Moral preening is a superficial public display meant to project a superior moral character. It is closely related to terms like virtue signaling or moral grandstanding. Its coin of the realm is a holier-than-thou attitude, adopting a judgmental or self-righteous stance in order to look virtuous to others. This what’s going on now in certain quarters of left-wing Adventism, bolstered by Bettina Krause’s crocodile tears presentation at the 2022 NAD Year End Meeting.
A land acknowledgment is what you offer when you have no intention of giving the land back. It is the receipt a highwayman hands over after taking the jewels—an inventory of what was taken, with no offer to return it.
Examples in Adventism
In November 2022, the Andrews University DEI officer issued a statement in the Andrews Agenda online publication, acknowledging that Andrews University sits on land that was seized from the Potawatomi Indian Tribe in the 1830’s. No effort was made to return University property to the poor Potawatomi’s, presumably because the acknowledgment relieves the speaker and the audience of the responsibility to think about Indigenous peoples, until the next SDA public performance.
Burman University is an Adventist university founded in 1907 in Alberta Canada. In 2022, the university issued this statement:
“Burman University acknowledges that we are located on Treaty 6 territory—the traditional and ancestral territory of the Cree, Dene, Blackfoot, Saulteaux and Nakota Sioux. We acknowledge that this territory is home to the Métis Settlements and the Métis Nation of Alberta, Regions 2, 3 and 4 within the historical Northwest Métis Homeland. We are grateful for the traditional Knowledge Keepers and Elders who are still with us today and those who have gone before us. We make this acknowledgement as an act of reconciliation and gratitude to those whose territory we reside on or are visiting.”
No effort was made to return the property to Cree, Dene, and Blackfoot survivors.
The Manitoba-Saskatchewan Seventh-day Adventist Conference makes this acknowledgement on their website.
Our Commentary
If the statements are meant seriously, the obvious next step is to deed the property over. If they are not, they are theater.
The practice did not begin in Adventist committee rooms. It was popularized in Australia in the 1970s, in activist circles around Gary Foley, as part of a broader “decolonization” politics that treats the present population as illegitimate occupants. Half a century later it has been adopted across American institutions as a ritual of belonging to the left.
It also functions as historical revisionism, in the same family as the 1619 Project and the toppling of Columbus statues: a story told to loosen the moral claim of the country that exists now. Calling the first peoples of this continent “native” in the absolute sense only works if one quietly adopts a separate origin for separate races—an old racial theory Adventists have no business reviving. On both the biblical account and the ordinary archaeological one, the ancestors of those nations arrived here like everyone else, as migrants.
This kind of signaling appears when parts of the church borrow their identity from a grievance politics that is not ours. What is wanted is not the end of Adventist institutions. It is the institutions without the message: the machinery kept running, the biblical vision unhooked, and the mission swapped for the priorities of the surrounding culture. The Everlasting Gospel is sold at a discount, and the buyer is told the price is justice.
Don’t buy it. The gospel is larger than virtue-signalling, and it does not need the permission of the moment. Jesus has kept his hand on this movement. Ask him to keep His hand on you. In that hand there is forgiveness, courage to stand, and the will to endure to the end (Matthew 24:13).
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“For do I now persuade men, or God? Or do I seek to please men? For if I still pleased men, I would not be a bondservant of Christ” (Galatians 1:10).
