The print copy of Adventist Review came in the mail a few days ago. I almost never read the Review, but this time, for some reason, I was curious. Then I looked at the masthead and the editorial on page 5—Oh, yes, Justin Kim is now the editor! Worth a look, I decided.
The first article I read carefully was “Looking Back to 2022,” a survey of the notable events of this past year, by John Bradshaw, the president of “It is Written” ministries. As you might it expect, it was a review of some of the notable news stories of 2022.
Then I came to this interesting passage about Covid-19:
“In September of this year President Joe Biden announced that the COVID pandemic was “over.” After more than two years the great majority of COVID-related restrictions were rolled back in the United States and around the world. Planet Earth reopened for business, people were able to freely visit family members after being long unable to do so, and again tourists traveled the world. As the fog of COVID began to lift, the death toll slowed dramatically, and many businesses began the arduous journey back from the economic doldrums. While debate will long linger regarding Doctor Fauci and politicians and community health boards, the church can now assess how the church handled COVID.”
Indeed, how did the church handle Covid-19? In my opinion, we did not cover ourselves in glory. We closed our churches for months on end over a disease with a survival rate of at least 99.7%, a disease most of whose victims were over 70 years old, and that posed no threat to children and little threat to young, healthy adults of working age. In our fear of Covid, we acted as though this life is all there is, and that we’d better hunker down and cling tightly to it, because maybe there is no afterlife after all. Then, to make matters worse, the highest level of the SDA Church aided our malevolent ruling elites by issuing an official statement that made it more difficult for Adventists to claim a right of conscience to refuse the vaccine.
The heroic churches were those of John MacArthur in Los Angeles and his protege in Canada, James Coates, who was imprisoned rather than shut down his church. The heroic churches did not include the Seventh-day Adventist churches.
“While some congregations were models of Christian cooperation, others, in the words of many pastors I have spoken to, “will never recover.” COVID allowed us to see beneath the surface of our Christian experience. As Ellen White wrote in Christ’s Object Lessons: “It is in a crisis that character is revealed.”
It is not clear what Bradshaw is talking about. Why will some congregations “never recover”? Is it because they shut down for so long, preventing people from attending church? Is it because they required people to mask up at the door? Is it because they didn’t require people to mask up at the door? Is it because they required congregants to be vaccinated? We need more specifics here about how and why Covid affected local congregations.
If anger, debate, and disagreement characterized attitudes and behavior during COVID and the COVID thaw, we saw stark evidence of our great spiritual need. History has taught us there will always be issues. How one reacts to an issue is where the rubber meets the road for the believer in Jesus. Christians whose experience was exposed as wanting during the COVID emergency were given the opportunity to consider their words and actions, and to inquire how they might stand during earth’s last great crisis. As Jeremiah wrote: “If you have run with the footmen, and they have wearied you, then how can you contend with horses?” (Jer. 12:5).
Now the issue Bradshaw is broaching comes into focus: he doesn’t think we should have argued over the General Conference’s pro-vaccine statement. If we did, our Christian “experience was exposed as wanting.”
Note that Bradshaw’s article was not published a year ago, or nine months ago; it was just published days ago. We now know that the vaccine is not so much a health measure as it is a crime, an international atrocity. It has killed hundreds of thousands and injured millions, and it was never even an effective vaccine: It doesn’t prevent infection, transmission, sickness, hospitalization, or death, and it is now becoming clear that the more boosters one has, the more likely one is to die from Covid.
Those of us who were angry about Ted Wilson’s policy of collaborating with a corrupt Biden regime acting as the enforcement arm of the pharmaceutical-industrial complex were right to be angry. The SDA Church’s official statement about the Covid vaccine was disgraceful, and those like me who wrote against it were, if anything, too gentle with those who created and promoted this appalling policy.
Why did Ted Wilson harness the official SDA Church to promote the deadly clot shot? There are lots of reasons, including the money and influence the medical profession wields within the SDA Church. But the broader and more important reason, it seems to me, is that at the most basic level the Seventh-day Adventist Church does not understand who its friends are and who its enemies are.
It quickly became apparent that powerful global elites in government, media, tech, and the pharmaceutical-industrial complex, were exaggerating the danger of Covid, especially to younger people, and denigrating inexpensive older therapeutics like Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, all of which was designed to stampede us toward a rapidly rolled-out vaccine. Once the vaccine was marketed, these same forces (including, we now know, the Federal Bureau of Investigation) combined to censor and spike stories of adverse side-effects, injuries, and deaths. Then we began to learn of things such things as “Event 201” and the WEF’s promotion of a universal digital vaccine passport, which could be broadened into Chinese Communist Party-style social credit score passports. It became obvious that the global cabal was using Covid and mandatory mass vaccination to pursue their agenda of snuffing out human freedom.
And yet the SDA Church collaborated with this globalist/Leftist cabal’s project of universal mandatory vaccination, because our leaders seem to believe that this cabal are our natural friends and allies, even though atheism and unremitting hostility toward organized religion are fundamental to Leftist ideology. Where is the discernment within the SDA Church?
Much more needs to be said about the SDA Church’s fatal ideological blind spot, and the damage it is doing, and will continue to do, to our Christian witness as a denomination. But for now we must return to Bradshaw’s Review piece, because he is about to wade into even deeper waters of liberalism, on the topic of sexuality:
“LGBTQ+ issues were prominent in 2022. While people learn how to deal with issues that have not long—or not ever—been central to the church’s experience, it is to be remembered that LGBTQ+ poses no risk to the church. The church has weathered talking movies, television, rock ’n’ roll, prohibition, free love, hip-hop, and TikTok, and will certainly survive evolving moral and lifestyle sensibilities. What will affect the church is how the church relates to changing perspectives. Irrespective of the reasons an individual may identify as “they” or “them” or “bisexual” or “transgender” or “nonbinary,” what 2022 has reinforced is that Christians are going to have to learn how to carry themselves in the spirit of Christ. The church is being forced to learn how to demonstrate to people—especially young people—that they are loved, even when their beliefs and actions do not meet with universal approval. One ministry leader told me abortion is increasingly common among college students who fear pregnancy would bring ostracism and condemnation. Even those who don’t follow God’s Plan A—perhaps, especially those who don’t follow God’s Plan A—must feel love and acceptance from those who claim to closely follow Jesus.”
There is so much wrong with this passage that it is hard to know where to start.
I will begin by reiterating a couple of the points I made in my previous article, one of which is that following the Bible’s model of patriarchy, which is consistently taught in both the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures, and an important aspect of which is the unequivocal rejection of same-sex sexual activity, has always been “central to the church’s experience.” Christianity was born into the pagan Greco-Roman world, whose sexual norms prominently included same-sex activity, including sex between boys and grown men, and of course lesbianism; Christianity’s radical rejection of these practices was the very thing that most characterized the early Church and distinguished it from paganism. It certainly was “central to the church’s experience.”
As I also stated in my previous piece, sexual issues have admittedly never been central to Seventh-day Adventism, because our denomination was born into a time and place—the United States of the mid-19th Century—in which the Christian sexual constitution was firmly established, with all the protection civil and criminal law could lend it. The world into which Adventism was born did not need Adventists to tell it about the Christian model for human sexuality.
But the Sexual Revolution of the late 1960s-early 1970s shattered the Christian sexual constitution in the United States and the rest of the Western world, and over the last half century has added on ever more radical amendments, including same-sex “marriage” and the notion that biological sex is not in the least indicative of “gender.” This increasingly radical sexual revolution is clearly a challenge to all Christian denominations, including the SDA Church, but so far it is a challenge our denomination has largely chosen to ignore.
“The church has weathered talking movies, television, rock ’n’ roll, prohibition, free love, hip-hop, and TikTok, and will certainly survive evolving moral and lifestyle sensibilities.”
To the contrary, a large segment of the church has effectively not survived the “evolving moral and lifestyle sensibilities.” These “evolving moral and lifestyle sensibilities”—Bradshaw’s delicate euphemism is really an evasion, a way to minimize extreme and accelerating cultural degradation—have put mainline Protestantism out of business.
The Episcopal Church USA has been hemorrhaging members for decades, largely over its decision to embrace female headship and then, inevitably, to normalize same-sex sexuality, recently ordaining an openly gay bishop who is married to another man. The ECUSA is losing members daily, and of those that stay, whole conferences are rejecting the American leadership and affiliating with conservative African bishops.
Other mainline Protestant denominations are following a similar trajectory. The “United” Methodist Church is united no longer; for years it has been planning a split over the issue of same-sex sexuality in the church, and the faction that will uphold biblical sexuality will be by far the smaller of the two denominations to emerge from the split.
So “evolving moral and lifestyle sensibilities” have all but destroyed the Protestant denominations that created America’s culture, eviscerating their cultural influence. The SDA Church could go the same way, and will go the same way if we continue toward female headship within the Church. As Arminians who reject Calvinism, Adventists do not believe in irresistible election; no person or group of people will be saved despite their own free choices, and that includes the Seventh-day Adventist Church.
“What will affect the church is how the church relates to changing perspectives. Irrespective of the reasons an individual may identify as “they” or “them” or “bisexual” or “transgender” or “nonbinary,” what 2022 has reinforced is that Christians are going to have to learn how to carry themselves in the spirit of Christ. The church is being forced to learn how to demonstrate to people—especially young people—that they are loved, even when their beliefs and actions do not meet with universal approval.”
This is very troubling. Bradshaw is warning Adventists to get with the program and start using people’s “preferred pronouns,” even when they do not match the person’s biological reality. If we do not observe the new transgender pieties, including the pronoun game, we are failing to “carry ourselves in the spirit of Christ,” he implies.
This is an astonishingly dangerous rejection of reality and of the divinely created sexual order. This is cultural Adventism, uncut and undiluted—an Adventism that cannot bring itself to care about sexual issues. But, worse than that, it is collaboration with the satanic forces that mutilate children, cutting off the breasts of teenage girls and giving children opposite-sex hormones to interfere with their development into the man or woman that God intended them to be.
A person’s sex is determined at conception, when the father’s sperm fertilizes the mother’s egg with either an X or a Y chromosome. From then on, every cell in the rapidly growing body is stamped with the reality of sex. A person who believes that he or she is, or should be, a member of the opposite sex is mentally ill. We do not demonstrate love by indulging mental illness. It is not loving to tell someone who believes he is Napoleon that, yes, he really is Napoleon. It isn’t loving and it isn’t moral, because you are lying to that person, and when you lie to vulnerable children, your lie could have terrible, life-altering consequences.
Even an atheist like Jordan Peterson well understands these facts. How much more should we understand them, we who believe that God incarnate said, “Have you not read that from the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’?”
We should not need to add that no one should be cruel or bullying toward a child who is having gender dysphoria or confusion. But indulging the child’s mental illness by playing the pronoun game, or assenting to the physical or chemical mutilation of the child over a condition overwhelmingly likely to be transient, is cruelty on a much larger scale.
This is the type of article that should never appear in the Adventist Review. Let me be very clear: I do not blame this on Justin Kim; he just arrived, and this article, likely this entire issue of the magazine, was already in the pipeline before Kim became the editor. Justin Kim is faced with the gargantuan task of changing a culture at our flagship periodical that was decades in the making. He will need some time to turn the ship around, and he needs our prayers.