My membership in the Seventh-day Adventist Church may not automatically make me part of "the remnant," but it’s indisputable that I’m a Republican, duly registered in the state of Maryland. With full cognizance that I risk being challenged to a duel, I will also assert that I am at least as loyal a Republican as Zell Miller is a Democrat.

I stand on my record: I was founder and, to my knowledge, sole member of Nebraska Republicans for McGovern in 1972. I must warn that I will not submit in silence to any effort to tarnish that achievement with reports that I was not yet old enough to vote.

A vast chasm runs between my idiosyncratic Republicanism and the Republicanism of Dick Cheney and Tom DeLay. Yet it’s also true that today’s GOP bears little resemblance to the political party that grew up during the second half of the nineteenth century, contemporaneously with the Seventh-day Adventist "remnant" movement.

The Republican-remnant kinship, if unofficial, became so close that in the 1970s a scholar would describe late nineteenth-century Adventists as "conservative in theology and overwhelmingly Republican in political sympathies." Accurate in its denotation, the description also conveyed profoundly and insidiously misleading connotations.

By the 1970s, the word Republican evoked clean-shaven, suburban tameness as well as elitist privilege. Its usage had the effect of re-creating the Adventist pioneers in the semblances of Gerald Ford, Pat Boone, Billy Graham, and Richard Nixon. In fact, the Republicans with whom the Adventists of the 1860s had affinities looked and acted, in many respects, a lot more like the hirsute radicals protesting racial injustice and the war in Vietnam.

The Republican party was formed in 1855, the same year that the Adventists began setting up their headquarters in Battle Creek. The crisis over slavery was deepening and would soon culminate with the Civil War. The early Adventists’ sympathies leaned Republican because it was the party of liberty, human rights, and temperance. Always a diverse coalition, the party’s most forceful and coherent wing during its first couple of decades—the Radicals—were the foremost advocates in national politics for the powerless and oppressed.

When the Republican party fielded its first national ticket in the presidential election of 1856, the Adventists weren’t sure if they should vote but were sure that they weren’t going to switch their energies from their fledgling remnant cause to getting out the vote for John C. Frémont. Their stance has subsequently been attributed to some mixture of premillennialist determinism, pietistic individualism, or sectarian stand-offishness. Yet it was quite similar to that of another variety of apocalyptic radicals more widely known on the national scene—William Lloyd Garrison and the American Anti-Slavery Society.

According to biographer Henry Mayer, Garrison saw the abolitionist movement as a "saving remnant" working for a "spiritual revolution accomplished by a minority liberated from conventional politics and armed only with the righteous conviction of truth." The movement’s task was "to work on the constituencies rather than the candidates," and thus to transform the moral conscience of society. Enmeshment in partisan politicking would undermine the power and authenticity of the reformers’ public witness.

The outbreak of the Civil War in 1861 and its transformation into war against slavery in 1863 created an entirely new situation by the election of 1864. The Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln, unwavering in his commitment to abolition after painful slowness in coming to it, stood for re-election as a Republican against the great appeaser of the Confederacy, the popular Democratic general, George B. McClellan.

The fate of the slaves hung in the balance that fall. And because the Republican party had demonstrated both the ability and resolve to end the foul curse, Garrison believed it was now time to join the political fray, and stumped vigorously for Lincoln.

In the Review that same fall, J. N. Andrews warned against any notions about the possibility of smuggling proslavery politics past divine inspection on judgment day. As their earthly sojourn prolonged, Adventists realized they had to act their part for the "Prince of Peace" until the final establishment of his reign. Questions of whether and how to vote, stated in a resolution voted at the General Conference session the following year, turned on the impact for "justice, humanity, and right," and against "intemperance, insurrection, and slavery."

The century following the Civil War witnessed an ongoing struggle for the soul of the Republican party. Would it be primarily the party of profit, allied with the interests of large corporations and a burgeoning military-industrial complex? Or would it be the party of principles such as liberty, equal opportunity, and honest, benevolent government?

Republican heroes of the latter emphases during the first three decades of the twentieth century (at least portions thereof) included leaders of black empowerment such as Ida B. Wells-Barnett and A Philip Randolph, and eloquent progressives such George Norris of Nebraska and Robert "Fighting Bob" La Follette of Wisconsin. During the second half of the twentieth century, Edward Brooke of Massachusetts, Jacob Javits of New York, and Mark Hatfield of Oregon carried on the tradition.

This specie of Republican, however, dwindled to the verge of extinction by the end of the century. At the Republican Convention this year, the lieutenant governor of Maryland, Ronald Steele, referred to the little-noted fact that a far higher proportion of Democrats than Republicans in the Senate voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Twenty-one Democrats voted against the legislation now so universally honored, whereas only five Republicans did.

What Steele did not mention was that one of the five Republican opponents was the party’s presidential nominee later that year, Barry Goldwater. It was the beginning of a "southern strategy" that made sharply conservative white southerners the dominant force in the party.

Through these transformations, the "remnant" people deepened their de facto bonds with the GOP. But the soul of Republicanism had fundamentally changed. A facade of tradition obscured parallel shifts in the soul of Adventism.

Ellen White, of course, had labored to keep the remnant from debilitating divisions over partisan politics. Her nonpartisanship, however, was not in the service of noninvolvement or apocalyptic fatalism. Rather, it was a strategy for a kind of "movement" politics based on a distinctive identity as "subjects of Christ’s kingdom."

From that standpoint, Adventists could make discriminating use of the political process in the name of a healing, loving God, as well as resist being co-opted for evil purposes. The direction from the voice of the Son of God, Ellen White declared, is "ye will not give your voice or influence to any policy to enrich a few, to bring oppression and suffering to the poorer classes of humanity" (Testimonies to Ministers, 331–32).

Differing conclusions may well be drawn as to how all of this influences electoral choices on November 2. Yet the Adventist heritage cannot, without delusion, be invoked in support of apathy, disengagement, or policies that diminish access to health care, education, housing, and economic opportunity while favoring unfettered accumulation for the fortunate few and military aggression intended to preserve and extend that privilege.

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