Ok, I'm going to be up front. I'm Adventist and, since I've never seen one before (except in maybe a few movies), I thought it would be fun to write an Adventist character in my story since I am very familiar with it.

That said, I'm aware of the problems people have with it (conspiracy nuts, extremism, anti-Catholicism, EGW as a prophet, thinking they are the "one true church," etc.) and why people (both Christians & non-Christians) shy away from it or even call it a cult. I'm not going to sit here and claim it's a flawless sect (because it isn't) or try to spend a lot of time "defending" my denomination because that's not the point of this post. Just know that I don't think my sect is the "true church" and I do my best to avoid extremist ideas.

I think I'm what one would call a "moderate SDA." I'm Sabbatarian, I follow kosher, and only use EGW's works as guides, but not hard interpretations of the word. Past that (and maybe a few other things that don't come to mind at the moment), my beliefs follow (what I think is called) "mainstream Christianity." And I wanted to use my beliefs as the basis of my MCs faith while being very careful not to make him either overly religious or a self-insert character. Honestly, like most of us I would assume, he's just a normal person with his own character who also has religious beliefs, which is, from my research, how you are supposed to write these types of characters.

In my story, a big thing I wanted to touch upon is different cultures as well as the belief systems and religions within them, so it's not like my character would stand out for being religious. I just feel like him being labeled as Adventist will make people dislike him, or the story at large, because of how negatively I think the Church is viewed (at least based on what I've seen on Reddit and other websites). I'm thinking of keeping ambiguous and writing him (and also technically another character) doing stuff with the idea of Adventism in mind, but never explicitly stating it.

What are you guys' thoughts? Again I understand that some of you probably avidly dislike or disagree with Adventism, but would you be willing to give me your advice anyways? Anyway, God bless you all and thank you in advance. Also sorry for the long post.