{"id":78331,"date":"2015-11-02T04:50:31","date_gmt":"2015-11-02T12:50:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=78331"},"modified":"2015-11-02T04:51:43","modified_gmt":"2015-11-02T12:51:43","slug":"ben-carsons-church-believes-the-u-s-government-will-team-up-with-the-antichrist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=78331","title":{"rendered":"Ben Carson\u2019s Church Believes the U.S. Government Will Team Up With the Antichrist"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jay Michaelson writes<\/a>: Ben Carson\u2019s church believes the United States government will bring about the End Times.<\/p>\n

According to mainstream Seventh-day Adventist doctrine, the Second Coming of Christ will occur after the U.S. government teams up with the Catholic Church\u2014which Adventists believe is the \u201cBabylon\u201d of the Book of Revelation, with the pope being the Antichrist\u2014to compel Adventists and others to worship on Sunday, rather than Saturday.<\/p>\n

That may seem like a small hook on which to hang the fate of the world, but for Adventists, it is a core belief, taught at \u201cprophecy seminars\u201d and elaborated in excruciating geopolitical detail by key Adventist leaders.<\/p>\n

Is it awkward for Ben Carson to run for president, if his faith believes the U.S. government will team up with the Antichrist? Will it matter to his evangelical base if he, like his denomination, believes that the government will join forces with the Whore of Babylon, to persecute religious minorities and compel Sunday worship?<\/p>\n

So far, no.<\/p>\n

We don\u2019t know, though, what Carson personally believes\u2014only what his denomination teaches. <\/p>\n

In fact, the one time Carson was asked about the End Times, the media blew it. In an interview with conservative journalist Sharyl Atkisson, Carson first focused on the universal aspects of Adventist theology. <\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m a Christian,\u201d he said. \u201cI belong to the Seventh-day Adventist denomination. I believe in godly principles, of loving your fellow man, caring about your neighbor, developing your God-give talents to the utmost so you become valuable to the people around you.\u201d<\/p>\n

Pressed on his view about the End Times, Carson said, \u201cYou could guess that we are getting closer to that. You do have people who have a belief system that sees this apocalyptic phenomenon occurring, and that they\u2019re a part of it, and who would not hesitate to use nuclear weapons if they gain them.\u201d<\/p>\n

But, he reassured the public, \u201cI think we have a chance to certainly do everything that we can to ameliorate the situation, to prevent\u2014I would always be shooting for peace. You know, I wouldn\u2019t just take a fatalistic view of things.\u201d<\/p>\n

The mainstream media howled\u2014Ben Carson believes the End is Nigh!\u2014but missed the real story, as Sarah Posner, a columnist at the online journal Religion Dispatches, noted. Neither Atkisson nor anyone else pressed Carson on the Adventist-specific aspects (if any) of his worldview.<\/p>\n

The Seventh-day Adventist sect (and, later, the Jehovah\u2019s Witnesses) emerged out of messianic fervor in the mid-19th century, when the date of the Second Coming was established as October 22, 1844. Unlike the more recent predictions from the likes of Harold Camping, this one, by Baptist preacher William Miller, was not a fringe phenomenon. Tens of thousands of Americans believed the Second Coming was about to happen, and they acted on those beliefs, selling belongings and gathering on hilltops awaiting Christ\u2019s return.<\/p>\n

When it didn\u2019t happen, in the words of one believer, \u201cOur fondest hopes and expectations were blasted, and such a spirit of weeping came over us as I never experienced before.\u201d<\/p>\n

Quickly, though\u2014precisely as described in Leon Festinger\u2019s classic When Prophecy Fails\u2014many of the faithful regrouped. One of Miller\u2019s followers said that Christ had returned, in a way; He was now in Heaven, commencing the judgment of the world. Judgment Day is more like Judgment Period, and October 22, 1844, is when it began. <\/p>\n

To most Christians, all this is heresy, and Adventists have been persecuted for a century and a half. Their peculiar ways\u2014vegetarianism, church on Saturday\u2014mark them as different, which is obviously part of the reason they exist in the first place. And other distinctive beliefs\u2014for example, since death is simply a kind of sleep, there is no such thing as hell\u2014have caused many fundamentalists to reject them. While Seventh-day Adventists may, today, seem like just another Christian denomination, in fact they have long seen themselves as a group apart from the rest of the world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jay Michaelson writes: Ben Carson\u2019s church believes the United States government will bring about the End Times. According to mainstream Seventh-day Adventist doctrine, the Second Coming of Christ will occur after the U.S. government teams up with the Catholic Church\u2014which … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,42703,35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-78331","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adventist","category-ben-carson","category-christianity"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78331","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=78331"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78331\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":78333,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78331\/revisions\/78333"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=78331"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=78331"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=78331"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}