Life Among the Sadventists: They’re Always Watching

The above video was made by Seventh-day Adventists for Seventh-day Adventists — or, as I prefer to call them, Sadventists, because it’s much more accurate.  The video is funny because it’s true.  It’s also disturbing because it’s true.  I’ve never been quite sure what Sadventists fear more — the wrath of god, or being caught by other Sadventists while doing un-Sadventisty things.

All of Christianity is judgmental.  There are few things more annoying than being told by a Christian, “Judge not lest ye be judged,” because Christians spend most of their time passing judgment on other people.  It’s what they do.  Sadventism is no exception.  During my time among the Sadventists, I used to think they had refined judgment to an unbelievable degree.  They judge no one as harshly as they judge each other.  I’ve often said that while putting up a pleasant front for outsiders, Sadventists regularly eat their own, like spiders and sharks.  The vignettes in the video “Adventist Alert” might seem exaggerated to non-Sadventists.  I assure you, they are tame compared to the real thing.

I’ve known people in many other Christian denominations — very religious people, stern and rigid — who look at Sadventists, shake their heads and say, “Wow.  Those people are really extreme.”  That’s because little things that might appear perfectly innocent to non-Sadventists — even to religious non-Sadventists — are, in the Sadventist cult, crimes that must be hidden from other Sadventists.  Getting caught doing things like eating meat, if you’re a vegetarian Sadventist, for example, would be unacceptable.  Or, if you’re a second-class Sadventist and you do eat meat (the vegetarians are upper-class, don’tcha know), you certainly don’t want to get caught eating unclean meat like pork or seafood.  And drinking wine or liquor?  Fuggeddaboutit.  Depending on the level of severity of the particular Sadventist church you attend (some are more liberal than others, although the range is rather narrow), you don’t want to get caught dancing, or going to a movie theater or an establishment known for serving liquor (even if you’re not drinking any liquor), or drinking coffee or caffeinated cola, or engaging in any unacceptable activities on the Sabbath (sundown Friday to sundown Saturday).

Sadventists are a very insular lot.  Along with the churches, they have their own schools — they claim to have “one of the largest church-supported educational systems in the world” — and they have their own hospitals throughout the U.S.  Sadventists tend to hang out with Sadventists, attend camp meetings and church retreats, go to Sadventist doctors and dentists and patronize Sadventist businesses whenever possible.  It’s a tight-knit group and everyone knows everyone.  And they’re always watching.  Should you get caught by other Sadventists in the act of breaking one of the many, many Sadventist rules, there are consequences.  For one thing, word on the Sadventist grapevine (which, by the way, is made up of grapes intended to be used only for grape juice and never for wine) spreads faster than an STD at a crackwhore gangbang.  After that, references to the behavior in question are dropped into conversations by your friends and acquaintances in the church.  These references are disguised as concern, subtly mentioned to let you know that they know.  If the offense is severe enough, you’ll get more than mere references — you’ll get questions.

“Is it true that you had a glass of wine while you were out to dinner last Tuesday?” someone might ask.  Or you might get a helpful suggestion like this:  “Instead of going through the McDonald’s drive-through after church on the sabbath, maybe you should stay for the pot luck lunch to avoid the temptation.”  Sadventists, you see, are not supposed to do any business on the sabbath — no buying, no selling — and they aren’t supposed to do anything that would cause anyone else, even a non-Sadventist, to do business on the sabbath.

You will get stern looks from some, looks of sad concern from others — because you are now a Badventist.  But more importantly, they know you’re a Badventist, and they’ve got something on you, which is a favorite pastime in Sadventism.  If you are caught engaging in the unapproved behavior more than once, someone — perhaps your pastor — might have a stern talk with you.  Some people might even stop talking to you.  This is how people are punished in Sadventism.  And people are punished a lot in Sadventism.

You might find all this fuss over such trivial things rather silly.  But there’s a reason for it.  Sadventism is built on following rules — it would probably be more accurate to call them laws.  That is how you get to heaven.  Most mainstream Christian denominations believe that you are saved by the grace of Jesus Christ, not by anything you do.  They believe that his death on the cross was the sacrifice needed to deliver you from sin, and if you accept that, you are saved.  Not Sadventists.  Nosiree Bob!

The Seventh-day Adventist cult’s “prophet” and founder, the alcoholic, masturbation-obsessed habitual plagiarist Ellen G. White, was astonishingly fanatical and legalistic, and let’s face it, folks, crazier than a bag of wet cats.  At the age of nine, Ellen was hit in the head with a rock, which resulted in her being comatose for three weeks.  Many think this trauma damaged her brain in ways that could have caused her extreme zealotry — I prefer to call it religious lunacy — which involved what she claimed were visions shown her by god, visitations by angels, and even a trip to Jupiter.  Others think she was a calculating, greedy, power-hungry fraud.  Some think she was a combination of both.  Then there are the Sadventists, who believe even today in 2011 — despite the mountain of evidence to the contrary, all of which is poorly explained away by the cult, although the explanations are good enough for the believers — that she was a true prophet of god whose writings were divinely inspired and remain an infallible supplement to the word of god.  The cult holds Ellen in the same regard as the biblical prophets (something else they deny vehemently to outsiders but acknowledge within the invisible walls that surround the cult).  Over the years, there have been endless revisions and changes made in Ellen’s writings by the Sadventist Powers That Be to cover up some of her more embarrassing statements or obvious errors, which seems odd if her infallible writings are divinely inspired.  Nevertheless, nearly a century after her death, Ellen’s writings are still the arbiter of doctrine and scriptural interpretation in the cult.

Ellen passed down a litany of rules that would read to the average person like the ramblings of a maniac.  She originally prohibited consulting physicians or using drugs of any kind, although she later reversed that when it turned out that she needed medical help.  She forbade the eating of butter, eggs, cheese, pickles, mustard, pepper, cinnamon and other spices and any desserts, the drinking of coffee, tea and, of course, alcohol, and the use of baking soda and vinegar (although she later admitted she was addicted to drinking vinegar, which at that time was heavily alcoholic).  These prohibitions were not simply for health reasons — they were moral edicts!  She claimed they excited the “animal passions” of fragile human beings and led to masturbation, which she believed to be the greatest evil facing humankind, and they even interfered with one’s relationship with god and could destroy one’s chances of salvation.  Here’s an example:

“You place upon your tables butter, eggs, and meat and then your children partake of them.  They are fed with the very things that will excite their animal passions, and then you come to meeting and ask God to bless and save your children.  How high do your prayers go?”
– Testimonies, Vol. 2, p. 362, 1870

So, if you eat butter, eggs and meat, your prayers won’t reach god.  Betcha didn’t know that!

Ellen also condemned card games, chess, checkers, football, tennis, cricket, baseball and bike racing.  Also banned were picnics, social parties, the reading of fiction and attending the theater, secular concerts, billiard halls, bowling alleys, dance halls (and dancing itself) and the circus.  She instructed women to wear pants under their skirts (when I attended Sadventist school in the 1970s, many girls were made by their parents to wear pants under their dresses to avoid exposing their legs) and condemned the wearing of jewelry (to this day, it is still common for Sadventist men to give an engagement watch rather than an engagement ring, and some Sadventists — but far from all — have only recently begun wearing wedding rings).  She told Sadventists that they were breaking the fourth commandment if they washed dishes, shaved, or engaged in any games, swimming or “pleasure seeking” on the sabbath.  She told them never to buy life insurance, join unions, pray standing up, live in the city, and not to send their children to school before the age of eight.

I apologize if I’m boring you with all this Sadventist minutia, but it’s necessary in order for you to understand Sadventism’s rigid legalism.  Just about any Sadventist will tell you that today, the cult has loosened up a lot and isn’t nearly as stern and legalistic as it used to be.  “We’re not the legalistic church we used to be,” they’ll say.  “We’ve become much more liberal and modern.”  This may be true on the surface.  But you don’t have to scratch that surface very hard to find that it hasn’t changed much over the decades, and in some areas, you’ll find Sadventists who are still as rigid, legalistic and batshit-crazy as Ellen herself.  It seems the thing they are the most liberal about is their definition of the words “liberal” and “modern.”

Keep in mind that, to Sadventists, Ellen G. White is a messenger of god and her writings are infallible.  Rules from Ellen are rules from god.  Breaking those rules is a sin.  Sadventists aren’t allowed to sin because Ellen told them they have to be perfect in order to go to heaven.  Most of Christianity teaches that perfection is achieved only in heaven, but in Sadventism, perfection is required to get to heaven.  Once again, this will be denied by Sadventists, and it’s not taught directly — no one says from the pulpit, “You must be perfect!”  In fact, you might hear Sadventist pastors contradict the Sadventist pope Ellen White by actually claiming that we humans cannot be perfect.  But the idea that perfection is necessary for salvation, while not identified in those words, permeates the cult’s teachings the way fat marbles a rib eye steak (oh, no — a meat reference!).  When you add it all up, the result is REQUIRED PERFECTION.  And Ellen makes that quite clear in her writing.  Here are a few examples:

“As the Son of man was perfect in His life, so His followers are to be PERFECT in their life.” —  The Faith I Live By, p. 44

“Not even by a thought did He [Jesus Christ] yield to temptation. So it may be with us.” — Desire of Ages, p. 123

“In order to let Jesus into our hearts, we must stop sinning.” — Signs of the Times, March 3, 1898

“To be redeemed means to cease from sin.” — Review & Herald, September 25, 1900

“Human beings may in this life attain to perfection of character.” — Acts of the Apostles, p. 531

“Perfection of character is attainable by every one who strives for it.” — Selected Messages, Vol. 1, p. 212

So, before Jesus will accept you, before you can be saved, YOU MUST BE PERFECT!  Imagine what it’s like to believe that firmly, with all your heart.  And imagine having so many ridiculous, nonsensical rules to follow.  It’s a tense life, let me tell you.  Sadventists love to tell people how happy they are, but from my experience, they are more likely to be bundles of guilty anxieties and religion-induced neuroses.  You might wonder why they would choose to live this way, why they would subject themselves to this.  Sadly, most of them don’t know they have a choice.  Most Sadventists are born into the cult and then pass that belief system on to their own children, all the while living within the cult’s insular community where all their beliefs are reinforced and all of those ridiculous rules are believed to be of utmost importance.  They don’t know anything else.

The following of these rules is so important, and the cult is so insular and close-knit, that deviating from the rules in any way becomes a game of cat and mouse.  If you’re going to break a rule, you’d better not get caught doing it by other Sadventists.  The rules are so important that they will notice, and it will become an issue.  The unexpressed attitude seems to be, If I have to follow all these rules, then so do you, and I’m not going to let you get away with breaking them!

Back to that video.  Yes, it’s funny.  But I find it disturbing because, as I mentioned earlier, it was made by Sadventists for Sadventists and was shown recently at the 2011 Florida Hospital Church Retreat.  It reveals that they are aware of their cult’s rigid legalism and harshly judgmental nature.  They are aware of their own pettiness and mean-spiritedness.  But rather than address the problem, rather than trying to find a solution to the problem, they’re comfortable enough with it to joke about it.  “Look at us!  We’re judgmental and petty and mean-spirited!  Isn’t that funny?”  This reveals a level of arrogant pomposity in the Seventh-day Adventist cult that astonishes even me — and I thought I’d gotten to the point where it would be impossible to astonish me with any negative revelations about Sadventism.

Ellen White would have disapproved of this video strongly — not because it casts Sadventists in a bad light, but because it’s funny.  Ellen was not a fan of laughter.

“You sport and joke and enter into hilarity and glee.  Does the Word of God sustain you in this?  It does not.  Christ is our example.  Do you imitate the great Exemplar?  Christ often wept but never was known to laugh.  I do not say it is a sin to laugh on any occasion.  But we cannot go astray if we imitate the divine, unerring Pattern.  We are living in a sad age of this world’s history.” — Manuscript Releases Vol. 6, pp. 90-91

That was my life for a long time.  My heart goes out to those still living it — even though they’re in it so deeply that they can’t understand why someone would pity them and probably would be offended by it.  Believe me, if there were an app such as the “Adventist Alert,” every Sadventist would have one … but they wouldn’t want any of the other Sadventists to know they needed it.