Page-by-Page Summary
Ronald Lawson, “Sect-State Relations: Accounting for the Differing Trajectories of Seventh-day Adventists and Jehovah’s Witnesses” Sociology of Religion, Winter 1995, Vol. 56, No. 4, pp. 351–377 (Oxford University Press)
Journal page numbers are given in brackets.
PDF p. 1 — JSTOR cover page Standard JSTOR front matter identifying the article, its author Ronald Lawson, the journal issue, and the stable URL (jstor.org/stable/3712195). It notes that Oxford University Press published the piece and collaborates with JSTOR to preserve access to Sociology of Religion. The page carries the usual terms-of-use and contact information rather than any substantive content.
PDF p. 2 [p. 351] — Title page and abstract The abstract states the puzzle at the heart of the paper: Seventh-day Adventists and Jehovah’s Witnesses share Millerite roots, apocalyptic premillennialism, rejection of political participation, an expectation of persecution, and refusal to bear arms, yet their relations with governments diverged dramatically. Witnesses grew more intransigent and endured harsh persecution, while Adventists compromised their original positions and came to prize governmental approval — making the former an “established sect” and the latter a group far along the road toward denomination. Lawson previews his explanatory factors (organizational openness, ideological rigidity, apocalyptic urgency, indoctrination intensity, and persecution) and opens the narrative by tracing Charles Taze Russell’s own debt to Advent Christian preaching in 1869.
PDF p. 3 [p. 352] — Shared roots and the church-sect framework Russell absorbed conditionalism from former Millerite George Storrs and biblical chronology, prophetic time rules, and historicist Revelation interpretation from Nelson Barbour, so both movements shared overlapping prophetic schemes and highlighted dates (1798, 1843–44). Their radical millenarianism made them intensely evangelistic and internationally missionary, but also set them against other churches — especially Roman Catholicism, cast as “the whore of Babylon” — and against the state, which prophecy told them would persecute God’s people as Satan’s instrument. Lawson then introduces the analytic apparatus: Yinger’s elaboration of Troeltsch’s church-sect classification and Benton Johnson’s 1963 proposal to reduce the typology to a single attribute.
PDF p. 4 [p. 353] — Defining the divergence Johnson defined a church as a group that accepts its social environment and a sect as one that rejects it; Stark and Bainbridge reactivated this as a continuum of tension marked by difference, antagonism, and separation. By that measure both groups started strongly sectarian, but Adventists traded their original positions for governmental approval while Witnesses actually increased their intransigence, especially in wartime, settling into Yinger’s category of “established sect.” A long footnote underscores how alike the two remain on other dimensions — presence in 204 versus 229 countries, comparable membership and growth rates — which makes the divergence in state relations all the more puzzling.
PDF p. 5 [p. 354] — Research methods and early Adventist politics Lawson describes eleven years of research on international Adventism: travel to 54 countries across all eleven world divisions, over 3,000 in-depth interviews with administrators, pastors, teachers, hospital staff, students and laity, plus questionnaires, field notes, periodicals, and statistical reports. For the Witnesses he draws on secondary literature, Yearbook statistics, Watchtower and Awake!, and phone interviews with two formerly prominent Witnesses, noting that Christine King’s comparative work on sects under the Third Reich sparked his interest in the contrast. He then turns to the data, tracing Millerite rejection of the American Dream, William Miller’s focus on Daniel and Revelation, and the apolitical withdrawal his preaching encouraged.
PDF p. 6 [p. 355] — The Civil War and institutional growth Adventists went further than the Millerites by identifying the United States in 1851 with the lamb-horned beast of Revelation 13 that “spoke like a dragon,” cherishing the Constitution while condemning slavery and Sabbath-keeper prosecutions. The Civil War forced the question of military service; Ellen White declared that God’s people could not engage in war, and Adventists secured noncombatant recognition through the loopholes created for Quakers, a stance formalized by the 1865 General Conference. Between 1870 and 1901 the church built colleges, a medical school, 75 sanitariums, and publishing houses, giving it a stake in society, lengthening its expected timeline, and prompting Ellen White to counsel rapprochement with civil authorities to advance missionary work.
PDF p. 7 [p. 356] — Religious liberty lobbying and World War I Facing the National Reform Association’s campaign for a national Sunday law — 50 Adventists convicted and 30 imprisoned under state blue laws by 1892 — the church founded a religious liberty magazine and association, lobbied Congress, filed legal briefs, and helped defeat Blair’s Sunday-Rest bill, becoming known as First Amendment defenders. When the U.S. entered World War I, the church reaffirmed noncombatancy but transformed its meaning from nonparticipation in war to unarmed military service, so members could express patriotism as unarmed soldiers “doing good while refraining from killing.” Red Cross training schools established in 1916 made Adventist draftees attractive to medical units, yet 35 men were still in prison at war’s end over Sabbath-related disobedience.
PDF p. 8 [p. 357] — World War II, Korea, and militant patriotism The Medical Cadet Training Program, run with army cooperation from 1939, and the church’s insistence on the label “conscientious cooperators” rather than objectors won far more military favor than the Witnesses received; some 12,000 American Adventists served as noncombatants in World War II, and the church celebrated Medal of Honor recipient Desmond Doss. Korea brought paid Adventist military chaplains, the 1954 noncombatant training camp at Fort Sam Houston, and “Project Whitecoat,” under which 2,200 Adventists volunteered as biological warfare research subjects for the U.S. Army between 1955 and 1973. In South Korea, by contrast, two Adventists were executed at the front and about 100 imprisoned for refusing to bear arms, and a church official told Time that Adventists “despise the term ‘conscientious objector.'”
PDF p. 9 [p. 358] — Bearing arms abroad Where medical postings were unavailable, local Adventist leaders let members serve with arms, completely reversing the Civil War position but keeping tension with governments low. German Adventists agreed in 1914 to bear weapons for the Fatherland, explicitly including Saturdays, which caused the bitter Reform Movement schism; comparable accommodation followed under Stalin, where leaders declared military service a Christian duty and disfellowshipped dissenters, and under the Nazis, where Adventists praised Hitler and largely escaped repression. From Franco’s Spain to Eastern Europe, Taiwan, Thailand, and Latin America, national leaders concluded the General Conference’s American-framed statements did not apply to them, and frequently compromised on Sabbath observance as well.
PDF p. 10 [p. 359] — The 1972 policy shift and the volunteer army In 1972 the General Conference formally recognized how far practice had drifted, declaring military service a matter of individual conscience — a change driven mainly by Vietnam-era conflict between militant patriots and youthful conscientious objectors within the American church. The new flexibility was confirmed in 1973 when Korean leaders, advised by the General Conference, reversed their 1960s stand rather than risk their college’s closure over armed training. After the U.S. shifted to a volunteer army, Adventists enlisted in unprecedented numbers with no noncombatant option available, the church redirected its effort to chaplaincy, recruiters appeared on Adventist campuses, and attitudes turned openly jingoistic during the Gulf War.
PDF p. 11 [p. 360] — Exchange relationships with governments The wartime Medical Cadet Corps built a durable exchange relationship with U.S. political and military authorities, which by the 1950s–70s extended to accepting government financial aid for Adventist hospitals and schools — something previously regarded as dangerous and wrong. In the early 1980s church leaders discovered large sums of USAID money available for distribution and transformed their relief agency into ADRA, which became effectively an arm of American foreign policy, aiding Contra-war Honduras but not Nicaragua. Over two decades this pattern went global, with Adventist leaders trading legitimation for liberties and favors — Pinochet’s Chile gave college accreditation in return for religious cover, and quiescent Korean Adventists were rewarded by Presidents Park and Chun.
PDF p. 12 [p. 361] — Poland and the USSR Polish Adventists, only 4,700 members in a nation of 38 million, won extraordinary publishing and public-hall privileges by attacking the regime’s chief enemy, the Catholic Church — during the Communist regime’s last seven years only the Bible and Lenin were published more freely than Ellen White. In the USSR, General Conference President Neal Wilson helped cement an exchange relationship in 1979 by publicly disavowing the schismatic True and Free Adventists, then cultivated Council on Religious Affairs chair Konstantin Kharchev through reciprocal visits. Adventists repaid the favor by reporting favorably on Gorbachev’s 1987 forum, disavowing Reagan’s “evil empire” language, and honoring Kharchev in 1989 as a “Spokesman for Human Rights,” subsequently gaining permission for a publishing house, clinic, and headquarters.
PDF p. 13 [p. 362] — Adventist conclusion; Witness beginnings Lawson concludes that both tension and separation between Adventists and secular governments have been greatly reduced — increasingly as conscious leadership policy since World War II — moving the group far toward the denomination pole. Turning to the Witnesses, he notes Russell taught “absolute political neutrality,” avoiding voting, public office, and military service, but read Romans 13’s “higher powers” as secular rulers who should be obeyed except where their demands contravened duty to God. Peace made this position uncontroversial until 1914; thereafter Russell’s apolitical apocalypticism sharpened, Bible Students refused conscription, churches accused them of sedition, publications were banned in Canada, members were mobbed and tarred, and eight Watch Tower directors including Rutherford were imprisoned in 1918.
PDF p. 14 [p. 363] — Rutherford’s hardening and the Nazi overture With its leaders jailed the Society briefly compromised — endorsing a national day of prayer for victory and permitting war bonds — but this brought no benefit and was repudiated after the directors’ release nine months later. The experience hardened Rutherford’s commitment to neutrality, and in 1929 he reinterpreted Romans 13 so that the “higher powers” meant Jehovah and Christ rather than secular rulers, rendering all governments demonic and members obliged to obey human laws only when they harmonized with God’s. Yet in 1932–33, facing the Nazi threat, Rutherford abandoned his earlier pro-Zionist stance, declared Witnesses “the true Israel of God,” and prepared a “declaration of facts” for a Berlin congress staged with swastika flags and a hymn set to “Deutschland über alles.”
PDF p. 15 [p. 364] — Nazi persecution and the flag salute The declaration and its accompanying letter to Hitler were self-serving attempts to ingratiate the Witnesses by attacking Jews, Britain, the U.S., and the League of Nations and claiming shared goals with the Nazis; 2.1 million copies were distributed despite member unease. The Nazis were unmoved, persecution resumed within two days, Rutherford reverted to intransigence, and after the 1935 conscription law made refusal punishable by death more than half of German Witnesses ended up in concentration camps, with one in four losing their lives. The German refusal of the Hitler salute produced a worldwide ban on saluting flags or standing for anthems, which in the U.S. brought school expulsions, the adverse 1940 Supreme Court ruling, a sharp rise in mob violence, and blanket denial of ministerial draft exemption after conscription resumed.
PDF p. 16 [p. 365] — Prison, court victories, and a partial softening Three-quarters of imprisoned conscientious objectors were Witnesses, and because the Board of Parole demanded they stop preaching as a condition of release, most served their full sentences, averaging 30.6 months. Between 1933 and 1951, 18,866 Witnesses were arrested in the U.S. alone and roughly 1,500 incidents of mob violence occurred — the worst faced by any American religion since the nineteenth-century persecution of the Mormons. Taking their grievances to the courts, they won 36 of 45 Supreme Court cases between 1938 and 1953, and these victories led The Watchtower in 1962 to abandon Rutherford’s extreme hostility and return to Russell’s reading of Romans 13, though tensions persisted in Malawi, Marxist states, and countries with established religions.
PDF p. 17 [p. 366] — Witness conclusion and the interpretive question Witness separation and tension increased rather than decreased over time, rising sharply under Rutherford despite his two attempts at compromise, and even where court victories eased matters they returned only to about the level of Russell’s day. They remain banned in several countries, estranged from most other religious groups by their attacks on them and their claim to be God’s one true church, and thus firmly sectarian — especially in wartime. Lawson then frames his interpretation around Wilson’s question of what promotes or retards denominationalization, showing that neither Wilson’s four-type scheme (both groups were “adventist”) nor Yinger’s persecution hypothesis (both were initially conversionist) can by itself explain the divergence.
PDF p. 18 [p. 367] — Race, social boundaries, and growth as explanations Lawson rejects an anonymous reviewer’s suggestion that the Witnesses’ large African-American membership explains the street violence of the 1930s–40s, since much of it occurred in small northern towns and both groups had comparably large black memberships (over 29 percent for Witnesses by 1992, just under 60 percent non-Hispanic white for Adventists). He also finds McGuire’s boundary-maintenance thesis works in reverse here: Adventist Sabbath, dietary, and entertainment restrictions plus rural institutions created “Adventist Ghettos” and strong separation, while the Witnesses’ few peculiar norms were far less isolating. Since the ideological boundaries between Witnesses and the world were originally much the same as the Adventists’, the fact that Witnesses sustained them and Adventists did not is precisely what needs explaining — as does the failure of growth and geographic spread to differentiate the two.
PDF p. 19 [p. 368] — Table 1 Table 1 summarizes the seven interacting factors Lawson identifies as shaping sect-state relations: group social mobility, organizational openness, ideological rigidity, apocalyptic urgency, proportion of hereditary members, indoctrination of converts, and extent of persecution. Adventists show considerable upward mobility, leadership concerned with public image and status, growing tolerance of doctrinal diversity, an eschaton reconciled to delay, more hereditary members, reduced indoctrination intensity, and only isolated persecution — yielding a marked decrease in tension and the label “denominationalizing sect.” Witnesses show little upward mobility, isolated leadership valuing separation, no tolerance of diversity, urgent date-setting apocalypticism, very high turnover with few hereditary members, high-intensity indoctrination, and widespread persecution — yielding persistently high tension and the label “established sect.”
PDF p. 20 [p. 369] — Social mobility Lawson takes his first clue from Yinger’s observation that sects turn from radical challenge to acceptance when their members gain wealth. Adventists opted for a professional ministry and built a worldwide network of hospitals, schools, colleges, publishing houses, and health-food factories, encouraging members to attend their own institutions to staff them — producing marked upward mobility, with two of three American Adventist men in professional, managerial, or white-collar work and college attainment nearly double the general population. Witnesses, having neither educational institutions nor professional clergy and actively discouraging higher education, rank last among thirty “religious families” in college graduates (4.7 percent) and lowest on Kosmin and Lachman’s “Protestant Ethic” status ranking, since careers take second place to witnessing.
PDF p. 21 [p. 370] — Organizational openness and ideological rigidity As Adventist education levels rose, independence of thought and intellectual diversity were promoted, and leaders — typically hereditary members with college degrees — came to identify with corporate executives, moving headquarters to a Silver Spring corporate park in the 1980s and proposing in 1994 that their president be called “chief executive officer.” The Witness president and Governing Body, by contrast, head an equally centralized structure but are less educated and intellectually, psychologically, and physically isolated, having lived at headquarters for decades and still valuing “separation from the world” with no yearning for recognition. Adventist education has also reduced members’ sense of isolation, made leaders accommodate cultural and doctrinal diversity in a predominantly Third World church, and produced a marked decline in disciplinary proceedings.
PDF p. 22 [p. 371] — Discipline and apocalyptic urgency Because few Witnesses have higher education or exposure to challenging ideas, and because members must attend many meetings, meet witnessing quotas, and read thousands of pages of Watch Tower literature yearly, the organization maintains strong discipline, expelling deviants and requiring even relatives to shun them. Adventist urgency has faded markedly: the leadership and most members appear reconciled to a delayed eschaton, the 150th anniversary of the Great Disappointment was celebrated rather than grieved in October 1994, and the church has embarked on necessarily lengthy programs like planting congregations in 2,285 unentered population segments. At the same time it works through its Public Affairs and Religious Liberty Department to postpone the very church-state events its prophet predicted would precede Christ’s return, even as conservative strains steeped in Ellen White remain urgently apocalyptic and some set dates.
PDF p. 23 [p. 372] — Distancing from fanaticism; hereditary members Adventist leaders have refused to set dates since Miller’s fiasco and take pains to distance themselves from apocalyptic “fanatics,” most strikingly by hiring a public relations firm during the Waco standoff to keep the media from linking the church to David Koresh’s Branch Davidian Seventh-day Adventists. Witness urgency, by contrast, has barely changed, because the leaders’ intellectual isolation has let them retain and promote the radical eschatology, including official embrace of several dates followed by the pain of disappointment. On membership composition, high Witness turnover — worsened by each failed date — leaves them with proportionally fewer hereditary members, which keeps them sectarian, while Adventism’s larger cohort of birthright members educated in its own institutions has made it far more open to change.
PDF p. 24 [p. 373] — Indoctrination intensity and persecution The Adventist leadership’s early-1980s decision to make growth the first priority raised world membership 117 percent (3.6 to 7.9 million between 1981 and 1993) but created competition among divisions and pressure on evangelists, who baptized converts after three weeks of meetings rather than two years of classes and neglected post-baptismal nurture. In Wilson’s terms this moved Adventism from an “adventist sect” to a “conversionist sect” — the category that denominationalizes fastest — accelerating its metamorphosis, while Witnesses’ continued high-intensity socialization keeps them “adventist” and therefore slow to change. On Yinger’s persecution hypothesis, Witnesses have endured the greatest persecution of any American Christian group this century and rank among the most persecuted worldwide, whereas Adventist oppression — Sunday-law arrests, mob violence in the Philippines and Latin America, exile in Tsarist Russia, hardship under Soviet collectivization — was real but rarely sustained.
PDF p. 25 [p. 374] — Why persecution differed; relations with state and society Since Adventists were active in the very countries where Witnesses were oppressed, differences in state repression cannot explain the disparity; the explanation must lie in the groups themselves. Witnesses’ urgent eschatology produced pugnacious publications attacking other churches, the state, and patriotic symbols, generating images so negative that they were disbelieved even on the two occasions they tried to compromise — whereas Adventists proved eager to avoid conflict from the Civil War onward, acquiesced on military service and Saturday schooling, built coalitions, and compromised whenever they smelled danger. Thus Witness expectations of persecution were confirmed and encouraged them to stand firm, while Adventist expectations were rarely realized, teaching them the utility and comfort of ready compromise — with the result that Adventists relaxed tension with governments, churches, and society while the politically clumsy Witnesses remained alienated.
PDF p. 26 [p. 375] — Conclusion and start of references Applying the Stark-Bainbridge measure of difference, antagonism, and separation, Lawson concludes that Adventists are best characterized as a “denominationalizing sect” while Witnesses remain an “established sect.” Witness commitment to principle and radical apocalypticism was bolstered by organizational isolation, intense indoctrination of converts, rigid internal discipline, and considerable persecution. Adventist willingness to compromise whenever external threats or opportunities for acceptance arose is correlated with their ideological diversity, organizational openness, and diminishing concern for indoctrination — all flowing from upward mobility that relaxed apocalyptic urgency and gave them an increasing stake in society; the references section then begins with Adessa, Alexeyeva, Beaven, Beckford, Bergman, and others.
PDF p. 27 [p. 376] — References (continued) The bibliography runs from Dick through Roof and McKinney, including General Conference statistical reports for 1901 and 1990–93, Raymond Franz’s Crisis of Conscience, Christine King’s studies of sects under the Third Reich, and the Watch Tower Society’s 1933 response to Nazism. It also lists Kosmin and Lachman’s One Nation Under God, Niebuhr’s The Social Sources of Denominationalism, Penton’s Apocalypse Delayed, and Morgan’s dissertation on the remnant and the republic. Lawson’s own earlier conference papers on Adventist church-state relations, military service, and Branch Davidian notoriety appear here as well, showing the study’s larger research program.
PDF p. 28 [p. 377] — References (concluded) The final entries run from Sahlin through Zork and include the theoretical backbone of the paper: Stark and Bainbridge’s The Future of Religion, Troeltsch’s The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, Yinger’s Religion in the Struggle for Power and Religion, Society and the Individual, and Bryan Wilson’s “An Analysis of Sect Development.” Denominational sources include the 1993 Watch Tower Yearbook, Sibley and Jacob’s Conscription of Conscience, Schwartz’s Sect Ideologies and Social Status, and Syme’s history of SDA church-state relations. Primary Adventist material closes the list, notably Ellen White’s 1863 testimony The Rebellion, an 1862 Review and Herald editorial, and letters to the Adventist Review.