Luke Ford

I spent a couple of hours with my seventh grade friend Dr. Gary Chartier Friday afternoon, Sept. 5, 2008. Video

Luke: "One of the things I hated about growing up Adventist was that I did not feel at the center of things. You’re out in the country. When you watched the news, rarely was the Seventh-Day Adventist church affecting the world. We’d get our own news through the Review & Herald. When I picked up Time magazine, I never got the sense of us being at the center of things."

"It’s part of the religion. It’s otherworldly."

Gary: "You’ve got a group of people who think the world’s about to come to an end."

Gary: "We’ve got our own institutions. We don’t have to feel excluded from institutional life. We have schools. Health care… We have created an area that is distinctly Adventist… Why would you want to be out in this outer world when you have this educational and professional [Adventist] track."

Gary has been teaching Sabbath School for about eight years.

Luke: "As a kid, I was interested in battles. You never read about Seventh-Day Adventist generals."

Gary laughs.

Adventists tend to be pacifists and non-political.

Luke: "I love politics. You never hear, ‘How is Barack Obama going to capture the Adventist vote?’ Or, ‘Barack Obama will be flying into Loma Linda to meet with his big Seventh-Day Adventist money men. It just didn’t come up."

"The other thing I began falling in love with [as a kid] was professional sports. You never heard about great Seventh-Day Adventist sportsmen because of the Sabbath."

Gary: "Adventist Sabbatarianism really affected Adventists professionally. You could either be self-employed or work for a church institution."

Luke: "And then culturally. There won’t great Seventh-Day Adventist filmmakers nor novelists or playwrights or painters."

Gary: "Adventists are just the latest series of people who are scared of artists. Classical musicians are about the only artists who are embraced."

Luke: "Have many of your peers dropped out of Adventism after attending secular universities?"

Gary: "A lot went through Adventist undergraduate education. Then a lot of us went on to graduate school elsewhere. I don’t know if that was the driving force, but I do find that as someone involved in Adventist church life, I’m in a distinct minority."

Luke: "When I was growing up, my dad was like a rock star of Seventh-Day Adventist life. Who are the rock stars of Seventh-Day Adventist life?"

Gary: "It’s hard for me to say as Adventism is much more fragmented to say that there are people who play that role. A quarter-century ago when your dad played that role, Adventism was more cohesive."

Luke: "I’d see my dad get mobbed wherever he went. People would swarm him. Adventism has a high percentage of nutters, people who’d get off on eschatology and conspiracy theories. When you walk into a room, there was one person who everyone wanted to talk to. I’ve gone to parties with Martin Amis and Christopher Hitchens and they were mobbed."

"It’s the controversial, high-profile speakers. It’s the eloquent speakers who are the rock stars of Seventh-Day Adventist life. The people who can move vast audiences."

Gary: "That captures what mattered as far as your dad is concerned. Who could pack a hall right now? I’m not sure I can think of somebody."

Luke: "Who can make people cry?"

Gary: "Sure."

Luke: "How about Ivan Blazen?"

Gary: "Ivan is a great guy but he’s not a rock star… He’s a thoughtful careful guy. I don’t know that he’s going to have the same emotional impact as someone like Smuts [Van Rooyen] or your dad."

Luke: "What’s the biggest church around here?"

Gary: "Loma Linda."

Luke: "Who’s the pastor?"

Gary: "Randy Roberts."

Luke: "Does he make people cry?"

Gary: "I don’t think so. He’s a very capable communicator but a low-key communicator. He’s not playing on the violin of his congregants emotions."

Luke: "How much do you think that Adventists got exhausted?"

Gary: "From everything in the eighties? Ford, [Donald] Davenport. [Walter] Rea."

I felt in the middle of this Adventist cultural storm in the late seventies and early eighties and I sensed that most people burned out on the controversy and wanted to get on with their lives.

Luke: "It didn’t get me laid. One of the definitions of rock star is that you can walk into a bar and women want to sleep with you. As Godly people, we don’t engage in such behavior…"

Gary: "It’s not as overtly erotic as Mick Jagger, but there’s an underlying erotic tension…"

Luke: "That’s why so many clergy get in trouble. Because they have the opportunity. The average shlub doesn’t have the opportunity."

Gary: "What could be more erotic than the vulnerability people often experience to the clergy person to whom they are bearing their souls, looking for guidance, to a person who moves people’s emotions."

Luke: "I had this rabbi, Mordecai Finley, and every Shabbos morning, I felt like he was talking to me. He unlocked myself to myself as no other speaker had done. My father did that for many.

"I’m trying to figure what type of people were moved by my father and which people were unmoved and which people were repelled."

I guess evangelical Adventists were moved, lifestyle Adventists were unmoved, and traditional Adventists were repelled.

Luke: "In the summer of 1980, I went from feeling at the center of the world [when we were in the church], to feeling peripheral. That freshman year of high school, I had a D plus average. I was so miserable."

"I wonder how much of my sneering contempt for humanity is genetic and how much comes from being Desmond Ford’s son and having these nutters come around? By ninth grade, I had developed this honed contempt. People would come over to talk to my dad and I’d wind ’em up…about back-lacing [rock] lyrics and conspiracy theories."

We reminisce about John Todd, who made the rounds of Adventism in the late ’70s and early ’80s, claiming to be an escape from the Illuminati.

Gary: "The guy who legitimized this stuff was Roy Allan Anderson, a professor at Loma Linda who was an enthusiast for this stuff. His books laced with this stuff."

Luke: "The other thing I hated about my Adventist upbringing was that ‘competition’ was a dirty word. They didn’t want you competing with people. I was a lousy student because the only thing that gets me motivated is competition. I wanted to smash, clobber and stomp my enemies or people I competed against. That’s what gets me going in the morning. Because I wasn’t allowed to compete, I couldn’t do any schoolwork."

Gary: "I’ve never said this to you but that’s what I most remember about you from seventh grade. You were the guy who terrified me by destroying me at Stratego. It was a military strategy game. You were deadly. I wanted to play that with you because this guy was this terrifying intense figure."

Luke: "I was out for blood. I wanted to have debates. I just always wanted to fight and there were only limited socially acceptable ways to do that."

Gary: "A culture of aggressive engagement is endemic to Australian Adventism, which may be more broadly Australian than Adventist."

Luke: "Like Australian evangelist John Carter. You don’t want to get in front of that freight train."

"I remember evangelists getting together and boasting about how many people they’d brought to Christ. When communism fell, they couldn’t wait to go do their thing in the former Soviet Union."

Gary: "Evangelism has always been the sexy thing in Adventism. It’s always been the thing that’s gotten the attention. The person who does ordinary pastoral nurturing of congregants is a distant second."

Luke: "That’s one of the things I hated about Adventism and Christianity when people would get in the mindset that everyone was just fodder for Christ."

"I remember Rabbi Mordecai Finley saying that if Protestants had more rituals, they’d be less driven to evangelize. Orthodox Jews have so many rituals, there’s no time left for evangelizing [except to fellow Jews]."