THE NEXT ADVENTISM
Adventism, America, and the Politics of Location
WHY BLACK CHURCHES ENGAGE THE PUBLIC SQUARE DIFFERENTLY BY JA SON O’R OURKE
American Christianity has always been a study in contrasts. It is not a single voice but a choir—many languages, many migrations, many wounds, many hopes—singing the same hymns from very different historical locations. Korean, Chinese, Filipino, Caribbean, Latino, African, Native, and European believers all gather under the same Scriptures and confess the same Christ, yet their lived experiences of faith have been shaped by profoundly different relationships to power, belonging, and survival. Tis reflection does not reduce Christianity to a simplistic
racial binary. Te church in the United States has always been multiethnic and multicultural. Yet, for the sake of historical clarity, one contrast remains especially determinative for the American religious imagination: the divergent political theologies that developed within the Black church and the white church. Tese two streams were formed under radically unequal social conditions, and thus, they cultivated radically different instincts about justice, power, and public life. One learned to preach from the underside of history. Te other learned to preach from its throne. Other immigrant and minority congregations oſten share
more in common with the former than the latter, for they too know what it means to live near the margins. But the Black– white divide remains the central moral fault line of American Christianity, because it is along this line that citizenship, safety, and personhood were most fiercely contested. Understanding this distinction requires first acknowledging
something many Adventists prefer not to name: Seventh- day Adventism, despite its global reach, is historically and institutionally an American denomination. Te movement was born in 19th-century New England
revivalism. Its founders were shaped not only by Scripture but by the assumptions of Protestant America: individualism, rationalism, moral reformism, and a deep confidence in the American experiment. Tese cultural instincts became embedded in Adventist life long before the church imagined itself worldwide.
Tat American imprint remains visible today. Te General
Conference of Seventh-day Adventists is headquartered in the United States. Te historic publishing centers—Review and Herald Publishing Association and Pacific Press Publishing Association—shaped what theology and devotional materials circulated across the globe. Te flagship Adventist educational institutions that have trained generations of international leaders—our seminary at Andrews University for ministers and missionaries, plus Loma Linda University for medical professionals—all sit on American soil. And so do the archives, the graves of the founders, and the administrative machinery. Institutions do not merely transmit doctrine; they transmit
culture. And for most of Adventist history, what has been considered “reverent,” “orthodox,” or “appropriate” has largely reflected Euro-American Protestant sensibilities. Tus, American Adventism has oſten mistaken its own cultural comfort for biblical neutrality. But neutrality is rarely neutral. It
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