The Seventh-Day Adventists: Heretics of American Civil Religion

Abstract

Seventh-day Adventism is the least understood of American religious movements. It is argued here that the sect has defined its identity in contradistinction to precisely those elements of the host culture that have constituted civil religion, and that the deviation is heretical in nature. This analysis not only provides a model for the study of Adventism; it also suggests that civil religion has been sufficiently differentiated to generate an identifiable heresy. Seventh-day Adventism is one of the most important religious movements native to the United States. World membership is more than five million - exclusive of unbaptized children and casual adherents. The rate of growth rivals that of the Mormons. In 1880, when there were 160,000 Latter-Day Saints, there were less than 16,000 Seventh-day Adventists. The ratio has been diminishing ever since. The Adventist church boasts the most extensive educational system of any Protestant denomination and operates numerous medical institutions in America and the Third World. Although still governed from General Conference headquarters in Washington, D.C., eightyfive percent of Adventists now live outside North America. The movement is, in every sense, a New World Faith (Stark, 1984). Despite this, Adventism has received little scholarly attention and is usually treated only as a postscript to the failure of Millerism. There are several reasons for the omission. First, Adventists, unlike Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses, have never captured public attention through dramatic confrontations with the state. Having never been notorious, the church has not become familiar. Second, the movement's followers are so widely dispersed that they nowhere constitute a significant proportion of the population and always appear to be an insignificant minority. Third, the context in which Adventism should be discussed has seemed uncertain. Is it yet another subdivision of the