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

02 When Adventists were Activists

03 The Truth Behind Christian Nationalism

04 Making Sense of the Headlines

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 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.

Series

Defending Religious Liberty in an Age of Deception

02 When Adventists were Activists

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Defending Religious Liberty in an Age of Deception

03 The Truth Behind Christian Nationalism

50m

Religious Liberty Under Pressure

Disarming Prejudice

54m

Religious Liberty Under Pressure

The American Experiment

57m

Religious Liberty Series

Prophecy over Politics

37m

Religious Liberty at a Crossroads

02 Understanding PARL: Why Public Affairs and Religious Liberty Matter

1h

Unusual Living

Speaking as a Dragon? A Report on Religious Liberty and Biblical Justice Today

1h 8m

Navigating Through Politics: Lessons from Adventist History

49m

The World is Asking

27m

His Invitation

04 Reconciliation, Unity, and Latter Rain Power

1h 1m

Religious Liberty Teetering on the Edge

02 Are Adventists Wrong about Revelation 13?

55m

The Origin, Foundations, and Destiny of the United States of America, Part 2

56m

The Future of Adventism: Will Our Biblical Foundation Give Way to Culture?

5. The Future of Adventist Evangelism

1h 20m

Sound Doctrine