By Jules Suzdaltsev

Over the last week, thousands of San Franciscans have opened their mailboxes to discover an unwanted, unordered, and inexplicable book miraculously appearing amongst their regular mail. The religious text, entitled The Great Controversy: Past Present Future, How Will It End? with imagery of chess pieces strewn across planet earth across the cover, spurred questions like, “Why did I get this?” and “Where is the nearest blue bin?” What is the story behind this religious mass-spam? How will it end? At the request of one of our readers (who emailed us at tips@thebolditalic.com), we decided to get to the bottom of the big questions surrounding the unsolicited book.

Turns out, since San Francisco is still considered a godless city of pinko liberal heathens, the Seventh-Day Adventist church is pretty set on helping us all out — and spreading homophobic ideas, lucky us — by sending everybody a copy of their prophetic text. It was written by one of their founders, Ellen G. White, over 100 years ago, and warns of Christ’s imminent return. Of course, the book was written 1858, so “imminent” might be a relative term. Since I didn’t really want to read the whole book (or any of it, to be honest), to see how it all turns out, I was lucky enough to find a synopsis in a thread on Reddit’s /r/SanFrancisco

“It seems to go down like this: God will wreck [sic] havoc on the world with his voice, crush all the palaces that evil men have built, and take the good people to heaven where Satan can’t get to them. Then Satan comes up and has a mad party for a thousand years … Fear not ye sinners, even after a thousand-year sinfest, Jesus the Zombie Master will take us all back.”

Through a concentrated mass-mailing project, the Seventh-day Adventist publisher, Remnant Publications, has sent out over two million books throughout New York City, Washington, DC, and Charlotte, NC, but as they say on their website, “San Francisco is not the easiest community to reach. For years the city has been at the forefront of the gay movement. In fact, 15 percent of San Francisco residents are homosexual. The area is home to the University of California-Berkeley, a hotbed of liberal ideas.”

It appears that at the cost of $225,000 (money they’re asking for donations to cover), the group is attempting to send out nearly 1 million copies of The Great Controversy to homes in the Bay Area, with 750,000 earmarked specifically for SF and Oakland. What these Seventh-Day Adventists have missed, however, is that SF’s gay-friendly, liberal community isn’t easily reachable through a somewhat homophobic web crusade and an unsought religious text. The Adventists would probably have more luck getting support by donating that quarter of a million to any number of SF charities. You know, like Jesus would’ve done. Just a thought.

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Photo by Rachel Salberg