PARIS, France — Seventh-day Adventists have been officially identified as the World’s Worst Dancers. The finding comes as a result of a five-year study by a team of sociologists and anthropologists from UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization).
Published today as part of a larger study into the effect of religion on culture, the findings surprised the UNESCO research team:
“Despite the fact that there are more than 18 million Adventists worldwide, hailing from almost every culture and major language group, Adventists were surprisingly predictable in their inability to execute even the most basic of dance moves,” said the official report published in UNESCO’s International Social Science Journal (ISSJ).
“We have never seen such striking uniformity in a religious or cultural group of this size and diversity. It is fascinating. It would not be an exaggeration to say that Adventists are religiously bad at dancing.”
Sarah McPherson, one of the lead researchers on the UNESCO team said that “large percentages of perfectly healthy Adventists couldn’t even pull off a simple two-step — a common, basic move in folkloric dance the world over.”
McPherson said that by contrast, church members of all ages demonstrated impressive, off-the-chart proficiencies in other areas. “Two strengths displayed by a disproportionately high percentage of Adventists were superior knot-tying and — even more surprisingly, given their history as conscientious objectors in time of war — their marching abilities.”
McPherson says her team discovered that “these capabilities hail from wide-spread participation in an Adventist version of scouts called Pathfinders that features incredibly beige uniforms, highly vegetarian food and comprehensive training in what the denomination has dubbed ‘essential life skills’ like soap carving and flawless cat identification.”
