Faith in Context

How Many Adventists Are College and University Students?

By Monte Sahlin

The most recent Freshman Survey in the United States (from 2014) found that three-tenth of one percent of the students reported that their religious preference was Seventh-day Adventist. That is 0.3%. Only two of the listed religious categories at a smaller response: 0.2% each for LDS (Mormons) and Quakers. The largest responses were 27.5% who indicated "None" and 25.3% who selected Roman Catholic.

The most recent number available for the total number of Freshmen in all institutions in the nation is 2.2 million. (National Center for Education Statistics.)  That means there were about 65,000 young adults who indicated that they are Adventists in the Freshmen cohort for the 2014-15 school year.

If this sample can be applied to the entire population enrolled in post-secondary education in the country (a total of 21 million), then there are more than 600,000 students who have an Adventist religious preference. According to the statistics on the denomination's North American Division Education web site, no more than 30,000 of these were enrolled in colleges and universities affiliated with the Adventist Church.

It is important to understand that "religious preference" is not the same thing as membership. And members do not all participate regularly. Research has shown that about 30% of Adventist Church members in North America only rarely or never attend on Sabbath, and this percentage is somewhat larger among young adults.

There is a hint of this generational differential in the data from the Freshman Survey. The incoming students were also asked the current religious preference of their parents. The response was 0.4% for both mothers and fathers. Compared to the 0.3% for the self-reported preference, this means that one out four students with Adventist parents do not prefer to be Adventists themselves or a generational dropout factor of roughly 25 percent. That is actually about half the rate found in Roger Dudley's longitudinal study of teenagers in Adventist families in the 1990s. (Institute for Church Ministry at Andrews University)

Is there some chance that the dropout rate among Adventist young adults is slowing down? Perhaps, but remember that Dudley's study followed a sample of young people from the time they were 15 and 16 to the time they were 25 and 26. The Freshman Survey sample is largely age 18 and 19. For these young adults it is too soon to know. Which also means you can still do something about it.

You can respond or ask questions by Email at:   [email protected]

The Thinking Primate

by Loren Seibold

It’s the year of analyzing our own consciousness, and the megahit Sapiens, by Yuval Noah Harari rules the field. (Recent others in a similar vein: Leonard Mlodinow’s The Upright Thinkers, Edward O. Wilson’s The Meaning of Human Existence, and The Human Age by Diane Ackerman.)

Naturally, Harari asserts that somewhere along the evolutionary line a bipedal ape developed an astonishing level of consciousness of a sort that was quite different from that of its similarly large-brained relatives. Sapiens is about how we became the thinking primate, and what that led to.

The religious people who reject the initial premise might miss out on the what is a marvelous insight from a secular historian and anthropologist: that the key to humanness is faith, i.e., the ability to believe in things that aren't physically there. These abstract notions are impossible for our nearest primate relations. Writes Harari:

"It's relatively easy to agree that only Homo sapiens can speak about things that don't really exist, and believe six impossible things before breakfast. You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven."

This cognitive revolution, says Harari, sets the stage for everything that comes afterwards: the agricultural revolution, human cooperation in government, religion and economics, and our advancement into science and discovery. All the great achievements of humanity—tribe, trade, money, corporations, religion, government, scientific theories, mathematics, literature, music and art, rights and laws, contracts, even relationships—are predicated on that ability to create and trust abstractions, an ability that Harari sees manifested in (and possibly first stimulated by) religious faith. 

"[F]iction has enabled us not merely to imagine things, but to do so collectively. Such myths give Sapiens the unprecedented ability to cooperate flexibly in large numbers. Ants and bees can also work together in huge numbers, but they do so in a very rigid manner and only with close relatives. Wolves and chimpanzees cooperate far more flexibly than ants, but they can do so only with small numbers of other individuals that they know intimately. Sapiens can cooperate in extremely flexible ways with countless numbers of strangers. That's why Sapiens rule the world, whereas ants eat our leftovers and chimps are locked up in zoos and research laboratories."

One needn't accept the evolutionary narrative in order to be fascinated by this key point. After all, isn't it the Bible's claim that God breathed into God's most advanced creature a breath of consciousness that made us, in a fundamental way, thinkers like our Creator?  

We religious people know that faith isn't responsible for everything that has proceeded from abstract thinking: the machinery of capitalism, for example, as astonishingly abstract and fictional as it is, is only as moral as its practitioners make it. Nor does the ability to imagine what isn't there mean that everything we can imagine actually is. 

Yet here is at least a small admission, from academic disciplines that Christians sometimes complain has pushed God out of every gap where there were still bits of him to be found, that faith is at the heart of humanness, as necessary as our biological wiring. It's neither a theology nor an incontrovertible fact, but I'll take it. 

Seventh-day Adventist Church Refuses Ordination to Women

By Loren Seibold

The latest conservative denomination to deny women ordination is the Seventh-day Adventist church, a denomination whose single most significant shaping force was its 19th-century prophetess and co-founder, Ellen Gould Harmon White. 

White's role in the church might have suggested that women's spiritual leadership would be welcome. But that assumption wasn't tested until the push to strengthen women's rights in the 1960s and 70s. In the 1985 meeting of the quinquennial world convention, delegates voted to allow female pastors to work under a limited "commissioned minister" license, and congregations to ordain female lay elders. The decision was welcome in many parts of the American, European, and Australian church but sat uncomfortably with others, sparking three decades of campaigning against any further moves in that direction. 

Delegates in 2010 requested a Theology of Ordination Study Committee (TOSC) with the hope of settling the question. Impetus was provided by a few smaller judicatories in the United States and Europe that pushed ahead with granting full ordination to the women ministers in their territory. The TOSC convened in 2013. Though the result of that committee's work was encouraging about the possibility of women's ordination in those parts of the world church that wanted it, a motion was presented at the 2015 meeting of the world church without the recommendation from the TOSC.

Three things worked against its passage. 

1. 

   Ted N.C. Wilson
   The shifting of the church to the global south. About three quarters of church membership is now from cultures with traditional roles for women, like Latin America, Africa and southern Asia. 
2. The selection of Ted N.C. Wilson as church president. Wilson, though a North American, won the loyalty of the conservative delegates by promising to fight against the liberalization that many feared was happening in the American church. Wilson is a skilled politician with an authoritarian style, which he used to good effect against the women's ordination movement. 
3. A new theology of male headship. Opponents made a Biblical case for male leadership while also succeeding in grouping women's ordination with homosexuality, which frightened many in the aging demographic of the church.

On July 8, 2015, at the world conference in San Antonio, TX, the motion to allow large geographical regions (divisions) to decide for themselves about women's ordination was defeated 60% to 40%. (To the disappointment of many, who hoped this vote was a referendum on all female church leadership, female commissioned ministers and female lay elders were not eliminated: the motion was confined to the question of whether divisions could grant full ordination to women in their territory.)

The denomination has tried hard to maintain uniformity in both theology and polity throughout its approximately 175-year history. In the latest session much was made of an 1875 statement by Ellen White (ironically) that the General Conference session is the highest authority of God on earth, meaning that the July 8 vote was an ex cathedra decision binding all parts of the church.

Yet some of the judicatories that had already begun ordaining women have said they'll continue to do so, in defiance of the session vote. Which leads most observers to conclude that the question is far from settled.  

 

 

 

 

Related articles

Seventh-Day Adventists Vote Against Ordaining Women

Seventh-day Adventists affirm women in ministry, but vote down their ordination

Does Alcoholics Anonymous Work?

by Loren Seibold

Those of us who have never struggled with a chemical addiction, but who work with those who do, have long taken it for granted that 12-step programs are the only answer to alcohol addiction. I’ve recommended them, and I suspect most physicians, counselors and ministers have. But recently I’ve come across researchers who say that Alcoholics Anonymous may not be all we think it is. Gabrielle Glaser summarizes the problems in an article in the April 2015 Atlantic magazine:

• There's been little empirical research to show that AA works. The organization uses its “anonymous” descriptor to avoid doing comprehensive studies of effectiveness—which would involve knowing people’s names, contact information, and doing follow-up. Handbooks continue to say that 50% will become sober immediately if they really try, and another 25% may struggle but prevail. But in The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry, Lance Dodes, a retired psychiatry professor from Harvard Medical School says it’s closer to 5-8% who use AA treatment who stay sober.
• Alcoholics Anonymous sessions are uneven in their effectiveness: it requires no professional training beyond that given by participation in the program.
• Some researchers believe that AA’s claim that even one drink brings an alcoholic back to full-blown alcoholism sets up a binge-purge cycle: “If I take one drink, I might as well go completely back into full-blown alcohol abuse.” Other treatments teach patients to manage alcohol, rather than eschewing it.
• The Handbook of Alcoholism Treatment Approaches, a comprehensive comparison of treatments worldwide, ranks AA 38th out of 48 methods. 
• To say, as AA does, that you have to “hit rock bottom” before you can overcome is, according to addiction psychiatrist Mark Willenbring, equivalent to telling “a guy who weighs 250 pounds and has untreated hypertension and cholesterol of 300, ‘Don’t exercise, keep eating fast food, and we’ll give you a triple bypass when you have a heart attack.’”
• Some European countries have had success (a claimed 78% in one study in Finland) using an opioid antagonist called naltrexone, combined with therapy. Unlike the American abstinence approach, Finnish researchers suggest the drinker take it before he plans to drink, to reduce his craving and subtly teach him how to be happy drinking less. 

The Affordable Care Act has expanded the availability of addiction treatment, and HHS is currently evaluating treatments. The automatic recommendation of AA as the treatment of choice may soon be questioned. Says addiction psychologist Tom McClellan, “This is going to be a mandated benefit, and insurance companies are going to want to pay for things that work.” They’re unlikely to be content with single-digit results. 

It's More Than a Headscarf

by Loren Seibold

How a headscarf became news twice in a single week:

1. SCOTUS issued a nearly unanimous ruling on Monday, 4 June 2015, that Abercrombie and Fitch was in violation of the religious rights of Samantha Elauf when they refused to hire her because she wore a Muslim head scarf. A&F, whose strict sartorial standards exclude headwear, said that it was up to Samantha to inform them that she wore the scarf for religious reasons. The justices said that if A&F even had a hunch it was for religious reasons (and really, how could they not?) they were in violation of Title VII.
2. Only a couple of days earlier, a hijabed Tahera Ahmad, a chaplain at Northwestern University, was refused an unopened can of Coke on a United flight because, the flight attendant said, she might use it as a weapon—though the attendant was giving unopened cans to others. When Tahera objected, a man across the aisle said, “you Moslem... you know you would use it as a weapon, so shut the **** up.” 

Samantha Elauf

The two situations differ, but they're both about judgements people made of a humble headscarf.

This is hardly the hijab’s first brush with controversy. In several majority Muslim countries (Turkey, Tunisia, and Tajikistan) the hijab is banned by law in government buildings and universities. (Even Iran banned the hijab in 1936, before making it mandatory in 1979.) France, the home of a large number of Islamic immigrants, in 2004 banned from schools all clothing or symbols by which students “conspicuously display their religious affiliation”, and in 2010 banned the full face-covering in public. 

These countries seem to be motivated by a desire to enforce a public secularity, and more recently to discourage Islamic extremism. Some cite security concerns: that a terrorist could go incognito under a niqab (the Muslim total face covering) or burqa (the full body covering). 

The motivations of those who insist that women wear it, and those women who choose to, are more complex. Beyond “thus saith the holy writings” (which in fact, they don’t—the whole “doctrine” is based on a passage that says Muhammed’s wives had to stay behind a curtain when he was meeting at home with other men), the stated justification has been modesty. But in the case of both of the above women, they are modern in other aspects of dress and make-up: Samantha appeared in court wearing tight leggings or jeans. Given A&F’s sexy reputation, one wonders why a modest person would want to work there.

But that’s beside the point, and none of our business. These cases are about the hijab's religious/cultural symbolism as it affects economic prospects, in Samantha’s case, or is the occasion for ignorant discrimination, in Tahera’s. 

I believe the SCOTUS decision was the right one. But I also believe, along with some feminist thinkers, that there are legitimate questions to be raised about a concept of modesty that seems to say that the responsibility for male sexual temptation falls on women, as is not infrequently the case in both Muslim and Christian contexts. The fault for a man’s sexual trespass, then, isn’t his, but his temptress's. In some Muslim cultures women are held responsible for their own rape, and Christian attitudes in some circles come very close to that. Bill Gothard (see this column) has gone so far as to say that a woman wearing clothing that a man considers provocative has implicitly promised him sex. So who could blame him for taking it? One more example of abusive religion, in a field that hasn't been short of such examples lately.

What Does New Survey Tell Us About Adventists?

By Monte Sahlin

The Pew Research Center released its 2014 Religious Landscape of the United States yesterday and this morning there are news stories about the rapid growth of "nones" (people who tell pollsters their religion is none at all) and the decline in the number of Christians. I want to point out a small piece of the data that is probably of interest only to a narrow range of readers ....

The survey found that six-tenths of one percent of the respondents identified themselves as Adventists. Of these, most (five-tenths of one percent) said they are Seventh-day Adventists specifically. Only adults are included in the survey, so if one takes the total adult population at the time the survey was conducted (last year), then the six-tenths of one percent equals 1,455,258 and the five-tenths of one percent equals 1,212,715.

The membership of the Seventh-day Adventist Church in the United States at the end of last year was 1,124,313. In other words, 7.3% more American adults told the Pew Research Center they were Seventh-day Adventists than the number of people that the denomination has record of. And this math makes no allowance for the fact that a portion of that membership total (at least 5%) are children ages 10 through 17 who are baptized members.

Bottom line: There are an estimated 300,000 to 350,000 adults in America who have sufficient affinity to Adventist faith to tell survey-takers they are Adventists but are not accounted for in the official count of the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

My own surveys (conducted in more than 1,000 local churches over the past two decades) show that about 30% of the 1,124,313 members of record have stopped attending church. That is about 340,000 people.

This means that there are about 785,000 people who make up the active participants of the Seventh-day Adventist denomination in the U.S. (Those who attend at least once a month during at least nine months of the year.) And there are another 700,000 who are either participating in some other Adventist group or not participating anywhere despite their Adventist identity.

This accounting makes no effort to estimate another group, which I am sure is larger than either of the two described above. These are the people who no longer identify themselves as Adventist believers, but due to family history or background have a connection with the Adventist faith. I have personally interviewed more than a thousand of these people since 1980 and I am working on a book that will tell their stories. A very small portion of these are active in "former Adventist" groups, seeking to prove that the denomination is not legitimately a Christian faith. The vast majority have simply got on with their lives and have a mix of fond memories, respect for certain individuals they met through the church, and wry thoughts about some of the more sectarian aspects, "the silly stuff," to quote one interview. There is also some painful memories for some of the individuals in this category.

So what?

This is my faith, my denomination, so I have spent considerable time observing it. I think it is only one example of a much larger reality: Around organized religion there are large collections of human beings who have not found it beneficial to stay in the boat. At what point do we quit blaming these people and pay attention to the flaws in the institution?

America's Most Secular Cities

By Monte Sahlin

"Nones" are people who when they are asked in a survey, What is your religious preference? answer with "none." That is their religious preference is no religion. One of major trends underway in America today is the rapid growth of "nones," especially among new generations. (As we have mentioned often in this space.)

New data reports the percentage of adults who are "nones" in each of the major metropolitan areas of the United States. For those who have studied American history and geography, it comes as no surprise that (with one exception) the cities with the higher percentage of "nones" are all in the West and the North. The South and the Midwest have fewer "nones" and more people interested in and involved in religion.

Portland (Oregon) is the metro area with the highest percentage of "nones." Overall 42 percent of the adult residents have no religious preference.

Three metros tie for second place, each with a third of their adult residents who are "nones." These are all in the West: Seattle, San Francisco and Denver.

Six metros each have about a quarter of their adult residents who are "nones."

• 26 percent in Phoenix (Arizona)
• 25 percent in Tampa-St. Petersburg (Florida)
• 25 percent each in Los Angeles, Boston, Columbus, Detroit

All of these metro areas are also among the leaders in cultural and technological innovation, as well as having above-average proportions of young adults. They reveal the map of cultural tensions in America.

Source: Christian Century, April 15, 2015 (page 9)

 

What We Haven't Understood about ISIS

by Loren Seibold

The cover piece from the March Atlantic about the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria has received wide recognition, and for good reason: it's the most cogent explanation so far of this brutal Middle-Eastern movement. Most of us, when we heard of it, assumed ISIS was more of the same: another al-Qaeda-like terror organization. Graeme Wood explains its significant differences:

• Its level of devotion to what it regards as real Islam far exceeds that of the conservative Islamic groups we now know—and it's directed against other Muslims as much as against us infidels. While we take note of ISIS's beheading of a handful of Westerners, takfiri, excommunication of Muslims, is central to the movement, even requiring tortures such as amputations and beheading for Muslims who don't behave. ISIS is a brand of Islam that requires discipline and full devotion, which is what has made it attractive to Muslims all over the world. Furthermore, it holds al-Qaeda in contempt for not sufficiently embracing and enforcing piety.
• It's a territorial movement, revolving around the establishment of a geographical caliphate. Note that ISIS's terrorist acts have been within their territory, and they're not likely to become an offensive threat toward other nations until the caliphate is secure. Wood says, "Its threat to the United States is smaller than its all too frequent conflation with al-Qaeda would suggest." It seeks no recognition by other nations, nor other Muslims, and probably never will.
• It is also an apocalyptic movement. Al-qaeda has a self-destructive, psychopathic streak, but ISIS has a precise eschatology in mind that, they say, must lead to an end-time showdown in Dabiq, Syria. Where al-Qaeda is furtive and conveys confused motives, ISIS is relatively transparent, its intentions known. 
• The strategies that have worked with other Islamic groups might not be applicable here. For example, sending tens of thousands of Americans in to defeat them would fulfill ISIS's prophecies and thus legitimize it. Says Wood, "The biggest proponent of an American invasion is the Islamic State itself."

Wood adds an important nuance for those of us who have wanted to believe that Islamic terror sects don't represent real Islam. ISIS is, in fact, purely Islamic, following the letter of the Koran and the hadiths, though with a distinctly restorationist hermeneutic. "People want to absolve Islam," Wood quotes scholar Bernard Haykel. "It's this 'Islam is a religion of peace' mantra. As if there is such a thing as 'Islam'! [Islam is] what Muslims do and how they interpret their texts." Which is to say, Islam need not necessarily be violent, but it would be a mistake not to recognize that violent ISIS is Islamic.

Fortunately, Wood's entire piece is on line, and is well worth reading in its entirety here.

Class Warfare and Religion in the United States

By Monte Sahlin

America has always prided itself in being a society unlike many places in Europe and the southern Hemisphere where there are large differences between the elite and the masses. (In fact, Europe has changed significantly over the last half century and more recently there have been emerging middle classes in Brazil, India and other developing nations.) For decades the vast majority of Americans have told surveys that they are "middle class" in proportions that quite different than household income data would indicate. Most Americans have thought of themselves as "middle class" until the emergence of "culture wars" in recent decades in which Christian activists of various kinds have had a role, but the most powerful dynamics seem to be a tension between traditional culture and "cultural creatives" that has strong economic and political correlations.

"Class warfare in America is over," points out a recent issue of Christian Century. "And the well-to-do have won. The result is that the less well-to-do are being shut out of the decision-making process. Very few working-class Americans get into government, even at the state level. Running for office is so expensive that only wealthy Americans aspire to elected office. Once in office they reflect their own class. Social safety net programs are stingier, business regulations are flimsier, and tax policies are more regressive than they would be if our politicians came from the same mix of classes as the people they represent." (Oct. 1, 2014, pp. 8-9)

Has conservative Protestant faith become captive to this traditional culture political/economic dynamic? Historically African American congregations (of all denominations) have traditionally put much energy into helping the poor and promoting education, but now some are becoming more middle class and less involved in community service. In white Evangelical congregation (of many denominations) it is common to find a significant share of the members how think that helping the poor "is not really the mission of the church" and a narrowing of focus to strictly religious activities and support for typical middle class family life.

I see/hear more and more condescending remarks by Christians labeling as "leftist, socialist" any initiative or ministry or expression seeking to address social justice. Has political philosophy and class self-interests erased or modified in the minds of these Christians (who usually read the Bible in a very literal manner) the plain statements of Jesus in a number of places in the New Testament such as Matthew 25:31-46?

This particular passage interests me because it is in the context of the "sermon" of Jesus recorded in Matthew 24-25 which is so relevant to my Adventist faith. It begins with a question from His disciples about when He will return and when will be the end of the world, and specifically focuses on how to live in an eschatological context. There are many other texts that are equally clear about the value that God places on social justice. A friend told me recently that "social justice is heresy." Is that true, or is the shaping of conservative Protestant faith by anti-social justice views the real heresy in God's eyes?

Is "Spiritual But Not Religious" Real?

By Monte Sahlin

Nancy Ammerman's new book, Sacred Stories, Spiritual Tribes is excellent. I recommend that you read it! One interesting question she raises is about the category that is currently getting a lot of attention, the people who say, "I am interested in spiritual things, but I am not interested in religion." So much study is currently focused on this category that it now has a label among scholars and professional research writers: SBNR (Spiritual But Not Religious)

Dr. Ammerman calls SBNR a "unicorn," a species that does not exist in real life. Closer examination, she reports, finds that the people in her surveys who were "most active in organized religion, were also most committed to spiritual practices and a spiritual view of the world." She suggests that the SBNR thing is simply a device for people to tell their zealous friends to back off and leave them alone on topics related to values, spirituality and religion.

A reviewer in the Feb. 4 issue of Christian Century makes the observation that SBNR may be a media invention. "Dominant U.S. media don't seem to know how to talk about religious congregations" or spiritual life in general, so "lacking such capacity" they pretend that places exist that are not there in reality, observes Anthony Robinson, a UCC pastor.

Unlike Ammerman and Robinson, it seems, I have met a lot of people who are SBNR. Once they trust you as a friend, they are more than happy to talk about both religion and spiritual life. They express concerns, beliefs, emotional connections with the Divine; they pray, express spiritual sentiments and ask religious questions. They are turned off or simply unimpressed by the usual round of things we religious people do to express our faith both in the context of congregations and in our private lives.

Let's be honest, a lot of what we do is tradition and ritual, and not all that vital or vibrant even to those of us who enjoy it. To make faith real requires a level of creativity and authenticity that we are usually not willing to invest in. It breaks through at funerals, weddings and similar very important occasions, and sometimes even unexpectedly, but it is almost impossible to sustain daily or weekly or even once a month. That is why many religions invest so much value in "revival" or "renewal" or "reformation."

The incongruous thing about the emphasis on "revival" is that often the people who talk the most about it are the largest opponents to real change. We want the benefits of an edgy, powerful relationship with God while keeping it safely under control and limits. That is the real unicorn! I got news for you; there is no such animal. Either your experience with God is risky and upsetting, turning over things you would like to cling to, or it is boring and meaningless ritual that most of the people around you will not see a reason to give particular respect, time or energy.

SBNR is simply one aspect of being people real about organized religion. We want the riches without paying the price. We are just a little bit cheap and fraudulent, but we want people to treat it as if it were the wonder of the universe. Get real .... one way or another.