Luke Ford

I spent much of January 1991 with friends at Pacific Union College in the Napa Valley. I met a guy who was raised Jewish and converted to Seventh-Day Adventism.

I told him about my journey to Judaism.

From page 275 of the book Seeking A Sanctuary:

“However, it was for the nation’s Jews that greater efforts were made. Believing that they “will receive our literature more favorably because it comes from Sabbath-keeping, non-pork eating Christians,” Adventists approached them with high hopes. But Adventist feelings of affinity with Judaism were unreciprocated, and apart from the establishment of a Jewish church of 25 members in New York in 1949, these endeavors met with little success. Nonetheless, a few later Jewish converts, such as the writer Clifford Goldstein, were to become leading lights in the denomination.”

Adventists tend to conform to state authority. Their religion imbues them with a passive attitude towards life. The church discourages individual initiative and praises conformity.

From pages 193-194:

For example, in Hitler’s Germany, the wish to avoid confrontation was undoubtedly a factor in the development of the church’s open support for the Nazi party. German Adventist leaders completely associated themselves with the aims and objectives of their nation at that time. They denounced the Treaty of Versailles, accepted the theory of Aryan purity, and particularly welcomed the arrival of a Fuhrer who abstained from tea, coffee, alcohol, and meat. They fully supported the Nazi notion of “living room” and applauded the remilitarization of the Rhineland, the annexation of Austria, and the march into the Sudetenland. They also merged their welfare activities with those of the state and replaced the Jewish sounding “Sabbath” with the German word for rest day, Ruhetag, all in what turned out to be a successful effort to evade proscription.