Michigan Camp Meeting 2025: He Must Increase

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Michigan Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

Defending Religious Liberty in an Age of Deception

Bettina Krause

01 The Messy History of Religious Liberty in America

You're about to enjoy a presentation recorded at the 2025 Michigan Conference Camp, held at Cedar Lake, Michigan.

We pray that the Lord will bless you as you listen.

Gracious Father, we just ask for your presence in this place this morning.

Please give us a heart to hear what you have to say to us today.

And we ask these things in the name of your son Jesus.

It's not something that we think about on a daily basis.

Because when I came in through the gates of this campground, no 1 was standing there telling me that I couldn't come in and worship.

And last time I checked, there was no 1 who was banning Adventist books and Adventist websites.

No 1 is saying, hey, you belong to the wrong religion.

You need to get with the majority religion.

Yet when you think about it, when you think about religious liberty and what we enjoy in America today, and you consider the vast sweep of human history, then what we experience here, our ability to come together and worship, it is remarkable.

And it is remarkable because it is just a blip on the historical record.

No other time, no other place in human history have we had this expansive ability to worship according to our conscience.

It's not just history, because what we enjoy today is remarkable also in terms of the international context.

Before coming to Liberty magazine, I worked for the General Conference and my focus was on international religious liberty.

And I can tell you, from talking with people who are suffering for their faith, who have suffered for their faith, What we have here in America is absolutely extraordinary.

I remember 1 of the cases that I was involved with just before coming to the North American Division was the case of this young man.

And he was just 27 years old when he was arrested for the crime of blaspheme, blaspheming the Prophet of Islam.

He was arrested, he was tried, he was convicted, and he was sentenced to life in prison.

Now, if you want to know what it is like inside a maximum security prison in Pakistan, then just Google it.

Inadequate nutrition, lack of access to medical care.

And this young man was held in these conditions.

You know, the irony was he hadn't actually committed this so-called crime.

He had been framed for this, and because he belonged to a religious minority, he was vulnerable to this accusation.

But he was in this prison, and at the time, there were religious hardliners in Pakistan who were trying to get his life sentence changed to a death sentence.

And then, after a series of what I can only think of as miraculous events, he was eventually acquitted.

He was taken to another country for his own safety.

Something strange happens when we start talking about religious liberty in America because in the context of something like this young man, I mean, religious liberty couldn't be clearer.

It simply means the right to live and worship and express your faith out loud, without fear, without consequences.

But then something very strange starts to happen when we start talking about religious liberty within the context of today's culture wars, within the context of our political polarisation, things start to get a little bit strange.

And so that is what we're going to be talking about over the next few days.

And there are 4 big questions related to religious liberty that I'd like us to spend some time thinking about.

And the first question that we're going to think about today, and it may surprise you, but the question is this.

Is it time for us as Seventh-day Adventists to rethink our unique religious liberty message?

Because let's face it, times have changed.

I mean, the culture that we live in today is very, very different from the culture of 20 years ago, 50 years ago, and certainly from the time of our pioneers.

So is it time to rethink that core part of our religious liberty message, separation of church and state.

Is it time to say that separation of church and state is just an outdated idea, something that we would be better off without?

Now if you think about how this idea, separation of church and state, is thought about within America today, you'll see that within many corners of American Christianity, it is not a popular idea.

I mean, at the very least, it's the idea that it should only flow 1 way.

So, the government should stay out of the business of religion, but religion, when it comes to getting benefits from the government or preference from the government, bring it on, it's fine.

And that is the view that most people have.

Have things changed so much in America today that it is time to update our beliefs about this.

Well, there is 1 thing that they are definitely right about, and that is that things have changed.

I mean, I think we all know that when we look at the news every day.

I remember 30 years ago when I first came to this country, straight out of law school, I was young, naive, didn't know much, but I did know that I wanted to work in religious liberty advocacy.

So I got a job with a small organisation called Council on Religious Freedom and 1 of the first projects we had was helping to sort of usher a piece of religious liberty legislation through Congress.

And I remember attending the coalition meetings and I remember sitting around the table with us where all the people you'd think would be there, like religious groups and conservative political advocacy groups, but also seated around that table were people who you would not expect, people from the left side of the political aisle, the ACLU, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, the American Humanist Association.

We all sat around that table together because at the time, religious liberty, free exercise of religion, was as close as anything could be to a bipartisan political issue, something that people and politicians on both sides of the political aisle could sort of rally around and say, this is a core American value.

In fact, just a few years earlier, a Democratic president, Bill Clinton, had signed this sort of supercharged piece of legislation into law, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which is a wonderful piece of legislation, and Americans of all political persuasions celebrated because it was protecting a core religious value of, or constitutional value of Americans.

That scenario is absolutely surreal because today religious liberty means something else in the minds of many Americans.

Look here at what the director of the US Civil Rights Commission wrote a few years back about religious liberty, and it was in an official report.

He wrote that, religious liberty will stand for nothing except hypocrisy so long as it remains code for discrimination, intolerance, racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, Christian supremacy, or any form of intolerance.

But that view of religious liberty is increasingly 1 that is held by many Americans today.

So times have changed, culture has changed.

There is now a situation where there are basically 2 opposing voices when it comes to issues of religious liberty.

On 1 side, you have those who say, like this gentleman here, Religious liberty is dangerous.

But then On the other side, you have those, the voices who are saying, hey, religious liberty is a tool.

We're using it as a tool to retain the cultural, legal, political power of America's traditional religious majority.

We are now standing on this sort of very uncomfortable middle ground, and the ground underneath our feet is shrinking.

And as it shrinks, many of us are feeling confused.

We as Seventh Day Adventists are part of the culture here in America.

I was thinking about all of this just days after the last presidential election, and I was thinking about all the letters that we get, emails we get at Liberty Magazine, from both ends of the political spectrum.

But Adventist pastors who are tired, exhausted from navigating these politically polarized congregations, from church members who are looking around and saying, this is not the America I know.

And through their anxiety, through their confusion, they have become, and there's no other way to say this, they have become pulled in to partisan politics.

So the million dollar question is this, what does faithfulness to Christ look like in this new environment?

Is it time, perhaps, for us to update our view of church-state separation?

You may wonder why this change has come about.

I think most of us probably know, and I think a very good starting point is this slide here.

Over the period of just 20 years, Gallup, a national polling organisation, Every year it's been asking this same question.

Are homosexual relationships morally acceptable?

We see here 2002, 38% of Americans said yes.

02 When Adventists were Activists

Gracious Father, we are so thankful for all the blessings that you've poured out upon us.

We're thankful for the gift of your salvation.

We're thankful for the privilege of just being here together to study your Word and we ask that you will guide us, that you will lead us and we ask this in the name of your Son Jesus.

Now yesterday after the presentation I was absolutely delighted to run into someone who had travelled all the way from New Zealand to be here at this camp meeting.

And it was lovely just to have a few minutes to chat with her and to hear someone talking with the same accent, similar accent to myself.

And it got me thinking about differences in language, it got me thinking about differences in culture.

Because you know, a lot of people just assume that Australians and Americans speak the same language.

Take the storage compartment in the back of your car.

I mean, here in America we call it, what, a trunk.

Does anyone know what we call it in Australia?

I remember the look of bewilderment on the face of a young lad when I first came over here 30 years ago, he was helping load groceries into the car and I said to him, thank you, just put them in the boot.

We do not call in Australia a sweater, a sweater?

What do we – do you know what we call it?

There's some honorary Australians here in the audience.

But I remember confusing a shop assistant in Macy's department store.

I've since discovered a jumper is like a dress, right, that you wear over the top of a blouse.

And I told her very earnestly that I was looking for a winter jumper for my husband.

I'm not quite sure what she made of that.

There are a lot of cultural differences between our 2 countries.

But There is 1 cultural difference that I have not grown accustomed to, and it hits me every time I go back to Australia to visit family.

And that is just how secular Australia has become, Just how far talk of God and faith has just been pushed out of the public space?

You know, Australians are just not comfortable talking about faith, probably because the vast majority of Australians have no faith.

Regular attendance at church services or religious services in Australia hovers around 10%.

There's a voluntary question on the Australian Census asking, you know, what's your religion?

Can you guess the box that is checked the most often?

By the way, it's telling that about 70, 000 Australians in the last census wrote in that religion category, Jedi, as in the Jedi Knights from the Star Wars movies, which kind of gives you a glimpse into the Australian mindset and maybe the Australian sense of humour.

But Australians just aren't comfortable talking about faith.

At no point have I ever heard an Australian politician saying, God bless Australia.

In fact, 1 of the biggest faux pas you can make as a politician in Australia is actually to acknowledge that you have faith.

And the gentleman who most recently discovered this to his detriment is this guy here.

His name is Scott Morrison, and he led Australia as Prime Minister for a number of years.

He is the first prime minister in recent memory to actually acknowledge that he was a Christian.

He actually invited the media to come along to his church.

And thereafter, it seemed that the media had it in for him.

They called him Bible basher, happy clapper, and more seriously, they called him a Christian nationalist.

There was a cartoon that was published in 1 of the national newspapers in Australia during a wildfire emergency, and it pictured Scott Morrison kneeling, praying as fires burned around him.

Australians, and especially the Australian media, is not kind to folk who talk about their faith in public.

And When he left office, he was 1 of the most reviled and ridiculed politicians of recent years.

So when he did leave office, I reached out to his staff and asked if I could interview him for Liberty magazine.

And I did that not because I was interested in his politics necessarily, but I was interested in this dynamic, how a public figure of faith is perceived and how that interaction happens, that dynamic happens in a very secular country.

I wanted to find out if the media was correct.

I was fascinated to hear some of his replies.

I asked him, first of all, how far did your faith influence your policy proposals and your legislative proposals?

And he said, well, you know, obviously my faith informs my values, But at no time was I trying to push Christianity onto an unwilling Australian public.

And he went even further than that, and he said, you know what?

Christians in Australia actually need a reality check, because he got a lot of flack from Christians who felt that he wasn't trying to push their agenda a little bit more robustly.

Therefore, they need to lower their expectations because Australia is a representative democracy.

Is that how Christianity should be seen within a secular culture?

Because in many ways, I see what happened to Australia as almost foreshadowing what is happening here in America.

Because we are still a very religious country.

You know, our church attendance or religious service attendance rates are still reasonably high when you compare them with other Western nations.

There was a national polling company that came out with figures from last year, and they said for the very first time, regular attendance by Americans at church services or religious services had, for the first time in all the decades they'd been measuring this, dipped below 50%.

So even though our rates of participation are high, they are falling.

Religious demographics are taking us to a point where maybe, in the foreseeable future, we may be faced with a situation like Australia, where Christianity is a decided minority.

So given all of that, the question for today, we talked yesterday about how our religious liberty message is unique, separation of church and state, an absolute centerpiece of what we believe as Seventh-day Adventists.

Today I want to focus on a different question, and it's this.

If we have this unique perspective, this unique understanding of church-state relations, What are we meant to be doing about it?

She says, the banner of truth and religious liberty, held aloft by the founders of the Gospel Church and by God's witnesses during the centuries that have passed since then, has in this last conflict been committed to our hands.

And when you think about that, that's a pretty sobering statement.

Because we now have this banner of truth and religious liberty in our hands.

How do we participate in our civic responsibilities?

How do we be faithful citizens here in America in 2025 in a way that honors our unique understanding of religious liberty, that honors the truth, the prophetic truth, the biblical truth that we've been given.

Well, activism, because we're talking here about Adventist activism.

Activism is a loaded word because there are many, many different types of activism in our world today.

03 The Truth Behind Christian Nationalism

You're about to enjoy a presentation recorded at the 2025 Michigan Conference Camp held at Cedar Lake, Michigan.

Gracious Father, we come to you again this morning as your sons and your daughters and we are asking for your guidance.

We're asking for your presence to be with us this morning.

And we ask this in the name of your Son, Jesus.

Okay, so welcome to the third in the series that we've been doing this week, Defending Religious Liberty in an Age of Deception.

On Monday, we talked about why our message as Adventists is unique when it comes to religious liberty and how separation of church and state is kind of the centrepiece of what makes us distinct.

And then yesterday we talked about how our early church pioneers, how they looked at that beast of Revelation 13 and they realized it wasn't just about the future, it was also about what was happening around them and we we saw how they spoke out strongly and creatively about issues like slavery and temperance and religious liberty.

And this morning we're going to be talking about Christian nationalism, and I want to explore it by way of a question.

What is it today that distinguishes Adventist activism from the activism that's taking place in other quarters of our nation?

And, you know, I realize that's a really broad question, so let's try to narrow that question down a bit.

What are the goals of Adventist activism as we engage, whether it's on Capitol Hill or whether we're engaging with our local community leaders or we're engaging with other faith leaders or just presenting ourselves in the public space, whether we're voting and we're engaging in our civic responsibilities, what are our goals and how do those goals perhaps differ from those of many other American Christians?

So, that's a question that we're going to be kind of looking at this morning.

Now Jennifer Woods is sitting over here and she is the Director of Public Affairs and Religious Liberty for the Lake Union.

And before coming to the Lake Union, She worked at the General Conference for Government Affairs, representing our church down on Capitol Hill.

And that was a role I also had for a time.

And so she engaged with legislators, lobbied on certain pieces of legislation, tried to influence public policy in certain ways.

How does that type of engagement, how does that differ from other types of political activism?

The problem with Christian nationalism is that it is a loaded term.

It has been used, it has been abused, it has been misused, misapplied.

It has been slapped on as a label anyone who brings their faith-shaped values into the public space and tries to advocate on them.

That is not Christian nationalism, that's civic engagement and that is what Seventh-day Adventists have been doing for a hundred and 50 years.

But there's another phenomenon, there's something else, something different and you know whatever you want to call it You can call it Christian nationalism or you could call it dominionism or you could call it transformationalism.

Any of the many other names it has traveled under during the history of our American republic, There is a phenomenon that exists.

And, you know, it can be and it has been studied by sociologists.

If you read Liberty magazine, you will see that we've published interviews with experts on this religious populism.

We've published articles looking at what this thing is and why it's important.

And you will also see, if you read Liberty Magazine, that it is not exclusively an American issue.

I mean, if you look around the world today and you look at what's happening in countries like Poland or Hungary or Brazil or, You know, even that most western of secular countries, Sweden, you will see that there are individuals who are in the public space who are making the case that they have a mandate to clean up the country, to bring it back to its traditional values, often Christian values, and that some of these folks are winning big at the polls.

I mean, if you really want to see this phenomenon in action, look at Vladimir Putin.

I mean, This is not reported on as much, although you can read quite a lot about it, but he has made an art form of co-opting the Russian Orthodox Church to further his own political ambitions.

He has positioned himself as this one-man wall holding back the forces of Western decadence and secularism, and it's proving a popular message.

You know, We're going to be talking today about a global phenomenon.

We're talking about a growing phenomenon.

But most importantly, we are talking about a phenomenon that we have been warned about.

We've been warned about it in Scripture, and we've been warned about it by Ellen White.

We know also, we have a warning from our own past.

We know what it is like when majority Christianity has its hand on the political levers of our country.

I mean, we know that when a majority religion holds political power, that it's not comfortable for folk whose religious practices are kind of out of step with the majority, such as folk who worship on the seventh day of the week rather than the first day of the week.

But there's a wrinkle in all of this that we've just been talking about.

And the wrinkle is that we as Seventh-day Adventist Christians, We are connected to our brothers and sisters in other Christian denominations in America in the sense that we hold many of the same moral values as them, and we derive them from our faith.

We are conservative in the sense that we hold to a biblical understanding of human sexuality, and that makes us conservative in today's world.

When you open up your iPad or your computer or you open up a newspaper, if you're still using a newspaper, it's hard not to feel sometimes like we're under siege.

To be honest, it's sometimes really difficult to not feel just frustrated and feel like you want to fight back.

I was talking with a friend a few months ago, and we were talking about this rash of state-level legislation that we've been seeing over recent months and in years in states such as Oklahoma and Texas and Louisiana, and these are pieces of legislation that mandate things like posting a Protestant version of the 10 Commandments on the walls of every public school classroom, or mandating that Bible teachings be integrated into every class subject from math through to English to whatever.

This friend, He's worked in religious liberty for many years, and he's familiar with what we teach as a church.

He said, you know, I've preached on these topics.

I know that you can't coerce religion, but wow, just a little part of me wishes that this legislation would all pass and we could just poke our fingers in the eye of those anti-Christian bigots.

And why is it so absolutely antithetical to everything that we stand for as a church?

And here's another important question related to that.

How do we, in our concern not to buy into the narratives of Christian nationalism, how do we not throw out the baby with the bathwater and say, okay, so I shouldn't be trying to use political power to build up Christ's kingdom here on earth, so let me just stay silent about everything.

Let me withdraw from any conversations about public policy, even though I'm convinced that my faith-shaped values have worth and merit and should be discussed as part of this public discourse.

You know, this is really a difficult and complex and nuanced topic and, you know, I struggle with it at times to understand what those parameters are and what those lines are that shouldn't be crossed.

And there are many, many different ways that we could come at this topic and try to look at it and analyse it and think about it.

I was talking with someone yesterday, Monday, who mentioned a really helpful framework that many people refer to when they try to think through what's a legitimate area for a government to be legislating on, and what is sort of out of bounds, that they shouldn't touch.

And that is this idea of the 2 tablets, the 2 tables of the commandments.

And so you see on 1 side, the second tablet, you see all those areas in which it's legitimate for the government to be concerned with, protecting property, protecting life, organizing or helping to regulate the social cohesion of a nation, of family law, fairness, justice and so on.

But when a government strays over into the first tablet, That's where we see troubles arising.

Series

Defending Religious Liberty in an Age of Deception

01 The Messy History of Religious Liberty in America

Transcript

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