by Loren Seibold

It appeared he’d put much effort into the presentation, for he had a lengthy list. As he read off my offenses to the church board—ideas he adjudged heretical, fractured bits of sermons that when rearranged and decontextualized made me sound like either an infidel or a fool, minor omissions that loomed far larger than any of my accomplishments—I could feel his anger: a steam boiler without a check valve, the fire blazing. 

It is (and I am reluctant to say it) the one thing that causes me to doubt the validity of the Christian religion. Questions about doctrines don’t shake my faith, nor the Bible, its origins or teachings, nor eschatology; not the church structure and leadership, nor concerns about use of tithe or manner of worship, nor even that there are sinners in the church. What causes me doubt is that Christian congregations are too often fissiparous, discordant places, nursing people who are seemingly unaffected by the kindness and gentleness of Jesus in whose name they gather.

There are many lovely Christians, of course. And I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised that there are unlovely ones. I do, however, wonder if there is something about our particular faith culture that nurtures a set of people who can justify destroying their fellow believers and church leaders in an attempt to save their own conception of the faith. Oddly, we don’t seem to know what to do with these people, or what to say to them. Some congregations mistake their spleen for zeal and put them in positions of leadership. Because they claim to be the keepers of our distinctive beliefs, others regard them as a fount of evangelistic energy.

For what offenses have you seen a church member disfellowshipped? Moral problems. Family problems. Believing and teaching heresies, or openly disbelieving truths. But have you ever seen someone who was sexually moral and doctrinally correct disfellowshipped because he or she was unkind, critical, manipulative, and kept the church in a constant state of pain?

I didn’t think so. Neither have I. Being nice, it seems, is of less consequence than being right.

My antagonist at the church board meeting felt that way: “We’re always talking about being a happy church. But Jesus came to bring a sword, not peace. There’s no point in getting along if we’re allowing heresy to grow and neglecting the truth we’ve been called to.”

Why does the Seventh-day Adventist church have so many angry believers?

•••

From the start, our movement was not about rediscovering basic Christianity, but detailing innovations upon it. To this day the innovations outshine the basics. Too many Adventists, if asked what they believe, would first volunteer the Sabbath, healthful living, or the imminent return of Christ before mentioning grace, salvation, love for others, and simple kindness. As I heard one of the saints say, “I’m so sick of hearing about grace. It is just an excuse not to hold people accountable to our distinctive truths.”

I don’t think it was always this way. When you read about the Millerites, about the shouts of joy when coming home from the all-night prayer meetings, I have to believe that God’s grace flourished among them.

But disappointment changes people. After 1844 a few said, “Well, I guess we were wrong to set a time for Jesus’ return” and continued on in their Christian walk. Others, though, evolved an alternative diagnosis: we weren’t right enough. If we just try harder (add the Sabbath and the levitical food laws, get rid of our jewelry, hold evangelistic crusades) Jesus will return.

I remember a conversation with a child whose parents were divorcing. “Maybe it’s my fault,” she said. “Maybe if I had been more obedient…” It was, I knew, her mother’s constant harping, her father’s wandering eye. But she was reluctant to hear my reassurances. She wanted to believe it was her, because then she might be able to alter her behavior and bring her parents back together.

We Adventists were disappointed, and for a century and a half we’ve taken upon ourselves the responsibility for Jesus’ not showing up when we expected him. There must be some changes we can make, some work we can do, that will make him keep His promise. We have supposed it has to do with the purity of our beliefs, or our soul-winning ardor. But no matter how hard we’ve tried, we’ve apparently not yet met his expectations.

The ironic consequence has been a diminution of Christianity among us. We’ve stripped faith down not to Christian basics, but to Adventist distinctives. What we present in evangelistic meetings (and no matter what happens in our universities, it is the evangelists, not seminary academics, who are our church’s systematic theologians) is a sort of baroque improvisation on mere Christianity. Jesus and his love is fare for our children; in adult theology, we take the main body of Christian belief for granted, while we tailor fashions to decorate its corpse.

So it is by a spiritually superficial and often quite personalized set of criteria that some of us define orthodoxy. There isn’t space, or time, or need, to insist that Christians to be kind, like Jesus was. We assume, perhaps, that the already-Christian people we evangelize know all that. But whether they do or not, our own people too often sideline basic Christian goodness in favor of correct teachings and doctrinal fealty.

And so believing becomes more important than being. A pious mien more important than deep goodness. And rightness more important than relationships.

•••

I’m not sure organizational psychology is enough to explain it, though. We have to search right at the heart of how we as a church regard spiritual truth.

Some years ago a pastor friend told me this true story. A member of his church had been convicted of child sexual molestation. After his release he returned to church, and the leaders weren’t sure what to do about him. They finally assigned a full-time deacon to trail the resident pedophile any time he was in or around church.

You’d think this would tend to abash one. Not this man. The other passion of his life was the evil of guitars in worship. He would stand to his feet at the appearance of a guitar and denounce the musician, the pastor, the entire church for their sin. The relative weight of his own behavior over against guitar music never seemed to occur to him. Something horribly hurtful to another human being felt less consequential to him than a matter of personal taste.

Hypocrisy is an ad hominem accusation, disallowed in formal argument. But it is an inescapable judgment in religion, because religions claim that believing what they ask you to believe will change you for the better. That’s why skeptics chortle when Jimmy Swaggart is caught with a prostitute: it confirms their suspicion that Christianity is just talk.  And can you blame them? Don’t they have the right to expect Christian actions from those who claim to have the goods?

I admit this was a surprise to me when I was younger—when the most confident, conservative pastor in the conference, the pastor that was always on the pedestal at workers’ meeting, was expelled for a pattern of moral misbehavior. At the time I found it nearly incomprehensible: I had supposed, I think, that if someone claimed the theological high ground I could take his life as a pattern. When I saw the self-righteous falling, I was shocked, and at times, I’m ashamed to say (depending on how annoyingly self-righteous they had been) evilly schadenfreudian.

After some years in the church, I’m less surprised. For when you place the essential things last, and the details first—when you put up the trim without foundations and walls—strange things happen. It creates a sort of upside-down psychology that lets one dodge one’s own deep pain and fear, and instead externalize it as others’ lack of sound doctrine. One’s own indisciplines, doubts and degeneracies are a far too heavy burden to bear, and it is much easier to subscribe to a set of teachings (and boost your self-esteem by noting those who don’t) than to take on one’s whole screwed-up life.

•••

Which is why I’ve come to suspect that most of this anger isn’t really about theology at all. I posit a mechanism, facilitated by our church culture and the way we have traditionally related to our distinctive beliefs, that allows a person to transfer his pain within to anger at others.

I call it the “at least I” technique.

A man who’d had a horrible marriage, whose children hated him, and who admitted to dalliances, was one of his fellow believers’ harshest critics. “I may have had a bad family life,” he admitted. (An understatement: not a single child would talk to him). “But at least I stand strongly on the Adventist truths. Unlike the rest of you who compromise for the sake of being nice.” By his standards, he was exemplary, in the food he didn’t eat and damned others for eating, the jewelry he didn’t wear and criticized others for wearing, and his thoroughgoing obsession with true doctrine and the end time events that too few others seemed to share. But his children still hated him and had fled the church at the first opportunity, and very few others wanted to be around him, either.

Because I’m not a psychological professional, I am pushing through deep brush here. Still, even though I can’t support it but anecdotally, I’ve seen it too often to doubt it. Whether you call it transference, or projection, every experienced pastor will tell you that you can often make a correlation between a person’s anger at the church, pastor, or fellow-believers and difficulty in his personal life. The church (and by extension, the pastor) is almost tailor-made as the ideal target for transferred emotion.

Here’s a bit of advice I wish I’d known when I was young, and I now offer it to young pastors: if someone’s emotional reaction is out of proportion to their stated reason for being upset, then the stated problem isn’t the problem.  It may be a component of it, it may affect it, but it isn’t it. The man who says hateful things about you because of your interpretation of the nature of Christ is troubled by something quite other than incarnation theology. The woman who spits venom about who you let teach a Sabbath School class really isn’t drawing from a cistern of concern about church standards. Dig a little deeper, and you’ll find something more personal, something unspoken, perhaps shameful—for their emotions say much more about them than content of their complaints.

•••

I have a friend whose pre-Christian life was marked by bacchanalian excesses. Christianity gave him a reason to bring himself into subjection, and the power to achieve it. He is a better man now than he used to be. But he still seems frangible, and that’s probably why he clings to the spiritual attitudes that originally fastened him into place. He finds threatening the suggestion that one can trust one’s life to general spiritual principles rather than a precise list, and he wants to tie everyone down with the same bonds that he finds so protective. One gets the sense that unless his life is operated cautiously, the bearings will give way, the gears disintegrate.

In Homer’s Odyssey there’s a story of Odysseus having to sail past the sirens, mermaids who sang so beautifully that they lured sailors’ ships unto the rocks. Ulysses fills the ears of his crew with beeswax so they can’t hear the tempting voices, and has the crew bind him to the mast, and not release him until they are beyond the sirens’ voices.

Some well-meaning Christians find the world just that frightening. So they try to tie everyone to the mast with themselves, to stop the ears of the whole church. They don’t understand that some of us don’t have their fear of sailing onto the rocks. My friend’s rules keep him from his temptations; but his temptations aren’t mine. Not only do I not have his same weaknesses; I have the added advantage of understanding and having accepted God’s grace. While I try hard to please God in my beliefs and behaviors, I know that God forgives my sins, which is why I don’t need to be obsessed with marking out that line between right and wrong as finely as he does.

It seems to him, though, that he’d have an easier time of it if he could apply the prophylactics that protect him from spiritual and emotional breakdown to all of us. That he can’t is, I think, a major source of his anxiety.

•••

So it appears that we human beings are capable of shuffling our neuroses here and there around our lives, defining them in religious terms and applying them self-protectively as needed. The only antidote we have against such dysfunction are those central Christian values like grace, patience, kindness, peace, which I would argue are more important even than the Sabbath and the events preceding the Second Advent, more important than diet and dress and Ellen White, more important even than the whole Seventh-day Adventist church.

I asked a Sabbath School class once, “Which is it more important to avoid: pork or war?” I couldn’t get a direct answer. “Both” most said; “So, equally important?” I asked. No, a few conceded, war is sometimes necessary; but there’s never an excuse for eating pork.

Again, that confusion of the impossibly huge and consequential with the personal but manageable. Not eating pork is easy. Taking in the pain of the tens of thousands of innocent civilians killed in Iraq (think about babies with burned flesh and severed limbs) and opposing the quasi-patriotism that fuels that vile machinery is much harder. The answer “both” may be correct, but it won’t do for practical living. We can’t hold on to too many important things at once without dropping the heaviest of them.

A friend’s daughter was told to study for her algebra test after supper. She hates algebra. When mom came to check on her an hour later, the girl was cleaning her room. “Why aren’t you studying?” mom demanded. “You’re always telling me I should clean up my room,” the daughter replied. “And now you’re upset with me for doing it?”

When we don’t make good distinctions between things of value, we spend our time and energy on those that cause us the least pain. And so we shouldn’t be surprised that there are Christians who are angry fanatics about minor things, while thoughtless in the major—and that’s hardly an original observation.(1)

•••

In the 1763, Scottish writer Tobias Smollett set out on the traditional gentleman’s Grand Tour of the continent. At Bolounge he observed cloaked Catholic devotees, religious fanatics whose piety didn’t impress him. He journaled,

For my part, I never knew a fanatic who was not an hypocrite at bottom. Their pretensions to superior sanctity, and an absolute conquest over all the passions, which human reason was never yet able to subdue, introduce a habit of dissimulation, which, like all other habits, is confirmed by use, till at length they become adepts in the art and science of hypocrisy. Enthusiasm and hypocrisy are by no means incompatible. The wildest fanatics I ever knew were real sensualists in their way of living, and cunning cheats in their dealings with mankind.(2)

The old coot nailed it: a confusion about what is important leaves room for an astonishing self-righteousness, that not infrequently issues forth in an equally astonishing hypocrisy. But like an anorexic unable to see her body as starved, these seem not conscious of the dissonance between their words and their behavior.

For too many years, we’ve tacitly accepted that knowing Adventist truths excused us from living Christian ones. Ellen White (in one of those passages that don’t get quoted by The Always Right) observed it in her day: “Many take it for granted that they are Christians, simply because they subscribe to certain theological tenets. But they have not brought the truth into practical life. … Men may profess faith in the truth; but if it does not make them sincere, kind, patient, forbearing, heavenly-minded, it is a curse to its possessors, and through their influence it is a curse to the world.”(3)

It is a startling claim, that truth can become a curse. Yet in the phalanx of the self-righteous, that is precisely what has happened. Our denomination is home to some of some of the most knowledgeable Adventists and shallowest Christians in all of Christendom. Which means this is work we must do, and quickly. Because prophecy notwithstanding, North American Seventh-day Adventism is on its way to becoming a footnote in Christian history.

If we are ever again going to be worth a damn as a church, if ever the best of our message has a chance of reaching all the people we hope to reach, we will have to return to the teachings and the behavior of Jesus, and especially this one: “They shall know you are my disciples, by your love for one another.”

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1 “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices—mint, dill and cummin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former.” Matthew 23:23

2 Tobias Smollett, Travels Through France and Italy, about 1760

3 The Desire of Ages, pp.309-310