WASHINGTON — President Trump signed an executive order Thursday renaming the Seventh-day Adventist Church the Seventh-day American Church for U.S. federal use, calling the change “official, effective immediately,” even as demographers noted that most Adventists do not live in the United States.
The order directs the Interior Department to update the Geographic Names Information System within 30 days and remove “all references to Seventh-day Adventist, consistent with applicable law.” Maps, contracts, quarterlies and potluck sheets are to follow. Trump said aides had “notified all the various people we have to notify,” a list said to include conference clerks and Pathfinder leaders.
Flanked by a map titled “Making the Remnant Even Greater,” Trump offered his own history of the church.
“It started here, people forget that,” he said. “America. Very American beginning. Best beginning. They had the visions, they had the wheat fields, they had the breakfast cereal, tremendous cereal. We built the schools, the hospitals, the headquarters — Silver Spring, beautiful, a little beige, but beautiful. The money comes from here. It’s the breadbasket. Everybody knows it. Other places have the members, lots of members, wonderful people, but the engine is here. Deepest pews, I call them. Same as the lake. Most of the volume is ours.”
He waved off the global membership numbers. “We started it. We fund it. We have a gulf and a lake,” he said. “Now all we need is a potluck.”
Church officials in Silver Spring said an American executive order cannot rename a worldwide denomination, alter membership rolls or change the wording on a church sign in Nairobi, São Paulo or Seoul. In New York, conference leaders said they would keep the name already on the building.
The Seventh-day Adventist Church in Canada was blunter. “Things must be called by their name,” it said, “and this church is called Seventh-day Adventist — today and forever.”
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