Outside the Fold
It’s been nearly 20 years since I began the slow, slide away from Adventism. My departure was a quiet, gradual disentangling. I can no longer remember exactly when I stopped going to church, stopped paying tithe, stopped pretending to care about the dramas and intrigues of the Adventist community. But at some point in the early aughts I could simply no longer take the cognitive dissonance, and set myself free from any Seventh-day Adventist-specific diet or lifestyle injunctions.
Since then I have gone on to live what seems to me a “normal life.” A life of school plays, going to work, grilling in the backyard on nice days, and being part of a suburban community. Despite being taught in Adventist schools that true happiness comes only from Jesus and that I’d be lonely and miserable outside the fold, I have found meaning and contentment and fulfilling relationships. My journey away has been largely undramatic.
And yet, 2 decades later, I am still making sense of the experience of being raised Seventh-day Adventist, an experience that as of this writing was more than half of my life. Like the prophet Jonah, I find – frustratingly – that there are aspects of that system I cannot seem to completely escape; some parts of it all I cannot fully leave behind. To this day I harbor strong opinions about Fri-Chik versus Prime Stakes, or The Wedgewood Trio versus Take Three. Whenever someone of another Christian denomination speaks about or interprets the Bible in my presence, my instinctive reaction is to mentally check their theology and wonder why they haven’t found “The Truth.” When I meet someone with jewelry or tattoos, one of the first thoughts in my head is that “this person is not Adventist.” And to be clear, I also have tattoos and wear jewelry.
Thirty-something years of upbringing and indoctrination are not easy to forget or undo (not that it all has to be forgotten or undone). And I have found that there very few people I can really talk to about this. Many people in my life have left religious movements, and we certainly share many things. But there are aspects of being “ex-Adventist” that only another ex-Adventist can really understand.
What does it mean now, even as I no longer believe? 20 years ago I might have asked myself what it meant to be an ex-Adventist in a secular world. Now I want to know if there are others like me, and if so, how their experience resembles mine.
That is where this project begins for me.
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So happy to see this – will be taking your survey 🙂
4th generation SDA here, PK. Left the church at 18, when I graduated from Andrews Academy. That was thirty years ago and I’m STILL dealing with the fallout and legacy of SDA bullshit.
Happy I can discuss with other Ex-Adventists about the lies we’ve been fed within the SDA system and even those in SDA offshoots, from whatever Spirit of Prophecy is to bizarre outlandish conspiracy theories.
It’s true. I left the church ten years ago and I still don’t eat bacon or pork. And neither do my kids, despite having little connection to the church.
I was surprised that the survey was created by an ex-Adventist. A lot of questions were written in such a way that I would have expected it to be from a very conservative Adventist. It is unfortunately rife with bias. That it’s created by an ex-Adventist shows how deep the indoctrination goes. I can provide some examples of things that could be changed for future iterations.
A few weeks ago my husband (never was an Adventist) and I went to Boulder to a deli to get something to drink. I noticed they’re closed Friday nights to Saturday nights. I was like, “Oh, this place is totally Adventist!” We walked in and the employees were all older and dressed in linen and very conservatively—no tattoos or jewelry. I told my husband, “Oh, this place is definitely Adventist!” We sat down and looked at the menu. No alcohol, but they had a carob drink on the menu. “Yep, this place is Adventist.” I wanted to ask the server so bad, but my husband, a visibly Jewish man, was very uncomfortable and didn’t want me saying anything. I went to the bathroom and on my way back to the table, I saw religious literature on a shelf. Didn’t get a good look at what it was, but was convinced it was an Adventist deli. I sat at the table and my husband handed my his phone where he had googled the deli. It’s not Adventist, but owned by the 12 Tribes Cult. Funny, huh?