The inheritor of a website that Gerry and I wrote for before we established Fulcrum7 has written a piece about the Conrad Vine controversy, in which he concludes that Elder Vine’s proposal is being driven by his secular political ideology. “The striving faithful,” he concludes, “must turn their focus from cultural grievance and conspiracy speculation.”
Is our opposition to vaccine mandates being driven by “cultural grievance and conspiracy speculation”?
Although I have my disagreements with this brother, I respect his intellect and learning, and especially his commitment to the Adventist Church and its message and mission. Moreover, this brother is careful not to distort Vine’s position by stating or implying, as some have, that Vine suggested diverting tithe away from the SDA Church, or establishing a new denomination. He acknowledges that Vine,
“is suggesting the possible viability of a parachurch organization by which tithes and offerings from concerned church members could be diverted from Conferences (local and otherwise) where vaccine mandates, LGBTQ acceptance, and similar practices are enforced as policy by church administrators, and subsequently be directed to segments of the church structure where opposition to such practices is the policy of those who govern.”
He also raises fair questions that would need to be answered if Elder Vine’s germ of an idea ever proceeded to the planning stage:
First, if a parachurch organization of the sort being described here were to be assembled, how would its constituents be chosen? Who would screen them? What standards would measure their fitness for participation in such a structure? The principal architect of this suggestion says that “fidelity to Scripture” would be the test for the organization’s choices in the disbursement of tithes and offerings to various entities within the denomination. But exactly what would this mean, and who would determine its contours and limits?
Second, how far would the group’s definition of “fidelity to Scripture” be taken? Would the writings of the Spirit of Prophecy also be included? What about SDA Fundamental Beliefs, and church policies endorsed by the General Conference in session? Would decisions made by the GC executive committee at Annual Council and/or Spring Meeting have any role here?
These are fair questions, and asking them highlights how far Elder Vine’s suggestion is from a serious, realistic proposal, and hence how disproportionate was the church leadership’s draconian response. There seems to be a sort of “death penalty”—career death, anyway—in effect for any mention of tithe that does not obsequiously toe the party line, which is that all tithe must be returned to the “storehouse” and that the “storehouse” is always and only the local conference. But is that true?
Ironically, the article in question demonstrates that it is not. In a 1905 letter to an Elder Watson, who was president of the Colorado Conference, Ellen White stated that she diverted her own tithe to support poverty-stricken workers in the post-Civil War South:
“It has been presented to me for years that my tithe was to be appropriated by myself to aid the white and colored ministers who were neglected and did not receive sufficient properly to support their families. When my attention was called to aged ministers, white or black, it was my special duty to investigate into their necessities and supply their needs.” Manuscript Releases, Vol. 2, p. 99.
Based upon other instances of the phrase, “it has been presented to me,” it is reasonable to infer that God showed Mrs. White that this was how she was to use her tithe. The brother argues that such an exception can apply only to prophets, who have a direct line of communication to God, but he is missing the main point: God told Ellen White that there will sometimes be more urgent uses of one’s tithe than sending it to the local conference “storehouse.” (Although here, we need to repeat yet again that Elder Vine did not suggest diverting tithe from all the conferences, just from the unfaithful ones, to be sent to the faithful ones.)
A Man-made Test?
The crux of this brother’s objection to Elder Vine’s sermon is that he does not think that vaccines mandates are “a hill to die on” because they are not the mark of the beast but rather a “man-made test”:
“The biggest problem here is man-made tests. Whatever opinion one holds of the COVID vaccine, or any other vaccine, neither vaccinations nor vaccine mandates are forbidden by the inspired writings—not in Scripture, not in the writings of Ellen White. . . . No credible evidence can be shown that the current controversy over the COVID vaccine has arisen because of a deeper study of the Bible or the writings of the Spirit of Prophecy.”
It is worth remembering that this brother does not believe that Scripture condemns abortion. Most of us would deem “thou shalt not kill” a sufficiently clear prohibition of abortion, but this brother is not adept at identifying moral principles in Scripture and applying them in modern situations.
One can imagine him asserting, “whatever opinion one holds of Russian Roulette, it is not forbidden in Scripture,” and indeed, the Bible does not forbid it by name. Moreover, you are unlikely to die from one round of Russian Roulette; there are six chambers in the cylinder of most revolvers, so a live round in one chamber means the odds of the hammer coming down on an empty chamber are 83%. You have only a 17% chance of dying.
But most of us would conclude that Scriptural principles forbid us from taking that kind of chance. Not only does the Bible forbid self-murder, it forbids us “putting the Lord our God to the test” (Mat. 4:7; Luke 4:12), i.e., taking unnecessary risks and expecting God to protect us.
Avoiding unnecessary health risks is effectively SDA church law. No Adventist pastor would baptize and accept into membership a smoker, although the odds of a life-long smoker contracting lung cancer are no more than 10 to 20 percent.
What is the rate of serious adverse reactions to the Covid vaccine? We know that it is many times more dangerous than any vaccine in the history of vaccines. Some 37,300 deaths have been reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting system (VAERS), many times more than any other vaccine in history, but VAERS captures only 1% to 13% of serious vaccine injuries. Moreover, there are multiple non-fatal vaccine injuries for every vaccine-caused fatality. Many believe that the overall adverse reaction rate could well be in the range of 10 to 20 percent.
If the adverse reaction rate is anywhere near this, then we have not a “man-made test” but rather a biblical principle that we already agree on. Fundamental belief 22 states:
“ . . . because our bodies are the temples of the Holy Spirit, we are to care for them intelligently. Along with adequate exercise and rest, we are to adopt the most healthful diet possible and abstain from the unclean foods identified in the Scriptures. Since alcoholic beverages, tobacco, and the irresponsible use of drugs and narcotics are harmful to our bodies, we are to abstain from them as well.”
Again, this is not a “man-made test.” The health message is something that Adventists have long embraced, and have understood to be a spiritual and biblical issue, with the full endorsement of the Spirit of Prophecy.
Is This Controversy, at its Roots, About Politics?
This would seem to be a simple factual question: Is the Covid vaccine dangerous and nearly useless, or is it safe and effective? Who is right? What are the facts? But, alas, it is not that simple. The story you hear about the vaccines depends entirely on who you are listening to. As the author of the article in question phrases it:
“Were it not for the widespread, knee-jerk suspicion of civil government, the medical establishment, and the mainstream media—suspicion largely driven by secular political biases and untenable conspiracy theories—it is highly unlikely that this controversy would have come close to causing the division we presently see on this subject in the Seventh-day Adventist Church.”
It is certainly true that the “mainstream” sources of news—the broadcast and cable networks, the New York Times, the Washington Post, etc., and the government agencies such as the FDA, the CDC, etc.—all claim the vaccine is safe and effective, and they repeat this endlessly.
And it is also true that whether one agrees with the official narrative breaks down largely along ideological lines. Leftists accept the official narrative coming from media sources that they know are reliably Leftist (or at least understand that they are meant to agree, and act accordingly). Conservatives, by contrast, are skeptical of these sources, mainly because we understand that every word and syllable from these sources is very carefully curated to convey the agreed upon Leftist narrative.
There are, of course, exceptions, most notably Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.; the Kennedy name is synonymous with the Democratic Party, but Kennedy has spent his legal career litigating against pharmaceutical companies, and that changes one’s worldview. Kennedy knows the Covid vaccines are bad news, which makes him an ally of conservatives at least on this topic. Another prominent exception is Naomi Wolf, a left-wing feminist and longtime Democrat, who become a very outspoken skeptic of the Covid vaccines, and the leader of a crowdsourced analysis of the Pfizer clinical trial data a court forced Pfizer to release pursuant to a FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) request.
This is not a MAGA issue, either. President Trump continued to tout “project warp speed”—his fast-tracking of the Covid Vaccines—as a great accomplishment years after he should have stopped that. To this day, Trump petulantly whines that he did not get enough credit for his handling of Covid, whereas most of his supporters believe he “got rolled” by Fauci and Birx, who talked him into an array of disastrous Covid “counter-measures” that did far more damage than the disease itself, not least, ironically, by justifying mail-out ballots that were fraudulently harvested and drop-boxed to turn Trump out of office.
Another irony is that 30 years ago, it was the Republicans who were aligned with Big Pharma—in 1986, Ronald Reagan gave immunity from civil liability suits to vaccine makers—and other big business interests, whereas the Democrats were aligned with the plaintiff’s trial bar (lawyers who sue drug companies) and other skeptics of the pharmaceutical industrial complex. (I remember this very well, because at the time, in the early and mid 1990s, I was a plaintiff’s trial lawyer, and made my living litigating against the Upjohn Company.)
That has all turned around 180 degrees. America today has a fascist governing system, a governing alliance of big corporations, media, and government which it seems almost everyone has joined, with a Leftist ideology to which all must give obeisance. All large institutions have Marxist commissars, political officers usually given anodyne titles like “vice president of diversity,” who enforce ideological conformity to ESG, DEI, CRT, feminism, and other aspects of cultural Marxism.
Corrupt elected Republicans not only do not oppose this system, they perpetuate it: The “Republican” House of Representatives has funded every penny—literally every penny, and then some—of the woke and weaponized government set up by Nancy Pelosi in the previous congress, even as their increasingly frustrated and demoralized voters are the targets of weaponized government and politically motivated criminal prosecutions at every level, not to mention corporate lies and propaganda, and scores of millions of illegal immigrants who do not speak their language or share their culture.
With these provisos and caveats, however, we can say that the brother is correct in stating that ideology is at the bottom of this controversy. Leftists believe the regime’s propaganda that the vaccines are “safe and effective”; conservatives do not. We have sought out, and listen to, other sources of information, non-regime sources of information.
Should Conservative SDAs Go Along with the Marxist Governing Elites?
This brother’s solution is that we, the conservatives, should knock it off and toe the party line. His reasoning is that it is divisive, it is political, and we are not suppose to be political. Here is what he believes is the problem:
“Neither the Bible nor the writings of the Spirit of Prophecy condemn vaccinations or vaccine mandates. Neither does either inspired source offer a sweeping condemnation of any particular political ideology, whatever position that ideology is assigned on the left-middle-right spectrum.”
We have already dealt with the first part of this statement; although Scripture does not condemn vaccination, or Russian Roulette, by name, it does condemn taking unreasonable risks with our health. Even at its most dangerous, when it first emerged from the biological weapons laboratory at Wuhan, China, Covid posed zero risk to healthy children and young people so, in the case of youngsters, there was never any reason to take any chances with any vaccines, much less a novel, untested gene therapy. Forcing those healthy young people to take the vaccine was never anything other than demonic evil.
For older people, the vaccine provided at best 4 to 6 months of minimal protection against a severe case of Covid, but at the cost of possibly permanent damage to the immune system, and an unreasonable chance of death and other debilitating side effects. Saying “no” to the clot shots has always been an easy decision for almost everyone except perhaps those over 78 years old. Forcing anyone to take the vaccine was never anything but tyranny and grave injustice.
But I want to focus on the second part of the statement:
“Neither does either inspired source [the Bible or Ellen White] offer a sweeping condemnation of any particular political ideology, whatever position that ideology is assigned on the left-middle-right spectrum.”
That is not true. The brother needs to go back and read Revelation 11 and Great Controversy, Chapter 15. In fact, Scripture and Ellen White both condemn revolutionary Leftism as worse than papal domination. During the era of papal domination, the Scriptures preached, “clothed in sackcloth,” that is, kept untranslated in an unused language, and buried beneath centuries of accumulated traditions and pagan beliefs. But the Bible still spoke truth during those centuries of Roman Catholic domination.
Any revolutionary Leftism regime, however, kills the Scriptures. The Bible, and the biblical worldview, lies dead in the streets. Revolutionary Leftism is a more direct form of satanic power than is Roman Catholicism, and it is much more dangerous. History has born this out: scholars estimate that the papacy killed some 50 million people during its centuries of domination, but revolutionary Leftism killed over 100 million people during eight decades of the 20th Century alone. The Scriptures and the inspired writings of Ellen White offer exactly a “sweeping condemnation” of Leftist ideology.
And it is unquestionably revolutionary Leftism that we are dealing with today in the United States and the rest of the Western world. There are many indications of this, including the Covid saga itself, in which we were subjected to endless official lies and gaslighting, things completely unheard of in the Western world prior to four years ago, but typical of the communist regimes of the 20th Century.
The leaders of the new fascist regime in America are unabashedly Marxist. Barack Obama admitted in two biographies that he was mentored by communist Frank Marshall Davis, as well as his Marxist university professors; he began his political career in the living room of unrepentant communist terrorists, Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dorn. Pete Buttigieg’s father, Joseph Buttigieg was a Marxist professor who studied the life of Antonio Gramsci, the father of “cultural Marxism,” and translated his “prison notebooks” into English.
Kamala Harris was the most Leftist member of a U.S. Senate that included Bernie Sanders, who honeymooned for 10 days in the Soviet Union in 1988; her father was a Marxist professor, who subscribed to Marx’s crackpot labor theory of value. Her vice-presidential candidate, Tim Walz, has conducted a 35 year-long love affair with China that included thirty (30) trips to the communist dictatorship. As a high school teacher, he praised the “People’s Republic of China,’ telling his students that it is a system in which “everyone shares” and gets free food and housing.
“It means that everyone is the same and everyone shares . . . The doctor and the construction worker make the same. The Chinese government and the place they work for provide housing and . . . about 30 pounds of rice per month. They get food and housing.”
But Revolutionary Leftism isn’t just who they are; it is what they do. They are dismantling the United States Constitution, because it is designed to limit governmental power, and Marxists can accept no limits on their power.
At first, they were doing it secretly: the shadowy Marxist politburo that governs in the name of the severely demented Joe Biden has detailed hundreds of federal agents to censor social media, including everything and everyone who dissents from the regime position on the vaccines. This was not discovered until a couple of years later when, after he bought Twitter, Elon Musk allowed journalists Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger to see at least some of the correspondence between government agents and Twitter. Face Book founder Mark Zuckerberg recently confirmed that his company was also subjected to very heavy government pressure to censor anything that did not support the regime, including anything skeptical of the Covid vaccines.
Now, they are saying the quiet part out loud. Kamala Harris told CNN’s Jake Tapper that social media companies “are directly speaking to millions and millions of people without any level of oversight or regulation and it has to stop.” Tim Waltz said that there is “no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy.” Just a couple of days ago, John Kerry said that the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech was a real obstacle to Leftist elites trying to form a governing consensus—and then he hinted that if Kamala won by a large enough margin, that would be a mandate for getting rid of it. About a week ago, the New Yorker published a piece by Louis Menard entitled, “Time to Torch the Constitution? Some scholars say that it’s to blame for our political dysfunction—and that we need to start over.”
These people do not believe in the U.S. Constitution, nor in bedrock principles like freedom of speech and of the press. They do not believe in the First Amendment to the United States constitution, which is what guarantees freedom of religion in the United States.
Conclusion
The Conrad Vine controversy is ultimately not about Covid or the Covid vaccines. It is about whether the Seventh-day Adventist Church will, in the future, knuckle under to the ruling Marxist regime, as it did with the Covid vaccines. That is why Elder Vine entitled his sermon, “Remnant, Respectable, or Regime Church?” A Marxist regime is what we are living under now, and if the SDA Church cooperates, we are a “regime church.”
This is also why he used the phrase, “go woke, go broke”; everyone understands that “woke” is shorthand for critical race theory, which is one of critical theories that Gramscian or Frankfurt School cultural Marxists have used to dissolve Western Christian civilization in the hope of replacing it with a Marxian alternative.
The question for the Seventh-day Adventist Church is: are we going to go along with the Beast from the Abyss of Revelation 11? Because that is what we are confronted with in the year of our Lord 2024.