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17 2 — A Rhetoric of Opposition the seventh-day adventist church and the sabbath tradition Lizabeth A. Rand Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor, and do all your work; but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God; in it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your manservant, or your maidservant, or your cattle, or the sojourner who is within your gates; for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it. —Exodus 20:8–11 The fourth commandment, “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy,” has been a central principle of the Seventh-day Adventist (SDA) church, a Christian denomination with over sixteen million members worldwide, since its beginning . According to Adventist theologian Raymond F. Cottrell, “the Sabbath was . . . in a very real sense, the unifying factor around which the Seventh-day Adventist Church came into being, and it is still a potent force that binds together the Adventist people around the world, transcending all barriers of nationality , race, language, political ideology, and economic status.”1 Adventists worship on Saturday—the seventh day of the week—because this is the day that they believe God set aside for that purpose, the day that God sanctified and blessed. Across the nation, and across the world, Seventh-day Adventists spend the twenty-four-hour period from Friday sundown to Saturday sundown with their families and friends. Many participate in special religious events on Friday evenings, followed by Sabbath school and Sabbath worship on Saturdays. They share Sabbath meals and Sabbath rest. Secular talk, secular reading, and secular activities are also generally put aside. The Seventh-day Adventist church, a denomination that developed out of a 18 ■ lizabeth a. rand premillennial movement led by Baptist preacher William Miller in the 1840s, was cofounded by Ellen White and her husband James, along with Joseph Bates, a former sea captain, and shortly thereafter it made Battle Creek, Michigan, its home. The founders built much of the framework of the Adventist movement, with Mrs. White, as she’s commonly referred to in Adventist literature, serving as the prophetic voice of the worldwide church. Adventism, both past and present , has contributed most significantly to the American landscape through its message of health and wellness. The Adventist church promotes vegetarianism, funds smoking cessation and addiction recovery programs, and operates a vast network of clinics and hospitals. It is the Sabbath, however, that shapes the Adventist church’s relationship to America more than anything else. For non–Seventh-day Christians (the vast majority of Christians in America), worship on Sunday is such an established custom, so outside of interpretation, that it holds little tension. Seventh-day Adventists, however, define themselves more by their opposition to worship on the first day, and their loyalty to the Saturday Sabbath as sacred time, than by any other moral or religious principle. Founding members believed themselves to be engaged in a cosmic battle against Sunday keepers. Modern-day Adventism in America remains powerfully shaped by a rhetoric of resistance to worship on the first day of the week. For Seventh-day Adventists, the day on which Christians worship (and what, specifically, should occur on that day) is a contested site of both spiritual and political meaning. The Sabbath Commandment in Western History: Sunday Becomes Sacred In his book Please Don’t Wish Me a Merry Christmas: A Critical History of the Separation of Church and State, scholar Stephen M. Feldman argues convincingly that while America makes strong claims for the separation of church and state, the boundaries between the two are often blurred. The source of these less-than-strict boundaries can be traced back to the early history of the Christian church, as Christianity separated from Judaism and formed a complex relationship with Rome.2 Christianity and the state “struck a deal for their mutual benefit” for the first of many times in the centuries to come—a deal that clearly privileged Christian identity over all others.3 At this time, it was Jewish citizens who suffered the most, persecuted for their non-Christian beliefs and practices, including their day of worship. Making use of the discourse of the New Testament, early Christians “[redefined ] Jews as a subcultural Other.”4 Jews were assigned to the realm of the “carnal ,” the...

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