Through the past 140 years the Seventh-day Adventist Church has changed its official stance on military service from strict pacifism and noncombatancy to its present support for "conscientious cooperation" by its members where they feel a personal call to that kind of patriotism. The change did not come easily and it leaves some members troubled.

The church's founders were New England pacifists who had roots in the Radical or Anabaptist Reformation, and they shared a tradition of social and political dissent that had given rise to Quakers, Mennonites, and other religious communities committed to the ethics of nonviolence.

This commitment was both formally stated and rigorously practiced by early Adventists, many of whom believed that even touching a weapon was sinful. On May 23, 1865, the Review and Herald published a General Conference resolution "as a truthful representation of the views held by us from the beginning of our existence as a people, relative to bearing arms." The document-composed in the aftermath of a war that had caused many abolitionists to abandon their earlier pacifism-affirmed a legitimate role for the civil government, but declared that Adventists, as a people, are "compelled to decline all participation in acts of war and bloodshed as being inconsistent with the duties enjoined upon us by our divine Master toward our enemies and toward all mankind."

During the Spanish-American War of 1898, Adventists were outspoken critics of what they saw as America's imperial foreign policy. In opposition to other prominent churches that embraced the war as a Christianizing and civilizing campaign, they pointed to the glaring inconsistency of linking the cross with militarism of any sort. "Christian love demands that its possessor shall not make war at all. 'Put up again thy sword into his place,' is the word of the Author of Christianity, the embodiment of Christian love," thundered former army sergeant A. T. Jones. "Christianity is one thing; war is another and far different thing. Christians are one sort of people; warriors are another and different sort of people." Percy Magan's The Peril of the Republic, rushed to print in 1899, similarly denounced American actions in the Philippines as mere "colonial greed and rapacious lust." Better, Magan argued, "for a few missionaries to lose their lives at the hands of heathen savages than for heathen savages to lose their lives at the hands of those calling themselves Christians."

This Adventist commitment to nonviolence was based primarily not upon concern for personal moral purity, but upon a systematic critique of America's revered institutions of power. According to the Adventist reading of the books of Daniel and Revelation, the United States could not fail as a nation so long as it remained true to its Republican and Protestant heritage. Yet the fact that America would eventually fail was a foregone conclusion. No nationalistic project could replace the divine plan to redeem humanity once and for all. The creedalism and intolerance of the emerging Protestant empire-intent upon a new union of church and state-coupled with the social injustice implicit in the economic order, revealed the seeds of corruption eating at the heart of the American experiment. The United States, declared Ellen White, Joseph Bates, A. T. Jones and other Adventist pioneers, was the beast of Revelation 13, a morally contradictory amalgamation of dragon and lamb-like qualities, who "doeth great wonders, so that he maketh fire come down from heaven on the earth, and deceiveth them that dwell on the earth by the means of those miracles." Even the best government in human history, these prophetic agitators insisted, had feet of clay.

II

From Ellen White's death in 1915 on, however, the Anabaptist ethos of the early church rapidly eroded. This was true in matters of ecclesiastical authority and biblical hermeneutics, but particularly with regard to the military and bearing arms. During World War I, a minority of German Adventists parted ways with the church after being sharply criticized by church officials for resisting the Kaiser's draft. Meanwhile, in the United States, the Adventist commitment to not taking life remained largely intact; yet church leaders increasingly described Adventists not as conscientious objectors but as "conscientious cooperators." The consensus of the new generation was that it was no longer the church's role to question the rightness of military adventures or foreign policy so long as Adventist soldiers were allowed to continue in their peculiar commitment to Sabbath observance.

It was in this spirit of patriotic cooperation with the government that the Adventist Medical Cadet Corps was created, with beginnings in the early1940s. The Corps sought to prove that good Adventists were also "good Americans," eager and willing to serve in the military, albeit in noncombatant roles. The Corps thus helped to instill in a generation of young Adventists a love for the military jackboot and bivouac, and the belief that it is honorable to serve power for the sake of order. Unfortunately, these lessons could not be confined to one side of the Atlantic. During World War II Adventists proudly answered the call to duty in the United States, but also, disconcertingly, in Nazi Germany. While Protestant leaders of other denominations resisted fascism at considerable cost, there was no Adventist "Confessing Church," and up to the outbreak of the war Adventists even in the United States spoke of Hitler in positive terms as a fellow vegetarian concerned with matters of bodily hygiene.

Nonetheless, Adventists from the 1950s on generally saw World War II as a vindication of violence for a just cause. The idea that loyalty to God and loyalty to the military were fully compatible became powerfully entrenched in the minds of many Adventists, particularly in North America. Pockets of believers in Europe, such as Germany's Reformed Adventists, retained the older ethics of nonviolence; and Russia's True and Free Adventists heroically resisted Soviet totalitarianism in defense of freedom and human rights. But these pacifists-whose convictions placed them firmly in the tradition of the church's founders-were disavowed and marginalized by presiding church officials. With a burgeoning network of health and educational institutions and ambitious evangelistic campaigns around the world, the church by and large felt that maintaining good relations with government authorities was more important than promoting prophetic and politically dangerous brands of dissent.

With more and more Adventist chaplains rising in military rank, the church was also already too deeply invested in the military as an institution to question seriously the logic of violence or the rightness of American foreign policies abroad. The title of the Adventist chaplaincy's newsletter, For God and Country, revealed just how far pietism and patriotism had come to be wedded in the thinking of church leaders.

III

By the time of the Vietnam War the Adventist position had thus fragmented into incoherency. Some Adventists evaded the draft, others entered as noncombatant medics, and others avoided direct military action between 1954 and 1973 by volunteering as human guinea pigs in Project Whitecoat-a research program with links to the U.S. biological weapons laboratories at Fort Detrick, Maryland. During the war in Vietnam significant numbers of Adventists, encouraged by church officials to perform their patriotic duty according to "the dictates of their conscience," also picked up guns and, for the first time, began to kill according to the dictates of government planners.

This marked a stunning reversal in Adventism's historic identity. Religious leaders of other faiths, such as Thomas Merton and Abraham Joshua Heschel, decried the war in unequivocal language. But through the countless acts of brutality and depredation against unarmed civilians and their crops, Adventists had little to say. In a tragically ironic twist, even as America acted increasingly like the beast Adventists had long proclaimed it to be, the prophetic movement proved an increasingly timid page at the dragon's side.

In the post-Vietnam era, thousands of Adventists voluntarily joined the U.S. armed forces as full combatants. Adventist chaplains were recruited to minister to these fighters "without passing judgment," which in turn encouraged more Adventists to enlist. With large numbers of Adventists on active duty, it is not surprising that there was not a murmur of disapproval from the church in the 1970s and 1980s as the U.S. military covertly abetted brutal Latin American juntas in the slaying of tens of thousands of impoverished peasants calling for land reform-many of them Christians.

In 1994 significant numbers of Adventist Hutus in Rwanda participated in the genocide of their Tutsi countrymen, many of whom were also Adventists. Through the 1990s-as Buddhist Nobel Peace Prize winner, Ang San Suu Kyi, attracted world attention in her nonviolent struggle against Burma's military dictatorship-hundreds of Karen Adventists, whose great-grandparents had been evangelized by legendary missionary Eric B. Hare, engaged in a campaign of guerrilla warfare against the Burmese army with the goal of creating an autonomous Karen nation. And in 2002 rival militias comprised largely of Adventists fought each other for control of the government of the Solomon Islands.

The September 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States seemed to mark the final denouement of Adventism as a prophetic movement that could not be co-opted by nationalistic crusades. Amid the many heartfelt and sincere expressions of grief following the tragedy, churches from coast to coast reflexively wrapped themselves in the flag, no different from the rest of evangelical America. Sligo Church in Washington, D.C. featured a Veteran's Day service in which a military honor guard marched down the center aisle with bolt-action rifles gripped to their chests. At a camp meeting in Northern California, a patriotic song service was followed by a 21-gun salute with live ammunition.

Little thought was given by the planners of the event to the history of American intervention in the Middle East, the relationship between U.S. military and economic policy, or the many Afghani civilians killed by U.S. bombs. Where Adventists once venerated those Protestant martyrs who died rather than betray their religious convictions, they would now honor soldiers who kill in the name of securing peace but at the bidding of politicians. As President George W. Bush promised to take his war against America's enemies to far-flung corners of the globe, one thing was certain: many Adventists would soon be shipping out to exotic lands, not as missionaries, but as warriors, assault rifles in hand.