Holy Disobedience: Melissa Duge Spiers on the Seventh Day Adventist Church (Part 2)
About this episode
Melissa Duge Spiers discusses her traumatic experiences with the Seventh Day Adventist Church and her journey towards healing and deconstruction.
Part 2 with Melissa Duge Spiers picks up at the “WTF moment” when a call about her beloved father—a once‑celebrated Adventist youth pastor and doctor—exposes him as a child predator and shatters the good‑dad/bad‑mom story she’d carried her whole life. She walks listeners through confronting her parents, befriending “Dr. Z,” a former teen congregant who details the grooming and abuse, and realizing how deeply the Seventh‑day Adventist structure protected her father from quiet removal deals and put him back in the pulpit despite promises to keep him away from children. She zooms out to the broader SDA pattern: stories pouring into her social channels, the church’s historic role in conversion therapy and even female genital mutilation, and how these institutional obsessions with sex and control shaped her own relationships, including a dangerous “cult of one” partnership she ultimately escaped with the help of a religious‑trauma therapist and psychedelic‑assisted work. As she finishes her memoir audiobook and helps launch a new mass‑tort case against the Adventist Church, Melissa shares what real healing has looked like—naming crimes as crimes, accepting there may never be full…
People in this episode
Hosts: Sarah Edmondson, Anthony “Nippy” Ames
Guest: Melissa Duge Spiers
Topics covered
- child abuse
- religious trauma
- cult dynamics
- family confrontation
- healing
- deconstruction
Keywords
- child predator
- grooming
- conversion therapy
- female genital mutilation
- religious trauma therapist
- psychedelic-assisted therapy
- mass-tort case
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Seventh Day Adventist Church, Pintas & Mullins
Books & works: Holy Disobedience
More episodes of A Little Bit Culty
- International School of Temple Arts (ISTA): Two Insiders Expose Consent, Control, and Cult Dynamics (Part 1)
- Stop the Tall Man, Save the Tiger: Peter Young on the Cult of Uncle Robert Booty (Part 2)
- Stop the Tall Man, Save the Tiger: Peter Young on the Cult of Uncle Robert Booty (Part 1)
- ALBX: Catching up: Book Update and Listener Voicemails
- The Art of Influence: Mind Games’ Alice Hines on NLP and High-Control Manipulation
- The Oracle’s Daughter: Harrison Hill on the Aggressive Christianity Missions Training Corps (Part 2)
Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the A Little Bit Culty podcast page.