News

Dr Arthur Patrick
Honorary senior research fellow

The Seventh-day Adventist Church is learning to respond to the needs of heterosexual Africans who transmit AIDS through multiple partners as it realises the extent to which Adventists are infected. This is according to academic Dr Ronald Lawson, who spoke at a colloquium on Avondale College's Lake Macquarie campus this past Thursday (September 11).

One of 3500 Adventist interviews Dr Lawson has conducted in 59 countries since 1984 was in 1990, with the president of one of the African-based divisions of the worldwide church. The president stated that, "AIDS is not an Adventist issue," believing it was sufficient for the church to forbid sexual promiscuity.

That same year in Washington, DC, at the first Adventist conference focused on AIDS, Dr Fritz Guy observed that "responding to AIDS would be natural for Adventism, because we claim that healing and caring are part of our mission, and because a sexually transmitted disease is immediately relevant to our understanding of the wholeness of man."

AIDS was first diagnosed in 1981. Dr Lawson described Adventism's long struggle, in the United States and Africa, to develop coherent responses.

At first AIDS appeared to be a male homosexual disease, so some church leaders suggested it was "God's judgment on wilful sinners and a sign that the end of the world is imminent."

Even Loma Linda Medical Center (California, USA) was loath to treat AIDS patients because of the "fear of infection, moral disgust with the patients and risk of financial problems attendant on providing care for patients who often lacked medical insurance."

Dr Lawson recounted the difficulties encountered by the worldwide church's AIDS Committee, formed in 1987, and Adventist AIDS activists such as Eunice Diaz and Dr Harvey Elder.

"An Adventist AIDS conference in Harare in 2003 represented a turning point, at least in acknowledging that Adventism had been slow to respond to the epidemic, that many Adventists were infected, and that those who had contracted the disease frequently faced stigmatisation in their churches," Dr Lawson noted.

Dr Lawson, an Adventist whose mother taught at Avondale (1937), graduated from the University of Queensland (PhD, history and sociology, 1970). Since 1977, he has been a professor of sociology in Queens College, City University of New York--one of the university's 23 campuses.

Databases in the Avondale Library (such as ProQuest) offer the full text of many of Dr Lawson's 24 journal articles reporting his research relating to global Adventism, the focus of three books he is writing. Dr Lawson has also written a chapter in Christianity and Homosexuality (2008), a book now in the library.