August 22: Second Founding with Eric Foner and Douglas Morgan
We will watch a video of the great historian of Reconstruction, Eric Foner, and discuss it with Adventist Historian Douglas Morgan
Reading Recommendations Below
With Moderator Bill Shull
On the recent July 4 Sabbath we honored the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence with a celebratory lecture by former secondary school American history teacher Michael Anderson. A followup presentation on the subject of “Second Founding” was promised. This is the term used by historian Eric Foner to describe the impact of the three amendments which truly remade the US Constitution.
Adventism’s formal beginnings took place right in the midst of the events related to the remaking of the United States, the “Second Founding” and Reconstruction. Yet Adventism’s participation was mostly limited to protecting it’s unique teachings and showing how these events underscored the immanent return of Jesus. A movement which included abolitionists as founders did not consider racial equality sufficiently important to protect; instead, as Reconstruction unraveled Adventism quickly embraced the segregation sentiments which resulted in nearly 80 years of Jim Crow laws.
Furthermore, most of us grew up with a narrative about this historical period of American history that has since been replaced, even debunked. That narrative cast Reconstruction as a failure, the freed slaves as unable to participate in society, and the Jim Crow era as an inevitable consequence. This was our own Adventist take on the period as well, and it continues to reverberate in Adventist understanding.
But if the good news is about doing justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly with God, then we need to take another look at this period, because that is what it was about - on a scale that is almost unfathomable. And not any too late, before all the advances of the “Second Founding” are undone.
The “Second Founding” - the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments and the Civil Rights Act of 1866 were profound documents which re-set American constitutional law, and provided the foundation for human dignity and flourishing - “if we can keep it!”
Suggested Readings:
Eric Foner, Second Founding (Kindle here)
Douglas Morgan, Adventism and the American Republic (Chapters 1 and 2) (Online Adventist Archives) (Chapter 6, “A Pluralistic Remnant,” is also relevant to our discussion.
(The link is to the digital version of the book at Adventist Archives. A new edition of the above work will be available in September with an Afterword by the author, from the University of Tennessee Press. We hope to study this work in Sabbath Seminars in the future.)
About Eric Foner:
“One of the most dangerous men in the United States” - History News Network
About Douglas Morgan:
Church History Professor at Washington Adventist University
Sabbath Seminars has studied Douglas Morgan’s books “Change Agents” and “Lewis C. Sheafe, Apostle to Black America” and looks forward to participating in the Adventist Peace Fellowship which Morgan has helped to lead.
Sabbath Seminars
Room 3208
Centennial Complex of Loma Linda University Sabbath Morning 10:30-12:30
Galileo Galilei: 'I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.'
