Is “Cult or Not” the Wrong Question?

Many evangelicals would tell you that I grew up in, and indeed am still part of, a cult. In the past, this bothered me a lot, and I would have invested more effort into trying to “debunk” that claim. But I think we ought to consider how the sensationalism of a label like “cult” might actually make excuses for abuse and harmful behavior. Especially in today’s MAGA-saturated climate, I think we all need to reconsider our priorities and categories before going cult-hunting.

Somewhere around 2010 or 2011, I was attending a multi-denominational (but largely evangelical) university, when I first had the unique experience of one evangelical classmate bringing over his friend to point and gawk at me like I was part of “show and tell.”

“This guy is a Seventh-day Adventist!”

I watched her—this singular girl who made up the audience for this show-and-tell moment—as her eyes widened with astonishment. It was as if she had stumbled across a rarely sighted endangered animal species in the wild.

Adventists were typically considered by evangelicals to be among the “Christian cults” alongside Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses until about the 1950s. During that time period, a series of meetings called the “Adventist-Evangelical Conferences” brought together figures from both worlds to discuss what Adventism actually taught. The conclusion reached by evangelicals Walter Martin and Donald Barnhouse was that Seventh-day Adventists were essentially fellow Christians with a small handful of unique and/or heterodox ideas. Their conclusions have made partial inroads into broader evangelical consciousness.

Today, it is hit-or-miss whether people in either camp will know that these conversations happened at all. In some cases, Adventists like me move pretty fluidly through evangelical spaces, make friends, have relationships, get educations, and participate in worship. Evangelicals sometimes send their kids to Adventist summer camps and schools. Other times, the algorithm gets churning and yet another evangelical YouTuber discovers the “question” of Seventh-day Adventists again—spawning their own video series and plenty of response and objection videos by Adventists.

What I think is more interesting to call into question, though, is the whole task of cult-hunting in the first place. I don’t say this only as an Adventist critique of evangelical behaviours. Adventists have more than enough negative things to say about other Christians, and we often sequester ourselves into really intense isolation by vilifying them. Not only do Adventists often consider and speak of other Protestants as being essentially “Babylon,” but Adventists also participate in the same evangelical cult rhetoric about Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses—I think largely in a bid for broader acceptance to follow up the the PR victories gained in the 1950s.

Now, as deconstruction has become more of a live topic in our shared discourse, I have wondered what might become of these old hostilities. Many Christians today across the denominational spectrum find themselves horrified as they watch parents, aunts, uncles, and pastors they once looked up to falling into the “cult” of Trumpism. I have watched as friends and peers in both evangelical and Adventist spaces have wrestled with their religious identities and affiliations in the wake of it all.

Simultaneously, I have watched with fascination as a Latter-day Saint, Dan McClellan, has become one of the most prominent and well-respected online voices in conversations pertaining to religion. People across the spectrum of faith and non-faith find a Mormon guy to be consistently helpful in sorting out fact from fiction—particularly in explicitly naming the excesses, hypocrisies, and bids for power made by the rising “cult” of MAGA.

If you had told me about that in the early 2010s, I wouldn’t have believed you—not only because I too, at the time, held anti-Mormon theological prejudices, but also because I knew that people in general didn’t respect Mormons for many of the same reasons they didn’t respect Adventists.

I am sure that many others who read this blog are like me in consistently finding Dr. McClellan’s voice to be helpful in sharpening my own thinking about religion. I also wonder, though, if this has in any way helped us to sharpen our thinking about people who belong to vilified groups. As an Adventist wanting acceptance among evangelicals, I made the mistake of forgetting a truth that I simply assumed for myself: that people are more complicated than the labels we give them.

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I knew very keenly that my death metal–loving self couldn’t and didn’t have to be the perfect stereotypical representative of Adventists to the broader world. I came to appreciate that my evangelical-theology classmates naturally wouldn’t take me as representative of all Adventists. This was just what it meant for people to treat people fairly as individuals.

In fact, during the time in my life when I was most deeply surrounded by evangelical culture, I wanted to characterize myself as an “evangelical Adventist,” in no small part because music is one of the areas where Adventism has, unfortunately, been prone to the behaviours of “high-control religion.” I was as much a spiritual product of the heavily-evangelical (pun intended) mid-2000s Christian metalcore explosion as I was a product of my Adventist upbringing. To me, Evangelicalism represented a kind of open-mindedness to art and freedom of expression that felt rare and unattainable in Adventist spaces as I knew them in my youth.

In hindsight, the fact that I once perceived Evangelicalism as the more open-minded and liberating option has become all the more interesting as I watch various evangelical figures catch all kinds of heat and hate from their own community as they “deconstruct” from infernalist, eternal-conscious-torment eschatology into the annihilationism that has always been mine as an Adventist—just for an example. My yearning to be an “evangelical Adventist” has waned aggressively as I have watched many among both Adventists and evangelicals joining the “cult” of Trump. I have become increasingly grateful for the Adventist prophetic tradition that taught me to be suspicious of any sign that American Protestantism was making plays for political power—a perspective beautifully demonstrated by a relatively recent video by Garrison Hayes, with whom I attended the Seventh-day Adventist theological seminary.

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Seventh-day Adventism as a denomination is not a “cult,” which is part of why I have stayed. But I readily admit that within it, there are spaces and communities, congregations and small groups, movements and leaders, that could easily fit the cult descriptor. And I suspect that many e(x)vangelicals would say the same thing about evangelical spaces. And sometimes, many (though not all) evangelicals and Adventists are actually members of the same “cult”—America First, Trumpism, and ultimately, the cult of power: Caesar is Lord.

But I actually think that slapping the “cult” label on MAGA and the Trumpists, as tempting as it may be, is also a mistake. Hence my use of scare quotes on that word throughout this piece so far. Seventh-day Adventism not being a “cult” doesn’t excuse or erase the abuses, excesses, and harms done within our communities. Evangelicalism is not a “cult,” but again this does nothing to excuse the wrongs done within it. People are people, after all, and group labels that easily classify “good guys” and “bad guys” run the risk of blinding us to where accountability and change might be needed. “Cult” can, in some ways, imply an amount of brainwashing that could potentially explain away the willfully chosen bad behaviour and malice of people who should have known better. Neither the MAGA movement nor any church needs to be a “cult” to be

Perhaps what I’m really trying to say is that, for many of us, it has become clear that the lines of allegiance are changing—or maybe just becoming more clear. Perhaps we are learning new lessons about what it looks like to truly know those who love Jesus “by their fruits.” Many of us are learning how deeply true it is that what we do with our beliefs matters just as much as what we believe. My Adventist upbringing would have presented that truth as the importance of sanctification, or “victory over sin.” I guess I hadn’t expected some of those same people who taught me that to then bow down to Nebuchadnezzar’s statue.

And, to keep the Daniel analogy going, I suspect that more and more of us are learning to better recognize formerly unfamiliar faces among others who are refusing to bow down.

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The New Evangelicals is a digital-first 501(c)(3) nonprofit committed to creating a better path forward at the intersection of faith, politics, and culture. Through educational resources and inclusive community spaces, we empower people to reject Christian Nationalism and boldly advocate for their neighbors while holding onto a faith rooted in the way of Jesus: with love, justice, and compassion for all.

Maxwell Kozen is a musician and writer from Toronto, Canada, currently based in Manchester, UK. He is one member of the podcast Passionfroot, a global collective of twenty- to thirty-year-olds exploring life, purpose, and faith outside the box.