Can an Adventist be President?

As a life long Adventist I have often wondered what life would be like if we had an Adventist President of the United States of America. The most obvious question, "How would one observe the Sabbath?" is far down the totem pole of my concerns. More important to me would be how can one withstand the criticism from the, separation of Church and State camp, within the church and maintain a positive connection to the church? The Adventist Church socially and culturally has long taught us to remain neutral and abstain from the issues of the world.

I don't know the solution but I do know that recently there is a renewed interest doing Kingdom Good by engaging in the concerns of our world. I don't know how far our involvement will go but could an Adventist become President of these United States?

Here's an interesting article from the January 26, 2006 Adventist Review Anchor Point magazine by Bill Knott entitled, "The Nearly Adventist President."

WHETHER WARREN G. HARDING WILL GO DOWN IN HISTORY as a great President will depend, first, upon appreciation of the homelier virtues,” urged Review and Herald associate editor C. A. Holt in a column three weeks after the Republican president’s sudden death in August 1923, “and second, upon the ability of men who write the record to estimate the times and their needs.”¹

If Holt’s lines sounded defensive of a U.S. president now routinely ranked as the worst in the country’s history, they were.² For the previous three years Review and Herald columns had offered glowing praise of the personal and professional characteristics of the only U.S. president to have close Seventh-day Adventist ties and relatives. Holt and his fellow editors--all keen observers of both American and international politics--had undoubtedly begun to hear the chorus of reassessment and revision that seemed to follow the dead president’s funeral cortege to his final resting place.

Adventist leaders already had reason to be dismayed at what was happening to the Harding legacy about which they had said so much, and to fear the assessment of future historians. Presidential appointee Charles R. Forbes, head of the Veterans Bureau, had resigned his post in February of that year and fled to Europe when details of his corrupt dealings with government contractors came to light and a primary attorney in his agency committed suicide. His public friendship with the president’s Adventist sister, Carolyn, and her minister husband, Heber, had occasioned much criticism in the popular press.³ Interior secretary’s Albert B. Fall’s leasing of government oil reserves to large oil corporations was already under investigation by a Senate committee.⁴ Attorney general Harry Daugherty’s questionable connections to both government contractors and bootleggers were prompting calls for congressional investigations.⁵

Holt could write safely only of Harding’s “homelier virtues,” memorialized one week earlier in a black-bordered column on the masthead page of the Review. There the dead president had been lauded for his “honesty and integrity,” his “loyalty of purpose and sincerity of endeavor.” According to the unsigned column, Harding “sought faithfully and conscientiously to discharge the duties of his high office.” He was “a man of noble, generous impulses.” He had, the column continued, a “kindly, courteous bearing” that “endeared him to all classes.” “In marked contrast to the tinsel and show, the hypocrisy and cant, of much of present-day living,” Harding had clung to “simplicity of life.”⁶

Choosing to discount the persistent stories of extramarital affairs that had dogged Harding’s political career for more than 20 years, the Review had proclaimed him “a loving husband, a kind neighbor, a wise counselor.”⁷

In a highly unusual tribute to the deceased leader, the Review editors placed a picture of Harding surrounded by funereal emblems on the front cover of the August 16, 1923, edition of the church’s general paper with the headline “A Nation Mourns Its Fallen Chief.” Never before--and never since--have any of the seven other American presidents who died in office been so honored.

All in the Family
On one level, the effusive praise for President Harding was the understandable reaction of an editorial team that, like the rest of the nation, was shocked at the news of the leader’s sudden death in San Francisco on August 2. But Review editors had dealt with very bad news for the nation at other moments in the journal’s 74-year history. The other American presidents--Republicans all--who had died in office since the founding of the magazine [Lincoln (1865), Garfield (1881), and McKinley (1901)] had all been victims of assassination, unquestionably a more devastating blow to the national psyche. Harding’s health problems, moreover, had been a matter of some concern for months to his physicians and family members, with high blood pressure and cardiac strain topping the list.⁸

It was the dead president’s close family ties to the Seventh-day Adventist Church, both in his native Midwest and in the nation’s capital, however, that made the loss seem doubly dear, for the church’s informal access to the seat of American political power would inevitably now be greatly diminished. At the time of his death the president’s younger sister, Carolyn Harding Votaw, ran a police program for unwed mothers in the District of Columbia, a job that she had gotten as a direct result of her brother’s intervention when he was a U.S. senator. Carolyn’s husband, Heber H. Votaw, an Adventist minister who had served with her in mission work in Burma from 1905 to 1914, was currently serving as director of the Federal Prison System, though he had no professional training or experience in such work. He had originally left church employ in 1917 to serve as his brother-in-law’s primary Senate office clerk. The president’s brother, George, Jr., had followed in his parents’ professional footsteps as a physician and was now a prominent Adventist doctor operating a mental health sanitarium in suburban Columbus, Ohio. Presidential nephews George III and Charles attended nearby Washington Missionary College in Takoma Park, Maryland, just one mile from the church’s world headquarters on Eastern Avenue. President Harding and his wife, Florence, had attended nephew George’s graduation at the college on May 20, 1923, a visit duly noted and lauded in the Review.

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