Seeking a Sanctuary: Seventh-Day Adventism and the American Dream

by Malcolm Bull, Keith Lockhart

The completely revised second edition further explores one of the most successful of America's indigenous religious groups. Despite this, the Adventist church has remained largely invisible. Seeking a Sanctuary casts light on this marginal religion through its socio-historical context and discusses several Adventist figures that shaped the perception of this Christian sect.

Genres: History, Christianity, Religion, Nonfiction

520 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2006

About the author

Malcolm Bull is Professor of Art and the History of Ideas at Oxford University and a Senior Associate Research Fellow of Christ Church.

Reviews

[Ben Schnell · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is an amazing study of Adventism. It was a page turner for me. It's very interesting to hear an objective outsider study the church without an agenda to promote the church or destroy it, but just to explain it. I will read again.

[Mei · Rating 4 out of 5]

Just got back from the Spectrum Conference with Bull and Lockhart, who were both articulate and phenomenally engaging human beings. This book sparked a great deal of controversy, some were hostile to the idea that their church was not, and has never been on the forefront of political change or social activism. And also the idea of the revolving door, which posits the observation that when Adventists get more educated, they leave. It was interesting to see the need that the Adventists had to either deny the observations that Bull and Lockhart had made in a way that seemed like, well...denial, or to embrace them as prophets - there were countless questions of what they thought could happen next, and even, what they thought was possible to happen next. I couldn't help but feeling that what was possible didn't lie with them but with the very people who asked the questions. Like myself, I suppose.

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Definitely one of the best academic books in existence on Seventh-day Adventism. Probably not a good place for the novice to begin, however. Its chapters are stand alone essays, and the authors assume a certain level of basic familiarity with Adventism.

[Seth Anderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

A sociological study of the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

[EM CIRSTEA · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book. A must read.

[John]

This magisterial work is generally regarded as the most important academic study of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. Bull and Lockhart create a compelling picture of the SDAs as one of America's least-understood, but most-successful, indigenous religious movements. This study brings together a history of the SDA Church and a study of its subcultures with an analysis of the Church's ambivalent relationship with the United States. This ambivalence is characterized by the authors as a function of the Adventist preoccupation with time: The Church's peculiar understanding of temporality (its emphasis on the seventh-day Sabbath and its focus on eschatology) is, according to Bull and Lockhart, the primary source of its identity. Sometimes they push this understanding too far. For example, at one point they interpret the disapproval of novels by Ellen White and the early Adventist leadership as a rejection of the secular understanding of time that would be encouraged by the novel as a literary form. A couple of pages later, though, the argues discuss the encouragement of specifically SDA novels by the same early leadership. If it had been the novel as a form per se that was problematic due to Adventist concerns about marking out sacred time, then the subject matter would have been irrelevant. If this approach is occasionally stretched to (or beyond) its breaking point, it nonetheless provides a fascinating interpretive lens through which to view Adventism in America.

The final third of Seeking a Sanctuary is devoted to a consideration of "Adventist Subculture," analyzing the interplay between race, gender, socio-economics, and professional life in the inner dynamics of Adventism. These chapters are uneven. The most fascinating is adiscussion of the influence of health reform and Adventist medicine on the overall direction of Adventist culture, polity, and theology. Bull and Lockhart argue that the classic denominalization thesis is not really applicable to the SDA church; this body, they say, has been not so much denominalized as medicalized. The tensions between the ordained ministry and administration of the church, on the one hand, and its medical practitioners and institutions on the other, emerges with compelling vividness in this discussion.

This book is absolutely essential reading for anyone interested in Adventism or sectarian movements in America.