Originally found in Facts for the Times: Extracts from the Writings of Eminent Authors, Ancient and Modern, ed. M. E. Cornell (Battle Creek, Mich., 1858).
(A seven-minute read.)
(Note: I’ve decided, in recognition of Black History Month, to focus my newsletter on issues of racism, social justice, and racial reconciliation each week. I trust you, my readers, will have the emotional stamina to process these important issues together over the next few weeks. This week, I look at an important part of my denomination’s history and identity—though I trust those outside my faith community will find it enlightening, helpful, and thought-provoking.)
During the nineteenth century, a number of Christian denominations in America split over the question of slavery. Some denominations literally began so members could maintain the right to keep owning slaves. Others promoted gradual emancipation. Still others proposed that Black people were cursed.
Not Seventh-day Adventists.
In contrast to most other Christian denominations and movements in the nineteenth century, Seventh-day Adventists were united in their belief in and promotion of immediate emancipation of the enslaved.
This put them at the cutting edge of social justice issues in their day. They were some of the few “woke Christians” of the nineteenth century.
The first president of the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists, John Byington, actively participated in the Underground Railroad.
Co-founder Joseph Bates was a “radical abolitionist” who faced tremendous opposition because of his abolitionist views when he daringly traveled to the South to proclaim the soon-return of Christ in the 1840s.
J. N. Andrews, the denomination’s first official missionary and most accomplished biblical scholar, sounded like a critical race theorist in 1857 when he claimed that the Declaration of Independence was disingenuous, since it claimed to promote freedom while simultaneously allowing the enslavement of millions of Black people in “abject servitude.”
Uriah Smith, the long-time editor of the denomination’s Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, the denomination’s flagship journal, repeatedly echoed this exact point, and noted that people in the North had “joined hands with the South in oppressing the colored man throughout the whole country.”
Co-founder James White proposed in 1862 that the biblical book of Revelation declared slavery to be the “darkest and most damning sin upon this nation” and that “heaven has wrath in store” for America as “due punishment for the sin of slavery.” He further noted that because of their anti-slavery sentiments, Adventist publications—which covered a whole host of theological topics unrelated to slavery—had been banned in slave states.
Perhaps most intriguingly, Adventist leaders repeatedly identified America as the “land beast” of Revelation 13—a beast which looked like a lamb but spoke like a dragon, and would bring persecution against God’s true followers—partly because of its practice of slavery. As the graphic above shows, they felt creeds and slavery were the two practices in America that identified it as this persecuting power.
For her part, Ellen White repeatedly and passionately spoke out against slavery and the oppression of Black people.
In 1859, she zealously urged disobedience against the Fugitive Slave Act, writing that “the law of our land requiring us to deliver a slave to his master, we are not to obey; and we must abide the consequences of violating this law.”
She further declared in 1862 that people who simply had sympathies for slavery (never mind slave-holders themselves) should not be members of the Adventist church, saying it was the “duty of God’s people . . . to publicly withdraw their sympathy and fellowship” from such individuals, lest others get the wrong impression that Adventists “walked” with them in a “church capacity.”
Her radical advocacy for Black people didn’t end with the conclusion of the Civil War or upon the emancipation of the enslaved, however. She continued throughout her lifetime to earnestly promote the welfare of Black people, declaring in 1896—a full three decades after the enslaved were emancipated—that “the American nation” owed “a debt of love to the colored race,” and that God had “ordained” that “Americans should make restitution for the wrong they have done them in the past.”
She further insisted that “those who have taken no active part in enforcing slavery upon the colored people are not relieved from the responsibility of making special efforts to remove, as far as possible, the sure result of their enslavement.”
These are just a few of many examples which demonstrate that Seventh-day Adventists, in their earliest days, were radically committed to matters of social justice—even at the expense of having their main theological platform (the Sabbath and Second Coming) unheard by people who couldn’t swallow their “political” convictions.
They were, truly, the “woke Christians” of their day.
Hindsight is 20/20
Of course, one huge temptation is to assume that their abolitionist and anti-slavery views were not all that remarkable since it’s quite obvious to us, living nearly two centuries later, that slavery is categorically evil.
Thus, to refer to them as “woke” is to make them more exceptional than they really were.
But three things:
First, hindsight is always 20/20. We are living nearly two centuries later and most of us are clear on the heinousness of slavery. Such was not the case back then however.
Which leads to my second point: as mentioned above, the abolition of slavery that Adventists univocally called for was quite exceptional among nineteenth-century Christians. Very few Christians, including Christians in the North, zealously campaigned for this posture.
But that’s not all: it was quite exceptional for all Americans—including Americans in the North—to advocate so passionately for abolition.
Indeed, some historians have estimated that, even as late as the 1850s, only about five percent of Northerners were abolitionists. This wasn’t anywhere close to a mainstream position, even in the North.
As Lonnie Bunch, the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, notes, “Most Northerners felt that abolitionists were extremists whose views were far outside of the mainstream.”
So the abolitionism that Adventists advocated for wasn’t simply radical for Christians in the nineteenth century—though it certainly was that. It was a radical and extremely progressive position in the view of all Americans, including among Northerners.
Furthermore, as Adventist historian Kevin Burton has pointed out, Adventists weren’t simply calling for abolition—as progressive as that position was.
Many were even advocating for more radical positions—calling for the full equality of Blacks by speaking out against the “Jim Crow” laws that were already operative in the North, petitioning against laws that forbade interracial marriage, and calling for Black suffrage.
Indeed, as quoted above, thirty years after the Civl War ended, Ellen White seemingly advocated for a form of reparations for the enslaved—which is a progressive idea even in 2024.
Thirdly, are Christians in America actually clear on the evils of slavery?
Perhaps not as much as we think.
It’s extremely troubling how there seems to be more and more American Christians who are less and less clear about the heinousness of slavery from a biblical perspective. It’s like we’re starting to turn back the clock.
The frightening reality is that there are more and more Christians in America whose vision is seemingly getting blurred on this issue.
Beyond even this question about slavery specifically, it feels like there’s an increasing number of Christians in America who are increasingly trafficking in racist, xenophobic, and nationalistic rhetoric.
This is especially surprising from an Adventist perspective.
I think that many of the founders of Adventism would be mortified at the racist and xenophobic sentiments that some express today—amazed at how far many Adventists in the twenty-first century have departed from the prophetic convictions that animated much of early Adventist thinking (especially in relation to the United States—and the nationalism, racism, and xenophobia that’s resurfaced of late, even among Seventh-day Adventists).
Simply put, somewhere in Adventist history, the movement took a turn away from its radical commitment to racial and social justice—and its advocacy for the “least of these”—and started to adopt the racist and nationalist temper that it so long critiqued (to the point that, by the mid-twentieth-century, Black patients were denied care at Adventist hospitals, banned from attending Adventist schools, and not allowed to eat in cafeterias at Adventist institutions).
What happened?
How did Adventism go from being the “woke radicals” in its earliest days, to an institution that is often eerily silent (at best) about matters of social justice today?
Perhaps that’s a story for another day.
Until then, let’s continue to study history.
*Many thanks to Dr. Kevin Burton, who’s responsible for much of the primary research that I utilized in this piece—as well as for helping me track down the original source of the graphic at the top (which I couldn’t find for the life of me).
**For extra inspiration, I’d strongly urge you to watch/listen to this powerful sermon, preached this last Saturday, by Pastor Cryston Josiah—who’s the cousin of my very good friend (and elder at my church), Dr. Judith Josiah-Martin.
Shawn is a pastor in Maine, whose life, ministry, and writing focus on incarnational expressions of faith. The author of four books and a columnist for Adventist Review, he is also a DPhil (PhD) candidate at the University of Oxford, focusing on nineteenth-century American Christianity. You can follow him on Instagram, and listen to his podcast Mission Lab.
So are your suggesting, then, that the Adventist church (and indeed most of Christianity) would not accept those early Adventists because they would be considered too radical? If so, that's certainly confronting (although not entirely surprising). How do we get that "radical wokeness" back as an organisation? Can we even get it back?
Thank you for sharing these... I'm learning alot.