Advent Messenger is a conservative-leaning SDA blog site, with content provided by Andy Roman, who reportedly is from Oklahoma. Much of the blog is focused on the Pope, the Roman Catholic Church, and Catholic contacts with the U.S. and the Seventh-day Adventist Church.
Three days ago, Advent Messenger published a critique of a column in Liberty Magazine by Elie Mikhael Nasrallah, a Lebanese immigrant to Canada who was educated at Carleton University in Ottawa. The article was entitled “On God and the Pandemic,” but it was unfocused, rambling, and almost incoherent. Andy Roman took exception to the piece’s gratuitous slap at President Trump, among other things.
I stopped reading Liberty Magazine about a quarter of a century ago, because it was misguided, Left-leaning, and promoted a wrong philosophy of religious liberty. Liberty’s philosophy can be traced back to John V. Stevens (1928-2015), a Serbian immigrant whose birth name was Velimir Bogdanovic. Stevens was the pro-abortion theoretician who, along with Edward Allred on the practical side (who was known as the “Ray Krok of abortion”), gave the SDA Church its pro-abortion culture.
The John V. Stevens philosophy holds that views about law, legislation, and social policy that are based upon a Christian or biblical worldview are a threat to religious liberty. People who adhere to this philosophy believe that any Christian who wants to improve society through legislation is an enemy. Kevin Paulson is the most prominent living proponent of this philosophy.
I reject this philosophy because Ellen White rejected it. She strongly supported prohibition—the outlawing of hard liquor and alcoholic beverages—and she repeatedly urged Adventists to vote for prohibition—even on Sabbath. Her opposition to alcohol was based upon her Christian worldview. The founders of Adventism were abolitionists, presumably because they, along with William Wilberforce and many other Christian abolitionists, understood that Christianity condemns chattel slavery.
Obviously, Christians are right to want to improve society through legislation. That a social policy goal is motivated by Christianity or a Christian/biblical worldview clearly does not make it suspect or illegitimate.
A more consistent and workable approach is to judge legislation based upon its object, not its motivation. In other words, whether what you are trying to legislate is right or wrong depends upon what you are trying to legislate, not on the fact that you are a Christian (or a Jew, Muslim, Hindu, atheist, Wiccan, etc.) The state should not try to enforce religious beliefs or observances, but it is perfectly appropriate for the state to legislate morality. A rough guide is that the state may not enforce the first four commandments, which deal with a man’s duty to God, but may enforce the last six, which deal with man’s moral obligations to his fellow man. We explored this philosophy of religious liberty here, here, and here.
The John V. Stevens approach to religious liberty has had a profound and, I would argue, a profoundly negative impact on the whole culture of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. Adventists deeply distrust other Christians; we do not like them, we do not want them to be numerous, we do not trust their political motivations, and we do not want them to have political power. Unlike other Christians, we do not support family values; we do not support legislation that upholds traditional marriage and sexual morality; we do not oppose same-sex marriage or polygamy; we do not support upholding the created bifurcation between men and women; we do not meaningfully oppose abortion, and abortions continue to be performed in nominally Adventist Hospitals as they have since 1970.
(If this were just political posturing it would be bad enough, but, not surprisingly, our public anti-Christian libertinism has bled over and corrupted the internal standards of the church.)
On the whole, our religious liberty establishment has been a net negative for our church, and for the larger society, not to mention the reputation of our church among other conservative Christians. The SDA Church in its interactions with the larger world has been decidedly anti-Christian.
But perhaps that is a subject for another day. Returning to Andy Roman’s critique of the Nasrallah article, one of the things Andy took issue with was this:
We confront evil by transcendental outreach to challenge existing reality and even create an alternative one. “Angels, demons, spirits, wizards, gods, and witches have peppered folk religions since mankind first started telling stories,” wrote Robin Marantz Henig in the New York Times on March 4, 2007. “Charles Darwin noted this in The Descent of Man. ‘A belief in all-pervading spiritual agencies,’ he wrote, ‘seems to be universal.’ According to anthropologists, religions that share certain supernatural features–belief in a non-corporeal God or gods, belief in the afterlife, belief in the ability of prayer or ritual to change the course of human events–are found in virtually every culture on earth.”
So “transcendental outreach”—theism, religious belief—is simply an evolved response to natural evil, according to Charles Darwin? Mankind simply evolved a belief in God? Is such a radically skeptical argument really the sort of thing we want to see in an official Seventh-day Adventist publication? Apparently Lincoln Steed thinks it is.
Andy Roman and I are not taking one paragraph out of context to stand for something the author didn’t really mean. To the contrary, an important and sustained theme of Nasrallah’s article was to explain, along Darwinistic, naturalistic lines, the origins of religious faith:
But humans are restless and rational and irrational beings all at once. We detest and complain about evil and death, and we turn to our gods for help and salvation at the same time. “The human is a knot of contradictions and opposing drives: reason and unreason; wisdom and recklessness; faithlessness and mysticism; logic and imagination. We feed on exact science as much as we do on myths, on fictions and fabulations. We can die for others or let them perish in the cold; we can create extraordinary things only to enjoy their utter destruction; human society can be paradise and hell at one and the same time.”2
These contradictions are also present all around us: in belief in God, in cultural heritage, language acquisition, survival tools and many other variables. “The bottom line, according to byproduct theorists, is that children are born with a tendency to believe in omniscience, invisible minds, immaterial souls–and then they grow up in cultures that fill their minds, hard-wired for belief, with specifics. It is a little like language acquisitions, Paul Bloom says, with the essential difference that language is a biological adaptation and religion, in his view, is not. We are born with an innate facility for language but the specific language we learn depends on the environment in which we are raised. In much the same way, he says, we are born with an innate tendency for belief, but the specifics of what we grow up believing—whether there is one God or many, whether the soul goes to heaven or occupies another animal after death—are culturally shaped.”
So religious belief is innate, inborn. Intellectuals like Nasrallah overcome it, the rest of you sheep do not. That’s the sort of anti-Christian propaganda with which Lincoln Steed fills his journal.
Andy Roman writes:
The Liberty Magazine article does not describe faith as a cherished belief based on God’s will and given to us by divine revelation. No, the different faith systems are defined as cultural constructs, just like the different languages. The different religions are just a reflection of the different languages. We are just one of many. They all exist and vary from location and culture.
Andy has a point. This was a bad article that should never have been published in an Adventist journal.
But Lincoln Steed did not respond well to the criticism. He emailed Andy:
How sad when Adventists become nothing but right wing hacks! We are about to repeat the sins of our church in Germany.
So Lincoln Steed believes that if you complain about an article that was devoted to providing a Darwinian explanation for our irrational belief in God, you are a “right wing hack” who is about to support Hitler.
Remember, Lincoln Steed gets paid from the tithe, and you don’t.