Eighth-Day Freedom

One size does not fit all

One size does not fit all

[Updated 4-21-23]

Group positionality statement
As an elaboration on how we describe ourselves on The Research Team page, here is our collective positionality statement. All three researchers are middle class, straight, cis, white, and able males from and living in the United States. One of us is middle aged and the other two are older. Hence we all experience many privileges based on these ascribed statuses and even more due to our individual achieved statuses. All three of us are professionals, working in fields that thankfully hold a respected place in our culture. We are demonstratively not perfect in any way, but especially in terms of being fully aware of the many biases we hold. With grace, we strive both in our personal and professional lives to embrace the principles of diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice. That said, our current work, this survey, is also not perfect. We will accept your feedback with grace and hope to be given the same.

To this point, one respondent wrote

“Some of the questions in this survey didn’t have adequate options. Some of the questions seemed to be based on presuppositions about Adventism. Perhaps the folk who wrote the questions did not realize that Adventism is practiced very differently in different parts of the world. It felt like this survey was more relevant to people who grew up in North America and never experienced Adventism in other parts of the world.”

The Seventh-Day Adventist church has a demonstratively global reach “…with a membership of over 21 million in 13 regions of the world.” Yet this survey was written from the perspective of US citizens who grew up in North America and may indeed have that bias, excluding accurately capturing the nuances of the experiences of ex-SDA people from other parts of the globe. Perhaps most obviously, this survey (as of now) is only available in English and thus excludes the voices of ex-SDA folks who cannot read English. It is also available only online via the Internet, and so only those who have access to appropriate technology can easily respond. As straight, cis males, our questions may be biased or skewed from the perspectives of non-straight, non-cis, and/or females.

The question about race
That the three researchers are white also adds a critical layer of potential bias. In North America, for example, we are aware  there is a Regional Conference system: essentially a separation of white Adventist churches and Black Adventist churches within the same General Conference system. Beyond the US, we know that Adventism can be experienced in a very different way than in the US, especially by those in the (so-called) Global South, in sub-Saharan Africa or Southeast Asia, for example.

Near the very end of the survey we ask, “Which below best describes you?” and offer only two options, ‘white’ and ‘non-white’. The next question (which provides a comment box) asks, “Please use the space below to (1) react to the inappropriateness of the choices in the question above and (2) describe how you identify yourself based on common cultural-linguistic, ethnic, racial, tribal, national or other categories.”

The concept of race is clearly problematic, especially so on a survey intended to reach across the globe. One respondent noted that,

“White isn’t a useful term as it forces so many cultural identities into one term that was used by the british [sic] to colonize and remove the cultural identities of immigrant groups (especially in Australia) that they oppressed but pitched against the first nations people to help oppress them and create division.”

Indeed, quite bluntly, ‘race’ is a fairly modern concept which is classist and colonialist, created by those in power to justify slavery and other forms of social and economic marginalization. Now ossified into most of Western -and most certainly US- cultures- the ‘race’ concept has various context-dependent meanings and connotations.¹ Which box, for example, would a Bangladeshi ex-Adventist tick off in a standard Western-based survey using what are arguably very culture-bound categories? Our intent with our two questions on race is to poke at the artificiality of the concept and then encourage respondents to self-identify “based on common cultural-linguistic, ethnic, racial, tribal, national or other categories.”

To illustrate this complexity, here is a comment made by one respondent from Brazil,

“In Brazil, I am considered white due to my appearance and the way society treats me. When I was in the United States, I was considered Latino. My paternal grandmother is indigenous and my uncles have indigenous phenotypic traits. Also, like most Brazilians, my paternal and maternal families are mixed. Thus, I find it difficult to answer when the options are merely White/Non-White. I also considered that this research is being done in the US, where I am clearly not considered white.”

One size does not fit all
Our survey -and subsequent analysis of the data- does not pretend to be void of biases nor to be seen as a ‘one size fits all.’ The survey and this blog are intended to be our most honest effort to hear and report on the voices of ex-SDA souls who choose to take the survey. Our hope is our efforts will begin a conversation among many, even well beyond just communities of former Seventh-day Adventists, about the process of rejecting church membership.

To those of you who think this project (the survey, our analyses) could be better, we welcome your suggestions! Please do give your feedback in the comments, here in the blog; send us email (exsda@proton.me and/or arcaro@elon.edu); or respond in the space provided within the survey itself. We do not promise to implement every suggestion, but we do promise to take each one seriously. Your feedback is welcome and encouraged.

We thank you for your feedback and hope you will join us in the journey of discovery, growth, and new perspectives on faith, reason, and what ‘Eighth-day Freedom’ entails.

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^1. In a 2019 article titled “A Global Critical Race and Racism Framework: Racial Entanglements and Deep Malleable Whiteness“ sociologist Michelle Christian expands on the idea that “...the processes of deep and malleable global whiteness that has sustained global white supremacy.” She argues for a Global Critical Race and Racism (GCRR) framework which helps us understand how race and racism have emerged from and been sustained and deepened by colonialism and post-colonial entanglements.  She writes,

“…racism is always “transforming” (Goldberg 2009) and “on the move” (Wade 2015), embedded in historical moments, geographies, and other markers of difference while still being entrenched in a continuum of white dominance and racial subordination (Weiner 2012).

In essence, Christian’s GCRR framework provides support for the ‘white’ ‘non-white’ choice survey respondents were offered in our survey.