Public Image and Private Life of the Seventh-day Adventist Church in the United States Browsing through the guidelines of the Seventh-day Adventist (SDA) Church on their official homepage (Adventist.org) and seeing the humanitarian work done by the Adventist Development and Relief Agency (ADRA) one would assume that the SDA is an American church that tries to emphasize the importance of empathy and attempts to lessen the condemning and judgmental attitudes of its followers. However, both reading the personal accounts and testimonies of former SDA members and analyzing the church founder Ellen G. White’s writings present a very different picture. My aim is to explore the two sides of Seventh-day Adventism; the accepting, humanitarian, health reformer image that the church communicates towards outsiders and the real-life SDA conduct which requires a rigidly obedient attitude to the ideals and prophecies of Ellen G. White. In contemporary consciousness SDA members are among the healthiest Americans (Secrets of Living Longer) and the ADRA is one of the most respected humanitarian organizations, Give Spot lists it as the third most efficient charity in the world (“GiveSpot 100”), dealing with AIDS patients in the Third World, in the world. The preventive attitude and modern health ideology in the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the twentieth century changed the position of the church in the public’s eye from being a post-Millerite cult into an accepted church. On one of the homepages dedicated to Seventh-Day Adventism one can read about the theological concept behind the healthy lifestyle ordained into the belief system of the church: “By combining the Biblical principles found in the Levitical Laws, the emphasis on self-control, with the emerging health and hygiene principles of the 19th century, the Seventh-day Adventist Church developed a unique teaching for the prevention and treatment of disease, that has