What Progressive Adventists Can Learn from the 2024 Presidential Election

by Jim Walters  |  15 November 2024  | 

The elephant and its rider is psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s graphic illustration of how one’s inner, visceral life trumps one’s intellect in either/or situations. In his The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, he portrays the powerful elephant as finally determining the direction she desires. Whereas the signal-calling rider thinks he is the final authority, he’s no match—all things considered—for the elephant. 

The United States electorate on November 5 followed its visceral instincts and voted in Donald Trump. Trump won an increased number of people of color and women, but especially the young male vote. ”He talks our language—like we guys talk to each other,” commented one young man in a recent TV interview. Trump gave a three-hour interview to Joe Rogan, whose podcast attracts 14+ million Spotify followers and 17+ million YouTube subscribers, all disproportionately young males. 

Affect vs. reason

Trump may sometimes be a nasty name-caller and make over-the-top claims, but to tens of millions of Americans he comes across as an authentic guy who just lets it all hang out. That attracts the less critical working-class guys who were put off in high school by smart, college-bound girls who dominated with good grades, and who are more likely bound for college, graduate school, and higher salaries.

Kamala Harris appealed to the head by marshaling powerful arguments against Trump:

• The former president whose long-term chief of staff now calls him a fascist.
• The instigator of the lie that Haitian immigrants were eating neighbors’ dogs and cats.
• The proud appointee whose Supreme Court justices overturned Roe v. Wade.
• The continuing perpetuator of the lie that he won the 2020 presidential election.
• The instigator of the January 6, 2021, invasion of the House of Representatives.
• The criminal convicted of 34 felonies.
• The convicted rapist who promised to “help women whether they want it or not.”

But when 150+ million Americans completed their ballots, enough voted their gut instincts that Trump was returned to the Oval Office, despite the reasoned people at the liberal New York Times and the conservative National Review constantly editorializing against him. 

This recent presidential election demonstrates that once again, affect outflanks reason. That’s the way of politics—and it’s also true of how most believers practice religion. The majority of Adventists, like most Americans, opt for their immediate and personal needs over more theoretical/moral issues.

Adventist identity

I was reminded of this proposition on October 26 when Loma Linda University (LLU) hosted David Trim, General Conference archivist, who was one of several who presented lectures in a series entitled “Narrative, Doctrine, and Practice: Reflections on Adventist Identity in History and Theology.” Trim’s lecture, which had originally been given at a conference he’d organized at Andrews University two years earlier, was called “What Have We Learned About Adventist Identity?”

In grappling with the issue of Adventist identity, Trim focused on doctrines. He noted, though, several “non-negotiables”: the state of the dead, Sabbath, sanctuary, Jesus Christ, and The Great Controversy. 

However, in Trim’s presentation, The Great Controversy received disproportionate discussion and was upheld most highly, with such descriptors as: 

• Metanarrative
• Foundational story
• “Even more than a theological master key”
• “A set of interconnected stories”
• Grand unifying theme
• Theological center
• “Sine qua non of Adventist identify”

Respondent Sigve Tonstad, Loma Linda University religion research professor, noted that the conference was meant to be focused not just on the church’s theology, but also its history. The presenters had 19th-century Adventist history in mind, asserted Tonstad, and they gave “succinct and unequivocal” answers. Said Tonstad, it seemed like “The history that matters most, the history that is formative, defining, and all but definitive, is 19th-century history, the days of the pioneers.” The presentations by two leading scholars, Adventist Seminary dean Jiri Moskala and Old Testament professor Richard Davidson, “seem unaffected by the twentieth century, including paradigm-transforming insights in biblical studies.”

Respondent David Larson, LLU professor of religion emeritus, like Tonstad, was focused on the present-day. Larson especially spotlighted the idea of metanarrative, and more precisely The Great Controversy. He contended that metanarratives and scientific paradigms are inherited, and should be modified as needed. And he added: “When they fall apart… we create new ones.”

Larson said that The Great Controversy metanarrative is couched in figurative language; the language is “partial and imprecise.” Larson, who studied the 2022 papers, observed that the “doctrine of the whole person” was not mentioned once at the Andrews conference. However, Adventism’s holism emphasis is highly relevant today:

• It addresses more contemporary concerns than what day to attend church and when Christ returns.
• It has widespread scholarly support.
• It’s anti-dualism (mind vs. body), advocating instead psycho-somatic unity.
• Current Adventism is practicing this emphasis as seen in its huge array of health and public service institutions (e.g., the Adventist Development and Relief Agency).

Why did David Trim and his colleagues choose to find the Adventist identity in old, established doctrines, and not in equally old but more dynamic concepts? Why not more emphasis on “preset truth,” progressive revelation, and conscience (being “as true to duty as the needle to the pole,” Education, p.57)?

Trim and Trump

As surprising as this may seem, there’s a parallel, at a deep level of our common human natures, between what David Trim said to the religious faithful and what Donald Trump said to his secular faithful. This is the lesson we more progressive believers can gain from the recent presidential election: that it’s only human for us to opt for concepts and identity brands that meet our immediate and personal needs over more theoretical and moral concepts that demand we apply hard reason.

(I readily appreciate that some Trump voters were equally rational as Harris voters—they just began from a different affective base. However, that’s not the case with all the Trump voters who fueled his historic comeback, such as the young man cited above.)

The Great Controversy narrative, originating in an 1858 vision, placed Sabbath-keeping Adventists front and center in end times. To tell, retell, and emphatically reaffirm this remnant message has long provided immense comfort and assurance. This story has long met and continues to meet most Adventists’ immediate/personal religious needs. 

However, Adventism in a very different key celebrates the dynamic concepts that jibe with its genius as a “movement.” Determining what God is doing among us now as a movement, being open to learning new ideas and unlearning old ones through eternity, is unsettling for most Adventists. 

And that’s okay. Who wants to engage in hard, unsettling thoughts about what God is doing now? It was relatively easy for a movement of some 2,500 souls in 1858 to ascertain what their God was doing among them. It takes unprecedented, hard, sanctified reason to ascertain what God is doing today.

Both church and state are complex, and there will ever be a tension between basking in deep feelings and channeling those feelings to higher ends.

James W. Walters is professor emeritus of ethics at Loma Linda University.

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