A funny thing has happened to us Adventists on the way to the Second Advent: we’ve become part of the cultural mainstream. Consider the following items:

• Two (down from three a year ago) current members of the United States Congress (representing districts in Texas and Maryland) are Adventists.
• The current chair of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is an Adventist.

• The current mayor of Philadelphia is an Adventist.
• The chaplain-designate of the United States Senate, a rear admiral, and retiring chief of chaplains of the United States Navy, is an Adventist.
• An Oregon court of appeals has ruled that the state’s high school activities association must make a reasonable effort to accommodate the Sabbath observance of schools that wish to participates in state athletic and other championship competitions.
• Oxford University Press has just published Diet, Life Expectancy, and Chronic Disease: The Health Studies of Seventh-day Adventists and Other Vegetarians.
• An Adventist team won an international competition involving business and business education students representing 1,300 colleges and universities.
• The current president and three other officers of the American Schools of Oriental Research (the AMA of biblical archeology) are Adventists.
• Adventist pop musicians have been nominated for, and have won, Dove awards in the contemporary Christian music industry.
• Adventist members of the judiciary numbered forty-three in 2002, representing an increase of twenty-four in the previous seven years and including fourteen judges in North America, eight in East Africa, and four justices of the Supreme Court of Papua, New Guinea.
• At the time of the Branch Davidian tragedy in Waco, Texas, ten years ago, our public relations people made sure the media knew that the Davidians were not part of us.
• All Adventist colleges and universities in the United States, and many elsewhere, are officially accredited by regional or national associations; and their graduates are regularly admitted to professional and academic programs at such institutions as Berkeley, Cambridge, Chicago, Harvard, Oxford, Stanford, and Yale (listed here in alphabetical, not pecking, order).
• Adventists increasingly hold major administrative positions in secular institutions.
• An Adventist college prepared an accreditation self-study report that was touted by its regional association as a model for other institutions to emulate.

Whatever the mixture of motives for these developments, it is understandable (and probably inevitable) that most people outside the mainstream culture would like to be inside it, at least in the sense of acceptance, respectability, and credibility.

This is not a new inclination in Adventism; it goes back to our nineteenth-century efforts to show that Adventists are true heirs of the Protestant Reformation (sometimes claiming to be the heirs), and to twentieth-century efforts to show that there are ample and distinguished precedents for our prophetic interpretation and our conditionalist convictions. Whenever possible, we have eagerly cited mainstream scholars who agree with our understandings of Scripture.

Now, at least in many parts of the United States, the days are largely past when Adventists were a culturally marginalized, socially disdained, easily disregarded minority.

In various other ways, too, we are part of mainstream culture—ways that may be regarded as morally good, bad, or ambiguous.

• More and more Adventists are willing to accept combat roles in the military in defense of their country, thus abandoning (or moving beyond) the traditional Adventist position of noncombatancy.
• More and more Adventist schools, colleges, and universities participate in interscholastic athletics, including league membership and tournament competition.
• Adventist divorce rates are coming close to national averages.
• Clergy sexual abuse is also an Adventist problem.
• Financial considerations are an increasingly important factor in individual and church decision making.

At the same time that we have moved into the mainstream of both secular and religious cultures, they have moved toward us in significant ways.

• More and more high school graduates are going to college: the Adventist emphasis on education, including higher education, is less distinctive than it was in the past.
• Vegetarian eating has become so popular that Burger King and MacDonald’s now serve garden burgers.
• The use of tobacco is universally recognized as unhealthful and is widely regarded as an addiction.
• Physical fitness (what we used to call "health reform") is a national concern.
• Tithing is advocated by more and more churches, and is practiced by more and more Christians.
• Affirmation of both the "multidimensional unity" of human personhood and the resurrection of the body as essential to the ultimate human destiny are commonplace among Christian theologians.
• The spiritual and physical value of Sabbath time is increasingly extolled by a variety of religious writers.

So being Adventist is becoming less and less weird. People still sometimes react to our denominational name by exclaiming, "What’s that?" but when we explain our beliefs and practices they generally accept them as reasonable commitments of people who take religion seriously.

All this is both good news and bad news.

It is good news in several ways. It is good not to feel like social outsiders, even among Christians. Being part of mainstream culture makes it easier to get a hearing for the Adventist message. We don’t have to devote so much effort to establishing our acceptability, since we are already accepted. We are less tempted to make different-ness a virtue in itself, and to suppose that the most important aspects of Adventism are those that are unique, rather than those we share with other Christians.

But being in the mainstream, to whatever extent we are, is a decidedly mixed blessing. It makes it more difficult for those of us in the United States to maintain our countercultural heritage, to resist the lure of Americanism ("My country, right or, wrong") and commercialism, and to let our religious convictions motivate a critique of current or proposed national policies regarding waging war, taking care of the sick, the hungry, and the homeless, and nurturing our natural environment.

To be accepted is not necessarily to be seduced, but acceptance makes seduction a greater danger. Once we have become socially and culturally respectable, it is hard to give up our respectability in order to be a "prophetic minority" (Jack Provonsha) that will "stand for the right though the heavens fall" (Ellen White). It is all too easy to accommodate what we should be opposing (like sensationalism), and resisting what we should be affirming (like inclusiveness).

Yet backing out of the mainstream would be neither wise (because that would forego the potential benefits we have obtained) nor possible (because respectable communities just don’t give up respectability voluntarily). So we will stay in, and we must try to maintain our theological and ethical identity and integrity.

We must use our growing respectability to enhance the effectiveness of our witness to the importance of Sabbath time, to the validity of the Advent hope, to the value of healthful living, to the excitement of discovering "present truth," and to the power of God’s infinite, universal, and unconditional love. We can get the best of both our prophetic heritage and our growing respectability by identifying, examining, celebrating, and communicating the positive implications of our beliefs and practices—implications for our own Adventist faith and for human existence in general in the twenty-first century.

Easy? By no means. Possible? Yes, indeed. Worth our best individual and collective efforts? Absolutely.

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