Adventism seems more interested in sexual politics than in feeding the poor. The two main issues of the last two General Conference sessions were women’s ordination and divorce/remarriage. Recently I was listening to a presentation at Andrews University on Adventist homosexuality given to present and future ministers. The audience was clearly nervous, snickering at words like "queer" and congratulating each other that at least everyone in the room was straight.

In the recent Valuegenesis2 survey of 25,000 Adventist youth, only 28 percent of respondents said that they "care a great deal about reducing poverty in my own country and around the world." Are we emphasizing the right stuff? Most, albeit "worldly" psychologists, sociologists, and ethicists propose that a person’s morality is measured by the breadth of where her sympathy lies, not with whom.

In her book, Seventh-day Adventism in Crisis: Gender and Sectarian Change in an Emerging Religion (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), Laura L. Vance asks: How did a religious movement in which women initially wielded visionary leadership eventually come to deny women access to many of its most powerful institutional positions? She suggests that Adventists seem to have a mostly negative preoccupation with sexuality.

Perhaps she is right in her analysis of a moral culture where it appears worse for two non-married members to consent to sex than to consent to shady money matters, where members lose church fellowship over homosexuality while adultery-committing pastors are merely moved to another district. This double standard also undergirds the restrictive Andrews University female dorm policy, reinforcing the destructive male role as sexual aggressors while showing that an Adventist women’s place is primarily to be chaste.

Sometimes this church appears more concerned with enforcing the retrograde dogmas of previous polytheists than thinking about present truth. What about sanctification? God just doesn’t leave a person alone. He educates, matures. Just because someone knows how to count from 457 B.C.E. to A.D. 1844 doesn’t necessarily mean he understands the nuances of human sexuality. Perhaps some seminary wives would agree.

Our present denominational positions on divorce and remarriage, homosexuality, and women’s ordination are rooted in a literalistic, prehistoric understanding of the Bible. These positions push the idea that it is the culture—not merely the concepts—that God breathed into Scripture. The sexual mores of the Adventist religious right are rooted in a mythopoeic past that believed life was contained in male semen. Thus, to spill is to kill.

According to historian John Boswell (Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980]), the textual condemnation of homosexuality is rooted in this onanistic misconception and the strict regulation of tribal difference. Surrounding the prohibitions to homosexuality are equally emphatic injunctions against sitting in chairs once occupied by a menstruating woman (classroom seating charts?). Also wrong are mixing fabrics and planting two different types of seeds in the same bed (the sin of heteroseeding). These ideas arose at a time when spirits controlled nature, gods battled, and humans married to form social contracts and had sex to promulgate the species. These sorts of rules occur throughout the ancient religious world and are rooted in tribal fastidiousness, not divine fiat.

Traditionalists fear a loss of values. But they forget that all values arise from experience. Lose the experience (anyone for wandering in the wilderness?), and you lose the contextual meaning. Note to traditionalists: ground your values in some prescientific past and spend the rest of your life confusing the absolute with the obsolete.

Things change. Thirty years ago students had their Adventism questioned for attending the picture show. Now professors and administrators attend. Are movies less angel repelling today? Perhaps we’ve just gotten more mature in realizing the difference between medium and setting. The same thing is slowly happening with music.

Eventually, women will be ordained, alternative lifestyles will be accepted, and women with abusive husbands won’t have to pray that their men cheat so they can escape. This is what traditionalists fear. Sex is their battle cry as they straddle the gap between the past and present. But it will only widen. As history shows, they will fracture into smaller sects, a miasma of minor texts and sex.

Getting religion is easy; a mature faith takes a lifetime. As Adventist faith grows, our morality should widen, perhaps someday to include even the least of these.

I appeal, stop wasting energy. Create some progress.

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