While working in my garden yesterday, I began to remember a statement in one of the union papers. It went something like, "when you choose not to be vaccinated, your choice will appropriately mean you are limited in terms of what you can and cannot do in your community, in work, and in travel." It was published sometime around August of 2021, I don’t recall which paper…
At the time, I remember thinking, "that author is saying that a perfectly healthy person who has questions about a treatment, but who does not submit to bullying authority, is in the wrong." That is an amazing position to embrace today when checks and balances sustaining religious liberty seem forgotten and members of global denominations are having their consciences trampled by their government, employer, or even by their church.
The article inveighed against the responsibility of the layperson to think for himself. Instead, it invoked the priesthood of experts—and secular experts at that! Those who disagree with an "expert" about something affecting the health of their body, that article suggested, were guilty of hyper-individualism. The author suggested that by responding to conscience, a church member makes himself one of a million raging popes and eccentrics, even incriminated for supporting anti-heroes and disinformationists. There are experts and there is everyone else, and everyone else doesn’t count, because the experts are more equal.
That’s Orwellian
The article pled for what was an effectively Roman Catholic viewpoint on religious liberty, for a group of experts or teachers to which others are subject. The teachers, in being labeled experts, in assuming that authority, in effect, plead that non-experts surrender their conscience to expert conscience.
All of which begs the question, Why did God give conscience to the non-experts if what they are duty-bound to do is to surrender their consciences to the "experts" anyway?
In a Protestant view of liberty of conscience, there can be no panel of experts to whom we owe moral obeisance. Because Adventists hold a Protestant view, we embrace fundamental belief #22. This belief boils down to the idea that because my body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, I am to treat my body in the most healthful manner possible. It is only logical then, it exactly follows then, that of course I will ask questions, of course I will hesitate to accept assertions that something is safe, or that it is dangerous, either way—no matter how many wheelbarrows filled with cattle compost are flung my way.
In the question of health, I should prove all things and then hold on to what passes muster. In the Seventh-day Adventist Church, health is not a cordoned-off domain where lady justice, pink hair flying and nose rings flaring, bars God’s entry with flaming sword. Bodily health is a spiritual domain and Jesus is on the throne in every domain in my life.
So, when I think of the departmental leaders in my union or any other, I want my religious liberty leaders not to be Protestants in name only, but in fact. I want that person to be a Protestant who will defend my liberty of conscience. I do not want that to be someone who engages in ad hominem, who attempts to prohibit discussion or dialogue, or who tries to prevent meetings from occurring. I want a leader who respects other viewpoints fully consonant with the Adventist approach that we seek to treat our bodies in the most healthful manner possible.
May God deliver us from those who think it appropriate to see brother and sister believers locked in their homes, terminated from employ, or imprisoned in Chinese quarantine camps. It should not surprise church leaders that many Adventists are dissidents from the secular narrative, and that they are puzzled when the church enrolls Adventists as leaders who are advocates for that narrative.
May God deliver us from the priesthood of experts.
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Larry Kirkpatrick serves as pastor of the Muskegon and Fremont MI Seventh-day Adventist churches. His website is GreatControversy.org and YouTube channel is “Larry the guy from Michigan.” Every morning Larry publishes a new devotional video.