Why ‘Anti-Conservative’ Adventism Is Doomed to Fail
There’s a tension in Adventism right now.
On one side, you have the fundamentalist crowd—fixated on dress codes, food fights, and debates over whether clapping in church summons demons.
On the other side, you have the oppositional crowd—pushing back hard (and rightly so) against the toxic legalism that has hurt so many.
For a long time, I found myself firmly in that oppositional camp. And to be fair, it brings some important and necessary critiques to the table.
But here’s the hard truth I’ve come to realize: oppositional Adventism, for all the good it offers, has one glaring flaw—a tendency to shrink itself into a shallow, reactionary identity built around being “not like them.”
“Look how unlike those other Adventists we are! Don’t worry, we don’t talk about prophecy, judgment, or anything too ‘Adventisty’. We’re the opposite!"
I get it. I used to be there too.
But then I stepped out of the Adventist bubble and started doing discipleship work with secular, post-church people. I thought they would love me and welcome me with open arms because I wasn’t like “those other Adventists over there”.
But I discovered something that wrecked my assumptions.
None of them cared.
Being “not like them” might have been cool to other oppositional Adventists. But to secular, unchurched seekers who had never even met the “them” I was opposing, my contrarian posture was insipid, irrelevant, and banal.
The Problem with Oppostional Adventism
Oppositionalism feels good when you’re trying to dismantle something harmful.
When you’ve lived under the shadow of toxic theology, it’s cathartic to swing the pendulum in the other direction.
But the danger of defining yourself as the opposite of something is that it becomes the entire shape of your faith.
You’re not building something meaningful—you’re just reacting.
Missionally speaking, this is empty because if the thing you oppose doesn’t exist then your very existence is pointless. And since the things oppositional Adventism opposes do not exist in the secular consciousness, then our very existence is pointless in that missional space.
That’s when I learned something else.
Emerging secular generations aren’t looking for faith that’s built on an oppositional, anti-conservative Adventist identity.
Why? Because they have no idea what that identity is. They have never experienced it.
It might have value in reaching “dechurched” Adventists. But “unchurched” seekers? Nah.
This post-church, meta-modern generation is not asking, “How do we undo that legalistic past?” (which they have no idea even exists…)
They’re asking:
How do we find authentic meaning in an age of complexity and uncertainty?
What does it mean to belong in a globalized, yet fragmented, world?
How do we reconstruct a world of justice and inclusion while resisting the power hierarchies that seduce us?
While some in Adventism are busy enforcing dress codes and others are busy rejecting them, the world spirals onward, asking questions neither crowd seems equipped to address.
Conservatism is stuck in its own toxic echo chamber.
But oppositional Adventism? It’s just a mirror image—a faith still stuck in orbit around the thing it claims to oppose.
The Futility of Contrarian Clichés
Look, I get it. I’ve been there.
When you’ve grown up under the weight of legalism, it feels radical to say things like:
“Doctrine doesn’t matter.”
“Relationship, not religion.”
It feels freeing to reject the shame and start over.
But step outside the Adventist echo chamber and try those phrases on a secular crowd.
To people who’ve never heard of the little horn or last-day events, those slogans don’t land.
“It’s all about relationship, not religion.”
Cool. But what does that really look like on a hyper-connected, economically imbalanced, socially fragmented Monday?
Contrarian faith can’t answer the questions of real life because its entire purpose is to distance itself from the past—not to build something for the present.
What secular people—and all of us—are searching for isn’t a faith that’s obssessed with being the opposite of those “other” Christians over “there.”
But a faith that catapults us into an ocean of color and a sea of wonder we’ve never seen before.
So What’s the Answer?
Years ago, I baptized a lady who had never been to an Adventist church before. She attended an evangelistic series and fell in love with the gospel. The night before her baptism, we ran through a quick overview of our 28 fundamentals. And she wanted to know more about Ellen White.
I immediately broke into a long winded, reactionary lecture.
“Our beliefs aren’t based on her… and we believe in sola scriptura… and some people misuse her but at the end of the day… blah, blah, blah…”
My lecture would have kept going, but the young lady interrupted me. She turned to the elder beside me and said, “Oh… OK… but, what was she like?”
There I was, going on and on about stuff she had never experienced when all she really wanted to know was what how many kids Ellen had, where she lived, and what made her happy.
I learned a valuable lesson that night.
The world doesn’t need anti-conservative Adventism. It needs an imaginal Adventism. An Adventism so enamoured with the sublime mystery of Yahweh that reacting to legalists just sounds boring. A creative, relational, adventurous Adventism full of wonder, and playfulness, and enthusiasm.
An Adventism that mines the beauty nested within its raw material in order to rediscover the stories it has been given.
Stories about justice, liberation, wholeness, and hope.
Stories about earth, bodies, and redemption.
And yeah… stories about a little old lady who loved Jesus and lemon pie.
Of course, this rediscovery invites us to discard baggage we were never meant to carry.
To reframe ideas that have been misunderstood or weaponized.
And that can certainly mean being clear about what we do not support, endorse, or promote.
But what it never means is reducing our idenity to nothing more than the things we oppose.
A Faith for the Chaos
Here’s the thing:
Young people aren’t looking for a our “anti-ness”…
The only folk amused by this never ending contrarianism is… well… us.
Yes, there are certainly appropiate times to explore the failures of faith and contend honestly with them.
But what I have learned is seekers today are longing for a faith that can stand on it’s own beauty.
A faith that’s:
Authentic enough to admit the failures of the church without making the criticism of failure our “main thing”.
Resilient enough to confront injustice, trauma, and suffering without being reauthored by cynicism.
Intellectually grounded enough to wrestle with the deepest questions of modern thought while pointing us to something greater than the greatest human thought.
Prophetic enough to call out Christian nationalism, systemic oppression, and spiritual abuse without reducing our identity to what it opposes.
A faith centered on Jesus—not the sanitized, Pinterest-board version, but the table-flipping, justice-speaking Savior whose identity was not in revolution or even reformation, but in love.
So Where Do We Go From Here?
We stand at a crossroads.
We can:
Keep clinging to the past, hoping to preserve expressions of faith the world has outgrown.
Define ourselves by what we’re not, building a reactionary identity with no relevance to the world beyond ourselves.
Or cultivate something meaningful, full of wonder, mystery, and existential utility for all mankind.
Option 3 is what it means to ignite a faith for this moment.
A faith that belongs, not to us, but to humanity.
An Adventism. Redesigned.
