In the late 1840s and early 1850s Sabbath-keeping itinerant preachers journeyed through small towns in New England and the American frontier carrying a carpetbag full of pamphlets, books and charts, one of which showed a two-horned beast, taken from Revelation 13. This ugly and evil monster, according to the itinerants, was the government of the United States. Today the two-horned beast has all but disappeared from Adventist literature and preaching. The antigovernment stance has changed; most Adventists here now see their government as the most democratic and freedom-loving nation on the planet.

The nineteenth-century identity of the early Adventist founders, who stood in firm opposition to the culture, has vanished. By the second or third decade of the twentieth century, Adventists grew very comfortable soaking up the national mythology and assimilating into the cultural mainstream of the nation. The change from a radical Christian community to one of conservative Christians surfaced noticeably in the historiography of the church by the second decade of the twentieth century and helped construct a new Adventist identity. By the end of the twentieth century, Adventist historians succeeded in reinventing the past, helping to place Adventist rootage and identity in the cradle of the national experience. They did so by reacting to the changes within the Adventist community, particularly by representing the church and its leaders with "hardy New England stock" and the Puritan ethic.

Seventh-day Adventists and Puritans

The early Adventists were quite different from the Puritans, who, coming from England, at their core were Anglicans. Their outward structure remained unchanged except that they became Congregationalists, a type of Anglicanism. Congregationalists boasted of a highly trained clergy, with graduates from Oxford and Cambridge, and they nurtured a well-reasoned theology which they laid out in many books and treatises. They valued education and established free schools for townships of 50 or more residents

In contrast to these colonial Puritans, the early Seventh-day Adventists treated book learning as an unnecessary luxury. Most Adventist leaders had little if any formal education, and only a couple of the founding leaders had attended a college or university, without graduating.

The two groups were also very different in terms of religious expression. The Puritans founded rural churches, with most of their congregants scattered throughout New England on farms and in small villages. By and large the Puritans were farmers, convinced that the Lord had chosen them to establish a new society free of all of the vices that plagued the church in England. Their worship was formal and rigid, and it followed long-established norms and patterns. Emotions did not cloud Puritan thinking. They took pride in being a cerebral people, guided by principles and not by feelings.

The Adventists, on the other hand, wanted Jesus to come and rescue them from a world totally corrupt and beyond redemption. Seventh-day Adventists emerged on the frontier and quickly moved to cities, into a world of factories and tenement houses where the poor did not get enough to eat but lived in illness and poverty. The Puritans left their farms on Sundays and worshiped in well-constructed edifices where religion became a complex and highly intellectualized affair. The Adventists lived in cities, worshiped in private homes, and took their inspiration from visions, testimonies, lively songs, camp meetings, and pamphlets. For Adventists, religion was an affair of the heart, not of the intellect.

The Puritans and the Adventists also came from different social classes, Puritans from the middle class and Adventists from the working class. As J. N. Loughborough, who wrote one of the first histories of the Adventist church, states in the last pages of his book, The Great Second Advent Movement, "We have shown how from obscurity and poverty, this message has advanced with accelerated force and power."

Ellen and James White, two of the three most prominent founders of the church, provide a good example of the social class that gave birth to it. Originally from Maine, they belonged to a charismatic group whose leader was once put into jail for being critical of the established churches in Portland. Poverty forced James and Ellen from Portland to Connecticut. In Connecticut they could not make it, so they moved to New York, then back to Maine and again to New York, hoping to find better grounds for survival. From Saratoga, New York, they again fled to Rochester, New York, and from there to Battle Creek, Michigan.

Like the Whites, most Seventh-day Adventists in the nineteenth century were displaced persons. Many who became Adventists had migrated or immigrated because of the oppressive conditions created by the Industrial Revolution in the United States or the revolutions in Europe. The Puritans were ideological reformers, the Seventh-day Adventists economic refugees.

The values of the Puritans were also radically different from those of the Seventh-day Adventists. The Puritans were about the business of founding a perfect society, creating institutions and imposing their values on the world around them. They wanted to prosper and show the world the model society. It did not take them long to discover that slavery could enrich and strengthen their new society.

In contrast, Seventh-day Adventists possessed no desire to found a "city set on a hill," but rather hoped for the imminent return of Jesus so they could abandon the society full of corruption and injustice in which they lived. They considered the United States to be the two-horned beast of Revelation 13, a demonic power in collusion with forces of evil. The words of Joseph Bates in the early days of the movement clearly state how the Adventists felt about the society in which they lived: "Then I suppose we shall begin to think (if not before) that the third woe has come upon this nation, this boasted land of liberty, this heaven-daring, soul destroying, slave holding, neighbor murdering country."

Adventists were suspicious not only of the nation as a whole but also of its leaders, whom they considered hypocritical. They spent no energy trying to reform the world around them because they saw it as totally corrupt. They took seriously the biblical claim that all humans were the children of one God. John Byington, first president of the General Conference, not only welcomed Blacks and Indians into his home in Vermont but also helped many fugitive slaves escape to freedom. He had left the Methodist church when it became clear that they would continue to support slavery. And John Preston Kellogg, father of the doctor and cereal maker, ran an underground railroad station on their farm in southern Michigan.

The distaste that Sabbath-keeping Adventists harbored for the nation led them to advocate civil disobedience. Many Adventists were willing to go to jail before obeying the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, which required Americans to return runaway slaves to their masters. J. B. Frisbie commented on this law in the Review and Herald in 1860: "We have been accused of not quoting this law correctly. We have therefore taken pains to procure the law, and copy out the part that we make use of to show the dragon voice from the dragon mouth of the two horn beast, showing how it makes us all slave catchers under penalty of 1,000 dollars fine or six months imprisonment."

The Adventist past and the Puritan past had little in common. Adventist historians faced a great obstacle in their effort to merge the two experiences.

The Adventist Worldview, Nineteenth Century

A primary element at the core of the nineteenth-century Adventist worldview was the idea that the world is a corrupt place full of injustice, with no hope for improvement. The first Adventist communities developed a deep, burning hope that Jesus would return and liberate them. Adventist distrust of the culture was geared toward not only public or civic authorities but also the religious hierarchies. This profound distrust surfaced clearly in the experiences of James and Ellen White immediately after the disappointment of 1844. They belonged to an Adventist community in Maine that in the opinion of many of the respected citizens of the city of Portland exemplified strange and aberrant behavior. Even other Adventists looked at the Portland group as suspect. Joshua Himes, chief promoter of the Advent movement, in writing to William Miller stated that the believers in Portland are in a "bad way."

A second tenet of the early Adventist worldview held that Adventists were part of a kingdom more powerful and influential than the governments of the world, the kingdom of God. Belonging to this kingdom gave them identity. They were not at all discouraged by injustice, oppression, or the evils of the world, because they were convinced that soon, very soon, their kingdom would take control. Their teaching assured them that Jesus at his second coming would usher in the divine kingdom, and the Sabbath was a sign that they indeed were part of that kingdom. Ellen White played a central role in encouraging the members of the movement to keep their hopes up, to look toward the future, to be of good cheer. Her articles and books became central to a forward-looking spirit. Her tone and voice are clearly seen in the first articles of the Present Truth. In September of 1849 she writes, "In this time of trial, we need to be encouraged and comforted by each other." She goes on to say, "God has shown me that He gave His people a bitter cup to drink, to purify and cleanse them. It is a bitter draught, and they can make it still more bitter by murmuring, complaining, and repining."

A third tenet of the Adventist worldview was the notion that they were to identify with the victims of injustice. They were not to separate from the world or run away from it, nor to reform it, but rather to be about the business of helping victimized people. It is in this context that Adventists established sanitariums, schools, city missions, orphanages, vegetarian restaurants, and bakeries and sold books. Their institutions were not intended to increase profits and make money for investors; they were simply designed to educate, heal, and aid the weak, the poor, and the victimized.

And a fourth tenet of their worldview was their conviction that the kingdom of God is advanced through service and love, not might, force, politics, or violence. Reforms, in the thinking of the early Adventists, were of no use. By and large, Adventists did not belong to national temperance movements, suffrage movements, or any other reform movement of the times. They regarded these as but a superficial bandage. Unselfish, disinterested love lay at the heart of the way Adventists were to behave.

Adventist Historiography

The early Adventists saw themselves as a remnant apocalyptic community. The first person who wrote an Adventist history, J. N. Loughborough, did not see the Adventist movement as part of a historical continuum, but rather as a movement that came out of the lower classes in response to apocalyptic prophecies. The mission of the movement was to proclaim the end-time.. In his book The Great Second Advent Movement, published in 1905, Loughborough touched on the Garden of Eden, the time of Jesus, the signs of the imminent second coming, then the developments in the church from the middle to the end of the nineteenth century.[32] He gave no space to the Middle Ages, the Protestant Reformation, or Colonial America. A similar approach was used by Matilda Erickson Andross in 1926 in a history for young people, sponsored by the General Conference, Story of the Advent Movement.

Clearly the early Adventists did not see the history of the Adventist church as part of a Puritan or European tradition. They were modern-day prophets in the tradition of the Old Testament prophets. In other words, Adventists believed that they were part of a preordained divine plan that was clearly outlined in the books of Daniel and Revelation. In the apocalyptic literature they found their origins. They were not reformers, but rather a prophetic people about to witness the destruction of all man-made institutions.

The church's lure and desire to identify with full-blooded Puritans apparently surfaced after the death of Ellen White in 1915, when the children of the German and Scandinavian immigrants who had entered the church in the second half of the nineteenth century began to take leadership positions. Even by the 1890s their presence was so influential that they elected the first immigrant General Conference president, O. A. Olsen, born in Norway but brought to the United States by his parents.

By the second decade of the twentieth century a deep-seated hatred in American society toward anything German or foreign forced Adventist leaders to reevaluate their identity. In Collinsville, Illinois, a mob of 500 people lynched a German immigrant, and the local courts exonerated the mob's leaders. In Iowa a politician announced that 90 percent of all men and women who taught the German language were traitors. Anyone who sympathized with the Germans during World War I became a victim of severe discrimination. Thousands of persons with German last names changed their names for the purpose of survival, and they tried to hide their German roots. These changing values in American society led to a change in Adventist identity.

Mahlon Elsworth Olsen's book Origin and Progress of Seventh-day Adventists became the standard history text for the church in the late 1920s and 1930s. The book, published in 1925, mirrored the changes that were taking place in Adventist identity and historiography. Olsen was the son of O.A. Olsen. The introduction to Olsen's book contains a section of almost 20 pages on the history of the Christian church in northern Europe, with 12 illustrations in which Martin Luther plays a prominent role. The following section, "Later Reformers," provides the history of English and Puritan reformers. An illustration of the Mayflower arriving in Massachusetts and a group of Puritans worshiping on the deck of the Mayflower before landing appeared in that section.

Olsen's book demonstrated that Seventh-day Adventists were slowly drifting away from the countercultural prophetic identity of the nineteenth century. By the third decade of the twentieth century they were no longer swimming against the current, but rather quite comfortably flowing in the national culture. By World War I Adventists had dropped their revolutionary stance and worldview and turned into cooperative, mild reformers fitting comfortably in society.

By the middle of the century, when Le Roy Edwin Froom published his four-volume work, The Prophetic Faith of Our Fathers: The Historical Development of Prophetic Interpretation, it became evident that Adventists had shed all of the nineteenth-century rootage and were now comfortable with a new Puritan identity. Froom's third voluminous tome was wholly dedicated to the Puritan roots of Adventist history. The section entitled "Prophecy's Key Place in Colonial American Thought" goes to great lengths to demonstrate how Adventist theology is firmly grounded in the works of the Puritan divines.

The new historiography reflected the accommodating style and identity that the Adventist church had embraced by the middle of the twentieth century. When the United States Army created a program to develop germ weapons in the 1950s and solicited the aid of the Adventist church in procuring human guinea pigs, the General Conference was more than willing to abide. Between 1954 and 1973, about 2,300 Seventh-day Adventist young men volunteered at the request of the General Conference Medical Department. In the words of Dr. Theodore R. Flaiz: "We feel that if anyone should recognize the debt of loyalty and service for the many courtesies and considerations received from the Department of Defense, we, as Adventists, are in a position to feel a debt of gratitude for these kind considerations."

The shift in identity that surfaces in the 1950s is clearly found in A. W. Spalding's Origin and History of Seventh-Day Adventists, published in 1961. This three-volume history graphically illustrated the radical changes that had taken place. The wild, hideous boar that had appeared in the early Adventist evangelistic literature had been transformed. In Spalding's history, the two-horned beast surfaces again, but this time as a tame American buffalo. Most of the illustrations in Spalding's book characterize the Adventist founders as proper Bostonians wearing well-tailored suits, with carefully groomed facial hair and the pleasant smiles of a people who could neatly fit into the world of the TV program "Leave It to Beaver."

In the early 1970s Adventist historians pulled off an admirable feat when they received the blessing of the academics. A Loma Linda history professor arranged a meeting with some of the most respected historians of the American religious experience, inviting them to present papers at Loma Linda University. This landmark meeting signaled that Adventists were no longer a cult, but had finally entered the ranks of the denominations. One of the Adventist historians, commenting on Ellen White, suggested that "Mrs. White, once the lioness on racial issues, encouraged discretion to the point of racial separation so that the 'gospel' would not be impeded among white southerners." In the early Adventist histories Ellen White had been painted as a radical abolitionist. Now, in the revised histories of the twentieth century and the compilations made from her writings and letters, she surfaced sitting comfortably in the company of segregationists.

The reinventing of Adventist history became even more evident in the 1980s, when a group of Adventist historians produced a book entitled The World of Ellen G. White. In fourteen chapters they described American society in the nineteenth century from the perspective of an Adventist scholar. However, in the introduction they were quick to point out: "Ellen White is not the subject of this volume; hence she appears only occasionally in these pages." In the text it is evident they preferred to skirt the problem of placing Ellen White in the society in which she lived. Clearly they wanted to document the history of their church, but were uncomfortable with the female prophet and the many thorny issues her presence raised.

Articles in Spectrum, Adventist Heritage, and other Adventist journals on the church's history in the second half of the century clearly supported the trend. In 1976 Ronald D. Graybill set forth the notion that a "new Adventist history" was in the making. He argued that the early historians, J. N. Loughborough and James White, wrote providential history, and that Nichols and Froom, in the middle of the century, produce apologetic history. However, with the advent of young Adventist historians with Ph.D. degrees from prestigious American universities, the historiography of the church was about to produce the "real stuff." In his words: "Those who write this history should strive to make Adventist history useful and credible to non Adventist scholars."

At the end of the century the works of the popular church historian George Knight clearly reflected the trend in Adventist historiography. His last book, A Search for Identity: The Development of Seventh-day Adventist Beliefs, starts by stating that if the founders of the church were to be brought back to life today, they would not be given membership in the Adventist community. Using theological categories and sidestepping social and economic categories, Knight argues that the Adventist church dramatically changed its identity. He also makes a case for the notion that the early founders would have approved, because they believed in what he terms "a dynamic concept of the present truth."

Conclusion

Adventist historiography passed through several stages as it evolved from the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first. Later generations with a burning desire to become "respectable" or "centered" aided the process of pushing the church into the mainstream. The church's ability to build successful institutions and become closely linked to the interests and values of the larger society contributed to the ongoing efforts to merge with the dominant culture. And the fact that in the United States a portion of the membership, and especially the leadership, of the church made the transition from the working class to the middle class added momentum to the process.

In summary, the historiography of the Adventist church helped create a new identity for the modern Adventist, no longer burdened by the troublesome baggage or worldview of the early founders, and no longer seeing the government as an evil beast in collusion with satanic powers. They no longer pressed to proclaim the second coming of Jesus because the world, after all, is not that bad. Unlike the Adventists of the middle nineteenth century who saw the nation as a warmongering two-horned beast, the modern Adventist feels very comfortable embracing the values and culture of the nation and its never-ending search for power and dominance.

Ciro Sepulveda is chair of the history department at Oakwood College, Huntsville, Alabama.

csepulveda@oakwood.edu

This article is abridged from a paper presented at the Adventist

Theological Society meeting in Nashville, Tennessee, December 2000. The complete text with references is available at the Electronic Journal of Adventist History. www.oakwood.edu/history.