Conclusion

Abstract

Throughout its history the Seventh-day Adventist Church has reacted to human rights in an inconsistent and on occasions even contradictory way. While the anti-slavery and abolitionist movements attracted the attention of the pioneers during the church’s infancy, issues of race relations and women’s rights, for example, have not been consistently dealt with in the twentieth century. While the church’s great emphasis on health education and its insistence on religious liberty brought it into direct relations with human rights, its members failed to apply human rights principles in such other areas as nationalism, totalitarianism and gender equality.