by stephen s4078770



Religion 2010
Ethnographic Research Project
With Marge Entermann
Seventh Day Adventist Church, (SDA) Ipswich QLD

AND

Mary (not her real name)
Exclusive Brethren (Plymouth Brethren)
Brisbane QLD


Introduction

This research project is made up of two interviews. The first, I conducted with Marge Entermann, an Adventist in her late 60s who has been a believing and practising member of the SDA Church since birth. The second was conducted by Carla with ‘Mary’ a member of the Exclusive Brethren Church since birth. The theme of this research is to explore how the interviewees’ religious background has informed their attitudes to the environment in general and how what they have observed or experienced in nature may have informed their religious beliefs

Method

My interview was carried out over one and a half hours on Sunday April 20 at the home of Mr and Mrs Entermann on the rural outskirts of Ipswich. The interview consisted of about 20 prepared questions which were added to during the interview as the topic of conversation shifted and as time allowed. The interview was tape recorded. Marge kept a copy of the Bible beside her on the armchair from which she quoted liberally throughout the interview.
Carla’s interview was conducted in Brisbane at Mary’s workplace. Mary is a receptionist for an accountant on Brisbane’s southside. This interview was carried out during Mary’s lunch break in order to ensure that other Exclusive Brethren Church members did not find out.

The interviews

Carla’s interviewee Mary reveals opinions that are very similar to those expressed by Marge. The natural world has been provided by God for the nourishment of the human race. Humans are permitted indeed expected to dominate over the land and all that dwells upon it because it is ordained by God. This notwithstanding, both interviewees did express a concern for the way that the environment has been exploited and destroyed by humans. Mary, Carla’s interviewee expressed a feeling of concern for the extinction of many ‘beautiful creatures’ which have been put here for the ‘aesthetic improvement’ of the world. Marge expressed the same by saying that all the plants and animals were put here by God for ‘me to enjoy’ and their extinction, which she conceded was sad, is due to our Original Sin. Even though both Mary and Marge do express the view that the environment has a value that is separate from any value that people may give to it, nature is still subordinated to the sustenance of the human race.

Marge was born ‘sixty something years ago’ in Ipswich. She was born an Adventist and has been one all her life just as Mary was born an Exclusive Brethren and has always been one. As a child in Ipswich she once found a baby leveret in a shallow ditch in a paddock, she brought it home. It died. She became distressed and her father told her that it had died because she had taken it out of its native environment. While she remembers this after more than fifty years, it was not any sort of ‘turning point’ in her attitude to nature. Marge said that in her childhood she was aware of the presence of God all around her. Although she never had a particular, favourite place she did like to go outside and walk in the garden or in the bush- a place where she could feel God’s presence by looking at creation all around her. Her father had come from a dryland farming background in South Australia and was very aware of conservation- something she absorbed by listening to him. Marge said: “We SDA believe when God made Adam and Eve and put them in the garden He told them to care for it and we have a responsibility and this has been part of my upbringing”.

This notion of ‘looking after the environment’ comes out clearly in Marge’s interview. Her view is one that could be described as a sort of human ‘stewardship’ over the earth. White’s 1967 Thesis on “The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis” however claims that the duality in Christianity that separated Humans from Nature placing us above the rest of creation has been the cause of today’s environmental catastrophe. White argues that Christianity is a highly anthropocentric religion that has given humans a divine justification to exploit nature with indifference and impunity. The implication being that the further humans were from nature the closer they would be to God. However this view is highly contested. Harrison (1999:86) says that White’s arguments of a cause-and-effect relationship between Christianity and environmental degradation are false. In history there has been environmental destruction without Christianity and at the same time many Christians have been more environmentally aware than adherents of other faiths.



Sanitarium Health Food Factory, Warburton, Victoria- Marge lived in the Adventist Community here for 8 years

Marge trained as a nurse, got married and went down to Warburton, Victoria which was and still is known for its large Adventist community and the famous Sanitarium Food Factory. She lived in Warburton for 8 years. Later she moved to Newcastle and worked in Newcastle Hospital. She was always honest and up front about her religion. She always observed the Sabbath and practised and preached vegetarianism as God’s plan for humanity.



We then focussed on vegetarianism. For SDA nutrition is very, very important. When SDA say that their body is like a sacred temple, they mean it. The centrality of ‘good food’ is inescapable- it’s part of worshipping God. Marge quoted from Genesis 1:29-30, God said:
“Behold I have given you every herb bearing seed which is upon the face of all the earth and every tree, in the which (sic) is the fruit of a tree yielding seed: to you it shall be for meat”.



And so God’s original diet for Humans was nuts, grains and seeds. This, Marge told me was what we were designed to eat- we were designed to live forever on that diet. After Adam and Eve sinned they could no longer leisurely pick seeds, nuts and berries, they would have to cultivate the earth and only by the sweat of their brow (agriculture) would they eat. It was only after the Flood that God allowed humans to eat flesh. Marge quoted Genesis 9:1-3:

"Then God blessed Noah and his sons, saying to them, Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the earth. The fear and dread of you will fall upon all of the beasts of the earth and all the birds of the air, upon every creature that moves along the ground, and upon all the fish of the sea; they are given into your hands”.

Not just any flesh could be eaten- only animals that both chew the cud and have a split hoof- cows, goats, and sheep. But not pigs- they have a split hoof but don’t chew the cud- and not camels, they chew the cud but don’t have a split hoof.



Sanitarium is an Adventist-owned Australian company with a huge range of vegetarian foods that promote a healthy lifestyle.
Good nutrition is a very important part of the Adventist way of life

In later life Marge also worked as a missionary in India. She worked near Hyderabad and then Bangalore in South India. She gave health talks to villagers on everything from nutrition to promiscuity to the effects of smoking. Here again I understood how for Seventh Day Adventist people their body is like a temple. Marge has never been a smoker or drinker. To do so would be like defiling a temple. And the results can be seen in their life expectancy. Adventists have a longer life expectancy than the rest of the population, Marge said. They suffer less from cardio- vascular disease and lung cancer and are less stressed.

When she came back from India Marge realised that she had accumulated too much ‘stuff’. Her house was full of it. What was it all for? Marge told me that seeing the Indians in the village with a simple life made her realise that she had cluttered her life with too much stuff that had no importance to her.
“Do you think perhaps people in this society have too much?” I asked.
“Of course” she answered. “We’re burdened down by it”. Marge stated that she recognised the environmental ‘unsustainability’ of the present growth-oriented system.

During her life Marge also used her background in nursing to be active in what she called, “health evangelism” using the knowledge that her religious background had given her. She ran get-fit classes for the over-40s in the days when they didn’t have many classes for older people. She assisted in ‘quit smoking’ campaigns starting in the 60s and ran nutrition courses in Ipswich; she did displays at the Ipswich Show and even organised health camps where people could come and eat healthy food and take health walks.

I asked Marge if people can know God by themselves, can they experience God, the divine, the Spirit without being taught it. Marge gave an interesting answer. Yes, of course you can experience God. God is all around us in nature but to know what God expects of us, where we come from and where we’re going we have the Bible to show us. The stories in the Bible show us how to lead our lives.

I told Marge that I grew up in the Catholic tradition but that I wasn’t very ‘practising’ anymore. As the interview came to an end she leaned forward in the armchair. She said something that I wasn’t expecting.

“Not every Catholic will end up in Heaven, you know” she said. “Not every SDA will end up in Heaven either. There are those who want to live their lives in harmony with God’s word. They are God’s People no matter what name is attached to them”.
“There are God’s People in every religion.
This is what we call the Church Universal”.


REFERENCES

Cohen, J. (1985). The Bible, Man and Nature in the History of Western Thought: A call for Reassessment. The Journal of Religion 65(2):155-172

Harrison, P. (1999). Subding The Earth. Genesis One: Early Modern Science and the Exploitation of Nature. The Journal of Religion 79(1):86-109

Holy Bible: New International Version. (1978). New York: American Bible Society.

White, L.(1967). The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis. Science 155: 1203-1212

interesting webpages related to christianity and/or vegetarianism:

http://www.all-creatures.org/fol/index.html
http://www.all-creatures.org/cva/mission.htm
http://www.christianecology.org/BiologicalBasis.html
http://www.counterbalance.net/enviro/intro-frame.html
http://www.jesusveg.com/qow699.html
http://www.sdada.org/index.htm
http://www.ivu.org/congress/wvc65/golden.html