Shabbat shalom,
If you haven’t already read it, Spectrum recently published an article of mine on AI and adventism. Twitter account @sdacaricatures has taken it and flew! Here’s my favorite but check out the rest of their thread:
This week, I wanted to try to write as brief a description of my interest in adventism, what about it I find valuable, and what is marginalized from adventist history that would benefit us to integrate.
In Peru, my grandmother converted to adventism and began sending her children to adventist universities, first to Lima, then Montemorelos. It was through these networks that Erica Guetti Suca alludes to in this Spectrum interview that I was eventually born a Californian. While I feel grateful for my citizenship, I also feel displaced, removed from my ancestry by two language gaps. Not only is there little memory of what my family’s traditions and spirituality was before adventism, but there is little interest. We disregard our heritage as superstitious. Adventism thrives alongside an internalized racism, “We had some Indian in our blood, but we’re Spanish.” Adventism is a global colonizing force. And it is global. As of 2021, adventism operates within 535 languages.
What is the message that comes through all these languages? Opportunities for education, medical assistance, very good things to be sure! All at the cost of the totalizing theology of linear time, disregard for and demonization of indigenous traditions, and ultimately importing repressive, 19th century psychologies.
Adventism brings so many cultures in relation to a shared mythology, the biblical canon. Imagine the potential for lore and cross-cultural wisdom that could come out of this shared relation! Imagine Maori retellings of Jonah– Quechua huayno versions of hymns– Bollywood renditions of Genesis! Imagine Thai Jesus, Cahuilla Jesus, Malian Jesus!
Something about adventism doesn’t allow for that. You could call it racism, colonialism, or imperialism. But to what end? Exploiting tithes from poor communities? Maybe. But I trust people to use their own money how they see fit. I think our worldview is so fragile that any sincerely-held indigenous cosmovision can undermine it in authenticity.
I just started David Gordon White’s Myths of the Dog-Man, where he explores the shared etymology of monster and demonstration and how the same mythological rhetoric exists in our modern descriptions of the Third World:
David Gordon White— For even as their importance is minimalized, the attention that is paid to them generally attempts to answer an extremely important, yet generally unvoiced question: If we are the people the gods and heroes brought into being when they won their cosmic battle and created the world, who are they?
The mytho-logical answer to this question is transparent and shallow: they aren’t really people; they used to belong to our world, but were cast out through disobedience; they are the bastard creations of antigods, etc.
What is the adventist response to this formulation? “It’s not that they’re evil, it’s that…” They don’t know any better? They have fallen prey to Satan’s tricks? Our language has changed and become politically correct, but they hold the same tribalism we’ve claimed to modernize past: they need to be civilized, rationalized, educated, theologized like we’ve done so to ourselves.
The adventist tradition is to theologize magic. As we explored a couple of weeks ago, Ellen White and her adventism didn’t erupt solely out of Miller’s calculations, but also traditions of methodism and mesmerism (which has evolved into what we call today, hypnosis):
Ann Taves– [Historical accounts] illustrate how early Seventh-day Adventists “made” a prophetess by demonizing mesmerism. In doing so, Seventh-day Adventists both neutralized mesmerism and inscribed it at the heart of the Seventh-day Adventist cosmos.
Adventism and hypnosis are fugue states of each other. There is a psychological splitting that can experience healing and integration. In doing so, we might find ourselves, not just corporately connected to our church buildings around the world, but in awe of the imaginations that sit in their pews and the ancestries that lie beneath their foundations.
These are the ideas I’m working with! Would love to hear your thoughts and feelings on these explorations. I’ve got a draft on spirits, spiritualism, and animism coming up.
Thanks for reading.