The Great Adventist Mythology
by Loren Seibold | 26 July 2023 |
Carmen and I occasionally reminisce about the first church where I served as a pastoral intern. We had just graduated from Walla Walla College, and in the space of a few weeks found ourselves married and dropped into a tiny, mostly elderly church in a small town on the North Dakota-Saskatchewan border. Because it was such a sudden and startling change in our lives, it has provided us with some vivid memories.
I remember early in our tenure hearing in a Sabbath School discussion in that church the curious assertion that before Jesus comes, Billy Graham would accept the Sabbath and join the Seventh-day Adventist church. It wasn’t said just once, or in passing; it came up repeatedly. I don’t know the origin of this notion (I suspect Emilio Knechtle, who was acquainted with Graham and was also the source of the claim that Ellen White’s books were prominently displayed on Graham’s bookshelf), but it was stated as a fact, and never questioned: people simply nodded as though it were something every Adventist knew.
We Seventh-day Adventists generate an active and evolving mythology. Generally, these stories come into being in order to support certain of our beliefs. Billy Graham’s conversion is a fairly harmless example: if, indeed, a church that claims 22 million members is to become the catalyst to polarize the entire eight-billion-and-growing world population, we’d covet a respected Christian figure throwing his weight to our side.
Not all our myths are so benign. A story that haunted me for years was told by a General Conference official named Ben Liebelt, who spoke in my home church when I was a child. Someone who knew someone who knew someone who knew someone the speaker knew, had toured a newly completed Roman Catholic edifice in a major city. While on the tour, he dropped away from the group to look for a rest room and accidentally opened a door, behind which he was astonished to find a vast weapons cache and an actual torture chamber. Someone caught him there—a priest who knew he was a Seventh-day Adventist pastor, as I remember the story. “But why is all this in your church?” the pastor gasped. “This,” the priest said as he guided the man out of the forbidden area, “will eventually be used on you.”
My wife heard the same story half a continent away, except in that version the man was a Seventh-day Adventist furnace repairman who had to enter a sealed part of a convent.
This anecdote, which has all the marks of myth including an untraceable provenance, seemed to say that small as we are, we are threatening to the largest Christian body on earth, which makes us very consequential indeed, and therefore all our claims—and fears—must be true.
Infiltrators
When we Adventists get hold of a salacious story, we’ve been not especially discerning about sources. The same congregation I mentioned above would gather after Sabbath lunch to listen to cassette tapes by John Todd, who was popular at the time for claiming that Satanic powers had taken over most Christian denominations, that he had been John F. Kennedy’s personal warlock; and that the Illuminati (of which he claimed to have been a member) was the driving force behind Satanic world domination. (I’ve been told that Todd was even invited to speak to Adventist church groups, though I’ve not been able to confirm it.)
“Father” Alberto Rivera is another storyteller who was pressed into service for Adventist eschatology. Rivera was thoroughly debunked as a fraud, but he’s still cited here and there to prove the unfathomable wickedness and unimaginable power of the Roman Catholic church.
One of the great Adventist myths of my lifetime was that Noah’s ark and the ark of the covenant had been found. Ron Wyatt, an Adventist nurse anesthetist, raised up a popular ministry based on his supposed discovery of both Noah’s ark and the ark of the covenant. At one point he claimed to have scraped a bit of Jesus’ dried blood from the ark of the covenant, which he’d been the first to discover in a secret cave under Golgotha. When the DNA was genetically analyzed it showed only half the genetic material of normal human DNA!
Why the Israeli authorities, who monitor every shekel and shard dug up anywhere in the country, would have let an amateur dig under a major tourist site has never been satisfactorily explained.
Many of the old myths, such as Jesuits infiltrating the church, continue to crop up. But the myth-making isn’t over; we’re constantly adding new ones. A myth that was propagated by evangelist David Gates was that Covid vaccinations contained tiny electronic circuits that would be activated by 5G signals so that the government (or Jesuits, or, well… someone—it isn’t clear who) would make us all into automatons, like Stepford wives.
Science can do some astonishing things, but there’s no evidence that’s one of them.
But why?
Besides the question of what motivates people to make up such stories, the bigger issue is why so many of us are willing to believe them, and why we’ll neglect central Biblical concerns like godly behavior, peaceful relationships, truthfulness, and the security of salvation in order to follow what can only be classified as “cunningly devised fables.”
Fables, because of course something always interferes with their confirmation. The authorities prevent a return to that mountain in Turkey. The pictures of the ark of the covenant are blurred, probably by Divine power. The vaccine makers have cleverly disguised their microcircuits. Of course the Roman Catholics, hard-core liars that they are, deny knowing Alberto Rivera. And would you actually expect them to confirm that they have thumbscrews, machine guns, and torture racks in their church basements? They’re way too smart for that.
Yet it is this lack of evidence that some find particularly convincing. In an online article in Adventist Today (among documents lost from our archive, unfortunately, due to a server error some years back), I challenged Colin Standish’s claim that there were Jesuit infiltrators in the Seventh-day Adventist church, and asked him to name them. To my surprise, Dr. Standish replied on another website. He wrote, “If I speculated who they are, I would probably be in error. They would be too clever for me to identify them.”
It seems that the impossibility of proof is, in fact, proof.
Of Alberto Rivera people said, “The Catholic church was behind discrediting him. That’s how we know he was telling the truth!” Though it was known that John Todd had been in prison for sex crimes—he died in a mental hospital after serving years in a South Carolina prison for rape—the cassette-listeners insisted that Satan was just orchestrating a conspiracy against Todd because he was bringing hidden things to light.
Though these stories are meant to reinforce our beliefs, they’re drawn from the same vat of bilge as UFO abductions, haunted mansions, and therapeutic magnetic bracelets. Another recent contribution to the Adventist mythology—that the antediluvian world was peopled with advanced genetic scientists who were able to do with DNA what can’t yet be done today—is not entirely original either: Erich von Däniken of Chariots of the Gods? fame collected archaeological data—most, as it turned out, spurious—to show that early peoples possessed advanced scientific knowledge. Just edit out von Däniken’s conclusion that it came from space aliens.
These tales have almost nothing to do with the Bible. They are introduced to bolster certain interpretations that float about at the tattered edges of our faith, to make the stories people already believe more vivid. But they are decidedly extra-biblical, with far less to recommend them than the Bible as it stands. They come with no real evidence, their origins are suspect if known at all, and they are not worth even a smidgen of a believer’s attention.
This has arisen, I will remind you, not with the so-called progressive Adventists, those who get accused of lacking faith because they don’t hold to perfect consistency between a word-literal interpretation of inspired sources and the real world. No, our ever-evolving mythology betrays a crisis of faith among a set of conservative Seventh-day Adventists who appear willing to mix into the narrative almost anything that will allow them to interpret the Bible and Ellen White on their own terms. While all of us believe that the Bible speaks truth, these latch on to incredible stories in an effort to make it more exciting to them, revealing thereby their own inability to believe the Bible’s truths unless they’re framed in make-believe.
It never occurs to them that such myths are often forgotten in a very few years, or proven untrue with the passage of time, and replaced by entirely new—even contradictory—myths.
Itching ears
Carl Sagan described von Däniken’s books as “object lessons in sloppy thinking,” which can equally be said of the Adventist myths I’ve mentioned here. But in fact, some Adventists adore sloppy thinking, and cling to it. After all, we were bottle-fed on the thrilling stories of The Great Controversy, and never weaned off them. Many of us apparently concluded that salvation by faith in a good and loving God wasn’t sufficient to soothe our anxious hearts. We needed something more exciting. No wonder we readily believe in Jesuit infiltrators, and that a nurse anesthetist discovered the ark of the covenant!
Sagan called such myths a sign of “the credulousness and despair of our times.” Few are as credulous and despairing as Seventh-day Adventists. How long have we waited for Jesus to return? How long have we been the disappointed remnant? How many “prophecies” about Sunday laws and persecution have gone unfulfilled? Perhaps this—credulousness and despair—is what Paul was referencing when he said,
“For the time will come when men will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear” (2 Timothy 4:3).
It is too late for Billy Graham to become a Seventh-day Adventist; he died in 2018. I doubt, though, his not joining our denomination will keep him out of the kingdom. If that were the criterion for salvation, I’m not sure I’d want to be there myself.
Loren Seibold is a retired pastor, and the Executive Editor of Adventist Today.
