as a Jehovah's Witness.

In 2003, a Minneapolis newspaper carried a story about a couple startled when Prince knocked on their door, offering a copy of The Watchtower, the Jehovah's Witness magazine.

"Though they were Orthodox Jews, and it was Yom Kippur, they were also Prince fans," wrote Sean O'Hagan of The Observer. "They welcomed him into the house where, with his friend Larry Graham, erstwhile member of Sly & the Family Stone, one of Prince's core influences, he spread the word of Jehovah for 20 minutes before moving on to the next house."

In a similar incident in the mid-1980s, Michael Jackson at the height of his fame once went proselytizing door-to-door in Alabama while staying in Birmingham to rehearse for a tour at the BJCC Arena.

Jackson, accompanied by local Jehovah's Witnesses, wore a disguise including a wig, but was quickly recognized and set off a frenzy that forced him into hiding.

Prince wrote often about God, faith and the afterlife, and his theology co-existed with raunchy sexuality in his lyrics.

"We are sensual beings, the way God created us, when you take the shame and taboo away from it," he said in an interview with V Magazine, and then described religion as "like a force, an electro-magnetic one or like gravity, that puts things in motion."

Although Prince celebrated sexuality, he wasn't afraid to share the gospel in a song. In "The Cross," from his "Sign O' the Times" album, he wrote and sang:

Black day, stormy night
No love, no hope in sight
Don't cry, he is coming
Don't die without knowing the cross
Ghettos to the left of us
Flowers to the right
There'll be bread for all of us
If we can just bear the cross

http://www.al.com/living/index.ssf/2016/04/the_faith_of_prince_seventh-da.html

Purple Faith: Prince's Life as a Jehovah's Witness

ALEX HEIGL
People Magazine
April 21, 2016
 

Prince 1958-2016

Prince's conversion to the Jehovah's Witness religion actually started, in a roundabout way, with Sly & the Family Stone. Well, that's not entirely accurate: It started with Graham Central Station, the funk group started by Sly and the Family Stone bassist Larry Graham after his tenure in that band.

"I was on tour with Sinbad, Graham Central Station, Earth Wind & Fire and Teena Marie," Graham explained in 2013. "We did a show in Tennessee and we were playing the amphitheater and Prince was playing the big arena there in Nashville. He heard I was in town and invited me to one of his famous after-shows."

The pair struck up a friendship; the younger musician grew up listening to Graham Central Station and Sly & the Family Stone. Prince invited Graham onto his next tour, and things blossomed from there. Graham, who converted to the Jehovah's Witness faith in 1975, became Prince's de facto instructor in the religion. "He had all of these questions that he would ask me," Graham explained. "And we had Bible study pretty much before and after our show."

Looking Back on EW's Final Interview with Prince in His Home

Prince was raised a Seventh-Day Adventist in Minneapolis frequently attending services with his grandmother at Glendale Church, a historically African-American congregation in the city. "Both of his parents believed in the strict faith as did Bernadette Anderson, who took him in after he left home," Touré writes in his book about Prince, I Would Die 4 U. Religion informed every part of his life: He told PBS that he informed his mother an angel told him he would no longer suffer from the epileptic seizures that plagued his early childhood.

Decades later, it took two years from Graham's initial work with Prince before the Purple One converted. News of Prince's conversion circulated in 2001 (the Associated Press was the first large outlet to report it, apparently based off an interview Prince gave to Gotham magazine), but people seemed to have a hard time believing the man who wrote songs like "Jack U Off" and "Sexy MF" was now a devout Jehovah's Witness until October of 2003.

On Oct. 5, 2003, a couple in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, opened their door at 2 p.m. to find Prince standing on their doorstep, Bible in hand. Needless to say, they were shocked. Compounding their surprise: They were Jewish, it was Yom Kippur and the Vikings were playing.

"My first thought is, 'Cool, cool, cool. He wants to use my house for a set,'" the woman, identified only as Rochelle, recalled to the paper. "Then they [Prince was accompanied by Graham on this particular outing] start in on this Jehovah's Witnesses stuff."

"They stayed for about 25 minutes," Rochelle continued. "Left us a pamphlet."

Prince became increasingly open about his faith, discussing it in interviews with both secular and Jehovah's Witness publications. "I don't really see it as a conversion," he told The New Yorker in 2008. "It's like Morpheus and Neo inThe Matrix." It informed his music as well, including 2001's The Rainbow Children.

Rumors circulated in the late '00s that Prince's faith was keeping him from a needed double-hip replacement surgery (Jehovah's Witnesses' beliefs prohibit them from receiving blood transfusions), and many pointed to his use of a cane as evidence the singer was ailing. However, Prince had been carrying a cane since the early 1990s and various interviewers described him as relatively agile in person.

Meanwhile, his faith kept him from at least one activity other than swearing and drinking. "I don't vote," he told Tavis Smiley in 2009. "I've don't have (SIC) nothing to do with it. I've got no dog in that race. The reason why is that I'm one of the Jehovah's Witnesses. And we've never voted … President Obama is a very smart individual and he seems like he means well. Prophecy is what we all have to go by now."

In 2015, engineer and producer Joshua Welton told Entertainment Weekly that Prince was living a "God-focused life," recounting how the first time the pair met, "we just stood in the kitchen and talked about Scripture for two hours."

In I Would Die 4 U, Touré recounts a conversation with Prince guitarist Dez Dickerson. "There's maybe three Prince personas. One of them is a very calculated marketing mind. That's where the 'embodying pure sex' thing comes from. Another of them is 'I'm gonna be the baddest musician there ever was.'"

"And then there's the guy who really is thoughtful and introspective and holds religious considerations close to his heart and ponders those questions sincerely and genuinely and deeply. And those are the three guys who, over the years, have vied for the microphone."

http://www.people.com/people/package/article/0,,21001773_21001759,00.html

Defectors Or Truth Seekers?

Published on Mar 30, 2016

Leaders of exclusive truth religions warn their congregants to avoid apostates. But who are these apostates and what do they have to say?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdTWTeTkPn0

Great controversy: What to do with religious books sent to Chicagoans

Leonor Vivan
Chicago Tribune

March 24, 2016

The Great Controversy

A little "controversy" is arriving in hundreds of thousands of mailboxes across Chicago – and it has nothing to do with local politics or the national election.

Although "The Great Controversy," a book authored in the 1800s by E.G. White, a founder of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, does touch on themes of lying, stealing and cheating.

More than 600,000 copies have been mailed out – unsolicited – across Chicago and residents started getting them in the past week, said Dwight Hall, chief executive officer of Michigan-based Remnant Publications Inc., a Christian publisher behind the mailing blitz in Chicago and several other cities. In the past few years, copies of the paperback were also mailed to New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Washington D.C. and Charlotte.

The 377-page books are arriving at homes unwrapped and without residents' names printed on them – only the address; stacks of them have been spotted in the vestibule, near the mailboxes, of apartment and condo buildings. The book provides a history lesson on Christianity and focuses on freedom of religion, Hall said. A postcard tucked inside the book includes a note from the publisher that reads, "With our world in such disarray, with so little time left, we don't have time to bash religions or people or ideas – we only have time to discover the truth before it's too late."

One of the reasons Chicago was selected to receive the "gift" is the city's problem with crime, an issue that faces other big cities as well. Through Sunday, the city recorded 125 homicides, an 84 percent increase over the same period last year when 68 people were slain, according to official Chicago police statistics. Shooting incidents have nearly doubled with 575 through Sunday compared to 290 during the year-earlier period.

Individual donors bankrolling the mass mailing, based on zipcodes not a mass mailing list, have a voice in where to send the book, which aims to help make America a better place and make a difference in the lives of others, Hall said.

"People believe if you go by biblical standards that the world would be a better place," he said, adding later: "The biggest thing is [the donors] can help somebody to have a better way of life. That's the whole reason for this," he said.

Remnant Publications partnered with Project Restore Inc., an educational ministry based in Virginia, to pull the funding together for the mass mailing in Chicago. Although Hall is a Seventh-day Adventist, he said his nonprofit organization, which has a mission of dissemination of religious literature, is a separate entity and not affiliated with the church. "They don't pay us. They don't tell us what to do," he said.

The church could not be reached for comment.

Formed in 1863 in Battle Creek, Michigan, the church has a spiritual focus on healthy living and an extensive network of hospitals and medical clinics. The term adventist refers to the belief that Christ's second coming is near. Seventh-day refers to the belief that the Bible requires observing the Sabbath on Saturday, the seventh day of the week.

The cost to print the books and mail them, he said, was just over a buck per book, more than the penny it costs to buy it on Amazon and less than the $11.95 price listed on the back of the book. The postcard inside the books directs people to donate through Remnant's website if they want to support distribution to other households.

There's no argument from Michael Murphy, director of Catholic studies at Loyola University Chicago, a Jesuit Catholic university, about the motivation to send the books. "I would hope that would happen – that anybody who is hurting and who wants to live a better life and came across anything they read and it helped them change for the better, that would be wonderful," he said.

His issue is with the means. "Making a 600,000 print job is not the best use of resources and energy," Murphy said, given the climate crisis. "Why not email it?"

Donors are aware the books may get tossed like junk mail, according to the publisher. Yet they still shell out money for the books in the hopes that will some people will flip through it, Hall said. "People care enough to work hard to give up their money knowing not everyone is going to read it, but at least [recipients will] have an opportunity to say, 'That's pretty awesome that somebody cared enough to send a book and they don't even know who I am,'" Hall said.

Some people who got the book have reached out to thank the publisher for the book, while others sent it back with a note they don't need it and won't read it, he said. "Everybody has a chance to read it, a chance to keep it or pass it along. But it's their book. They can throw it away," Hall said.

Chicagoans who received the book posted to social media their thoughts on the books ranging from using it as a charcoal chimney starter to saying it made great toilet paper.

Whether Chicagoans asked for the book or not, the great controversy might be what to do with the book: read it, shelve it, or toss it.

Chicago Tribune's Jeremy Gorner and The Associated Press contributed.

lvivanco@tribpub.com
Twitter @lvivanco

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-religious-book-mailed-chicago-met-0322-20160323-story.html

FW: All Your Questions About Seventh-Day Adventism And Ben Carson Answered

Jessica Taylor
NPR

October 27, 2015

Ben Carson has surged into a lead in Iowa and is climbing nationally thanks to his appeal to evangelicals. But could his own beliefs as a Seventh-day Adventist make him anathema to many of those same voters?

Donald Trump seemed to question the Republican neurosurgeon's faith over the weekend.

"I'm Presbyterian," Trump said at a Saturday rally in Florida. "Boy, that's down the middle of the road, folks, in all fairness. I mean, Seventh-day Adventist, I don't know about. I just don't know about."

Trump later denied he was trying to send up a "dog whistle" questioning Carson's faith, but he seemed to be trying to exploit the fact that the faith largely remains a mystery to many Americans.

Just look at the top Google trends for Seventh-day Adventists. Questions people are Googling: Are they a cult? Are they Mormon? Are they anti-Catholic? Are they Protestant? Are they vegetarian?

Here are some background and some answers to those questions and others. First, the background:

When did the Seventh-day Adventist Church begin?

The Adventist movement can trace its influences back to William Miller, a farmer turned Bible teacher who predicted that Jesus would return to Earth sometime between March 1843 and March 1844, based on his interpretation of Old Testament passages and other Scriptures. His followers began selling their possessions, anticipating the rapture. When that didn't happen, Miller said it would happen on a new date: Oct. 22, 1844. That prediction didn't come true either, of course.

The church still considers his original prophecy (though wrong on its dates) one of the central tenets of its faith — that Jesus will soon return. "He was wrong in his prediction, because he predicted the date of when Christ would come," says G. Alexander Bryant, the executive secretary for Seventh-day Adventists of North America "What we learned from William Miller is that no man knows the date or the hour when Jesus will return."

What happened next?

After Miller's prophecy didn't come true, there was a period the church refers to as the "great disappointment" that led to much soul-searching — but the ensuing reflection eventually led to the church's official founding. Its name, the Adventists, reflects that its adherents are awaiting the Second Advent of Christ.

"Many were quite disappointed and disenchanted with the beliefs," Bryant says. "Others began to think more diligently, 'Where did we go wrong?' and continued studying and searching."

One of those people was Ellen G. White, who along with others officially founded the Seventh-day Adventist Church in 1863. A prolific writer on faith and health, she is seen by the church as a prophetess who was instrumental in cementing many of the church's early beliefs. Overall, she wrote more than 40 books and over 50,000 articles.

While the influence of White's writings has drawn scrutiny, Bryant emphasizes that her writings are not seen as divine or meant to supersede the Bible.

"She was a complement to the Bible and a prophetic writer in her own right," he says. "She is viewed as a co-founder of a mission."

How many Seventh-day Adventists are there?

The Adventist Church boasts 1.2 million members in North America; with more than 18.7 million members worldwide it is among the fastest-growing denominations. The Pew Research Center found it to be the most racially diverse religious group in the U.S. earlier this year.

What makes Adventists unique?

Unlike most other Christian denominations, Seventh-day Adventists attend church on Saturdays, which they believe to be the Sabbath instead of Sunday, according to their interpretation of the Bible.

"It's not just that we worship on the Sabbath; we honor that day as a day of rest," Bryant says. "We don't engage in secular activities, we don't work during that time, and we look at that time to be rejuvenated."

There is also an emphasis placed on health and wholeness, partly drawn from White's writings. That includes abstention from alcohol, tobacco, illicit drugs and even meat. The church has an approach it abbreviates as "NEWSTART" — nutrition, exercise, water, sunlight, temperance, air, rest and trust in divine power.

So, are all Seventh-day Adventists forbidden to do anything on Saturdays and to eat any meat?

Not really. Bryant emphasizes that the church takes very seriously setting aside and respecting the Sabbath, but that it also recognizes that some work must take place, such as in the medical field. (The church also has a vast network of hospitals.)

Carson has said he tries to respect the Sabbath, but he has campaigned and made stops on his book tour on Saturdays. "Sabbath is still a precious day for us. We go to church as often as we can. Even if we're on the road we treat it as a different day than all the others," he told an Adventist news network in 2013.

"We do not believe that the only way you can be saved is to keep the Sabbath," says Bryant, noting that the Bible is their only source for their doctrine and that Adventists don't believe other churches to be heretical if they worship on Sundays instead of Saturdays.

As for some of the dietary guidelines, they're just that — guidelines. Not eating meat also isn't a requirement to be a Seventh-day Adventist, though it is encouraged.

"We don't beat people up if they don't choose it, because we still believe it is a personal choice," Bryant says. "But we believe [vegetarianism or veganism] is the healthier choice."

Do their beliefs differ from traditional evangelicals?

Not much. Aside from different days of worship and an outsize emphasis on health and nutrition, doctrinally the two are about the same. Evangelicals and Adventists believe in salvation through faith in Jesus Christ alone, and many of their original members came from other related denominations, like Methodism, or even some from Roman Catholic traditions. The current Seventh-day Adventist Church considers itself to be Protestant.

"If you know our faith, you can't say we don't have the same beliefs as other Protestants," Bryant says.

Randall Balmer, a professor of religion at Dartmouth College, concurred that there weren't many differences in beliefs or theology. But some of the notable stylistic differences may be why Adventists can be viewed very skeptically by some evangelicals.

"I think there's kind of a cultural difference and a residual suspicion because they worship on Saturday rather than Sunday," Balmer said. "My observation is that Seventh-day Adventists are looked askance [at] to some degree. It's not because of anything heretical in what they believe, but it's just kind of a cultural difference."

Do some evangelicals believe Adventists are a cult or are not Christian?

Some may, and there is still some residual skepticism. Earlier this year, Carson was disinvited from speaking at the Southern Baptist Convention's Pastors' Conference because of theological concerns.

On the website of the SBC's North American Mission Board, the church classifies Adventists as a "sect" of Christianity, not a cult, "because it has a number of distinctive doctrines not in accord with the mainstream of historic Christian faith."

Could Carson's faith impact his standing in the GOP primary?

Probably not. Evangelical voters are far more skeptical of Mormonism, which deviates more from their brand of Christianity than do Seventh-day Adventist beliefs. So if Republicans could nominate Mitt Romney, a devout Mormon, Carson's own religion shouldn't be a stumbling block either.

And if Trump is trying to throw doubt on Carson's own faith, there remain plenty of questions about his own — including the fact that the church he says he attends says he isn't an active member.

Carson has drawn scrutiny for some of his comments on abortion and other social issues. Where does the church stand on those?

The church says it does not condone abortion except in cases to save the life of the mother, and abortions are not performed in any of its hospitals.

It also recognizes marriage as solely between a man and a woman. But Bryant says that Adventists "also have a compassionate heart in terms of fellowship and acceptance for all those who come in fellowship and worship in our churches [and] do not condone singling out any group for scorn or derision, let alone abuse."

But while a same-sex couple would be welcome to fellowship with their church, they would not be allowed to join as members or be baptized.

Are Seventh-day Adventists endorsing Carson?

Definitely not. When he announced in May, the church released a statement reiterating its neutrality and reaffirming its belief in separation of church and state.

"We have a very strict and very strong focus on religious liberty," Bryant says. "We advocate and we believe deeply that church and state should be separated."

These beliefs would seem counter to Carson's assertion last month that a Muslim shouldn't be allowed to be president.

Are there other notable Seventh-day Adventists in politics?

Senate Chaplain Barry Black, who gained notoriety for his pointed prayers during the government shutdown two years ago, is the first Seventh-day Adventist chaplain in Congress. Two House members also hail from the church: Sheila Jackson-Lee, D-Texas; and Raul Ruiz, D-Calif., who like Carson is a doctor. Former Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, R-Md., was also a Seventh-day Adventist.

http://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2015/10/27/452314794/all-your-questions-about-seventh-day-adventism-and-ben-carson-answered