Holy Disobedience: Sex, Sin, and Secrets in the Biggest Church No One Knows with Melissa Duge Spiers

About this episode

Melissa Duge Spiers discusses her upbringing in the Seventh-day Adventist Church and her journey of deconstructing her relationship with the organization after uncovering family secrets.

Melissa Duge Spiers was raised as a several generations Seventh-day Adventist. It wasn’t until years later, when she discovered information about her father, who had been both a youth pastor within the Adventist church and a Loma Linda-educated doctor, that Melissa would be called to deconstruct her entire relationship with the organization. “In my early middle age, I found out that my father, during his youth Co-founded by Ellen G. White, who claimed to possess the power of prophecy, the Seventh-day Adventist Church often emphasizes annihilationism (a belief in the Judgment Day) and the second coming of Christ. “Basically, it is at heart an end times cult still,” Melissa said, “It is severely high control in so many ways. And a lot of what they think makes them special, the true remnant, etc., is based on Ellen White, and it’s not biblical.” Melissa noted the strict focus on a “great fear of sex” in the Seventh-day Adventist Church’s founding. “That was one of the biggest control things, and purity culture, of course, is a control thing. But some of Ellen White’s first writings were admonitions for mothers on preventing masturbation in children, in babies, and I know that was…

People in this episode

Host: Dr. Steve Hassan

Guest: Melissa Duge Spiers

Topics covered

• religion
• cult dynamics
• purity culture
• family secrets
• deconstruction
• Seventh-day Adventism

Keywords

• Seventh-day Adventist
• Ellen G. White
• purity culture
• cult
• family secrets
• John Harvey Kellogg
• religious control
• deconstruction

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Seventh-day Adventist Church, Battle Creek Sanitarium

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