The End Has (Not Yet) Come: The 1918 Spanish Flu and the COVID-19 Pandemic in a Brazilian Seventh-day Adventist Bulletin

Abstract

This is a comparative analysis of similarities and differences between the Brazilian Adventist discourse on the 1918 Influenza pandemic – also known as the Spanish Flu – and the current Brazilian Adventist discourse on the COVID-19 pandemic. It focuses on how Adventists articulate the distinctive eschatological and sanitary elements of their narrative tradition in order to explain the two crises and to situate themselves in relation to them. The analysis corpus contains select texts published in Revista Adventista, the official bulletin of Brazilian Seventh-day Adventists, pertaining to two time periods: 1918–1920 and the first quarter of 2020. Both materials present pandemic crises as opportunities for evangelism since they display the understanding that societal values and paradigms become less impervious to religion in such conditions. But they differ in the fact that the 1918–1920 material concentrates on religious expansion and doctrine, especially emphasising the message of impending judgement of a Great Controversy metanarrative, while the 2020 material explores the medical and humanitarian aspects connected to the pandemic, transcending a purely eschatological emphasis and accommodating a concerted effort to give the readers emotional support to face the pandemic.