Growing up in the Seventh-day Adventist church, I experienced first-hand our denomination’s tendency to separate itself from society at large. This reality takes on a physical meaning in the form of the Adventist school system as well as becoming a more abstract phenomenon in regards to the Church’s fundamental leaning on issues such as Sabbath keeping and consumption of meat. In the introduction and part one of their book Seeking a Sanctuary: Seventh-day Adventist and the American Dream, Malcolm Bull and Keith Lockhart address this propensity for social detachment, covering the denomination’s inception, founding personalities such as Ellen White, and the evolution of its doctrine in relation to American society at large (2007). Throughout
