Anchorage Daily News

WASILLA -- The front page of the July 10 edition of the "Talkeetna Times" reflected the town's busy summertime flavor.

A sizeable crowd was expected at the Moose Dropping Festival, where thousands watch preserved poop dropped on a bull's-eye. Two climbers died on Mount McKinley, sad news for this, the last civilized stopover before base camp.

But it was a two-page advertisement from an out-of-state religious group at the newspaper's center that's still got the town talking.

"LIBERTY OF CONSCIENCE THREATENED," blares a headline above a photograph of President Bush bowing as he clasps the hand of Pope Benedict XVI. "SUNDAY WILL BE ENFORCED AS THE MARK OF THE BEAST."

Another photo shows a billboard bearing the words, "Saturday the TRUE Lord's Day. Changed by Antichrist."

The Florida-based Eternal Gospel Church, a splinter group of the Seventh Day Adventist Church with a reputation for controversy, bought the ad. It accuses the Catholic Church of pressing for enforcement of Sunday "blue" laws regulating moral activities. Seventh Day Adventists believe Saturday is the Sabbath.

Huh?

Alaska doesn't have any blue laws, and Talkeetna -- population 850, sleepy winter mountain town, bustling tourist hub in summer -- sure doesn't seem like a place they'd start up any time soon.

Then there's the fact that the Talkeetna Times, which prints about 10,000 copies every couple of weeks for free distribution in the Upper Susitna Valley, isn't exactly a hotbed of inflamed religious debate.

The Times usually has such a hometown feel, said Renamary Rauchenstein, co-owner of Talkeetna's Swiss-Alaska Inn and parish director for the local Catholic Church, St. Bernard's.

"So it was a real shock to see in the middle of the paper, during Moose Dropping, which is a huge festival in town, to see this two-page spread of distortion and hatefulness," Rauchenstein said.

She dropped the Inn's advertising with the Times.

Though designed to look like a newspaper article, the Eternal Gospel Church ad was not marked as an advertisement by the paper.

That was "basically an oversight," said the paper's editor, Scott Anderson, who is running an editorial about the ad in Thursday's edition.

Besides the loss of the Swiss-Alaska account, Anderson said, he had received just two or three complaints.

He wanted to make two things clear: He and wife Cheryl do not endorse the opinions expressed in the ad. And the paper is not so hard up for money they had to take it.

Anderson said he approved the ad before seeing the final copy. That won't happen again under a revised advertising policy banning ads "to be in poor taste or offensive to our readers."

But he said he also wants to be careful about limiting free expression.

The ad sure generated some of that.

As soon as the Times hit the Fairview Inn, patrons jumped right to that center spread.

"Bam! That's what they went to," said Mike Lindgren, general manager at the historic downtown watering hole. "It was amazing. They were just drawn to it."

What followed was a violation of a cardinal rule of bar behavior: Never discuss religion or politics with a drink in your hand.

"It got into hardcore religious talk, whether it should have been printed as an advertisement in a paper, especially that large of an ad and made to look like a newspaper story," Lindgren said. "Then, of course, everything got involved. Obama and McCain were in there."

Another resident, 45-year-old Butch Sturdy, said he was disappointed rather than shocked when someone called his attention to the ad.

"Honestly, around here, the churches for the most part get along really well," said Sturdy, who works in construction and attends Talkeetna Community Church. "I believe there's a million places that we can stand together on, so why do we focus on the three or handful that we don't? I just thought the focus was extremely wrong."

While it's unclear why the Eternal Gospel Church would target the Times, the ad they placed matches a longtime strategy of inserting inflammatory notices grabbing attention for their message.

Founded in 1992, the church has made headlines before for controversial billboards posted around the South as well as newspaper advertisements. The Miami Herald apologized to the Miami Archbishop in 1999 for a full-age ad that called the Roman Catholic Church the "Whore of Babylon" prophesied in the Book of Revelation, according to a report in Editor & Publisher, a media trade publication.

Ken Crawford, president of the Seventh Day Adventist Church for Alaska, could not be reached in time for this article. The church, which is not connected to the Eternal Gospel Church, holds a yearly camp this week.

Times editor Anderson said the original call about the ad came from someone in the Talkeetna area, but he did not identify the caller. He wouldn't say how much the church paid for the ad.

Would he run it again, if he had it to do over?

"Probably not," Anderson said.

The church hoped to run a series of ads, he said.

They'll have to comply with the paper's new advertising policy.

Find Zaz Hollander online at adn.com/contact/zhollander or call 352-6711.

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