When the Church Speaks the Language of Babylon:
A Prophetic Warning Against the Subtle Infiltration of Marxist Thought into Adventist Institutions
By: Dr. Adami A. Gabriel, PsyD
1. Introduction – The Language of the Age and the Church of Prophecy
Every generation faces the challenge of communicating the gospel in a changing world. Language, however, is never neutral. Words carry worldviews. Whoever defines the terms defines the debate, and whoever shapes the debate shapes belief. As the American linguist Edward Sapir stated, "Human beings... are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society". He further elaborated that "We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation" (1929). This strongly suggests that language is inherently biased by cultural assumptions and worldviews. Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1922) famously articulated the deep connection between language and our perception of reality, stating "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world". The Marxist philosopher and linguist V.N. Voloshinov (often associated with Mikhail Bakhtin) argued that "Every word is a microcosm of the world, every word is a philosophy." (1973). The French philosopher Michel Foucault (1978) extensively explored how "discourse” is inseparable from power relations. He argued that the power to define "what can be said" and "who can speak" fundamentally shapes societal knowledge and belief. Finally, in modern cognitive linguistics, authors like George Lakoff (2004) emphasize how political "framing" through language heavily influences public opinion and belief systems. He argues that political discourse relies on specific, culturally embedded frames, and controlling the frame, or defining the terms, is essential to winning a debate and shaping public understanding.
Secular scholars and academics understand these principles on how influencing, shaping and reengineering culture and worldviews through language work and operate. In recent decades, secular society has produced a new moral vocabulary—equity, systemic oppression, inclusion, diversity, allyship, and social justice. These terms, born out of Marxist and postmodern theories (Mor Barak, 2005), often embed values that differ from biblical anthropology and morality.
In official statements and institutional materials, the Seventh-day Adventist Church increasingly employs this same vocabulary in its attempts to address racism, poverty, and human suffering. While these causes may appear righteous, the uncritical adoption of the world’s terminology risks compromising the distinct prophetic mission entrusted to the remnant church. Scripture warns,
“Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Romans 12:2, NKJV).
When the church begins to think and speak in the categories of the world, its transformation becomes reversal.
This paper offers a public apologetic and prophetic warning: that the borrowing of secular ideological language—especially language rooted in Marxist social theory—inevitably shapes thought, theology, and practice (Wittgenstein, 1922; Foucault, 1978; Lakoff, 2004). It will demonstrate, through examples from official SDA sources, how such language has become normalized, and then will analyze, through Scripture and the writings of Ellen G. White, why this blending of sacred and profane language is spiritually dangerous, even when pursued for a “good cause.”
2. Evidence from Official SDA Sources
2.1 General Conference Statements
The Global Poverty statement adopted by the General Conference in 2010 calls on Adventists to “advocate for public policy” and to cooperate with governmental and non-governmental organizations in support of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists [GC], 2010). Although well-intentioned, the language mirrors global policy frameworks that define “justice” and “sustainability” in secular, human-centered terms.
A decade later, the GC’s One Humanity: A Human Relations Statement (GC, 2020) committed the church to oppose “racism, casteism, tribalism, and ethnocentrism” and to become “a Church that is just and caring.” The vocabulary of justice, inclusion, and equity reflects moral categories that overlap heavily with Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) discourse common in public institutions. Though the statement anchors its vision in Scripture, the form of expression mirrors that of the broader social-justice movement.
2.2 North American Division (NAD) and Unions
In 2020, following the death of George Floyd, the North American Division released a statement urging members to “speak out against injustice” and launched public forums on “Biblical Justice and Ethics” amid “world social unrest” (North American Division [NAD], 2020). Pacific Union Conference that same year issued a formal Statement on Social Justice, pledging to “work purposefully toward equitable opportunities” (Pacific Union Conference [PUC], 2020). Columbia Union organized a Task Force on Racism in the Church to recommend institutional actions. Each of these efforts adopted sociopolitical language—equitable, systemic, structural, justice—without clearly distinguishing biblical righteousness from modern political ideology.
2.3 Universities and Health Institutions
Andrews University maintains an Office of Mission & Culture, formerly the Office of Diversity & Inclusion, whose mission includes “supporting the integration of mission, culture, and diversity across the University” (Andrews University [A.U.], 2023). Its published DEI statement pledges commitment to “freedom, justice, equality, equity, and human dignity.” Loma Linda University Health (LLUH) lists Diversity, Equity & Inclusion among its core institutional values, and Adventist Health hospitals include Health Equity goals in their community-health plans (LLUH, 2024; Adventist Health, 2023).
These initiatives, while laudable in intent, reproduce the moral framework of secular DEI programs. They shift emphasis from personal regeneration to social reform, from justification by faith to equalization by policy.
2.3a. Evidence of Critical Theory Influence in Adventist Higher Education
A review of publicly available academic materials from several Adventist universities shows clear patterns indicating the presence, and in some contexts the promotion of Critical Theory and its modern branches, including Critical Race Theory (CRT) and critical pedagogy. Although most syllabi remain behind password-protected portals, even the limited open-source information reveals a consistent trend.
At Andrews University, the evidence is the most explicit. In the undergraduate course ENGL 255: Social Justice and the Graphic Novel, students are required to read Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist, one of the most influential and overtly ideological texts within the contemporary CRT movement. Beyond classroom curricula, Andrews’ Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation (TRHT) office maintains an official anti-racism reading list featuring authors such as Robin DiAngelo (White Fragility), Layla Saad (Me and White Supremacy), Derrick Bell (Faces at the Bottom of the Well), Dorothy Roberts, and Angela Davis. These works are not presented for critique but commended as resources for shaping Christian practice and institutional life. Additionally, Andrews-connected graduate-level coursework includes Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, a foundational neo-Marxist text that frames education as a tool of class struggle and ideological liberation.
At La Sierra University, while fewer syllabi are publicly accessible, the university church’s widely promoted “Anti-Racism Resources” page showcases many of the same CRT-aligned authors—Kendi, DiAngelo, and others. Though framed as spiritual resources for Christian growth, these recommendations mirror the ideological frameworks now common in secular academia and reflect a worldview grounded in power analysis, identity dialectics, and the language of systemic oppression.
Meanwhile, course catalogs from institutions such as Burman University and Union College (including courses delivered through Southern Adventist University partnerships) explicitly list “critical theory,” “feminist theory,” and “postmodern theory” as instructional lenses. While these descriptions do not name specific books, the frameworks themselves are well-defined components of the broader Critical Theory tradition, signaling their integration into the academic architecture of Adventist higher education.
Taken together, these open-source indicators demonstrate that key Adventist educational institutions have begun incorporating—not merely studying—the methodologies, categories, and assumptions of Critical Theory as valid tools for moral, social, and spiritual formation. This subtle shift is significant because Critical Theory carries with it an anthropological and moral vision incompatible with biblical Christianity: a worldview grounded not in creation, fall, and redemption, but in power, oppression, and ideological liberation. When such frameworks begin shaping Adventist classrooms, training programs, and campus culture, the church risks speaking a language foreign to Scripture yet familiar in Babylon—a language that redefines sin as oppression, salvation as activism, and sanctification as sociopolitical consciousness.
2.4 Chronological Pattern
1985–2002: Early statements on peace and justice use traditional Christian moral vocabulary.
2010: Global Poverty aligns with UN language of sustainability and development.
2015–2019: Universities institutionalize DEI offices and coursework.
2020: Social-justice framing becomes dominant across divisions and unions.
2021–2025: DEI becomes normalized in strategic plans and health-equity programs.
This steady linguistic shift marks not a single act of apostasy but a cumulative cultural drift. The church increasingly speaks in the dialect of the age.
3. The Biblical Principle: Mixing the Sacred and the Profane
Throughout Scripture, God warns His people not to mix what is holy with what is common. To Israel He said, “that you may distinguish between holy and unholy, and between unclean and clean” (Leviticus 10:10, NKJV). Paul later applied the same principle: “Do not be unequally yoked together with unbelievers. For what fellowship has righteousness with lawlessness? And what communion has light with darkness?” (2 Corinthians 6:14, NKJV).
Biblical history is replete with examples of Israel’s downfall through linguistic and ideological compromise. When Aaron proclaimed a feast to the Lord around the golden calf (Exodus 32:5–6), he blended true worship with pagan symbolism. When Israel adopted Canaanite terms for fertility gods, they did not intend idolatry—they intended relevance. Yet this mixture provoked divine judgment. The same pattern reappears whenever God’s people redefine His truth in worldly categories.
In prophetic symbolism, Babylon represents confusion, truth and error mixed (Revelation 18:4). The final call of God to His people is not merely moral but semantic: “Come out of her, My people, lest you share in her sins.” To come out of Babylon means to reject its moral logic and linguistic deception.
4. Ellen G. White’s Prophetic Warnings
Ellen G. White repeatedly warned that Satan’s most dangerous tactics do not come through open rejection of truth, but through its subtle adulteration—the mingling of truth and error in ways that appear enlightened, compassionate, or progressive while quietly eroding obedience to God. She was explicit about this enemy’s strategy: “Therefore [Satan] is constantly seeking to deceive the followers of Christ with his fatal sophistry that it is impossible for them to overcome.” (GC, p. 489). This “fatal sophistry” ultimately leads men and women to believe that victory over sin, and therefore obedience to God’s law, is optional or unnecessary. Elsewhere she makes the point unmistakably clear: “Not a son or a daughter of Adam is elected to be saved in disobedience to God’s law.” (CE, p. 118).
Ellen White further observed that Satan’s work is not merely to tempt, but to strategically undermine the authority of divine truth: “Never was [Satan] more determined than now to make of none effect the truth of God…” (5T, p. 236). He accomplishes this, she wrote, by introducing error disguised as enlightenment, ideas clothed “in garments of light” (8T 293:4), and by substituting human philosophy for divine revelation, as she warned: “Truth came forth from the lips of Jesus, uncorrupted with human philosophy.” (Signs of the Times, Jan. 20, 1890). The danger, she insisted, lies not in blatant infidelity but in its subtle dilution: Satan “mixes truth and error. The most dangerous falsehoods are those that are mingled with truth. It is thus that errors are received that captivate and ruin the soul. By this means Satan carries the world with him” (PP, p. 338:3).
This is precisely what happens when biblical justice, rooted in faithfulness to God’s law and impartial love toward all (Micah 6:8; Romans 13:10), is reinterpreted through Marxist, Cultural Marxism or secular social theories. These frameworks define “justice” primarily as the redistribution of power or resources among competing groups, shifting the focus from repentance and righteousness to group identity and structural revolution.
When Adventist institutions uncritically echo such frameworks, they risk fulfilling E. G. White’s sober warning: “Many that are drifting into darkness and infidelity... and bringing in... unscriptural doctrines, and philosophical speculations... Those who permit themselves to be thus hindered are giving place to Satan, and surrounding their own souls with an atmosphere of doubt and unbelief.” (GW, p. 273). Her counsel to educators is equally direct: “In the prevailing systems of education, human philosophy had taken the place of divine revelation.” (Ed, p. 74).
These statements strike at the very core of modern academic pressure, where the authority of Scripture is often subordinated to the authority of social science, critical theory, or ideological narratives. Ellen White’s message is unmistakably clear: whenever the church absorbs worldly philosophies, no matter how moral or compassionate they appear, the result is always the erosion of biblical truth.
5. Ideological Parallels: Marxism and Its Modern Expressions
Classical Marxism interprets history as a conflict between economic classes. Modern Cultural Marxism and Critical Theory extend this conflict to race, gender, and identity. In each version, the world is divided into oppressors and oppressed; morality becomes defined by group struggle; redemption comes through social revolution rather than divine grace. (Fraser, 2019).
Crenshaw et al. (1995) argue that Critical Race Theory (CRT) views racism as embedded in systems and structures, emphasizing collective guilt and systemic reform. Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) initiatives operationalize these ideas by mandating representational outcomes rather than impartial fairness (Mor Barak, 2005). Social Justice, in secular use, shifts focus from moral righteousness to political equality (Williams, 2020).
When Adventist institutions use these same terms, they may intend compassion, but the frameworks carry assumptions incompatible with the gospel:
Human Nature: Marxist thought denies the fall and assumes human perfectibility through social engineering.
Salvation: Redemption is achieved through revolution, not repentance.
Moral Authority: Truth is determined by social consensus or power dynamics, not by divine revelation.
Thus, to adopt the language of such systems is to begin to think within their worldview. Over time, theology becomes sociology; sin becomes inequity; salvation becomes activism; and the everlasting gospel is eclipsed by temporary causes.
6. A Call to Distinctness and Faithfulness
The remnant church has been called to “keep the commandments of God and the faith of Jesus” (Revelation 14:12, NKJV). Its mission is not to echo the world’s moral discourse but to proclaim the everlasting gospel in purity. The language of Scripture—righteousness, truth, holiness, mercy, grace—must remain the language of the church.
Adventist education, preaching, and administration must therefore guard against linguistic syncretism. The purity of doctrine depends upon the purity of words. As E. G. White counseled, “Truth can afford to be fair;” it does not need the support of error (CW, p. 35).
This is not a call to withdraw from compassion or social responsibility. The gospel indeed commands care for the poor, the oppressed, and the stranger (Isaiah 58:6-7; Matthew 25:35-40). But the motivation and method must remain Christ-centered, not ideology-driven. True Christian justice flows from regeneration of the heart, not re-engineering of society.
The prophetic destiny of the Seventh-day Adventist Church is to stand distinct from Babylon, not linguistically integrated with it. The final controversy will hinge upon worship and obedience, not upon sociopolitical alignment. The church must therefore speak with “the pure language” of heaven (Zephaniah 3:9, NKJV), refusing to let the dialect of the world redefine its mission.
Conclusion – Hold Fast the Faithful Word
Language shapes thought; thought shapes destiny. When the church adopts the vocabulary of secular ideology, it unwittingly surrenders the battlefield of meaning. Culturally embedded "framing" through language heavily influences public opinion and belief systems (Lakoff, 2004). To speak the language of Babylon is to think with its mind and eventually to share its confusion. The call of Revelation remains: “Come out of her, My people” (Revelation 18:4, NKJV).
Christ will soon return. His kingdom is founded not on the shifting sands of cultural theory but on eternal truth. Therefore, let the church hold fast “the word of His patience” (Revelation 3:10, NKJV). Let every Adventist scholar, pastor, and member guard the tongue and the heart, “speaking the truth in love” (Ephesians 4:15, NKJV), that the remnant may stand pure, distinct, and faithful until the King of kings reigns forever.
“The great controversy is ended. Sin and sinners are no more. The entire universe is clean. One pulse of harmony and gladness beats through the vast creation. From Him who created all, flow life and light and gladness, throughout the realms of illimitable space. From the minutest atom to the greatest world, all things, animate and inanimate, in their unshadowed beauty and perfect joy, declare that God is love.” (GC, p. 678).
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Dr. Adami A. Gabriel, PsyD, is a clinical neuropsychologist and founder of The Answer :: Psychological Services, in Flower Mound, Texas. He writes and speaks on the intersection of theology, worldview, and the mind, with a focus on preserving biblical truth in contemporary culture. A lifelong Seventh-day Adventist, Dr. Gabriel is committed to proclaiming the everlasting gospel and strengthening the remnant church in preparation for Christ’s soon return.
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