Ronald L. Numbers is Hilldale Professor of the History of Science and Medicine and of Religious Studies, and a member of the department of medical history and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he has taught for over three and a half decades. He has written or edited more than two dozen books, including, most recently, Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion (Harvard, 2009), Biology and Ideology from Descartes to Dawkins (Chicago, 2010), edited with Denis Alexander, and the recently published Science and Religion around the World (Oxford, 2011), edited with John Hedley Brooke. He is a past president of the History of Science Society, the American Society of Church History, and the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science.

Numbers is also the author of Prophetess of Health: Ellen G. White and the Origins of Seventh-day Adventist Health Reform, a book that arguably did for Seventh-day Adventism what No Man Knows My History did for Mormonism. (In other words, it’s not at the top of most Adventist reading lists.) Revealing Adventism co-founder Ellen White’s talent for plagiarizing the health reformers of her time and casting doubt upon the divine nature of her prophetic visions got Numbers fired from Loma Linda University, the Adventist stronghold in California, but it also got him this interview with me. So perhaps it was for the best.

Vegetarian Adventist dietitians have had a big influence on the American Dietetic Association’s position paper on a vegetarian diet since 1988, when the ADA started endorsing vegetarianism. Not all Adventists are vegetarian — some estimates have it around 50 percent, and Numbers has seen estimates as low as 10 percent — but most Adventists believe that God told Ellen White in a vision that vegetarianism, and maybe even near-veganism, is the proper diet for mankind. Could this be in the back of Adventist researchers’ minds as they conduct studies proving the superiority of a vegetarian diet? You can probably guess what I think, but I’m an outsider on this issue and I wanted to hear what a former Adventist scholar had to say about it.

Were you raised as a vegetarian Adventist?

Yes. I’m a fourth-generation Adventist. My maternal grandfather was president of the international church. And all my male relatives are ministers, or were ministers, both grandfathers, father, uncles on both sides of my family, brother-in-law, my nephew. I went from first grade through college in Adventist schools. So I was thoroughly integrated into the Adventist church.

Adventism is not the only religion with dietary guidelines. But Mormons don’t care if gentiles drink caffeine and Jews don’t care if gentiles eat treif. Yet it seems to me that Adventists want to spread vegetarianism even outside the bounds of their religion. Is that a correct impression?

Well I’ve got to say that if that were a goal of theirs, they haven’t done very well. Adventists tend to be very insular. And other groups have taken over and promoted vegetarianism and vegetarian meat substitutes more than the Adventists have. By and large, the Adventists are out to convert to world to Adventism, but not to vegetarianism. Keep in mind, I don’t know if as many as 10 percent of Adventists are vegetarians. You know about the theology?

Which aspect?

So if you’re an Adventist, you’re encouraged not to eat meat. But you can still be saved if you eat clean meat and fish — fish, if they have fins and scales, and mammals that chew their cud and have cloven hooves. It’s the Old Testament Levitical rules.

Now, the only penalty for eating clean meat is that you cannot be translated, which is a term they use for going to heaven without seeing death. So if you eat meat, clean meat, you can be saved but you’ll have to die. If you don’t eat any meat, then you have the privilege of living through the worst period in the history of the earth, “the time of troubles.” I’ve been thinking of setting up workshops encouraging all Adventists to eat one bite of meat so that they die before the time of troubles. That’s a joke.

I, however, have not eaten any meat, even though I left Adventism decades ago. It’s because of psychopathology now. I just think of dead animals. I’m not principled at all.

Adventists talk about “medical evangelism.” What is that?

It’s using health reform and medicine to spread the Adventist gospel. As White liked to say, the medical work is the “right arm” of the message.

Adventists talk about vegetarianism being an “entering wedge” to get people interested in Adventism. When they are promoting vegetarianism, like through the American Dietetic Association and so on, is their goal really to get people to become Adventists, then, as opposed to vegetarians?

Yeah, largely. Now the entering wedge metaphor has traditionally been used to describe the entire Adventist medical work, which would include their hospitals and sanitariums. And for a while they were pretty big on developing vegetarian restaurants. In fact, my grandfather who went on to become president of the church started out running a vegetarian restaurant in Salt Lake City. Most of the Adventist vegetarian restaurants today are self-supporting. That is, they’re not owned by the church, they’re owned by private Adventists. So, yeah, they might use vegetarianism that way.

There was a huge battle in the early 20th century between Ellen White, the prophetess, and John Harvey Kellogg, the leader of the medical work, over whether the purpose of the whole health emphasis should be on conversion – was that the ultimate goal? – or simply to reflect Christ’s concern for suffering humanity. Ellen White was all about conversion and didn’t see that the medical institutions had any place in the church except as entering wedges. Kellogg had more humanitarian reasons.

Which method do you think Adventists focus on now?

It’s hard to say because Adventism does span a spectrum. Even at Loma Linda University, which is their medical center, the medical school has tended to go in the direction of Kellogg on this particular issue. Whereas the School of Public Health has tended to go in the direction of White. So you have very conservative people in the School of Public Health who want to prove that everything she said was correct and inspired, and in the medical school they tend to just want to practice good medicine.

When the School of Public Health conducts studies that vindicate vegetarianism, do you think there is bias involved in wanting to prove their prophet right?

In some areas, there certainly is. In fact, you may have heard that they, just a few years ago, re-ran the data on this longitudinal study of vegetarian Adventists and discovered that if you eat fish, you’re actually better off. I don’t see them out promoting that idea. What led them at the beginning to ignore that finding? Probably bias of some kind. I don’t know. I haven’t gone through the data at all, but I know that their researchers have gone back and found that flaw.

When science supports vegetarianism, do Adventists translate that into religious terms, as a vindication of Ellen White?

They take scientific support as a sign that she must have been inspired to be so far ahead of her time. Of course, she wasn’t.

Adventist Health Study 2 Lead Researcher Gary Fraser said: “I believe that the Lord gave the health message to the Adventist Church not only for its own members but also to share with others. The main goal of the [Adventist Health Study-2] research is to play a small part in improving the health of the nation, indeed the world, and so enhance people’s lives. The 96,000 members of AHS-2 all play a vital role in this endeavor. … The efforts on the part of all participants will pay off handsomely.” He wrote this statement at the beginning of the research. It seemed like he was already calling it in favor of Adventist vegetarians even though there was no way to know what the conclusions of the research were at that point.

And it’s hard to know what’s causative here. The Mormons enjoy longer, healthier lives, and they eat meat. It’s hard to isolate one factor in these studies. Maybe it’s because Adventists don’t practice sex, or something like that.

Anecdotally, does it seem to you that the vegetarian Adventists you’ve known are healthier than the meat eating Adventists?

As my meat-eating wife likes to say, it just seems that the veggies live longer because of our boring lives. No, I can’t tell any difference.

You mentioned that a lot of Adventists are meat eaters even though it’s discouraged.

Yes. I think it’s probably especially true outside of the US. And in the US I’ve heard estimates that would have no more than 10 percent being vegetarians.

And why do you think that is? When they do these studies on Adventists, there’s the vegetarian Adventists and the meat-eating Adventists, but otherwise they’re pretty much the same as far as other lifestyle factors like alcohol and caffeine. Even though my understanding is that those things are about on the same level as eating meat…

No no no, you can be a good Adventist and eat clean meat. You cannot be a good Adventist and drink alcohol or smoke. You are thrown out of the church for those. Caffeine’s a grey area. I don’t think anyone monitors that much anymore. When I was growing up, people cared about it, but I see lots of Adventists when I’m around them, drinking coffee. It’s like going to movies. It was terrible 50 years ago, and now it’s tolerated.

So then alcohol is on the same level as unclean meat?

Oh yeah! Indeed. And smoking. If you’ve read anything about Ellen White, you know how hard it was for her to give up meat. And Kellogg despaired that the ministers were still eating meat decades after her visions. And so giving up meat was really hard, I guess. I’ve never had to do it.

In old Adventist magazines, I saw stories about Adventist leaders encouraging Adventists to become dietitians or assistants to dietitians. Do Adventists become dietitians to spread the word of their prophet, the way that Mormons become archeologists in order to prove The Book of Mormon correct?

I imagine there are a few, but I don’t think that’s the primary motivation.

This is just a guess from knowing lots of Adventists many years ago — you may know I taught at Loma Linda University medical school, and they fired me for writing about Ellen White. But I do know a fair number of them and Adventists go into nursing and medicine and dietetics for a whole range of reasons. One of which is to help people. One of which is to make money. One of which, that you rarely hear discussed, is that you don’t have to worry about Sabbath observance. Adventists don’t believe in working from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday, unless you’re in the medical work, and then it doesn’t make any difference. So I knew when I was in a very conservative Adventist college, nursing students would sign up for weekend work, because that was tolerated.

So there’s the whole range of reasons. I am sure that there are some who go into nutrition and dietetics as a goal of promoting Ellen White’s lifestyle. But I suspect they’re a minority. I suspect it’s just a congenial occupation for many.

According to your book, when Ellen White was just beginning, faith healing and a rejection of worldly doctors was important to her teachings. But eventually Adventists embraced science and now are influential in mainstream dietary science. What changed?

Well, here the tricky word is science. Ellen White and John Harvey Kellogg thought that they were using good science. And Ellen White condemned sciences of “Satanic origin.” Or “science falsely so called,” a Biblical phrase. So they never saw themselves as anti-science at all, even when she was insisting on a six 24-hour day creation or on her dietetic laws, et cetera. It was always “true science,” as they called it. So there’s never been a bias against science. It’s just that they lumped into “Satanic science” anything they didn’t like — like evolution and any study that would support the consumption of alcohol or meat or anything like that.

They’ve always played with the label science. And as you may know, right now, La Sierra University is going through tremendous turmoil over the allegation that some of the biologists have been teaching theistic evolution. And the president of the church has come down hard, saying no deviation from six consecutive 24-hour days and a universal flood that deposited the fossil record. (Of course they’re not unusual. Two-thirds of Americans prefer creationism.) When it comes to science, Adventists are almost schizophrenic. They’ll use science when it helps their cause. And they’ll repudiate it, they’ll call it bad science, when they reject it.

If there were studies saying that vegetarianism was not as healthful as a diet that includes fish, then that would become bad science?

We’ll see. Let’s see if they start promoting the eating of fish. I don’t think they will. Well, some may, but not the orthodox ones.

And the battle over evolution is between the orthodox and the less orthodox.

With the overwhelming majority being anti-evolutionists. Seventh-day Adventists have the highest percentage of anti-evolutionists of any denomination in the United States. And what we now refer to as creation science, or scientific creationism, or young earth creationism, comes directly out of Adventism.

Could that inform their understanding of diet?

Not a whole lot. They do argue that until the flood, Noah’s flood, that the one explanation for the longevity of those pre-Noachian guys in the Bible was that they were vegetarian. And that after the flood, you have the 70-year lifespan. That’s when people were eating meat. So sometimes you’ll get that kind of explanation. But other than that there’s not much connection. Except that real conservatives who take Ellen White literally, which is the majority of the church, would take her comments about creation and her comments about diet to be equally inspired from God.

Do you have any idea why so many health reformers were attracted to vegetarianism at the time of Ellen G. White?

Remember, the health reformers were a tiny minority movement in 19th century America. Part of it, a large part of it, was that you were what you ate. And you would animalize your passions if you ate meat. And that would make you want to have sex, which is terrible.

Ellen White’s first publications were on the evils of masturbation. Within a few years she included abuse of marriage relations. And if you ate animals and animal products, it intensified your animal passions, they called them. So that was a big factor. And then that meat had cancerous humors in them. In other words, the disease argument was also very popular among the reformers. And many of the reformers were religious and thought that the original diet was probably vegetarian.

And then that might have influenced her views as well, as far as the Garden of Eden being vegetarian.

Well it had to. Because there was no death before the fall. So unless you were going to eat live animals, it wasn’t even possible to eat meat before the fall in the Garden of Eden.

Did Ellen G. White believe that by mimicking the Garden of Eden diet, or the pre-flood diet, that human life spans should be able to go back to what they were before?

In the late 19th century, there was a small subset of Adventists who became what is known as “Perfectionists.” And they not only believed that your character could become perfect, but that your body could. And you wouldn’t age or anything like that. Needless to say, that didn’t last very long because people died and their teeth decayed and they went lame. But there was a brief flurry of that. Ellen White did not join that.

Do some Adventists still believe that eating meat stirs up the animal passions?

Well yeah. If you eat a steak, you’re likely to go out and want to have sex right away. Isn’t that an established fact?

So that’s still a major reason for avoiding meat?

Let me just say this. Educated Adventists are embarrassed to talk about sex, and especially all the horrible diseases that Ellen White attributed to masturbation, which she saw in vision. And they just would prefer not to talk about it. And she said that it was dangerous to have sex more often than the moon quartered, which would be twice a month. They don’t want anybody talking about that anymore. Now, would they condemn masturbation? You bet. I lived in an Adventist boarding academy in Tennessee, and they put big windows in each door that you couldn’t cover so that the dean could monitor masturbation. So at one level there’s still an institutional concern about it. But it’s something that even conservatives, I find, don’t like to talk about.

Just because they know it makes them look bad even if they agree with it?

They’re probably uncomfortable with sex, period. There are all kinds of psychological reasons. When I was a kid, there were two books by an Adventist physician named Shryock called On Becoming a Man and On Becoming a Woman. And you give them to adolescent Adventists, young people, and that kind of followed the Ellen White line. Not as scarily, talking about the whole host of diseases and so forth, but condemning masturbation, et cetera.

Are there a lot of things Ellen G. White said that are ignored entirely by Adventists, that have been quietly pruned out?

Yes. The range of diseases caused by masturbation would be one of them. Her writing that wearing wigs led to insanity. They don’t talk about that, they don’t want anybody to know about that. At one time she condemned eggs and cheese, but Adventist cafeterias, schools and places would serve dairy products now. She once had a vision about how Adventist women should dress and promoted that for about a decade, but it was so divisive that they backed away from that one. They’ll change occasionally.

But they don’t officially disown those comments, they just kind of make them go away.

Yeah. Like for example, she was dead-set against drugs. Their hospitals and sanitariums use drugs just like anybody else’s today. Well, there are a few private Adventist sanitariums that don’t use drugs. But by and large they have. And the apologetic is, “Oh, those were harmful drugs back then. Now drugs do good.” And where she condemned physicians, it was the heroic physician who bled and purged and puked patients, so there’s almost always some way to justify a change. But sometimes they just drop it out. They don’t reprint it and hope everybody forgets. They do the same with theology too.

Do meat eating Adventists believe that they’re harming themselves with their meat eating habit, because of what they know from Ellen G. White’s teachings?

Boy. I have a lot of meat-eating Adventist friends. They don’t seem very guilty. Now, if they ate unclean meat, they might feel really terrible. But if they feel bad, then they just need to quit. There’s an easy option for that one. Maybe meat’s addictive, like sex and alcohol. I don’t know. I don’t think most of them have trouble. At least the people I know don’t seem to have trouble. They’re just glad there’s a loophole for them to eat clean meat.

Do vegetarian Adventists resent the meat-eating Adventists who take that loophole as opposed to being more devout?

Yeah, probably. One of the things that you rarely see, rarely see, is serving meat at a church dinner or at an Adventist institution’s cafeteria. So there’s a public image of Adventists being vegetarian. If you brought in meat to a church dinner, people would be shocked. Even though 90 percent of them might be meat eaters. It’s just something you shouldn’t do. It’s like if you brought a bottle of wine in and set it on the table for those who think it’s okay to drink wine. You don’t do that.

It violates the decorum.

Yeah, and really vegetarian Adventists tend to be more conservative Adventists. And so they would be upset that not all Adventists go strictly vegetarian.

Do some Adventists wish that loophole didn’t exist?

Yeah, but it’s not widely discussed. It’s not a big issue. Especially since Ellen White created the loophole late in her career, distinguishing between clean and unclean meat.

And then she later became vegetarian for moral reasons.

But Adventists don’t stress the moral reasons at all. They stress health reasons. And legal reasons — that it’s against God’s law to eat unclean meat. Growing up I never heard anybody even mention a moral reason.

And clean meat, that doesn’t violate God’s law. Avoiding that is purely for health?

That goes back to the Old Testament laws. God established them. So it can’t violate his laws.

So as far as clean meat being okay but not encouraged, the idea there is that it’s bad to do things that are against health, but not unforgivable?

Yeah, Ellen White frequently emphasized the Biblical idea that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost. So you had a moral and theological obligation to keep it healthy. She also, in a phrase she plagiarized from another health reformer, said that it was as great a violation to go against the laws of health as it was to break the Ten Commandments. And breaking the Ten Commandments for Adventists is really serious business. Especially the Fourth Commandment, the Sabbath. So she made health reform a very important theological part of Adventism. Or she tried to. She wasn’t very successful. Even at her own table.

If violating the health laws is as bad as violating the Ten Commandments, even eating clean meat should be as bad as violating the Ten Commandments.

Right, and in the beginning, that’s what she was saying. She was against all meat eating and all stimulants and all alcohol and spices. She wasn’t distinguishing between clean and unclean meat then.

Before the American Dietetic Association eventually adopted the Adventist views on vegetarianism with their vegetarian position paper, there seemed to be a lot of resentment from the Adventists directed toward the nation’s premiere health authority, which rejected the premises of Ellen G. White’s pro-vegetarian claims. Was it always an Adventist goal to get Ellen G. White’s beliefs recognized by mainstream science?

No. As I say, they’re pretty insular. And frankly I don’t know when they took this on. They were always grateful when some non-Adventist nutritionist would applaud them. The first major one to do so was Clive McCay, a nutritionist at Cornell, and they virtually embraced him into Adventism, although he never joined. He would say wonderful things about Ellen White and her dietary recommendations. And they would use that — they liked to promote the idea that Ellen White was 100 years ahead of her time, or 150 years ahead of her time, as evidence of her inspiration. I can assure you, having checked it out, there was not a single idea in all of her health writings that was ahead of its time.

But eventually Adventists did see the value in getting mainstream science to confirm White’s beliefs?

Oh yeah, they love for mainstream science to confirm what they believe.