Details of Roden's early religious views are as sketchy as those of his secular life. However, an obituary says that he joined "the Christian Church" in the same year that he married, although his journey to that church and the extent to which it involved change is uncertain. Kenneth Newport, a professor of Christian Thought, notes that "like many other converted Jews ... he carried with him into Christianity a good deal of his Jewishness", giving as an example of this the importance that Roden later attached to the Jewish festivals of
Purim and
Passover. By 1940, the Rodens were members of the
Seventh-day Adventist Church (SDA) in
Kilgore, Texas. It is possible that the appeal of the SDA lay at least in part in its similarities to some aspects of Judaism, such as practising the
sabbath on the seventh day and abiding by the
dietary laws of the Old Testament, but in addition the couple had been given
Bible Readings for the Home Circle as a wedding present by Lois's mother. That book was a publication of the SDA and it is probable, although not certain, that somewhere in Lois's family there was already an involvement with that church. The Rodens later moved from the church at Kilgore to that at Odessa, where Ben became a head
elder. Somewhere around this time, in the early- to mid-1940s, the couple became influenced by the
Shepherd's Rod movement, which had splintered from the SDA, and probably visited its base at the
Mount Carmel Center, near
Waco, Texas, even if only briefly. They were
disfellowshiped from their SDA church, which caused them offence because they had helped to finance the church building and felt that they therefore had a right to use it. Various accounts exist of a stand-off between Lois and the church, with her occupying it for several days and receiving supplies from Ben and their son, George. == Shepherd's Rod ==