“Adventism only seems to reward certain people–affluent white cis men and those they deem worthy to be elevated.”

-Alyssa

Alyssa’s story

The phrase ‘qualitative research data’ sounds impersonal and void of humanity, but what we as researchers know and respect is that each word shared is coming from a real person with a voice, a face, and a heart. As I read through the copious and generous comments written by each respondent I am humbled by the openness, awed by the passion, and saddened by some of the heartbreaking comments.

After taking our survey one respondent felt a need to speak more about her experience with the Adventist church and sent us a direct email. Alyssa’s story is her’s to share and, with her permission and encouragement, we invite you to read her words, many of which -both in tone and content- are repeated by her fellow respondents. Please note that the words in bold are my emphasis, not hers.

Alyssa starts,

Hello! 

After taking the survey yesterday, a lot of memories resurfaced and I realized my survey responses weren’t very concrete, and the more I thought about it the more I realized I left out a lot! 
 
For some context, I was born into a multi-generation Adventist family but didn’t start going to an Adventist school until 4th grade. I think I’m extremely lucky because my parents were just going through the motions of being Adventist, and really carved out a life that pushed against the boundaries as much as they could while still in the system. But even having liberal, open-minded and supportive parents, the schooling system was strong enough to really cause some damage. 
 
I don’t want to dump this on you and your research team, but after reading the Eighth-Day Freedom blog and seeing some other people’s comments and experiences, I felt like I should share some specific examples of things that, in hindsight, are a form of abuse or just really disappointing experiences in general:

• • My parents chose to put us into an Adventist school because academically, it was the best school in the area. I found out in college that kids who’d gone to other Adventist schools really struggled with a number of subjects, which led me to believe that my school had been a bit of an outlier. That being said, the way religion was taught at this school was deeply problematic. 
  • In 1992, when I was 9 and in the 4th grade, my first year at an Adventist school, we were told that Adventists are a persecuted religion and at any moment we’d have to run and hide in the mountains from the government, taking only what we could carry like the Waldensians of Switzerland. This gave me nightmares for years. 
  • When I was in the 7th grade, our religion textbook said that we’d be rounded up in internment camps and just before we’d be gunned down by machine guns, Jesus would come. More psychological trauma and fear. Our teachers wouldn’t directly teach us this but we were assigned to read it any way. 
  • We  were also taught that if we were faithful to Adventism, we’d be saved from death (but not persecution) because we were the chosen people. Jews were not considered chosen any more because they’d broken their covenant with God (according to more than one teacher). 
  • In Jr High we were strongly influenced into signing abstinence pledges 
  • Even though Adventists don’t believe in the rapture, we had a high school religion teacher who was from the Philippines who quasi-believed in it and showed us the “Left Behind” movies at the end of the school year. 
  • Colleges require worship, either once a week or multiple times a week. If you don’t do it, you’re eventually expelled (you could only miss a certain amount). There was no trust at all about allowing people to be adults or grow their faith in their own way. College became a chance to grow intellectually in some areas but not in others. 
  • At one point in college, I was told that yoga is bad because it’s a religious practice that invites the devil in. I remember realizing at that point that Adventists from all over the world are wildly different and while I grew up in a pretty ‘liberal’ area (we went out to eat on Sabbath and few people thought that was bad), there are a lot of Adventists that sequester themselves into highly controlled communities and cast a lot of judgement on others. College was definitely an eye opener on just how diverse Adventism is and between these experiences and how my home church behaved toward my family, just how toxic it really was for me. 
  • The Adventist church changed a lot in my teens and twenties, so much so that my grandparents commented on it before their deaths in the late aughts. The pivot toward evangelical services and less “old-school” community-based church services was pretty noticeable, and now it seems deeply right-wing in ways I don’t think my grandparents would recognize.
  • The overt and covert sexism in Adventist culture is something I try to forget. It was constant and relentless, and between that and seeing how sexist secular culture was like in the aughts, there was just no way to win as a young woman growing up. The older I got the more evident it was that my value as a woman was tied to whether or not men found me desirable enough to date or marry, and being single well into my 20s, it was very clear that I’d never find an Adventist guy worth being with, nor would I want to be with one. My friends and I talk a lot about how generations of girls and women have been so damaged by being linked to a conservative religious group. It’s heartbreaking.
  • Adventism only seems to reward certain people–affluent white cis men and those they deem worthy to be elevated. They’re the ones that matter the most to the structure of Adventism, the church, and to the community. It’s very clear that everyone else matters less and less the further away you get from those qualifications.  If you don’t fit whatever desirable mold is in place in that moment, then it can’t be much of a surprise when people drift away.
  • Nothing about the Adventist education system prepares a person for life outside of Adventism. I mentioned this in the survey in the last question that professionally, it was a huge challenge to not be within the Adventist system, but it was a challenge socially as well. I remember feeling almost stunted when I left college because so many people I met at my first couple of jobs just had way more life experience than I’d had–not just sex and drinking, but they read different books, felt at ease with various people of different backgrounds, and engaged with the world so easily. I eventually caught up but it took time and it was a pretty isolating experience. 
  • With the exception of some academic pockets, it felt like there was almost a systemic lack of curiosity about the world and the rest of society. I commented in the survey about political apathy and apolitical stances, but it was alarming how many American Adventists did not care about the world around them–about wars being fought in their name, about political decisions made on their behalf, or about America’s place in the world in general. This was frustrating for my family since so many people we socialized with just cared about the Adventist community around them and Adventist politics. Because we didn’t really feel the same way, I know people thought we were smug. This wasn’t as true for the European Adventists I’d met, but my experience going to an Adventist college in the UK was seeing how much less of a bubble Western European Adventists live in. 
  • None of my immediate family is Adventist and hasn’t been for ~20 years. We’re all a lot happier, though we carry our own scars. 
  • I think being an older millennial meant that I missed a lot of potential validation online, because social media didn’t really exist until I was in college, and it seems like a lot of dissatisfied people eventually found support in online spaces, which is really commendable.

I still have friends I made in college, and my best friend since the 7th grade. None of us are Adventist any more. One still goes to church from time to time but she married an atheist. . We all feel like we missed out on something, or that at the bare minimum we had a really steep learning curve in our 20s, figuring out how the world outside Adventism works. My few friends who are still Adventist have become “Christmas card friends”. 
 
My husband is atheist and grew up Episcopal. His church experience was limited to Sundays and was mostly enjoyable but he never felt that God was real. He jokes that I grew up in a cult and is always amazed by the “super weird and totally bonkers” Adventist beliefs that aren’t found in mainline Christianity. I went to an Episcopal church for a while, and even a United Church of Christ to see what it was like–both of which had women as their spiritual leaders! It was a peaceful experience, but it ended up making me feel a little sad because they seemed so normal. Ultimately, I think I’d burned out a part of myself on religion. Those other services were enjoyable but I was afraid to get involved or in too deep because of what I experienced within an all encompassing Adventist religion that was so corrosive. 
 
Lastly, the sheer fact that when Adventists speak about other people they say “non-Adventists” is a huge red flag! It’s Adventists, and non-Adventists. I’ve met a lot of people who were just

ifiably very salty about this–that Adventists lump other Christians or monotheistic faiths in with other religions and atheists. The vocabulary of Adventism is designed to separate its people from the world, just as its institutions are designed to self-sustain a community under the pretense that it’s above everything and everyone else. 

 

I think one memory from college helps back up this feeling of Adventism not being a good fit: In early 2006 I worked for the school paper at one of the colleges I attended, and I interviewed a couple administrators on the future of Adventism. I remember there had been a lot of discussion around that time about The Church numbers and millennial church attendance, but one administrator I spoke with wasn’t concerned. He explained that there was always a drop in attendance after young people graduate college, but then they would start having kids and they always came back. This talking point has stayed with me because it felt like there was asense of inevitability that The Church doesn’t really have to change or evolve because once we start having children, we’ll want to replicate the lives we had growing up (there was no addressing people who don’t have children), and Adventism offers consistency in a changing and uncertain world. I imagine for some people that sounds wonderful, but for people hurt by the actions of those within the church, or by The Church doctrine and structure itself, it’s hard to justify staying when it all feels increasingly at odds with how people really live and interact with the world. 

I think this is why I don’t really let myself think about Adventism too much–it deprived me of a lot of peace, joy, and opportunity and reflecting on it doesn’t lead to anything productive–at least it didn’t before taking this survey.

If you feel that using any of this information would be helpful, please do so. I apologize for dumping this on you and appreciate you taking the time to read it all! lease let me know if there is anything else I can do to help with your efforts. 
 
Best Regards,
Alyssa 

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Thank you and an invitation
What Alyssa shared is a deeply personal story and I thank her for her generosity and candor. What I know from her and others is that taking the survey can spur many memories which can be both painful and difficult to wrestle with. Sharing these memories can be cathartic even if (or especially if?) just sharing them anonymously on a survey.

I opened this post with a statement from Alyssa which particularly struck me, “Adventism only seems to reward certain people–affluent white cis men and those they deem worthy to be elevated.” I have devoted much of my time in the last few years developing and talking about the concept of critical Hydra theory (CHT)¹, and what Alyssa points out in her statement affirms the basic premise of this model, namely that all of the privileging forces emanate from one source -toxic othering. Although this specific comment from Alyssa only references class, race, and hetero/cis normativity, the other heads of the Hydra can also be inferred. I invite you to learn about CHT and how religion has been used ever since the rise of mono and poly theisms a few thousand years ago to normalize the marginalization of ‘others’ including women, the poor, and POC, among other ascribed statuses. If you care to jump down the CHT rabbit hole click here.

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¹Critical Hydra theory is inspired by and in many ways based on Critical Race Theory (CRT).

“As a social and as a personal force, religion has become a dependent variable. It does not originate; it reacts. It does not denounce; it adapts. It does not set forth new models of conduct and sensibility; it imitates. Its rhetoric is without deep appeal; the worship it organizes is without piety. It has become less a revitalization of the spirit in permanent tension with the world than a respectable distraction from the sourness of life.”
-sociologist C. Wright Mills

Respondent 666

The Mark of the Beast
As we neared 600 respondents I joked with my collaborators that I wanted to feature the six hundred and sixty-sixth person who chose to complete our survey. This person of course would have no way of knowing they were the 666th respondent and there is absolutely no scientific significance to this number. That said, there are many layers of cultural richness around the Mark of the Beast and the interpretation of ‘666’, to be sure, and my thought was perhaps we could explore one of those layers as part of our exploration of the data.

As sociologist C. Wright Mills told us long ago, a good social scientist must “wallow around in the data” and so I have been spending a good deal of time reading through all the comments generously offered by our respondents.

Until today I had forgotten about the idea of a ‘666’ post but when I happened upon this respondent I was struck by a coincidence.

Q28 asked, “To what extent do you hold anger or resentment toward the Seventh-day Adventist Church?”

Of the close-ended response options they¹ chose “Very angry and resentful.” In the comment box they wrote,

“I’ve seen so much BS and injustice working for the church. It is just toxic at all levels. I’ve seen such unChristian behavior towards pastors. The lawyers run things more than theology. Historians know prophetic interpretation (such as 666) is totally bogus, but the same old evangelistic series are preached, using the same old texts. Adventism is schizo.”

The next question, Q29 asks “Do you or have you struggled with any of the following, whether as an Adventist or ex-Adventist? (Check all that apply.)” This respondent selected the following from the options:

Acting out sexually: promiscuity, sexual infidelity, high-risk sexual encounters, excessive consumption of pornography, etc.
Depression, anxiety
PTSD, C-PTSD, religious trauma

Yes, you read that right. Quite randomly our 666th respondent mentions the teaching of the mark of the beast, ‘666’ and then indicates struggling with “PTSD, C-PTSD, religious trauma.”

Digging deeper
Q33 asks “To what extent did your experience as an Adventist impact your political views?” Number 666 chose “A great deal” and in the comment box argues that Adventism has drifted to the right, dramatically so.

“The Adventism I learned from “the pioneers” was very progressive and social-justice oriented. But white           Adventism today has swallowed evangelicalism and rightwing political views. Trumpism as a disease has infected white Adventism.”

Digging deeper into in response to Q34 “Have your political views changed since leaving Adventism?” our respondent chose, “Yes, I have become a great deal more liberal” and explains,

         “This started while within, because of the social justice witness of early Adventism and the Black church.”

In the next question, Q35, we asked “How do you think Adventist teachings about end-times impact most believers’ opinions related to the climate crisis and other environmental concerns?” Number 666 chose “End-times teachings generate greater concern regarding the climate crisis and other environmental concerns.” However they qualified their response noting that,

“The official statements of the church express concern about climate change and the environment. But Trumpist Adventism doesn’t care.”

We see the same theme continue in response to Q36 (“How do you think Adventist teachings about end-times impact most believers’ opinions related to social justice issues like racism and women’s rights?”) where this respondent agrees that “End-times teachings generate greater concern related to social justice issues like racism and women’s rights.” They argue that,

“Again, this is true for SDA pioneers and Black Adventists and some institutional Adventists. But white Adventist churches or state conferences are thoroughly Trumpist.”

Having read countless other responses from our survey I can confidently observe the above responses and comments are by no means outliers; they seem in line with the majority perspective represented by our now 700+ sample.

Given the above responses from this individual, their choice of “strongly agree” on Q40 “In my opinion, the Seventh-day Adventist church is cult” was no surprise. Then went on to comment,

“The institution itself is increasingly cultic, and the right wing fringes have long been there.”

For further discussion of the ‘cult’ question you can read this previously published post.

Still learning from Mills
That more fundamentalist religions in recent years have embraced a more conservative political stance is well documented by many researches. This most recent rapid drift has many sources. ‘The Beast,’ as anyone educated in Adventist schools should know, is the institution of the Papacy. But looking at the responses from respondent number 666, it is tempting to find an analogue in the rise in modern Christian white nationalism and Trumpism specifically. Of course the Church does not does not officially endorse Trumpism. But according to at least one former Seventh-Day Adventist, the movement is already ‘infected.’

The quote from Mills above was written seventy years ago and seems to have anticipated the shape of the religious right today in the United Sates. “It [religion] does not denounce; it adapts” he wrote. For moments in the last century what was called ‘liberation theology’ seemed to contradict Mills’ prophecy, but in the US cooptation of religion as a political force has borne out his words. Mills teaches us always to be critical and to never shy from speaking truth to power. Many of our respondents have asked that we use the results of our survey do just that, advocating for a reversal of a perhaps seemingly toxic drift within Adventism in the last decade or so. Or, as respondent 666 observed, “Adventism is schizo.”

Please contact me if you have any thoughts, comments, or questions. Know any ex-SDA who have not taken the survey yet? Here’s the link.

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¹In order to maintain utmost confidentiality I have used the pronoun ‘they’ throughout.

‘Social believers’ among our survey respondents

Social believers
While researching and writing about atheists a decade ago, I began using the term ‘social believer.’  Those people in the pew next to you who don’t believe in god but come to church only conform to family and community expectations? Those are social believers. In the vernacular of ex-Adventists, these individuals are commonly referred to as PIMO or ‘physically in, mentally out.’

It was sociologist Judith Butler that popularized the idea that gender is performative. I will posit that perhaps, for example, sexuality is as well. There are many social heterosexuals among us who live a heterosexual lifestyle, getting married and even having children, all while doing so only for social reasons, in their authentic self being attracted to those of the same sex. Sexuality is performative.

So, is religiosity performative and if so to what extent? Here are the current results to the first question on our survey, “What is your current relationship to Seventh-day Adventism?”

As you can see from our data above, nearly 12% of our respondents could be described as PIMO or social believers. Though the wording our response options is not precise, I will argue that we are not far off the mark in helping to capture an important phenomena. I feel confident in saying that the number of Seventh-day believers is far less than the number of people in the pew and those on the official records. How far less is impossible to say given the  impossibility of looking into people’s hearts and minds.

Mark 9:24
How many of any religion in their hearts actually believe in the teachings of their religion or in their god … or any god? Famously in Mark 9:24 we read, “I believe; help my unbelief.”  Social science researchers -and pastors, spouses, and friends- can ask questions about belief, but can they ever be confident the response offered is true? It is easy and convenient to answer the question, “Do you believe in the teachings of the church/god?” in the affirmative, but how often is it a lie? Further complicating the issue we must also raise the question as to whether a person can lie even to themselves. I know I have.

So, social believers are many, to be sure, but how many and to what degree are open questions. If religiosity can at times be performative, how can we ever know the extent to which social believers are in our temples, churches, mosques, and other houses of worship? Our data only provide an invitation to consider these questions more deeply.

Please contact me if you have any thoughts, comments, or questions. Know any ex-SDA who have not taken the survey yet? Here’s the link.

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Afterword
Take a minute and Google “fake Christian memes”.  I’ll wait.

How many “Christian nationalists” seem so … un-Christian? What about those in the public eye, particularly politicians, who claim to be Christian -holding up a Bible in a photo op- who act in a way which would be abhorrent to Christ?

How many of these ‘fake Christians’ can we also define as social believers (or vice versa)? Methinks the lofty rhetoric of religion is too easily coopted and abused by those who seek to abuse it.

 

What do our survey respondents look like so far?

Thank you
First, a big thank you to those 600+ of you who have taken the time to complete our survey. Yes, so far a remarkable 100% of those who started the survey completed it, spending an average of 35 minutes offering their thoughts and words. That everyone who has started the survey forged on to the very end is virtually unheard of in online survey research, especially with a long survey like ours which had 62 questions and encouraged written comments on most. Again, thank you to all the respondents for engaging our questions.

So, what do our survey respondents look like? They are dedicated, persevering, patient, and, based on the copious written responses, both thoughtful and generous.

As a research team we remain committed to hearing and reporting on your voices to the best of our ability.

A snapshot
Let’s take a deeper glance at what our survey respondents look like.

Mostly female
Our respondents are mostly female (55%), but with a good number of males (40%). Over 5% of the respondents checked ‘Non-binary’ or ‘Other’ indicating good gender identification diversity.

Well educated
Our respondents appear to be well educated, with nearly 15% with a PhD or post graduate work. The level of education is apparent in not just the volume of comments we have received but more so in the overall clarity and thoughtfulness of what has been written.

 

Mostly millennial
Our largest group are Millennials with 39%, but the older folk are well represented with Generation X at 27% and Boomers (like myself!) at 20%. The younger generations are lagging behind, with only 9% from Generation Z and none (as could be expected) from Generation Alpha.

 

From all over, but mostly the US
We asked, “In what region of the world do you currently live?” A larger majority of our respondents -74%- are from the USA and another 12% from Canada. The remainder of the respondents live in Oceania (6%), Europe (5%), with the remainder spread across the globe. Given evidence from the traffic on our blog site I think it safe to assume that the vast majority of those from Oceania hale from Australia.

Mostly white
In a previous post titled “One size does not fit all” I explain our unique approach to the question of race. To this point in the data collection process our respondents are indeed overwhelmingly white. Perhaps as word of this survey gets out to different geographic and demographic groups we will see greater diversity. The responses to the question following “Which best describes you?” are fascinating thus far. This question asked, “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.” I’ll report more on these responses in a future post.

 

Traffic on the blog
As of this writing we have had a modest number of people visit our blog (2,693) reading our updates and comment. Visitors are mostly from the USA but there have been site visits from 34 different countries and from every continent except for Antarctica.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

All for now
That’s all for just now. I will be updating this post in the near future. In the meantime please feel free to reach out if have any comments or questions. I can be reached at arcaro@elon.edu.

Again, thank you to everyone who has become a part of this project.

“Thanks for doing this survey for us ex SDA. It is a rarity, never done anything like it, so specific, before.”

-male, Millennial, Ex-Adventist

Some preliminary data

‘Data teasers’
We opened the survey nearly two weeks ago on March 1 and are both pleased and thankful that so many ex-SDA folks have responded. Our research team was recently interviewed by Santiago, host of Haystacks & Hell, and we had the opportunity to provide some deep background behind our survey. We are happy that our modest efforts have generated some interest among ex-SDA people and that the survey is providing a cathartic experience for many.

Below are some ‘data teasers’, very preliminary results and comment on same. Enjoy!

Remarkable response rate
As of this writing (3-12-23) we have 336 responses to our survey with a remarkably high 100% completion rate. That means every person who started the survey made it all the way to the end, pressing the final ‘submit’ button. This rarely happens in online survey research and in this case likely means a highly motivated population of respondents. This interpretation is supported by many responses to Q62 “Please add any final thoughts about the survey, any of the questions we asked, or anything you think may be useful to our research team.” One respondent commented,

“Thank you for doing this work, sorry for the trauma dump but I think the data is worth sharing cos I know I’m not alone.”

The mean time spent taking the survey is almost 34 minutes and an unusually high number of respondents are making comments, sometimes 100 words or more. Every possible indicator tells us that those responding to the survey are deeply engaged and committed to sharing their stories.

So, who’s responding to this survey? Question 1 asks, “What is your current relationship to Seventh-day Adventism?” The results thus far indicate the vast majority (88%) are indeed ‘Ex-Adventists” with a small but significant minority being physically in but mentally out (PIMO), i.e., “Non-Believing Adventists.” Over 91% of our respondents report they were born into Adventism.

Two word clouds
A word cloud is a visual representation of text data and the importance of each is shown with font size. Words that appear more often in the collective responses are bigger and help identify the focus of written material.

Q51 asked, “On balance, how do you now view your decision to leave Adventism? Good decision? Poor decision? Made at the right time?” Here is a representation of the 309 narrative responses thus far.

Q52 asked, “If you were to advise someone struggling with the decision to leave Adventism, what would you say to them?”  Collectively, 297 respondents said this.

 

Having read through all of the comments that went into both word clouds above I can report that the two messages, “good decision’ and ‘leave’ were amply and repeatedly stressed by the respondents. Here are three examples from Q51.

“It was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made in my life and wish I had made it sooner.”

“Great decision. I feel bad for people my age who still believe in it and are trapped in Adventism. I even wonder how in the world they still believe this baloney, with all the information out there on the Internet.”

“Excellent. The sooner the better.”

And now three examples from Q52.

“That leaving would give them a sense of overall peace and advise them to find other friends/support outside of the church.”

“That if they want to leave DON’T stay there just to please parents or by fear of family rejection. That’s being a hostage. Inner damage has begun at that point, and it is better to reduce the impact as soon as possible by leaving that place.”

“Leave. Run like the wind.”

Parsing through the data
The data so far provides a fairly clear picture of ex-SDA who have responded to the survey, and our job of parsing through all of the data has yet to begin; there is much to report. We will be keeping the survey open for a while but will not be able to avoid the temptation of sharing more ‘data teasers’ in the coming days and weeks. If there is a question that you would like to see the results for please let me know in the comments and I will respond with a post describing those data. In the meantime, please let us know if you have any feedback. I can be reached here or you can use this (ExSDA@proton.me) email as well.

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