Residents of Nashville, Tennessee — the ones who still read a printed Sunday newspaper — received quite a shock when opening the June 21 edition of The Tennessean, a Gannett Co. newspaper not generally known for tabloid-style contents.
A full-page advertisement from a little-known outfit, “Future For America,” was clearly designed to stun readers.
“Dear Citizen of Nashville,” the ad’s text read. “We are under conviction to not only tell you but provide evidence that on July 18, 2020, Islam is going to detonate a nuclear device in Nashville, Tennessee.” The text went on to make a range of bizarre predictions, including an assertion that Donald Trump would be the “last” President of the United States.
Surprisingly — to this observer at least — the ensuing media coverage was, by and large, accurate, explanatory and helpful to readers. Journalists quickly put the fringe group in its context, and even though the advertisement mentioned the Seventh-day Adventist Church (a denomination of 21.4 million worldwide, whose membership includes this writer), the church was not associated with either the group or Jeff Pippenger, its “speaker.”
That’s largely because Pippenger had been disfellowshipped — expelled from Adventist membership — in 2015. The North American Division of the church disavowed the group, though not naming the individual in their statement.
“[T]here is no connection between the Seventh-day Adventist Church and this group and their teachings,” the statement read.
Also, the ad referred to “the backslidden Seventh-day Adventist Church,” which signals — to say the least — a kind of distancing from that larger faith community.
There was what had to be a mad scramble at The Tennessean to do damage control. Media reports indicated the switchboard lit up with subscription cancellations, and online comments on Facebook and Twitter were not positive.
The paper’s initial story spelled out the details:
The Tennessean is investigating how a paid advertisement from a fringe religious group was published on Sunday in violation of the newspaper’s long-established standards. The ad featured a bizarre, pseudo-religious “prophecy,” including the declaration of an impending nuclear attack in Nashville by “Islam.”
The ad was immediately ordered to be pulled from future editions by sales executives and the investigation launched. A similar ad, one that did not mention Islam but also contained an end-times prophecy, published in the newspaper on June 17.
The newspaper’s advertising standards clearly forbid hate speech. Advertisements that do not meet the paper’s standards are routinely rejected for publication.
The paper’s administration stated it would donate the ad’s proceeds — $14,000 — to the American Muslim Advisory Council, a local Muslim-American group. The paper later stated it would offer a $50,000 advertising credit “which will be used for multiple Islamic organizations.”
The advertising manager who allowed the ad to run is now out of a job, according to a follow-up article in the paper: “The Tennessean and its parent company Gannett announced on Monday that an advertising manager was fired after the news organization published an anti- Muslim advertisement.”
In addition, the paper also refunded the $14,000 paid by Future For America, the article stated. Profuse apologies to readers and the Muslim community completed the second article.
Suffice it to say that Adventists have been in this lane before.
In 1993, the federal government moved in on the Mount Carmel installation near Waco, Texas, home to the Branch Davidians and leader David Koresh, an established sect that turned into a personality cult. The Koresh group was an offshoot of an offshoot of Adventism, although the ensuing firefight at the end of the siege, which killed 76, linked the Adventists to the carnage in many news reports.
Beginning in the early 2000s, another breakaway group, the Florida-based “Eternal Gospel Church,” began advertising via newspapers, direct mail, and billboards, attacking the pope as “the antichrist” and claiming to be “Seventh-day Adventists.” Because the main church has trademarked the Seventh-day Adventist name, the Florida group had to modify their ads and signage, and for the most part fell off the media radar.
This leads us to Pippenger and his group. Having served as a news editor for two entities at the Adventist’s world headquarters for 11 years, I believed I knew the principal outliers who campaign against the main organization. As a Latter-day Saint media person once said about their apostates, “these are people who leave the Church, but just can’t leave the Church alone.”
That said, I’d never heard of “Ministry of Future For America,” or of Jeff Pippenger. But on seeing the newspaper ad with its top-of-the page photo montage of a burning American flag and images of President Donald Trump and Pope Francis, my curiosity was piqued.
Reading the ad, I found references to Adventism, Ellen White and quotations from 19th Century editions of Review and Herald, the church paper now known as Adventist Review.
Adventists — the church-affiliated ones — aren’t afraid to use the media to promote our beliefs. The “Voice of Prophecy” radio program started near Los Angeles in 1929 and is one of the oldest media ministries out there. “Faith For Today” was one of the first religious television programs. And traveling literature salespeople — “colporteurs” in Bible Belt language — have plied the roads of America’s cities and small towns for more than a century.
But the Adventist Church no longer tries to scare people out of their socks and has never set a date for Christ’s return. (William Miller, whose 1840s preaching resulted in the Adventist movement, did pick October 22, 1844 as the date, but the Adventists were organized later and have avoided that pitfall.)
Unlike most reports here at GetReligion, this story has several happy endings. References to a church with which Pippenger is no longer affiliated were few, the coverage explained the rather unusual advertising and its result and the story wound down relatively quickly, thanks in no small part to the accurate mainstream coverage.
If only every complicated religion story had such a (relatively) happy conclusion.
Editor’s note: Mark Kellner is a former regular here at GetReligion. For more info on his work, click here.