Living with the end of times : an analysis of American Seventh-day Adventism

In this paper I examine to what extent membership in the North American division of the Seventh-day Adventist church, a global Protestant denomination with sectarian tendencies, informs everyday life experiences in a way that may be different from mainstream American society. For this purpose I conducted ethnographic fieldwork among a Seventh-day Adventist community in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C. from April to June 2002 and from October to December 2002. After discussing the church's idiosyncratic cosmology and history in a first section of the paper, I examine how the Adventist cosmology is expressed in and gives shape to members' everyday praxis. In a last section I present three case studies of former members as an illustration of the extent to which Adventist cosmology remains ingrained in the former members' habitus. I argue that the Adventist eschatology, and its implications of the end and subsequent beginnings of time, do not entail a rupture with but rather a reorientation of everyday life. Moreover, by engaging in habitual actions that commemorate the Adventists' positioning in time and that abstract from a position in space, Adventists can arguably be seen to distance themselves from the space of the society at large, even though this does not necessarily occur at a conscious level