Christians and politics: a memoir
I have often wondered why religious people vote the way they do. What is behind their decision to support a certain candidate or proposal? How do individuals form their political identities and affiliations?
The family I grew up in was not overtly political. We were Seventh-day Adventists, a Protestant denomination that believes the end of the world is near, and that the Second Coming of Christ will establish, for a righteous remnant, a home for all eternity. We also believed that keeping the seventh day of the week–that is, Saturday–as the true Sabbath marked us as God’s remnant people.
As a child, the only time I remember Adventists getting involved in politics was to oppose so-called Blue Laws, which had to do with closing stores on Sunday. The fear was that if the government could tell people not to shop on Sunday, the next step would be to tell Adventists they couldn’t worship on Saturday. I’m not sure I understood the logic.
Despite a general reluctance to engage in politics, my father was a Republican. I remember him telling us this story. When we were small children, he had us three boys march into the living room to perform. This was in the election year of 1948, when Thomas Dewey ran against Harry Truman. Tommy, 5, the oldest brother would call out: “Vote for Dewey for president!” Bobby, 3, would shout: “Dewey for president!” and I, at two, would come behind with, “Dewey! Dewey!”
In 1960 my parents were for Richard Nixon. When he came through Battle Creek, Michigan, Dad took us down to the railroad station to see him. Beyond that, there was little talk about either of the candidates. We did hear that Kennedy, the Democrat, was a Catholic.
There was also, in our church, little discussion of civil rights or efforts to integrate schools and public facilities. In Battle Creek we attended the Tabernacle, the large Adventist church not far from the Battle Creek Sanitarium, made famous by John Harvey Kellogg. My brothers, sister and I enrolled in Battle Creek Academy, the Adventist K-12 school. I never saw a black person at school or church, and only learned that there were black Adventists after hearing an exchange between two members of our church. One member, who had been in Florida, was greeted by another, who, teasing her, told her that with her vacation tan she was in the wrong place. She should go to the Berean Church across town. When I questioned my father about this, he confirmed that black Adventists had their own church, and conference. In short, the church was segregated. They, meaning the black Adventists, preferred it that way, he said.
Later, as the Civil Rights movement made its way onto the evening news, I watched, both shocked and intrigued, as demonstrators were beaten and fire-hosed in the South. When I asked my father about Martin Luther King, Jr., he was dismissive. “He’s causing a lot of trouble,” he said.
It was only when I left home, first to spend a year in Europe, then to attend college in Massachusetts, that I came into regular contact with African Americans. At Atlantic Union College black students were a minority–we heard there was a quota–as the college took applicants from both white and black conferences. My association with students of color there, and in two summers as a lifeguard in Washington, D. C. public pools, where I was one of only a few whites, were important times of awakening for me.
The son of a minister and former missionary, I was born in East Africa, coming to the United States at age three. My parents had served the native people of Tanzania (my birth certificate says Tanganyika), yet we had no knowledge or understanding of black life in America. Until I went to college, I knew nothing about segregation, voting suppression, housing, discrimination and violence that plagued and terrorized African Americans.
In 1961, the summer before my tenth grade, our family moved to Loma Linda, where my father became director of public relations for Loma Linda University, the church’s medical school. My brother and I were enrolled at Loma Linda Union Academy, the Adventist high school. I don’t remember any African-American students. There were a two or three Mexican-American students. One of them was named Jesus, and I remember a teacher stumbling over his name. “It’s Heysus,” the student said.
My father’s boss, now a vice president of Loma Linda University, had political ambitions. His name was Jerry Pettis, a former minister, educator and entrepreneur, and in 1964 he ran for Congress as a Republican. This was a big deal in the Adventist community, as no church member had ever won national office. Adventists, although eager to be seen as patriotic, had always kept a low profile in the political arena. Glad to help, my father wrote press releases and arranged speaking engagements.
My brother and I also got involved. In the months before the election, we drove an old station wagon all over the 33rd District, which included much of San Bernardino County, installing roadside signs. Our tools were a post-hole digger, nails and hammer. The six-by-four-foot signs in blue and red said, simply, “Pettis for Congress.”
This was the year Barry Goldwater faced off against Lyndon Johnson, and among family and friends, conservative sentiment was strong. I remember finding a thin paperback among campaign materials: None Dare Call It Treason, by John A. Stormer. A protestant minister and strident anti-communist, Stormer warned of a conspiracy to overcome America, aided by leftists embedded throughout American institutions. Along with Phyllis Shafley’s A Choice, Not an Echo, Stormer’s treatise helped swing the Republican Party further to the right.
In November, however, Goldwater was easily defeated, due in part to Johnson’s success in painting him as an extremist. Jerry Pettis, aware in the weeks before the election that the tide was changing, distributed a flier to district households showing a photo of him standing beside Lyndon Johnson. The photo came from a previous visit to the university by the then vice-president, and its reprint now conveyed the obvious message. Pettis would work well with the new Democratic president. Still, Pettis lost.
But two years later, Pettis ran again for Congress and won. The Adventists I knew were thrilled that one of them would now be their representative in Washington, and they welcomed the notoriety this would bring the denomination. I was in college that fall, and not long after, my parents called to tell me they would be moving to the nation’s capital as well. Pettis had asked my father to be his administrative assistant. That summer, instead of going home to Loma Linda, I joined my parents in a Maryland suburb.
Jerry Pettis served four and a half terms in the House of Representatives. In the early years of his tenure, he positioned himself as a conservative Republican, but by 1974 was considered a moderate. A Congressional ideology graph that year placed him pretty much in the middle.
His record on civil rights, however, drew harsh criticism. In a 1968 interview at nearby California State College, San Bernardino, Pettis defended his vote against the 1968 Civil Rights Bill, also called the Fair Housing Act, calling it a “garbage pail law.” Pettis said that he supported open housing in principle. The editor of the student newspaper pointed out, however, that Pettis had also opposed the 1963 Rumford Fair Housing Law in California. Pettis replied by stating he was no racist. He said he lived in one of the most integrated areas of the county, Loma Linda, and that one of his neighbors, a neurosurgeon, “was a Negro.”
On national security issues, including the Vietnam War, Pettis was a hardliner. Although he had arrived in Congress too late to vote on the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which gave President Johnson authority to expand military action in Vietnam, Pettis on several occasions voiced support for the Vietnam War. This was a problem for me.
At age 18 I had registered for the draft as 1-A-O. My father had explained that it was a deal the church had worked out with the Selective Service to serve in the Army, but in a non-combatant role. In World War II some Adventists had been medics. Others had become “white coats,” volunteering for medical experiments with new drugs.
The most famous Seventh-day Adventist in World War II was Desmond Doss, a combat medic from Virginia who was later awarded the Bronze Medal and the Congressional Medal of Honor. They made a movie about him. In Guam, Doss scaled cliffs to rescue scores of wounded soldiers. Doss believed he should help his country, but he refused to carry a gun.
Not all Adventists who were drafted, or those who enlisted, followed the church position, including a high school friend who had joined the Marines after being expelled from Loma Linda Academy. In Vietnam he contracted malaria. The summer before college I was a pallbearer at his funeral.
Increasingly, I had difficulty reconciling conscientious objection with most Adventists’ support of the Vietnam War. How could you be for the war and against the taking of life? Was it OK to shoot Vietnamese as long as you weren’t pulling the trigger? Could you support the torching of villages and bombing of cities as long as you didn’t have to do it?
In college in Massachusetts I started investigating various pacifist organizations. I read about the Quakers, and visited the American Friends Service Committee. I learned about Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement, and read the poetry and prose of the Berrigan brothers, Daniel and Phillip, Catholic priests and anti-war activists. I found out that my ancestors in Russia, before they became Adventists, had been Mennonites. I learned about their stance as pacifists and their migration from Germany to Russia to escape forced military service.
In September of 1968 Becky and I married, and transferred from Atlantic Union College to Cal State, San Bernardino. There I found myself marching in anti-war protests. Working on the student newspaper, I wrote editorials against the war.
That fall Richard Nixon won the election. “Thank God, we have a Christian in the White House,” a family friend said. Although Nixon had promised to bring an end to the war, it continued for four more years. On December 18, 1972, Nixon ordered the Christmas bombings of North Vietnam. Twenty thousand tons of bombs were dropped on Hanoi and Haiphong.
Long after the Vietnam War, I continued to explore why people of faith vote the way they do, and how they arrive at their political positions. What role does denominational doctrine and culture play? How does national identity affect our thinking? What makes some Christians more or less likely to stand up for the rights of others, or to keep silent about, or even to participate in, their oppression?
For me, the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement were crucibles, testing all I had been taught. As I struggled with how I should respond, I saw that some Christians, including Adventists, found ways to justify their support for violent and oppressive actions. On the other hand, I saw a few members of my church speaking out against the inhumanity of racism, participating in civil rights marches and advocating for racial reconciliation, both in and outside the church. I had friends who also opposed the Vietnam War. One burned his draft card in the Park Street Church in Boston. Another served in the Army as a medic, and another worked for two years as an orderly in a hospital.
In recent years I’ve taken a look at how Christians and especially Seventh-day Adventists in other countries have responded to human rights crises. In Germany in the 1930s, I was dismayed to find that the Adventist Church not only went along with, but in several ways facilitated the Nazi takeover and domination of society. Several recent studies document this.
In “Fatal Flirting: The Nazi State and the Seventh-day Adventist Church,” Harold Alomia writes that the German Adventist Church “became infatuated with Hitler. Hitler stood for conservative family values, was against pornography and prostitution, did not drink or smoke, and was even a vegetarian. He was an Adventist dream come true”(Journal of Adventist Mission Studies, Vol. 6 [2010], No. 1, Art. 2)).
The German church early approved of Hitler’s regime. Alomia continues::
Echoing the praises for the rise of Hitler to power, Adolf Minck, President of the Adventist German Church, penned his satisfaction with the election of Adolf Hitler in the August edition of Adventbote (the official periodical of the Seventh-day Adventist Church in Germany at that time): “A fresh enlivening, and renewing reformation spirit is blowing through our German lands . . . this is a time of decision, a time of such opportunities for a believing youth as has not been for a long time. . . . The word of God and Christianity shall be restored to a place of honor.”
Alomia quotes another Adventist leader, Wilhelm Mueller, who wrote that Hitler was “chosen by God” and praised his similarity with Adventists as a health reformer: “As an anti-alcoholic, non-smoker, [and] a vegetarian he is closer to our own view of health reform than anybody else.”
Reading several other reports, I learned that a vast majority of the approximately 38,000 German Adventists, encouraged by church leadership, voted for Adolf Hitler and his policies. In a paper written for the University of California at Santa Barbara Oral History Project, Corrie Schroder presented a comprehensive review of German Adventists under the Third Reich. She wrote: “In the Adventist town of Friedensau, 99.9 percent voted for the Nazi parliamentary party.”
Nevertheless, in 1933 the Nazis banned the German Adventist Church, along with other small denominations. Church leaders quickly mounted an appeal, countering that they were indeed loyal citizens eager to join in the work of building a new Germany. To differentiate themselves from Jews, with whom they shared observance of Saturday as Sabbath, as well as some dietary rules, Adventists changed the name of their Sabbath School to Bible School, and the name of Sabbath to Rest Day. Much more sinister, following directives from church leaders, they expelled members with Jewish backgrounds or those with Jewish relatives. This led to the banishment, imprisonment and/or death of an unknown number of Jewish Adventists.
The German Adventist Church also expelled members of a “reformed” branch of the church, which maintained the traditional belief that Adventists should not work on the Sabbath or serve as combatants in the armed services. Traditionally known as pacifists, Adventists were later given permission by church leaders to serve as combatants in the armed forces, and to attend school or work on Saturday.
Within two weeks of their appeal, the German SDA Church was reinstated by the government. In following months and years, the church found new ways to cooperate with the Nazis. Early in 1933 the government had announced the first of its eugenics laws, designed to cleanse the German racial pool. Titled “The Law for the Prevention of Progeny with Hereditary Diseases,” this law mandated the forced sterilization of individuals with nine physical or mental disabilities. Most Adventists were initially opposed to the sterilization law, but following persuasive articles in church publications, the Church signaled its compliance.
Neither did the Adventist Church object when in 1935 the Nuremberg Laws were passed, stripping Jews, Poles, Gypsies and others of citizenship.
In 1939 when the Nazis implemented euthanasia programs for children with physical or mental disabilities, the Adventist church remained silent.
The most extensive form of cooperation between church and state came when the Adventist Welfare Services offered to join with the National Socialist Welfare Department. This brought the well-organized church welfare programs under state control, which meant services would be restricted to those the Nazis considered worthy.
The leader of the Adventist Welfare Service was Hulda Jost, also the president of the Adventist Nurses Association, which operated several nursing homes and supplied staff to hospitals. A vocal supporter of Hitler, Jost in 1936 began a speaking tour in the United States. Quoted in a Chicago Daily News story, Jost said, “Hitler doesn’t want war.” Asked about treatment of Jews, she said: “Hitler has merely wanted to take leadership away from the Jews but he doesn’t want to hurt them.”
Adventist support for the Third Reich continued into the war. In a 1941 letter to the provincial governor, church president Adolph Minck wrote, quoted by Alomia: “At this occasion I may once again assure you that the members of our denomination stand loyally by the Fuhrer and the Reich. They are continually encouraged and supported in their basic attitude. The leadership of the denomination considers this as one of its most noble duties.”
The full effects of Adventist cooperation with the Nazi state may never be known. For Adventists with questionable lineage, it was devastating. Daniel Heinz, in a Dec. 28, 2017, article in Shabbat Shalom Magazine, tells of Adventists in Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia, who because of their Jewish background, were ostracized by the church, and who disappeared or perished in concentration camps.
There were, however, a few Adventists who went against the grain, who refused to comply with church or state directives. Heinz tells of Adventists in Latvia, Hungary and Belgium who rescued and sheltered hundreds of Jews while under German occupation. Of the Adventists in Latvia, Heinz writes:
One of the most courageous Adventists who fought against the mass murder of Jews was the Hungarian pastor and union president László Michnay. A tree planted in his honor in 1981 on the Avenue of the Righteous Among the Nations of the Yad Vashem in Jerusalem reminds us of his uncompromising resistance.
Another Adventist rescuer of those endangered by the Nazis was Jean H. Weidner, son of a pastor in Brussels. Heinz writes that Weidner and his organization led 800 Jews and another 200-300 endangered persons to safety in Switzerland and Spain.
These examples, however, do not diminish the sobering conclusion that in Germany the majority of Adventists–as well as other Christians–were complicit in the persecution and death of millions of Jews and other undesirables. They were complicit by their silence, and in some cases by their participation. Unlike the Lutheran pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, executed for his anti-Nazi activities, too many were seduced by the notion that their values and beliefs could be merged with those of the Third Reich.
Certainly nationalistic fervor played a major role, as did anti-Semitism, which had deep roots in Germany. Hitler would make the Fatherland great again, end unemployment, institute reforms and cleanse the nation of undesirables. Citizens were silent, compliant, or cooperative to the degree that their personal viewpoints matched or contrasted with the national agenda.
German Adventists were also motivated, as were religious of other denominations, by a desire to preserve their church organization. If Adventists are the one true church, as I was taught, then all must be done to preserve its mission. This was an argument I also heard during the Vietnam War. To the natural inclination to protect the organization was added, as the horrors of Nazism became clear, fear. Fear for one’s self and one’s family. Survival meant acquiescence and compliance.
These motivations are common in times of crisis, as people of faith have been confronted with corruption, evil and terror. They were certainly true for my relatives in Russia under Stalin. They were present in South Africa under apartheid.
In the church I grew up in, there was a tendency to see ourselves as targets of future persecution. I was taught that in the Latter Days–meaning the period before the return of Christ–we would be persecuted for our beliefs, particularly our keeping of the Sabbath. Indeed, Satanic forces, combined with Apostate Christianity, would seek our destruction. This would be our Time of Trouble. Only through obedience to God’s law and the sanctification of our souls could we hope to be saved. The great irony during World War II was that while Adventists were fearing their own Time of Trouble, millions were being slaughtered in death camps, and millions more perishing from bullets, bombs disease and hunger.
This is not in any way to dismiss the fears of those who chose complicity rather than resistance to the Nazi state. To stand up against Hitler’s “positive Christianity, could mean banishment, imprisonment or death. We cannot overlook the fate of 1,500 Jehovah’s Witnesses, who were shot or perished in concentration camps for refusing to give the Nazi salute or serve in the army.
Yet I cannot but wonder what would have happened if Adventists, along with Protestants and Catholics throughout Germany, had taken a stand early on against Nazi policies. In short, what if Christians had identified not with the forces of repressive power, but with the vulnerable–the Jews, the disabled, the undesirables–or in Christ’s words, “the least of these, my brethren”?
What can we learn from the past? What lessons can we apply to the challenges we face, including the 2024 elections in the United States? With whom will we choose to align? For whom will we vote?
Ben Jacques Stories 