I Used To Be A Seventh-Day Adventist & Here Are The Questions I Want Ben Carson To Answer

Ben Carson Is A Member Of The Seventh Day Adventist Church: Its History And Beliefs

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2015/11/ben-carson-is-member-of-seventh-day.html

I Used To Be A Seventh-Day Adventist, And There Are The Questions I Want Ben Carson To Answer

AUSTIN — I grew up Seventh-Day Adventist, a small but diverse church that tends to isolate itself from mainstream Christianity and the rest of the United States.

Adventist kids tend to go to Adventist schools or be homeschooled; I was the latter. 

Adventists were vegetarians and vegans before being vegetarian was cool; I didn’t eat meat or cheese until my later teen years. Adventists don’t just go to church on Saturday, they tend to frown on any secular activities taking place between sunset Friday and sunset Saturday. 

Before I went to a public high school, I knew no one who wasn’t Adventist. I was never out on a Friday night. I was all in, and so was everyone I knew. There were no half Adventists. 

Two-thirds of Adventists surveyed by Pew attend church weekly, a number which doesn’t fully capture the investment of the average church member.

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I grew up wanting to be a Navy test pilot and if I was lucky, an astronaut. You’ll have to excuse ten-year-old me. At the time the most important heroes in my life were my pastor and Buzz Aldrin.

I wanted to go to space and I wanted to be baptized; my sister wanted to be like Ben Carson, the miracle-working Adventist surgeon who was the first to successfully separate conjoined twins. Today, she’s two years into medical school. I never became an astronaut, a test pilot, or a pilot at all, because ten-year-old me knew such a thing could never happen. How could I possibly observe the Sabbath in space? I was a logical kid. I was baptized just before my 11th birthday.

Now I’m nearly 30 years old, no longer an Adventist and Carson wants to be president. I have some questions.

In this Sept. 7, 1987, file photo, Dr. Donlin Long, director of neurosurgery, left, and Dr. Ben Carson director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Md.,, holds a brain model of the conjoined twins who separated in a 22-hour surgery, in Baltimore. Carson is the only 2016 candidate for president who has never led a state or company or run for political office, but the retired neurosurgeon maintains that someone who can lead life-or-death operations surely can run the country.

Carson doesn’t want to talk about Adventism, even as he and his wife attend an Adventist church regularly. Perhaps understandably, Carson prefers to claim a more general and politically appealing Christianity. Yet I know well how difficult it is to be half an Adventist. 

While they might say that the church “doesn’t seek to influence political and civil leaders for the purpose of advancing the Adventist faith or inhibiting the faith of others,” several core Adventist beliefs have real political consequences.

Here’s what I want debate moderators, the media, and the general public to ask Carson.
How do you observe the Sabbath? Would that change how you tackled the job of being president?

It’s hard for the 10-year-old me who wanted to be a test pilot to reconcile Adventism and the world’s most demanding job. Adventists believe in a strictly non-secular observance of the time between Friday sunset and Saturday sunset, and many sermons in my childhood focused on heroic Adventists who rejected jobs, closed businesses, or even resisted out-and-out coercion to do non-secular activities on the Sabbath. In fact, the Adventist belief of the end of the world focuses entirely on observance of the Saturday Sabbath. I’d love to know just how a practicing Adventist expects to wake up to a national security briefing every Sabbath morning of his presidency.

Do you believe that the United States will follow a Biblical prophecy that according to Adventists, believes the United States will “speak like a dragon” and persecute Adventists, aligning with the Catholic Church to force Sunday church attendance?

Carson told the Associated Press he “loves Catholics” and believes that is “just an interpretation.” I might not remember calculus, but I remember Adventist doctrine, and if you believe in not-a-saint-definitely-a-prophet Adventist founder Ellen G. White then you believe this.

Do you believe that the office of the pope is, in fact, the Antichrist? How would this affect your relations with American Catholics and the Vatican?

Adventists got upset when Carson met with Pope Francis on his recent trip to the United States. Before he visited, I heard from Adventists who were scared that the Pope’s visit represented a beginning to the end times. Carson’s clearly trying to get some distance from the pope-as-Antichrist concept; but this belief is core to Adventism.

How does church doctrine affect your view of women’s roles in modern life, especially on a Carson White House staff?

You said that the church’s recent vote not to ordain women made no sense; but the doctrinal basis for that decision in part reflected the church’s embrace of traditional gender roles and women as “helpmeet”, and a discomfort with women being in roles that would oversee men. Would you hire women in leadership roles? Would you nominate a woman for a Cabinet role?

How would your belief in creationism affect education policy and your administration’s science policy?

As nearly literal interpreters of the Bible, Adventists may be some of the originators of modern creationism in the United States; my mother homeschooled me in part to avoid public schools teaching of evolution. Carson has spoken in front of Adventists and others defending this belief; he has not said how it would affect his views on the content of American education or its effect on science policy were he to become president.