Introduction and Guest Overview

John Dehlin [00:00:00] Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories podcast. I'm your host, John Dehlin. It is May 13, 2026 and today we have one of my favorite types of Mormon stories interviews. We're interviewing an ex member of another cult or high demand religion and we're covering a high demand religion or cult that we've never covered before on Mormon Stories and it's bigger and more powerful and significant. I doubt richer, but definitely bigger and maybe even more powerful or significant than the more mat definitely more claimed members.

John Dehlin [00:00:34] Today we are going to be covering in a two part episode the Seventh Day Adventist Church or movement. It's known as the, I don't know, the biggest church you've never heard of before, which I thought was kind of interesting.

John Dehlin [00:00:48] They claim 25 plus million members worldwide. As I understand it, they were founded around the same time that the Mormon Church was founded in the United States. They have, I found several really significant and meaningful similarities between the Mormon Church and its culture and its heritage and, you know, its own traditions. We're so lucky, so fortunate to have in studio a very vocal sort of activist speaking out against the problems with the Seventh Day Adventist Church and its culture. Her name is Melissa Dougie Spence Spires and she's here all the way from California.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:01:33] Hey Melissa, thank you for having me.

John Dehlin [00:01:35] Hi, thanks so much for joining us.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:01:37] So happy to be here.

John Dehlin [00:01:38] Yeah, we're really thrilled. And I, I want to just start by, by saying you've got a book out.

Melissa's Book and Seventh-day Adventism Basics

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:01:45] I do. Tell us about your book, Holy Disobedience. Let me make sure it's in frame. Sex, Sin and Secrets in the biggest church. No one knows that being the Seventh Day Adventist Church. It just came out about five, six weeks ago and details my upbringing as a fourth generation Seventh Day Adventist and all the problems that high control religion give you that you think you escaped when you left and that's not necessarily true.

John Dehlin [00:02:10] Yeah, well, I can't wait to get into it. So thanks for joining us. I think it's worth noting just really quickly that for our audience that this is one of my favorite types of series on Mormon Stories podcast. We have in the past we've covered Scientologists multiple times, Jehovah's Witnesses multiple times, Orthodox Judaism, two by twos.

John Dehlin [00:02:32] Yeah, we love covering other high demand religions or cults as you know, a way to learn about other traditions. We know that over half of our audience has never been Mormon these days. So it's a way to give representation to other groups that are interested in Mormon Stories podcast. It's also a really fun way to see your own tradition through the lens of someone else's. So I'm excited. This is the first time we've covered Seventh Day Adventists. We've had lots of requests to do this over the years. So again, check out other episodes as well. But Melissa, thanks for being our first Seventh Day Adventist.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:03:11] I love it. Happy to be here. Happy to represent, so to speak.

John Dehlin [00:03:16] It's always like this combination excitement and darkness, the types of things we do. Yeah, we're excited to talk about your trauma today. Religious drama for hours, anyway. Yeah. The other thing I'll just say is when we do these series, instead of having eight hour episodes, we decided it makes most sense to cover them in two parts. So part one of today is going to be kind of the history of the Seventh Day Adventist movement and their doctrine and theology and culture and practices as its own entity. And then we'll end part one and then we'll start up part two with Melissa's story from start to finish, including her faith crisis and her deconstruction and reconstruction. After that will be part. So that's what you have in store. So make sure and get both parts. Other than that, Melissa, other than letting people know about your book, anything you want to say before we begin, I

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:04:18] don't believe so book and where to find me and all of that. I think we'll probably cover again at the end. Probably. And otherwise, I'm just super excited. I'm really excited to hear what you found out about the similarities between Mormons and Adventists. I have a few to talk about, but this is gonna be fun.

John Dehlin [00:04:36] Well, hopefully it won't be annoying to the viewers and listeners, but that's kind of part of what I do in the episode is as Melissa tells the history and the doctrine and the theology, I'll be saying, yep, that's similar to Mormonism and here's how versus not. But hopefully most of the time people tend to value and appreciate that. Hopefully that will be the case today as well.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:04:58] Absolutely.

John Dehlin [00:04:59] All right. So I guess it's fair to say that Seventh Day Adventist is a Christian tradition.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:05:06] It is, yeah. They would call them just a standard Protestant Christian organization. I call them a lot of other things, but.

John Dehlin [00:05:16] Well, where, where do they begin?

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:05:19] Well, I had to go back actually and do a lot of research about the Adventist organization because I left at 18, so I didn't, you know, spend a whole lifetime in the theology. So this is going to be fun. All the research is fresh in my brain. So they began in the United states in the mid-1800s as. As part of the. Miller.

John Dehlin [00:05:41] What can you tell us about that?

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:05:42] Well, it was. William Miller had decided from the Daniel and Revelation stuff in the Bible that he knew exactly when Jesus was coming back and he was going to come back in October of 1844. And clearly he missed the bus or something because he never showed up. And.

John Dehlin [00:05:59] Or did he?

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:06:00] Or did he?

John Dehlin [00:06:01] Yeah, exactly. But I mean. But yeah, I think it was called the Great Disappointment.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:06:08] It was called the Great Disappointment, exactly.

John Dehlin [00:06:10] Well, one thing that's just super interesting is Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, was killed in June of 1844. So your church, kind of the Great Disappointment happens within three months of Joseph Smith's death, which is parallelism. But I found that.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:06:28] That's fascinating. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:06:29] Did Miller. Do you know if Miller had a church before? Was he just like this lonely, like,

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:06:35] religious thinker, writer, done more William Miller research before? I. Even as far as I know, he was just, you know, there was that whole spiritual awakening stuff that was happening there. Joseph Smith was part of it and all of that. And as far as I know, William Miller was just kind of part of that, like tent revivals and things like that. But I don't know that he had a set doctrine and church and, you know, that kind of stuff. So after his great disappointment, then of course everybody split into factions, finger pointing, all that stuff of like, who was wrong and how, and. And people literally sold all of their possessions and divested themselves of their homes and everything because they thought they were going to heaven.

John Dehlin [00:07:14] Can I just say that you probably know this? The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. The Latter Day Saints part is that Joseph Smith was a millennialist prophet as well. So Joseph Smith was also relying on or believing in or trading on this idea of Jesus is coming anytime. So both of our traditions were millennialistic

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:07:36] end times cults, basically.

John Dehlin [00:07:37] What's that?

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:07:37] End times cults, kind of. Yeah, definitely.

John Dehlin [00:07:40] So that's a pretty big thing. And Joseph Smith did predict that Jesus Christ would come sort of within his lifetime, but he didn't necessarily set a date to set people up for disappointment. There's some questioning about that, but that's one very huge similarity.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:07:58] Yeah, similarity for sure. Yeah. And Ellen White, the prophet, which we'll go into much later, she also learned the Joseph Smith trick of not setting a date anymore, just saying, within my lifetime, because, you know, that's handy. But so, yeah, in the wake of the great disappointment, a bunch of little factions started to establish themselves as churches and One of them was the Seventh Day Advent Movement. It was a man named Joseph Bates and John Harvey Kellogg, the Kellogg cereal guy, and a woman, Ellen White, and her husband, James White. And Ellen White became kind of the figurehead and the organizing centerpiece of the church very quickly because she claimed to have the spirit of prophecy. And the Adventists believe that that is one of the signs of being the True Remnant Church. And I know the Mormons call themselves something very similar. What do they. They call themselves the.

John Dehlin [00:09:00] Yeah, I mean, the idea of a living prophet that prophesies, that's central. And Joseph Smith, of course, was our founding prop with the ability of Christ.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:09:09] Did you guys call yourself the. Or the Mormons call themselves the Restored Church Restorations.

John Dehlin [00:09:13] Yeah.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:09:14] Okay.

John Dehlin [00:09:14] Yeah.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:09:14] So similar again, lots of fun similarities.

John Dehlin [00:09:17] And Joseph had a ton of failed prophecies, by the way, but he was viewed as the prophet.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:09:21] Ellen White had many failed prophecies. Yes, exactly.

John Dehlin [00:09:24] What do you know about her upbringing?

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:09:26] Or, you know, I love talking about this. So when she was nine, she got hit in the head with a rock.

John Dehlin [00:09:33] Where was she living? What state do you know?

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:09:35] She was on the East Coast. She was in Maine for a while. I know, and think Massachusetts for a while. I'm kind of unclear as to where exactly the rock throwing happened, but basically the Victorian equivalent of a mean girl, like, didn't like her in fourth grade or whatever, and threw a rock and hit her in the head and major, like temporal frontal lobe injury. She was in a coma for a long time. She had lifelong seizures afterward, fainting spells, all of this stuff, which people now kind of recognize, I think, generally as temporal lobe epilepsy, I believe, which comes with a lot of personality changes, often which she displayed all of, but she interpreted them as God.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:10:20] And now there's even more. Since I think, the 90s, there's been a diagnosis for frontal lobe injuries called Geschwind syndrome, and it comes with this list. I'm just gonna read it here because it's very interesting. List of symptoms. Hypergraph mafia writing all the time.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:10:40] Hyper religiosity, hyposexuality, Total disinterest in sex and vilifying it. Let's see heightened emotion and moralism, intense emotional expense. Strong. Let's see. Strong moral compass and sometimes rigid, humorless personality and viscosity and circumstantiality. Verbose, repetitive, and getting stuck on topics. Ellen White displayed every single one of those from Geschwind syndrome.

John Dehlin [00:11:14] Okay.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:11:14] G, E, S, C, H, W, I, N, D. Interesting. And she displayed absolutely all of that immediately upon injury and for the rest of her life, she was grim and humorless and rigid and just dour. And she hated sex. And she wrote so much that I would love for someone to put together a research of, like, everything that was supposedly written by her. She also plagiarized a ton and stole a lot from all of her assistants and things. But everything that was supposedly written by her, I think would have taken someone several lifetimes to actually write themselves.

John Dehlin [00:11:51] You know, I have 40 books and 5,000 articles and letters.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:11:56] Anytime she didn't like anything that anyone in the whole church was doing, particularly if it undermined her authority or her control. Letters. Letters to their church, letters to them. You're terrible, you're bad. God is to come smite you. So, yeah, complete hypergraphia.

John Dehlin [00:12:13] And just really quickly, Joseph Smith. We've found in modern times many, many instances where he plagiarized. So plagiarism as an author before he really even starts the church.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:12:24] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:12:24] Is a major parallel.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:12:26] Well, and I bet. I would bet. And let me know if this is not the case, but I would imagine the Mormons handle it exactly the way that Adventists do in saying that, like, oh, but everybody did it back then. That's what it was, you know, oh, plagiarism wasn't a thing. Nobody knew not to do that.

John Dehlin [00:12:42] No, that's actually different. The way the Mormons spin it is that God inspired him to consult sources that then were incorporated into his writings. But that's a feature, not a bug. In other words, the plagiarism was part of the holy process.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:13:03] There you go. Okay, so Adventists will say that also. First they say, no, plagiarism wasn't a thing. So she didn't know she was doing wrong. And then if you say, say. But she claimed it was visions from God, so it would still be wrong to be claiming that someone else's words were your vision from God. And then they bring in that whole, well, God was pointing her. God was using or, you know, using her. And. And she would defend herself viciously because during her lifetime, people would say, you cribbed from, you know, Paradise Lost, or you cribbed from all these other. Especially her health message was cribbed from all these other people.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:13:37] And she would claim up, down and sideways that she. She knew those books existed, but she read them before she wrote her book. And afterwards she read them. And she was so impressed that God had inspired her with the same message. So it was proof.

John Dehlin [00:13:52] Yeah.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:13:53] That God had told her the right thing.

John Dehlin [00:13:54] I'M guessing I will get to the health code, but I'm guessing she was inspired by the temperance movement, which Joseph Smith was as well.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:14:01] Yeah, yeah, they have huge similarities there. Yeah, she had her health message and he had his. What was it called?

John Dehlin [00:14:08] Wisdom.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:14:09] There you go. Book of wisdom. All that behavior control, which of course is just classic cult stuff. But all the dietary, the temperance stuff and the. What was it in the Victorian times? It was a big, oh, vigor, you know, your bodily vigor or whatever that having sex was supposed to dissipate, drinking was supposed to dissipate, you know, like the bodily vapors or whatever they really believed.

John Dehlin [00:14:33] And I know Kellogg's gonna come into this soon.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:14:35] Kellogg's gonna come.

John Dehlin [00:14:37] So. Okay, so she's probably just a normal Christian, but then she starts. She has these seizures and starts having visions. Right? Like, how does. Does she go from being a member of a. Of a dino, like, of a previous church to starting her own? Like, how does she evolve from just a Christian who got hit in the head having visions to, like, prophet status?

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:15:00] It's really interesting. So apparently she was a Methodist originally with her parents, raised Methodists, explored Methodist in the east coast, kind of Methodist tradition. And then at some point, right around the Miller, great disappointment. She was part of the.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:15:15] Kind of the jumping and screaming and speaking in tongues Methodist part. And then she got involved in the Sabbath keeping. That was, I think, done by several groups then. But the Adventists kind of took it as their thing. And from then on, she kind of just drove the bus for the Adventists, and they all rallied around her spirit of prophecy. And, you know, there was Joseph B. Kellogg and everything, but she. She cemented her power very quickly. By the time she was about 19, she was the Adventist, and nobody. She was already starting to vilify and tell people that God was telling her that they were bad and horrible, and she had the power to, like, kick them out.

John Dehlin [00:16:00] Okay, so we're talking. So there was an Adventist movement before Ellen White. Is that.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:16:09] Is that it was. It was kind of part of that Millerite movement, from what I understand. Again, I'm a little sketchy on all those details because Adventist history just makes me just. But there was a. Just following the. Basically the old, Old Jewish rules of sundown Friday to sundown Saturday, observance of the Sabbath, and then Seventh Day Adventist. There. There were some other. And there still are little fractions that use the word Advent or Seventh Day that are. But the Seventh Day Adventist Church of Ellen White became the primary one.

Ellen White's Origins and Role as Prophet

John Dehlin [00:16:52] Okay, so we're talking late 1840s. She's 18ish. And she's already seized control and consolidated a Seventh Day Adventist movement around this idea of a Saturday Sabbath observance.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:17:07] Right. And by the 1860s she really had church like up and running and centered around her and her, her health reform and the. Yeah, Seventh Day. They had all these things that they thought were made them special from everyone else that basically were based off of her writings and her reinterpretation of Paradise Lost.

The Saturday Sabbath and Adventist Distinctives

John Dehlin [00:17:33] So talk about, tell us a little bit more about what it means to have a Sabbath, a Saturday Sabbath practice for y'. All because I think not only is it a different day, but I wonder if the practice is even more controlled and rigid than a Mormon or even a traditional Christian. So what's the Sabbath practice like? As it would have been Saturday Sabbath practice, as it would have been practiced in the mid-1800s.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:18:02] Oh my gosh. As it would have been practiced back then. Even to this day there are extre. Practice it probably very similarly. You have to get ready on Friday. Absolutely everything, including cooking the meals, Getting everything. You weren't allowed to cook. You're not. And still, you know, you're not allowed to shop, you're not allowed to go out to eat.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:18:25] There is no amusement of any kind. You cannot listen to radio or watch TV or do anything. Most people start Friday night with vespers, either at home or they go to church. It's like a, a kind of supposed to be personal devotion type of service where it's mostly just prayer and reading the Bible. There's no real sermon type of thing.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:18:50] And reading Ellen White of course. And then Saturday mornings are for what they call Sabbath school, which is people broken out into age appropriate groups. So they have the little kids and the, you know, teenagers. And then after Sabbath school then everyone goes to church and that lasts until approximately one o' clock in the afternoon or something.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:19:10] Go home and you eat your midday meal and then you're supposed to do basically nothing except for something that would glorify God. So like we were allowed to walk in nature, but you weren't allowed to swim. You weren't allowed to do any like amusements, go anywhere, do anything, compete. We, we weren't allowed to do competitive sports or.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:19:36] And so you, you basically pray, worship. Of course most adults ended up just taking naps and sleeping the day away. But what's wrong with swimming on the Sabbath? Ellen White had said that it was wrong. She had all these very strange rules about no bowling, bowling alleys and movie theaters. I guess you know were considered sin and iniquity.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:19:59] But swimming was always a weird gray area, which of course tortured a lot of Adventist children. It was too much considered self. Self amusement really. Like you were having too much fun when you swam and Ellen White hated fun and it would distract you from God. Whereas if you were just taking a stroll, you were appreciating birds and grass and flowers and whatever. Supposedly. But yeah. No other real exercise. You can't go to the gym, you can't go running. You can't.

John Dehlin [00:20:30] Yeah. But so really quickly, just because the parallels are fun. Yeah. So Mormons don't start their Sabbath observance like Saturday night. It's just Sunday, you know, midnight to Saturday, midnight to Sunday. So it's Sunday. Sunday. However, the whole idea of like not watching tv, not watching movies, not doing anything worldly and interestingly, no sports, that's totally Mormon. Like byu, the Mormon Church's university, today is famous because they do any athletic events on Sunday.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:21:04] Oh my gosh, they have like a famous football team and all that.

John Dehlin [00:21:07] How they've been able to work with whatever athletic conference they're in as a university to make sure that whatever tournaments are held aren't ever held on the Sabbath. So Mormons are hardcore about no sports on Sunday. And Joseph Smith said swimming is dangerous for missionaries, but not for normal people. So there's a swimming thing and the waters are dangerous thing in Mormonism, but it's not necessarily on the Sabbath. It's more for missionaries. But you wouldn't swim on the Sabbath and you definitely wouldn't do sports on the Sabbath in Mormonism. And it's a holy day where you. In fact, a lot of Mormons grew up where you don't change out of your church clothes. You stay in your church clothes all day, even after church.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:21:51] Yes, that is a little bit of an Adventist thing too. Yeah, yeah, that's true. I didn't even think about that one. It was definitely frowned upon to get out of your church closed. That's interesting. Some similarities, a lot of fun similarities. And it's interesting when they're similar, but they have different reasons. And it just. I mean a lot of it speaks to that whole time that they kind of formed, you know, that whole Victorian obsession with, you know, a spirituality and no sexuality and all the other things that pressured the temperance and.

John Dehlin [00:22:20] But it reminds me most of Shabbat, like an orthodox Jews practice of Shabbat. Yes, that sounds like what y' all did.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:22:26] Yeah, exactly.

John Dehlin [00:22:27] Okay.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:22:27] And often Sab Sabbath ends with another worship service right before Sundown. And of course, as a kid, you were just sitting, watching the clock. And. And that was a sin, too. You can't just be waiting for sundown so that you can go back to your normal life. God would hate that. That's bad. But of course we did. We just, like, watched the clock so that we could do something. But, you know, you weren't even allowed to read anything secular. But Ellen White had a whole thing about that, too. She. She thought novels were a danger and magazines were a danger. And so we generally weren't allowed to read much of fun at any point, but certainly not on the Sabbath.

John Dehlin [00:23:07] Let me ask you about her core writings.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:23:10] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:23:11] So. So Seventh Day Adventists believe in the Old and New Testament. The Bible. Right. Really quickly, how do you. I guess Christians traditionally have a way of saying that Christ. What, the old law was Sabbath on Saturday, but the new law was Sabbath on Sunday. Y' all clearly have some different way of interpreting that. Do you even know the theological basis for that?

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:23:33] I don't know the theological basis for that, but my. I suspect that they blame the Pope and the Catholic Church because the Adventists have this huge obsession with the Catholics being the mark the of. Of the beast and the evil everything. And Catholics are going to come back in the time of trouble in the end, and they're going to like, torture them and.

John Dehlin [00:23:51] Can I blow your mind? Can I blow your mind? So the Book of Mormon denounces basically the Catholic Church is the great abominable church. It literally calls it in the Book of Mormon, the of all the earth.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:24:05] There you go.

John Dehlin [00:24:05] Did you know that?

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:24:06] I did not know. I knew that Mormons had a similar hatred for Catholics, but that verbiage particularly is. Absolutely. So we mark that beasted them and you guys, whore of the whole earth. Them. And the Catholics, meanwhile, didn't know any of us existed forever. And they still don't know Adventists exist. Ridiculous.

John Dehlin [00:24:24] But so the Sabbath maybe was tied to the Catholics.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:24:28] Yeah, I think that that was. They blame the original papacy and all of that for changing it from Sabbath to Sunday.

John Dehlin [00:24:38] Interesting.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:24:39] So. And they are the only ones, one true remnant church, because they obey the true Sabbath.

John Dehlin [00:24:45] I mean, yeah, these churches need a defining doctrine to kind of set them apart.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:24:52] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:24:52] And it sounds like the Sabbath was a major one for y'.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:24:54] All to set them apart and also to feel persecuted over. You know, the Adventists have a huge persecution fetish. And, you know, so they need lots of things that they can always feel like everyone is, you know, okay, okay.

John Dehlin [00:25:06] But otherwise similar To Protestant Christianity pretty much.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:25:11] They have a lot of. Yeah, I mean generally, absolutely. And they would say, yeah, we're no different. But then they also say, but we're so special because of. So they do have weird interpretations. And I had to go through and take notes because I was like, so they have these 28 doctrines that define the church. And most of them are just standard. You know, we believe in Jesus Christ, we believe in a trinity, you know, just standard stuff that doesn't make you blank too much. But the then toward the end of their doctrines is their whole definition of what happens. And I have to just get this right, because they have a first resurrection and a second resurrection of people on earth where the good people are resurrected and then the bad people are resurrected later just so that they can be tortured by God basically and then re killed.

John Dehlin [00:25:59] We have multiple resurrections too. Yeah, yeah.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:26:02] This is amazing. Okay, wow. Okay.

John Dehlin [00:26:05] So my patriarchal blessing said I would be resurrected in the morning of the first resurrection. That's what my patriarchal blessing says. So same. Keep going.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:26:13] Oh my God. Okay. So their whole belief about this. So they have this thing called the investigative judgment that they think really sets them apart. And it was basically defined by Ellen White as a way to make up for being wrong about the great disappointment. So she, and not just her, but other Adventist whatevers, but she really took it and ran with it and wrote many books about it, decided that they had been wrong, that Jesus was coming in October of 1844. What it really meant, what the Bible was really saying was Jesus was entering from, I guess normal heaven into the sanctuary in heaven where he was going to.

John Dehlin [00:26:57] He relocated.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:26:57] He relocated in heaven, which is, which

John Dehlin [00:27:01] is non disprovable, by the way. How do you disprove that Jesus moved? He can't. So that's convenient.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:27:09] Jesus moved. Yes. So then he's in some more. More holy spot in heaven where then he is doing the investigative judgment where he is going over the records of every single person living or dead. And there's something about, about he's arguing with God, like he has to prove to God who is good and who is bad or something.

John Dehlin [00:27:33] Like an advocate.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:27:34] Like an advocate, yeah, like. And I don't know what God's point is, but. And then, so then after that, let me see if I've got this straight because I again was just like, what? What did we believe? So crazy. Because again, I left at 18, so a lot of this stuff just went right over my head. I left because of all the behavioral stuff and not Weird theology stuff. And when I looked at it I was like, this is just absurd.

Adventist End Times Theology and Investigative Judgment

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:28:05] So, okay, so Jesus entered the most holy place in 1844. It's a part of heaven. He starts the investigative judgment. He's arguing with God over who's dead and who's alive deserves saving. Okay, so then the time of trouble starts. So by the time Jesus is almost done with the investigative judgment, somehow down here on earth it's going to be known and the time of trouble starts. And the Adventists are so excited about that. They really can't wait for all this persecution that's going to be rained down on them at the time of time of trouble. So Jesus closes whatever investigative judgments he's doing and there's a little time of trouble where the Catholics take over.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:28:48] They make a Sunday legislation and the Sunday law is one of the Adventists big, big claims to like specialness. The Catholic Church in the little time of trouble is going to join with the governments of the world and they're going to enforce a Sunday law where everyone has to worship on Sunday. So that's going to persecute the Adventists. And you know, growing up I never once heard them ever mention that Jews also worship on Saturday. But somehow just the Adventists are going to be persecuted for it.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:29:23] So the evil people are going to get the mark of the beast and the there are going to be a hundred and forty four thousand righteous people left on the earth and they're going to get the seal of God and then they're going to be the plagues and the disasters and everyone's going to be tortured. Who has the seal of God? The 144,000. And they're going to run and hide in the mountain.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:29:49] So then the second coming, Jesus comes down, but he doesn't touch the earth. Apparently he kind of hangs in the air above, above the earth and there's the first resurrection of everyone. The righteous dead are resurrected and they kind of ascend up into the little airspace with Jesus and the unrighteous alive people, people die. So then all the righteous, the living 144,000 and the resurrected righteous are taken to heaven with Jesus. So then begins the millennium.

John Dehlin [00:30:24] Okay, really quickly, that 144,000 something obviously Jehovah's Witnesses really cling to. Yep, that's in, I think that's in the Bible. So Mormons have that too. And a lot of end times, millennialistic kind of, you know, kind of stuff. I was really into that as a Mormon growing up is like what happens when Jesus comes Again. And the destruction and the great battle and Gog of Magog and that whole kind of thing. So anyway, yeah, same. Same with that.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:30:51] Yeah, yeah, they all love it. It's so vivid and it's so. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:30:57] So it's almost like a horror movie vibes for Christians, you know?

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:31:02] Yeah. Oh, and for kids being raised in it, I mean, it just gave us lasting nightmares and just horrible, horrible trauma. It's really. It's child abuse.

John Dehlin [00:31:11] Yeah. Because it scares you into wanting to obey the leadership because you don't want to end up getting burned. And by the way, Jesus is coming anytime. And I have to just acknowledge one big difference between Mormons and Seventh Day Adventists. So y' all believe that the soul is actually destroyed, right? Like, you don't go on living forever as an inferior, not in heaven kind of soul. Is that right?

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:31:38] They call it soul sleep. I guess they just believe that when you die, you're just like. Nothing happens. You're just. You kind of like are. You're just dead. That's it. There's no.

John Dehlin [00:31:49] That's pre judgment though, right?

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:31:51] Yes. Right.

John Dehlin [00:31:52] Okay.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:31:52] Yes. And then. Yes. And then they do believe in annihilationism or whatever after. Yes.

John Dehlin [00:31:56] Which is if you don't make the cut.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:31:58] Right.

John Dehlin [00:31:58] Then what happens to your soul?

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:31:59] Then you're burned in a lake of fire. Oh, yeah, we're getting there. Okay. Okay. So the millennium happens. So Jesus

John Dehlin [00:32:07] comes.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:32:08] Jesus and the righteous are for a thousand years are in heaven.

John Dehlin [00:32:11] We got that too. A thousand years. A millennium. My gosh.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:32:14] Okay. And so then. Then I guess they're going back over the records of everyone. And Jesus is proving now not arguing with God. I guess he's letting all of the righteous go over all the records. They get to look at everybody's their own. And so that they know that Jesus made the right choices. Judgment. Judgment. It's just so. They love judgment. And so the earth at that time, for those thousand years have no humans. It's just evil iniquity. It's Satan and his angels.

John Dehlin [00:32:41] Interesting.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:32:42] Destroying the earth for a thousand years. At the end, Jesus brings down the holy city, the new Jerusalem, and he lands this perfect, beautiful city with all the righteous with him on the earth. And that begins the new Earth, Earth and Satan and his angels. So then this is the second resurrection of the bad guys. So any evil people that were judged in that thousand years are resurrected on the earth. They join Satan and his angels and they try to fight. They. They circle the holy city and they try to attack the righteous. And then the lake of fire comes and burns them all. So yeah, there's no long lasting hell. There's just this final lake of fire that burns Satan, the bad angels and all the bad people. And then God stays on earth. Somehow heaven's not as good as this new earth with all the righteous and there's just perfection ever after.

John Dehlin [00:33:43] So Earth becomes heaven.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:33:45] I guess so.

John Dehlin [00:33:46] Okay. Yeah. So in Mormonism, earth becomes the lowest degree of heaven, the telestial kingdom.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:33:52] Okay.

John Dehlin [00:33:53] But there's other existences, but interesting. Yeah. So the soul extinction thing is different because in Mormonism you're in an inferior kingdom or in what's called outer darkness, but your soul isn't extinguished. In Seventh Day Adventism, it sounds like the soul.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:34:11] It is. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:34:11] If you don't make the cut, your soul is extinguished.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:34:14] You're just destroyed and you're not tortured forever and you're not anything. You're just burned up in the lake of fire.

John Dehlin [00:34:19] But the whole Satan with his angels in a final battle, that's all. Definitely, definitely us as well.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:34:25] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:34:25] Okay. Wow. And that's called eschatology, right? Like the study of end times.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:34:30] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:34:30] So you all have a robust eschatology?

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:34:33] Very, very. They're obsessed with end times. And I mean a lot of kids. I did not personally. Thank goodness. In Adventist school, a lot of kids are taken out into the woods to practice for end times. They have to eat bugs. They have to like they're chased by people with guns that some kids have the horrible stories of people literally like holding guns to their heads. Heads and saying, you know, I killed your parents and do you disavow the Saturday Sabbath and. And they have to, oh my God, practice for this. It's terrible.

John Dehlin [00:35:02] So is there preparism in your movement? Yeah, so we have that. So what is that? What does that look like?

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:35:08] Yeah, it's a lot of practicing. Well, again, you know, there's such a spectrum, I'm sure Mormons have it too, of like the liberals don't really. But then there's this extreme Adventist part where. Yeah. They're building compounds and they're, they're practicing living out in the woods and they're a lot of them literally kind of form family cult types of things and just go live off the grid.

John Dehlin [00:35:31] Completely. Food storage stuff.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:35:32] Food storage, yes, exactly.

John Dehlin [00:35:35] Yeah.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:35:35] Yep.

John Dehlin [00:35:35] Okay. Yeah, interesting. Okay. Lots of similarities there. Okay, so going back to Ellen White, let's talk about the. I don't know if you all call it scripture because I don't believe her stuff was ever canonized. To be the exact same status as the Bible. But what are her most important texts? What do they say and how are they used by members that you know of.

Ellen White's Writings and Legacy

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:36:07] Yeah, she is. They're very obsessed with making sure that everyone knows that they don't really believe. Put her work equal to the Bible. Yeah. So that she isn't officially canonized. And they think that that is the proof that they're not a cult Right there. End of subject. But. But they do. They believe every word that she wrote was divinely inspired. So, I mean, tomato, tomato. She. She had two big tracks. I like to think of it as. She had her. Probably her most famous work is the Great Controversy. Which.

John Dehlin [00:36:41] It's a book.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:36:42] It's a book.

John Dehlin [00:36:42] Yeah.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:36:43] In fact, it was a trilogy. The Desire of age is something. And it was basically just graphic, gory descriptions of this big battle. The end time stuff. God in heaven first. She first tells how Satan gets cast out of heaven in the beginning. And then she has this whole in the end times how it's gonna happen. And I mean, just hundreds and hundreds of pages of God versus the devil in various iterations.

John Dehlin [00:37:14] Are there characters like biblical characters? Are there humans? Is she like a central figure? Like, do you know. I mean, this sounds like end times New Testament Bible fan fiction basically.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:37:29] That's basically what it is. She's not a character. And as far as I can remember. And it's been. I mean, we were force fed it so much when I was in high school that I still can't even look at the books. But as far as I remember, it was, yeah, biblical fan fiction. Just retelling of biblical stories with all of her own embellishments and all of her own. Putting Adventist doctrine in there about the lake of fire and that. This and that. That doesn't appear in the Bible.

John Dehlin [00:37:54] So it's like an apocalyptic book.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:37:57] Yes. And you can see it's funny when they mail out because they have all these great controversy mailings. We're mailing 5 million copies of the great. They just cold mail this stuff to people. People are like, what in the world? And they put the most lurid covers on these things. They don't say they're Adventists. They just say this is, you know, what's going to happen soon. All signs point toward you must read this. And it looks like an apocalyptic novel and you just want to read it because, wow, there's these drugstore pulp fiction type covers of like battles. And so it is interesting. Yeah, it's. It's Bible fan fiction and that book

John Dehlin [00:38:37] is called what again?

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:38:38] The Great Controversy.

John Dehlin [00:38:39] Okay, so that. That's the first major work of hers.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:38:43] Well, it wasn't the first. She actually.

John Dehlin [00:38:45] You are noting as.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:38:47] Yeah, that's the seminal. I mean, that's her big work. But her first works were actually more. I mean, she did do a lot of doctrine, but she kind of refined and changed her doctrinal writings along the way. But a lot of her first efforts in writing were the behavioral control and the dietary stuff. The. Some of her first stuff was advice to mothers on how to get your children to stop masturbating. You know, just the horrible, horrible things torturing children.

John Dehlin [00:39:21] So she's in the mid-1800s. She's obsessed with children masturbating.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:39:26] Yep. She and Hell and Kellogg.

John Dehlin [00:39:29] Right.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:39:29] Yeah, they were big. I mean, the Adventist church and. And they hate it when I say this, but it is. It is so true. They have a huge obsession with sex in general. And it started with her, but it. It continues to this day.

John Dehlin [00:39:42] Do you know biographically what happened in her life that made. Just the head.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:39:46] The head injury, Mostly just the head injury. Nobody has ever shown that there was any kind of molestation or trauma or, you know, I mean, she got married really fairly young, but not young for that time. I think she was 16 or 17 or something and had the same husband all her life. And I, you know, I think, think it.

John Dehlin [00:40:02] Did they have kids?

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:40:03] They did. Those poor children. Oh, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:40:06] They didn't have a happy life.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:40:08] They did not. One of them ended up being sort of a charlatan just like her and trying to just continually say that what he wrote was biblical ish. His name was Willie or William, I think. And she would write them these nasty letters. I can remember, because some of them still haunt me that we would read as children about. About God doesn't love children who experience bad feelings. Remember to always be cheerful. And God won't save naughty children in the end times. When the persecution comes, naughty children can't be saved and just horrible things to write to children. But yeah, they're. They're.

John Dehlin [00:40:50] Did you have a euphemism for masturbation?

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:40:52] Oh, yes, there were several.

John Dehlin [00:40:53] What she call it.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:40:54] It was self pollution, was one of them.

John Dehlin [00:40:58] Mormons call it self abuse.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:40:59] Self abuse.

John Dehlin [00:41:00] Oh, y' all do that too?

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:41:01] Yep. Self abuse, self pollution. And she had another one that was even more kind of euphemistic. Oh, gosh. Because it's really goofy and very Victorian and I think Kellogg used it too. Oh, the solo vice.

John Dehlin [00:41:22] Okay. Yeah. Solitary vice, secret vice. Yeah, self abuse. Yeah. Mormons call it self abuse.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:41:32] And again, that was a Victorian obsession. You know, I guess they were even, you know, covering up the legs on pianos, grand pianos, because that was too sexy and might inspire lust and things, you know, just in general, Victorians were so, you know, that was a whole thing. I guess Queen Victoria was just horribly anti sex also. So I guess it was kind of trendy to be anti sex. But certainly the Adventist Ellen White, John Harvey Kellogg took it to an extreme.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:41:58] And when we start talking about my story, we'll talk about the modern iterations of it, the purity culture, which is super extreme in the Adventist church, and. And a lot of their anti LGBTQ stuff that today is really dangerous. They were one of the major proponents of conversion therapy.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:42:18] They helped get the gay death law in place in Uganda. They're just obsessed with controlling everything about generally natural sexuality. They don't control. What they don't control is the predators that prey on children in their church.

John Dehlin [00:42:34] And we'll have major similarities there. But this is interesting because Ellen White went the opposite direction of Joseph Smith. Joseph Smith went towards sexual predation, polygamy, lots and lots of sex. But weirdly, somehow the church pivots towards puritanical sexual mores, even though its founder can be classified as a sexual predator. So we ended up kind of where y' all were, but we started out with a founder who was the opposite. He obviously loved sex. Right. Isn't that weird?

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:43:04] It is so weird. I've often wondered how that is, how that jibes and in the Mormon tradition, because. Yeah, the whole. The magic underwear and the purity.

John Dehlin [00:43:12] I know the jibes by the church, hiding Joseph Smith's polygamy and denying it and lying about it for about 150 to 200 years. So that's how we pulled that off.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:43:21] There you go. Yeah, there you go. Yeah. There's lots of lying and hiding of Ellen White hypocrisies, too. So it's. Yeah, absolutely.

John Dehlin [00:43:30] Okay. So that wasn't necessarily a second book, per se. It's just sort of like a collection of her writings.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:43:38] It's a collection of her writings. She. Yeah, I don't even know. I'd love to know what her writing process was. And a lot of people have analyzed it and stuff, and she did lean on secretaries and things who wrote a lot of it, I think, for her. And then she plagiarized a lot. But what. What her books are is they were just continually packaged and repackaged. Like, you can find different quotes of hers in five or six different books that is like Ellen White's messages to mothers, Ellen White's messages to young people. Then she has the. The Adventist Home and just literally 50, 60 titles of advice for people on how to live. And she was just. She had advice for how to do everything. I'm sure she had advice for how to put on your shoes. You know, the typical cult control. And it just kind of like a

John Dehlin [00:44:29] self help guru of the mid-1800s.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:44:32] She would have thrived in the health and wellness guru area. I mean, she really was. Basically.

John Dehlin [00:44:38] That's what she was.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:44:38] You're right. Yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:44:40] And a lot of Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard stuff early on with, With. With. With his first major book that wasn't pulp Fiction. Basically Dianetics.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:44:51] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:44:52] Was kind of self help as well.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:44:53] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:44:54] Interesting. Really quick. You, you mentioned the plagiarism. This becomes a controversy in your church as it relates to people challenging the truth claims of the church and the legitimacy of Ellen White as a prophetess. And I have here just this book, probably this one, the White Lie. Yeah, yeah. Just because we've mentioned plagiarism. Do you want to go and talk about that?

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:45:22] Yeah. Okay. So this is the seminal book that really like busted the. The myth and mythos of Ellen White. And I think he got excommunicated, clearly. And he. So there's the Ellen White estate, controls all of her writings and apparently has huge vaults and vats of stuff that's never been published, never been exposed to the public. And he got a hold of some of it and was able to track, you know, the major plagiarism.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:45:54] He also. And then there's another one that I brought here that came out in 2020, a psychobiography of Ellen White. I don't know if that can be seen. But this also tracks a lot of the plagiarism, but also her lying, her hypocrisy, her consolidating power, like she would. The White lie covers a lot of where she would write to people. Well, God showed me that we should not be playing in politics. And if they, they didn't do what she said. Well, God showed me that we should play in. You know, I mean, she just, she would manipulate people.

John Dehlin [00:46:29] She would change her revelations. Joseph Smith did that too.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:46:32] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:46:33] Yeah, yeah, yeah. So Revelations could literally. Later Revelations could literally contradict earlier revelations.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:46:41] Yes, yeah, exactly. And he and Walter Reed was the first person to really show all of that as well as tracking down the sources. And he would compare sides side by side things and you know, she would change, maybe A few words or whatever. But again, she was claiming these were visions from God. It's not just like she was saying, hey, this sounds like a good idea. Maybe I heard it somewhere, you know, but she also. Both of those books really cover how she didn't walk her own walk or talk her own talk. Like she. Jewelry was banned, eating meat was banned, drinking alcohol was banned. She did all of those things. And again, those kind of came out in some of her writings.

John Dehlin [00:47:22] You're saying she drank alcohol even though it was forbidden?

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:47:25] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:47:25] Same with Joseph. Okay, so she. What are the things she did that she wasn't supposed to do? The hypocrisy.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:47:35] The jewelry was a big, big thing. She banned jewelry adornment of any kind, but wore it. But she had very expensive jewelry. And then are pictures of her wearing it. When I was growing up, even wedding bands were. Were forbidden for people. And there was some church controversy because the Europeans always wore their wedding bands and they didn't give.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:47:55] And the Americans were horrified by that. That was very bad. But so, yeah, she. She violated her own jewelry ban, and the drinking one was huge because there are letters of hers where she literally talks like she. She was in withdrawal. Like she said, she was trying to resist her. She made this cider vinegar combination, which I guess is very highly fermented and has a fairly high alcohol content. And so she would talk about trying to resist her vinegar that she needed and being really sick for weeks because she just was resisting her vinegar.

John Dehlin [00:48:35] So an alcoholic who's telling all the members not to drink, basically. Yeah.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:48:39] Yep, exactly. And then the same thing with her vegetarianism. She ate. Not only did she eat meat, but the big, big Adventist thing is, yeah, maybe, okay, some people can eat meat, but none of them will violate the biblical rules. The same ones that the Jews follow of, like, no unclean meat, you know, so shellfish and a pork, like Jews, basically. Right, exactly. And. But. But she. She ate oysters. There are letters of hers asking someone to bring her some oysters when they come from wherever. And so.

John Dehlin [00:49:15] And pork, you know, pork.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:49:17] I don't know if there's any. Anything that exists that shows that she ate pork, but I wouldn't.

John Dehlin [00:49:21] That is prohibited.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:49:22] Oh, yes. Yeah. Pork is prohibited. Oh, my goodness. I mean, there are, again, poor, poor Adventist kids. And I can remember, you know, mistakenly eating a piece of bacon because it was in something that you, you know, somebody made Mac and cheese, for instance, at some potluck or something that you went to that wasn't Adventist and you ate it. And you didn't realize there was like bacon in there and feeling like you were going to hell and crying and, and you know, repenting forever and being so terrified. Same thing with, with soda. Like caffeine was so forbidden.

John Dehlin [00:49:57] So great. We did. We do coffee and tea. So y'.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:50:01] All.

John Dehlin [00:50:02] Caffeine was like coffee and tea.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:50:04] Caffeine was wildly forbidden. But yeah, we. Isn't that weird? But you guys do. So did soda. Right. So Coke is okay.

Diet, Health Reform, and John Harvey Kellogg

John Dehlin [00:50:12] No, when I was growing up, it was forbidden with conservative Mormons to drink Coke or Diet Coke or any caffeinated

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:50:20] soda and have some of my coffee.

John Dehlin [00:50:21] Yeah, that's, that's an evolution of Mormonism in the past 20 to 30 years is okay. The cultural prohibition. I mean, there wasn't soda in Joseph Smith's time. Right. So what he forbade was coffee and tea. He actually called it hot drinks.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:50:36] Okay.

John Dehlin [00:50:37] But that got interpreted to be coffee and tea. But yeah, when I was growing up, the really righteous Mormon families would never drink Coke or Dr. Pepper or any caffeinated beverage at all. Okay. And then that's just.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:50:48] So why did he ban the hot drinks? I'm trying, I'm curious as to whether,

John Dehlin [00:50:51] I mean, we've done some episodes on this before, but there was just like with the temperance movement, there were some theories at the time that hot, temperature wise, hot beverages weren't good for your health. So again, he just absorbed some sort of folk common wisdom.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:51:12] Right.

John Dehlin [00:51:13] And you know, and he actually weirdly initially gave the word of wisdom as like advice, health advice.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:51:20] Okay.

John Dehlin [00:51:21] But then over time, the church caught up it as being truly forbidden.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:51:26] Right. Okay.

John Dehlin [00:51:27] But anyway, in that was no tobacco, no alcohol, no coffee, no tea. And interestingly, the word of wisdom said eat meat only in times of winter or famine. And Mormons have pretty much ignored that. But in our health code we have a general denunciation and. Or prohibition of meat.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:51:49] Isn't that interesting?

John Dehlin [00:51:50] So we share that.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:51:51] We do. That has to go back to just the general atmosphere in the, you know, Victorian. And I mean, that's a perfect entry to talk about John Harvey Kellogg.

John Dehlin [00:52:01] Yeah. Because so he goes back into the 1800s.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:52:05] He was. Yes, he was a founding part of that whole. I don't know if he was part of the Millerite, but very shortly after he joined the Adventist. He was part of the whole Adventist thing. And one of the really founding members, it was. He and Ellen were very close. He had a. What. What was called the Battle Creek Sanatorium in Battle Creek, Michigan. He was a doctor. And I mean presidents stayed There like very famous people stayed there for cures, you know, whatever cures were back then.

John Dehlin [00:52:39] The Michigan settle as the headquarters of the church.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:52:43] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:52:43] Around.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:52:45] Around 1860s, I think by the 1890s for sure it was there.

John Dehlin [00:52:52] And so Ellen White was living in Michigan, moved there.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:52:55] Everybody moved to Battle Creek. It was.

John Dehlin [00:52:56] That's your Salt Lake City.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:52:58] Yeah, it was where his sanatorium was. They had. They started the seminary there. That has since moved somewhere else in Michigan. Michigan. They had universities and everything.

John Dehlin [00:53:10] Got it.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:53:10] And we'll. We'll get into their whole obsession with medicine and. And education also.

John Dehlin [00:53:16] But where's Battle Creek? Just so I have.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:53:18] It's. It's sort of in the middle of Michigan. Ish. But I think more toward the Detroit side. It's not toward the Lake Michigan side.

John Dehlin [00:53:26] Okay. So Kellogg.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:53:28] Yes. So Kellogg had this sanatorium and he was obsessed. I mean talk about being obsessed with sex. And not. He thought that any sex depleted the life force. Etc. He was very anti masturbation, but he was even against marital sex. He and his wife never consummated their marriage. As far as anyone can know. They never had children. They adopted 42 children or something or they. They fostered 42 children and adopted seven of them.

John Dehlin [00:53:58] So is he either gay or asexual? Basically?

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:54:00] Well, that's what I can only assume. Nobody ever proved that he'd had weird, illicit, anything else's. So I'm thinking more asexual probably and. Or had had some sort of horrific experience as a child that he just like all sex was scary and terrible and bad maybe.

John Dehlin [00:54:18] So he shared that with Ellen White.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:54:20] Yes. Other. On in a way, I think. And so his stuff went as far as. So that's where the caffeine and alcohol and everything came in. It was partly temperance, but it was also. That loosens your inhibitions so you might get sexual and. Or it heightens them. So caffeine or. And so he and Ellen took it with their health message even further. So like I was raised with no salt, no. No pepper, no mustard. We were not allowed to have spices of any kind. Ellen said spicy things inflamed the body and made you sexual. That was also why we were not allowed to have drums. To this day there's no drum anything in Adventist services or music because those might make you move your body, which. That was a question I had for you. But Mormons do dance, right?

John Dehlin [00:55:13] Mormons dance, but we don't allow raucous instruments in our church service. It's just like organs and pianos and Maybe violins.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:55:22] Right, right.

John Dehlin [00:55:22] No guitars or percussion for sure.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:55:24] Right. Okay, that's similar. But you do dance because somehow dancing

John Dehlin [00:55:28] was weirdly Brigham Young and Joseph Smith loved dancing. And that. That was never forbidden.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:55:33] Isn't that interesting? Okay, so Ellen must have hated it because it was very forbidden. It was, yes. Dancing of any kind was very sexual. So when I was like, I really wanted to take ballet and I was not allowed to take ballet because that was not.

John Dehlin [00:55:47] Well, again, Joseph and Brigham loved sex, so they would not have hated dancing.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:55:51] Yet that's true. We have to remember that very polar distinction there.

John Dehlin [00:55:57] You know, Brigham young had like 50. Whatever wives.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:55:59] Right.

John Dehlin [00:56:00] Joseph had over 30 and Brigham had over 50.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:56:02] Brigham was a. Wow. Yeah. He was also the one who had the trans. The transvestite son. Right.

John Dehlin [00:56:09] He had a. A, yeah. Like a gender non conforming child.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:56:14] Okay, well, I mean if you have 50 wives and you have a gazillion children, I mean the variety there is going to be. But yeah, so.

John Dehlin [00:56:24] So spicy food. Spicy food was blame the passion, inflame the passion and caffeine.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:56:30] Yep. So Kellogg came up with his corn flakes and. And bran flakes and everything else as fiber was going to cure lust, basically. So you had to have high fiber everything. And this interestingly, was not just him. Again, it was part of the Victorian everything obsession with. Because he kind of crabbed that from Graham. Sylvester Graham, who invented the Graham crackers for the very same thing.

John Dehlin [00:56:59] But Graham wasn't seventh advent.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:57:01] He was not. But he was part of some other religious whatever that was trying to cure everything with diet.

John Dehlin [00:57:06] And you know, everything is remixed, man. Every. Everything is remixed. Right?

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:57:10] It's totally. And there was a French guy that even predated all of them who did very similar stuff.

John Dehlin [00:57:15] But so Kellogg's Corplex, I remember hearing this just randomly was. Was Kellogg's attempt to cure masturbation?

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:57:23] Yes, exactly. And he had all these other things. He was giving people yogurt enemas. He was doing everything all to cure lust and sex because it was just. But he, interestingly enough, is the main reason that up until recently anyway, most American boys were circumcised. It was a Kellogg push. Circumcision was supposed to prevent masturbation.

John Dehlin [00:57:46] But also Jews circumcised.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:57:48] But exactly.

John Dehlin [00:57:49] Yeah.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:57:49] But apparently his was this big push about masturbation and he was circumcising a D adults and then he was advocating doing it to children. And I guess that didn't sell very well to the populace. So then in America it became this cleanliness thing. Like, oh, it's got to be a cleanliness thing. And so. But Kellogg was also advocating circumcising women to prevent masturbation. And that carried forward in the Adventist system until the 1960s. And we'll talk about that talk. So dark. So dark. And they deny. Oh boy, do they deny that.

Sexual Ethics and Bodily Control in Adventist History

John Dehlin [00:58:24] So y' all have female genital mutilation in your history? Oh, I did not know that exactly.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:58:29] It's. Let me see. I brought all my handy dandy props.

John Dehlin [00:58:33] So this book, what's it called?

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:58:35] On Becoming a Woman, oddly enough, where they talk about chopping off your woman parts. But this is written by an Adventist physician named Harold Schryock, and it was written, I think, in the 1950s. We were still reading it as part of our marriage and family class in Adventist school in the 1980s. And I've heard from kids that still had to read it in 2006 in Adventist boarding schools. In it he has a chapter on preventing solo vice and talks about how it's very easily cured. You just snip off some little body parts and you're in its face.

John Dehlin [00:59:10] I'm just like getting sick.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:59:11] Isn't that ill? It just makes you absolutely sick.

John Dehlin [00:59:14] Do you know? So, like, first of all, it's so weird how these high demand religions or cults can have really prominent, significant, even horrendous doctrines that are mainstream and then somehow they can throw it down the memory hole, change, and then like one or two generations go by and the church is denying it and nobody even has a collective memory that it ever happened. Happened.

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:59:41] Exactly.

John Dehlin [00:59:42] And it sounds like, okay, do you know the history of how female genital mutilation got extinguished in your movement?

Melissa Duge Spiers [00:59:49] You know, I don't know that it has been. I think it's always been undercover since Kellogg, probably. And it's. And it's illegal in. In more than half the states. In the United States, A Man Named John Chua, if anybody wants to go down the rabbit hole, A Man Named John Chua, I believe C H U A did a very illuminating documentary for. And I never can remember if it's PBS or the BBC, but it was called the Cut Female FGM in the United States or in America. And he interviewed, he figured out this book. He interviewed a survivor of it who had had it done to her by an Adventist physician in, I would say, probably the early 60s. She had it done to her when she was three years old because her grandmother thought she was discovering her female parts. And that was evil.

John Dehlin [01:00:42] Oh, so it's sometimes a consequence for being discovered to be engaging. And of course, children dress themselves like just as a part of a.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:00:51] Happy. As part of growing up. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:00:53] Okay. So I would never ask someone this directly, but it just sounds like by the time you're growing up, that wasn't something you or your peers were experiencing.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:01:03] Not as far as I know. People were being sent to conversions. Therapy was the most draconian stuff I knew. But then again, when you think about a community that controls sexual information, we were given no information about how our bodies worked. It was just marriage and family abstinence. That's it. And so I do wonder how many women had this happen to them. Like that woman had it happen at three years old. She didn't even know until in the twenties. In her twenties. Oh, she had no clue because she was three. And so she said that in that documentary. She said, well, I went to an Adventist doctor when I was in like 20 or something and said, there's something wrong with me.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:01:41] Like I'm having issues. And he said, he gave her a pamphlet on masturbation and sent her away and said, just don't ever do this and you'll be fine. And so this, in the documentary, they went to Loma Linda Medical School, which is the Adventist. So this guy. Sorry, I. I'm kind of all over the place, so I get so upset about this topic. So Harold Schryock, who wrote this, was the Dean of Medicine. He wrote the manuals for all of the doctors trained at the medicine Loma Linda Medical School, which is a very famous medical school. They did one of the first heart transplants from baboon to child in the early 80s. It's.

John Dehlin [01:02:19] That's California.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:02:20] It's. Yeah, Loma Linda. Okay, yeah, yeah, In. In California. And it is North South Central. It's south. It's kind of east of Los Angeles, basically. And so for 30 years, he was the man who ran that medical institution.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:02:38] And there's a hall there, Shriek hall, named after him. He wrote a bunch of books for raising children, et cetera. And so this documentarian, John Chua, went to Loma Linda and said, hey, you guys were doing practicing fgm. What's up? And they were like, they interviewed, I think, the current Dean of Medicine. And he was just like, oh, no, I don't think we were doing that. And he said, well, you know, it's in this book and it's, I've met somebody and blah, blah, blah. And they said, oh, we don't know who Shriach is. We Don't. We don't really listen to him. And the documentary just panned to Shriek Hall.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:03:16] You know, I mean, it's just ridiculous. But again, you know how they just change. Sweep it under the rug and nobody talks about it again.

John Dehlin [01:03:23] So they probably would have had this point in the history where they would have destroyed all the evidence. I'm sure that that stuff ever happened. I'm sure there's gotta be a documentary or biography there about how that got changed, whether it was state legislatures outlawing it or whistleblowers.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:03:40] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:03:41] Like, I'm surprised we can't look in old archives of newspapers or magazines to hear about that hubbub.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:03:50] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:03:50] Cause I mean, with Mormon polygamy. Right.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:03:52] Right.

John Dehlin [01:03:53] The federal government came out against us and started incarcerating our leaders. And it took a couple decades, but eventually. But there's a paper trail and a legal trail of the extinguishing of polygamy, both externally and internally. To the church.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:04:09] Yes.

John Dehlin [01:04:09] So I have to believe that would exist with y'.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:04:11] All. You know, I think the problem there is, again, the. The tight control that they have on women and on sexuality. I really wonder how many women ever knew that it was done to them.

John Dehlin [01:04:21] Yeah.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:04:21] You know, because parents would have.

John Dehlin [01:04:23] Parents would have. Unless the doctors were doing it without parental consent.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:04:27] Yeah, parents would have known, but parents would never have.

John Dehlin [01:04:30] Unless they kept it from.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:04:31] Parents kept. Yeah, they. Yeah, the parents would have kept it from the kids. I think they would have done it so young or. You know, I. I know a. I don't know. It's just when they're. When people learn nothing about their bodies, and then women are told that sex isn't really about them anyway. Pleasure is not for them. It's just for their husband. So if these women were never having orgasms, and they were. They just went straight from being all virginal as far as they knew to a marriage where they. Where sex just really didn't feel very good. I don't know that they would have known that that was something that.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:05:07] Because they were missing body parts, I think they just would have gone onward. So, I mean, I really do wonder how many women are out there who had it possibly done to them. They would be older now, probably 50, 60, 70. I'm sure there's incredible shame around it, even if they do know that it happened to them.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:05:26] So I don't know how many people would talk about it. And so, yeah, the records would have to be parents who'd force them it. Who would actually fess up.

John Dehlin [01:05:36] Or diaries, maybe Diaries, maybe.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:05:38] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [01:05:39] Wow, that's wild. I didn't know this.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:05:41] If I. Nobody does. I speak about it and no one knows about it. Like, I mean, I didn't even know about it when I read the book the first time as a teenager. I didn't know what he was referring to. I didn't even know what vice was on. Becoming a woman talks about surgery. Yeah, he says I probably can find it because I've circled it with all kinds of exclamation points and angry marks. Yeah, here we go.

John Dehlin [01:06:05] Oh, my gosh.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:06:08] So there is an anatomical factor that sometimes causes irritation about the clitoris and encourages manipulation of this delicate reproductive organ. Although such cases are not very common, evidence of irritation of these issues is sufficient reason for a woman to go to a Christian physician. Oftentimes the remedy for this situation consists of a minor surgical operation known as a circumcision. This operation is not hazardous and is much to be preferred to allowing this condition of manipulation and irritation to continue.

John Dehlin [01:06:42] My gosh. That's it. And that was a book that evil like we have. We have a book called the Miracle of Forgiveness that was used to shame people sexually for decades. That's kind of like your miracle of forgiveness, basically.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:06:55] Very, very. And there's. Funnily enough, there's one on becoming a man. I don't know anyone who ever had to read it. I don't know that anyone ever. I have a copy of it and I should have actually brought it. I've never read it, but it is also very anti masturbation, but I don't believe it talks about circumcision.

John Dehlin [01:07:15] So. Okay, I don't know if this is the right time to talk about. About this, but, like, as I was doing some prep work, I noted the irony that your church is technically founded by a woman, and yet in modern times, there's been controversy over whether women could be ordained ministers. But before we jump to that, I'm just assuming traditional gender roles is kind of what that book is gonna be promoting. Is that right? What does it mean to be. Be a classical Seventh Day Adventist woman according to your history and culture?

Gender Roles, Sexuality, and Confession Practices

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:07:52] Yeah, Very, very traditional. Again, it's this weird thing where the Adventists are big on education, so they don't. They don't take education away from women, like, say, the JWs or something, I guess we were encouraged to go to college. We were. If it was an Adventist college, of course, church we. But then really women, at least until I graduated from high school, we weren't encouraged to pursue careers really you could be a teacher or a nurse until you got married and had children, same as us. But you could study anything you wanted in college. But it was just understood that you probably weren't going to use it, you know. And so yes, they do not ordain women still to this day.

John Dehlin [01:08:38] But just to be clear, divine. The divine role of a woman is to be a wife and a mother.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:08:42] Yes, wife and a mom.

John Dehlin [01:08:45] Like lots of kids. Some kids.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:08:46] You know, Adventists are so funny. That's one of the things that kind of thing sets them apart and they're so special is they don't believe in the whole Catholic and Mormon pop out a ton of children thing. They think that's kind of low brow or something that they're, they believe in quality over quantity.

John Dehlin [01:09:03] So like what's the standard? One or two?

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:09:05] Probably two to four. We had, you know, four was still on the border, but yeah, having large families was actually kind of sneered at behind very. So much of Adventism is not codified. It's. It's the sideways, it's the. What you just absorb. So we knew not to stretch our resources too far and only have the kids that you could afford to educate in Adventist schools which were not cheap and you know, that kind of thing.

John Dehlin [01:09:36] Interesting. Real quick, did y' all ever come out with the prohibition on like marital oral sex, that sort of thing?

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:09:43] Oh my gosh, that's a fun topic because I know the Mormons have a very strange thing on that everything was forbidden. We had, we had in marriage and family class we had a, A chart that showed us if you started dating someone and you started with holding hands and it would just go month by month and you'd better either be married by, by year two or three or it was all the woman's responsibility for what would happen because boys would just get blue balls and it would just be horrible and you know, it was all the woman's fault. And then in within marriage we never got any information.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:10:20] So there was no prohibition on oral sex or anything as far as I know. It was just like once you reach that, that gate of oh, you're married, then everything was just going to be fabulous and everything was free game and it was supposed to still all be about men. Women's pleasure was not part of it. But as far as I know there were no rules about. Okay, yeah, because the Mormons have the whole, the jumping on the bed for people or whatever. That. What?

John Dehlin [01:10:44] Well I mean that comes later. The, the whole soaking.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:10:47] There you go.

John Dehlin [01:10:49] But I mean before that we had a prophet in the early 80s come out with an official church declaration that oral sex was forbidden and it only lasted like 10 months and then it was rescinded. A lot of Mormons don't even know that history, but traditionally. Yeah. Like missionary position.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:11:09] Yes. Right.

John Dehlin [01:11:10] And even early Mormonism was like sex to have babies, but like sex for pleasure is kind of sketchy.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:11:16] Yeah. Yeah. That was a big part of. Well, clearly Kellogg. But also Ellen White. Was sex more than marital sex more than once a month. I think was one of her writings was clearly just about your own pleasure and thus not encouraged. Because nothing should be about your own pleasure.

John Dehlin [01:11:33] And I guess because you kind of talked about it, this idea of you referenced it slightly. But like women policing men's chastity and women being responsible gatekeepers. Yeah. And probably modesty. Do you want to talk about all that? Kind of.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:11:51] Yeah. So that what they call today purity culture. But of course we didn't have that verbiage back when I was in school and of course before that. But yes, modesty. We didn't have like the magic underwear or anything. But it was.

John Dehlin [01:12:08] Or garments as well.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:12:09] Or garments. There you go. Sorry.

John Dehlin [01:12:10] No, it's okay.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:12:13] But we were definitely policed in school rules and at home with like girls could not wear sleeveless stuff.

John Dehlin [01:12:22] So shoulders are bad.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:12:24] Yeah, Showing the shoulders and oh my gosh, a bra strap might be seen and that would just be the end of everything as anyone knows it. You know, skirts in school were measured. They couldn't be more than an inch above your knee or something.

John Dehlin [01:12:37] What about shorts?

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:12:38] No shorts.

John Dehlin [01:12:38] Shorts.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:12:39] Never allowed to wear shorts except for NPE class and that was, you know, and we had these long baggy things but. And then a lot of other control in terms of, you know, we had no. Supposedly no makeup, although pretty much everyone sort of ignored that rule to some extent. No jewelry. So women weren't supposed to be adorned. We weren't supposed to be glitzy looking. No fingernail polish, etc. And on any kind of camp experience or anything, only one piece bathing suits. Never anything.

John Dehlin [01:13:13] No bikinis.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:13:14] Yeah, no bikinis. Nothing risque. And only for swimming. And then you were, you know, you weren't allowed to lay around in your swimsuit, but because just bad things would happen. And then certainly when we had our marriage and family classes and we had these things in school called week of prayer and they. They would have a topic and basically all school classes would pretty much go out the window and you just assembled in the chapel every day all day for a week and did whatever the theme was. And so we would have these purity emphasis weeks of prayer and we'd have guest speakers come in and they would give us all the speeches about, you know, if you as a woman give in to sexual temptation, not only are you leading the men astray, but, but you become the licked cupcake and the crumpled dollar bill.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:14:01] And we had a teacher who loved, loved to use a sweated in, stretched out, dirty, wrinkled shirt that's on the floor. Would any man want to wear that shirt? He wants the one that's in the package still.

John Dehlin [01:14:17] It's almost like you read about Mormonism. Cause we literally had the licked cupcake. We had like a nail, nail in the board. You know, the whole.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:14:25] Oh my. Yes.

John Dehlin [01:14:27] You know the, the crumpled. Yeah, the crumpled dollar bill.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:14:29] Yes. Like that's all the lock that opens for any key, but the key that opens any lock is valuable, whatever. And yeah, all that stuff.

John Dehlin [01:14:38] So same, same there. Okay, okay, okay. And that's basically saying that a woman's worth is tied to her sexual purity.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:14:47] Yes, exactly.

John Dehlin [01:14:48] Or. Or it's ruined. Damaged. How did y' all handle confession repentance as teens and young adults pre marriage?

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:14:59] You know, thank goodness. That is the one thing I guess that I could say where Adventists were not horrifying. We didn't have any kind of public, you know, we didn't have to go to a priest or anything or a pastor and congress, confess our sins or anything. It was always just between you and God. No, you had big difference. Yeah, you had to confess all of your sins. And I know people who said they just spent their lives praying and feeling like they hadn't prayed hard enough and they weren't going to be forgiven. But it was all a personal thing.

John Dehlin [01:15:33] I mean, in some sense, if you hate sex as a culture, you don't want your men constantly talking to young teenage girls about sex. Right. Like, yeah, so I can see why that would be not adopted. But in Mormonism it was. So you have 40, 50 year old plumber Bishop men talking to 12 year old girls about if they touch themselves and where, like. And I don't mean to mischaracterize Mormonism, but that's a thing.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:15:57] But that's a thing. Yeah, I've heard that from, from other people who've escaped Mormonism and how, how creepy it was. You know, I've heard it mostly from women how creepy it was to have to do that and even when nothing more creepy came out of it. I mean, and I'm Sure. Lots of times more creepy came out of it.

John Dehlin [01:16:13] Oh yeah, no, there's lots of. It seems like almost every month in Utah there's another bishop who's discovered to have been abusing, you know, teen teenage girls or boys in his congregation. It's way rampant. So that's interesting. Y' all escaped confession.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:16:28] Yes, so.

John Dehlin [01:16:31] But also like that self self imposed, seeking a forgiveness with God can be more insidious sometimes.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:16:41] Yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [01:16:42] Scrupulosity and that kind of thing.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:16:44] Yeah, exactly. I think a lot of people, it ended up being an obsessive thing that really damaged them mentally because I guess if you're never given any outward sign of it, like, okay, it's fine. You know, like if your pastor can say, okay, okay, it's fine, move on, you've atoned for this or whatever, then I guess you can let it go. But if it's just you, you just keep going over it in your head maybe.

John Dehlin [01:17:10] Interestingly, Mormonism, the Book of Mormon condemns like costly apparel and jewelry, but that's somehow been jettisoned in our culture.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:17:19] I've seen Mormon lives of Mormon wives.

John Dehlin [01:17:21] I know, I know there's parts. It's just weird how parts get left behind or forgotten or ignored. Like for us, the meat eating thing. Like Mormons love their meat, but the Doctrine and Covenants word of wisdom prohibits it. But nobody cares. But then they really care about the coffee and the tea and the tobacco prohibition in the same chapter. Like we can be just so blind and selective in our observable. Were there tips on how to police masturbation and how to fix and cure yourself from that temptation as a young child or teen or young adult? Like, how was that treated? And when I say treated as if it's a disease, how was the disease of masturbation treated culturally in terms of solutions to prevent it or fix it?

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:18:12] You know, that's a really. Again, I'm not sure that there was a prescribed like thing that everybody pointed to or a process that they went through. I know this book on becoming a woman. He, he gives all these kind of platitudes of like, you should stay active and you should pursue your hobbies and call a friend and go out for a walk and you know, all that kind of stuff. But there was there.

John Dehlin [01:18:35] Eat your. Eat your Kellogg's Cornflakes.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:18:37] Exactly. Cornflakes. Absolutely. But there was no accountability buddy types of stuff or anything. That was, as far as I know anyway, that was put in to. I'm sure some people did it, but there was no wide Scale implementation of something like that.

John Dehlin [01:18:54] Yeah, we had had like cottage. And we have like cottage industry support groups and unethical therapists that parents pay for to help cure their kids of the addiction of masturbation.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:19:07] Oh, yes, I'm sure there's that because obviously conversion therapy was the model for that. And I'm sure there was exactly the same thing with masturbation as well. Like.

John Dehlin [01:19:18] Yeah, okay, so you were talking about the model woman education's fine, but stay at home and be a mom, have a couple kids and be a wife. And then what about patriarchy in the home versus not in patriarchy in the home?

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:19:34] Definitely we had the top down patriarchal model, the famous umbrella model with God and then the husband and then the wife.

John Dehlin [01:19:43] So the husband's the head.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:19:44] The husband is definitely the head of the family. Husband is the head and the wife has to listen and obey to him. And. And Ellen tried to kind of talk out of both sides of her mouth where she said that they're equal, but I guess that's. What is that complementarianism or whatever, which is just. But. And then children were definitely the slaves of the mother, basically. So they were under her. And there was a lot of advice from Ellen about the. How the mother was supposed to. To control every aspect of her children's lives. And that was her main. Her main duty in life.

John Dehlin [01:20:26] Okay, so yeah, that's very similar. Kind of the patriarchal structure and we even have this idea of the men preside, they're co. Equals, husband and wife are co. Equals. But the father presides.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:20:43] Okay.

John Dehlin [01:20:44] Presides and provides.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:20:46] Okay.

John Dehlin [01:20:47] But you know, the woman is to hearken unto the man.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:20:51] You know, very similar, almost identical. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:20:54] Okay.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:20:54] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:20:57] Okay, well, so we've talked about the role of women, the role of husband and wife, sexual morais, sexual shame, et cetera. Let's see. So as, so as Ellen White and Kellogg die, how does the church progress in terms of its growth and management and that sort of thing, you know,

Church Governance, Discipline, and Dissent

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:21:29] Very interesting because they do not have like the Mormons still have a living prophet all the time. Right. And they did not. Ellen was one and done. And Kellogg, actually she kind of shoved him out decades before. He didn't last all that long because he was too rich and too powerful and she couldn't take the competition. Basically she left. Yeah. So Kellogg died, not an Adventist at all.

John Dehlin [01:21:57] Whoa.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:21:58] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:21:58] Yeah. A lot of the founders, the co founders of Mormonism all got excommunicated or left the church. Do y' all have excommunication?

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:22:04] In your. Not a formal. We do, definitely, but there is no huge process of it. It's not a formal process. And generally, as far as I've ever seen, people get excommunicated for doctrinal issues. They don't get excommunicated because, for instance, they've been molesting children or anything. But if they disagree with doctrine or they. One guy, just recently, one pastor, got excommunicated or threatened with excommunication because he was encouraging his church not to pay their tithes to the General Conference. He was encouraging them to pay their tithes to the. To his church. Oh, boy. That got him excommunicated real fast.

John Dehlin [01:22:47] Okay, so y' all are more likely to excommunicate an apostate for doctrinal dissent than a pedophile for child abuse.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:22:55] Behavioral.

John Dehlin [01:22:56] Yeah, totally the same with us. Yeah, totally the same. Okay, so you do have a form of excommunication.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:23:02] Yeah, yeah, they do. And I'm not quite sure what it is, but it has to go through the conference level and, you know, people have to vote on it and something. The management of the church has to vote on it and things.

John Dehlin [01:23:12] Same with us. Okay, so what about. So how is dissent viewed in the church? Criticizing the leaders, criticizing the defense doctrine, disagreeing. How is that handled culturally and organizationally?

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:23:27] It's not handled very well. And. And, you know, I'm not the best person to speak on it since I've been out for the past three decades, you know, so I don't. I can only say what I see from the outside. But they did just. They had the same General Conference president whose father had been General Conference president before that. So the span of like, 50 years had been. This man and his son were General Conference presidents, and they were very controlling, crusty old white men.

John Dehlin [01:23:58] And what does General Conference mean in your country?

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:24:00] It is the worldwide governing body. Okay, so there are conferences within, like, every area. The United States has many different conferences. And then there's a separate. In the United States, separate conference for the block black constituents. Yeah. We have segregated conference even now, to this day. Whoa. I know.

John Dehlin [01:24:23] Apartheid.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:24:24] Yeah, yeah, it's.

John Dehlin [01:24:26] I did not know that.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:24:26] And there are all kinds of excuses made about it. And.

John Dehlin [01:24:29] Wait, so white and black Seventh Day Adventists don't share congregations?

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:24:35] You know, they do, certainly. All the churches that I attended had, you know, pretty much representation. They were primarily white, but representation from everybody. And of course, because they're such aggressive missionaries, you always have all these mission immigrants, too. But the American African American Adventist Church Is. And they even have at least one college that is primarily African American are definitely distinct. And I'm not quite sure. I don't know what the explanation is. My father was an Adventist pastor and I asked him about it once and he said, well, it's because the African Americans wanted it that way.

John Dehlin [01:25:23] And I was like, yeah, blame the victim.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:25:25] Right, exactly. And I was like, gosh, I wonder why they might have wanted it that way.

John Dehlin [01:25:29] That's like this really loved their setup with the plantations they were taking. Bastard took really good care of them, you know. Exactly.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:25:37] Right, exactly. It's like, gosh, maybe you guys were so horrible they couldn't exist within your system.

John Dehlin [01:25:45] So do you know if historically Seventh Day Adventist leaders were opposed to segregation? Like during the civil rights movement, that kind of thing?

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:25:53] Again, they love to speak out of both sides of their mouth. So apparently Ellen White said some very horrible, horrible things about black people in. In kind of pre

John Dehlin [01:26:08] antebellum.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:26:09] Yeah, exactly. And then when she realized that she could really grow up her church if she changed her tune, then all of a sudden she was very pro. Let's reach out to the freed slaves. And you know, but she really said horrible things. And even up until when I was in high school, mixed race marriage was definitely the whisper forbidden thing.

John Dehlin [01:26:36] Same with us.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:26:37] Yeah. You just didn't. It was not encouraged, it was not allowed. You weren't even allowed to date anyone that wasn't of your particular look. Whatever it was, you know, very similar. Yeah. We had at my school there was a large in influx of Filipino immigrants at one point. And you know, we. It was certainly not encouraged to mix.

John Dehlin [01:27:01] Yeah. And our Joseph Smith was definitely on both sides of the slavery fence at different points in his life. And Brigham Young has horrendously racist quotes. And Brigham Young implemented a racist teaching around the curse of Cain and black people not being members in full standing. That lasted until 1978.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:27:23] Yeah. And native Americans also the Mormons were

John Dehlin [01:27:26] horrifying to the Native Americans in different ways.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:27:28] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:27:30] So we've got a lot of that. And we definitely didn't like, like the civil rights movement or segregation.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:27:35] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:27:35] But now we love black people, you know.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:27:38] Exactly. Gotta, gotta grow the membership of the church. Yes. But I would imagine your missionary outreach stuff was probably similar to ours also, which is. Was, is just so fundamentally racist. Like I was taught that anyone out there in the mission field was a devil culture. And particularly if they had drumming involved in their culture, which of course is most everyone except for white America. You know, white, European, mutts And you know, so the Native Americans were vilified. The Africans were vilified because they had drumming and dancing and they were half naked. And so they were from the devil. It was from the devil. And the devil got into your soul through the drum beat. And so I mean fundamentally very racist. You know, even if they're not. Not saying that it. But just horribly racist. And I'm sure it's still going on to this day.

John Dehlin [01:28:30] So that term mission field in Mormonism was basically anything outside of Utah was referred to as the mission field.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:28:36] Yes.

John Dehlin [01:28:38] But I have to say this. Every twice a year we have a global annual conference for our membership. Guess what it's called?

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:28:48] Oh no.

John Dehlin [01:28:49] What's it called?

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:28:50] The Mission. I don't know.

John Dehlin [01:28:52] General Conference.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:28:53] Oh, the General Conference. Conference. Oh God.

John Dehlin [01:28:56] So I know you're back at the racing, but I'm just saying General Conference is a term. We use the term very broadly.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:29:01] Yeah, I have, I've heard that in reference to the Mormons and I assumed it was similar, but that is totally funny. And is it always held here in the United States? Ours is too. It's never been held outside. Even though the membership of the Adventist church is way bigger at this time point outside of the United States. But General Conference still right here.

John Dehlin [01:29:21] So we both have that General Conference like tradition and the mission field tradition and the racism tradition. But now the Mormon Church is all about Africa.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:29:30] Yes. Oh, all about Africa.

John Dehlin [01:29:32] I swear these cults, high demand religions, have the same lawyers, they have the same accountants, they have the same marketing people. Because we are following such similar playbooks, there has to be communication.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:29:48] Isn't that funny? But yet we're all unique.

John Dehlin [01:29:51] We're the ones. Oh, we're the one. True. So y' all are the one. True.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:29:54] Yeah, but they are. They share everything this exact same way that they deal with predators.

John Dehlin [01:30:00] Yeah, yeah.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:30:01] Then the Adventists hate the Catholics so much. I always love saying yeah, you do it just like the Catholics.

John Dehlin [01:30:07] Fascinating. This is so great. I'm loving this. All right, so, all right, so one thing that. But let's talk about your parochial school system, your hospitals and your media networks.

Church Wealth, Education, and Schools

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:30:20] Yeah, yeah, very fascinating. So the Adventist church always comes up in the top 10 lists of the richest churches in the world. Of course the Mormons are always the top slot. And then various iterations they divide the Catholic Church into several, like the German Catholic Church and the Some. Something. Yeah. And so Adventists are usually about fourth or fifth on the richest. Sometimes they drop to sixth richest. And then on the List of the largest medical systems in the world and the largest educational systems in the world. Adventists are again, consistently like third or fourth place, usually behind several versions of Catholics and sometimes I think the Mormons.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:31:01] Probably not with medicine, but maybe with education, probably, hopefully. So the Adventists have been huge on both of those. The medical thing is something that they are very proud of. It's part of this. Since Kellogg, it's been part of their thing again. Loma Linda Medical School, I mean, to become an Adventist doctor is. I mean, basically most of the men in my family for three generations, that's what they did. They all went to Loma Linda and they became same Adventist doctors, you know, and they have now what's called Advent Health, which is all over the world. It's enormous. They have hospitals, clinics, everything.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:31:43] They got a big bump, unfortunately, about 15 years ago, I guess from Dan Buettner, who wrote the Blue Zones. He did this whole thing for National Geographic.

John Dehlin [01:31:53] My wife is totally into the Blue Zone, so I'm like, all those Seventh Day Adventists are one of the Blue Zone groups.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:31:59] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:32:00] And where are they? What town are they? Centralized, where they would have been.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:32:06] It's.

John Dehlin [01:32:06] It's around me, Linda.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:32:07] It's around the medical school there is where they've been designated a Blue Zone. And they are so proud of it. Even though about five years ago the Blue Zones were partially disc. Well, let me start with Dan Buettner eventually sold the whole Blue Zones. At that point, it was an empire of books and recipes and whatever the heck else. I mean, personal training. I don't know what else it was, but he sold it to Advent Health. So now Advent Health uses the Blue Zones as their own personal marketing.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:32:38] So they've produced, I think the last. There was a special, a TV special about it a couple of years ago. So that was Adventist produced. I believe it was no longer Dan Buettner. So the Blue Zones is no longer at all an independent assessment. And it is Adventist bragging about Loma Linda being a Blue Zone. But the.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:33:00] And I'm not quite sure what else Advent Health has other than. I don't know if they've ventured into insurance, health insurance also, or if they are simply clinics, hospitals, medical groups, but they are one of those, the third or fourth largest in the world. And then educationally, same thing. Adventists have colleges all over the world. They have.

John Dehlin [01:33:23] What does parochial school mean? Mormons don't even know what that word means.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:33:26] You know, I'm.

John Dehlin [01:33:27] You have elementary, K12.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:33:29] That's it. It's. It's basically just K through 12 private

John Dehlin [01:33:33] school all over the United States.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:33:35] All over the. We have. Oh my gosh, like probably hundreds.

John Dehlin [01:33:39] See, I've heard of Catholic private schools, but I've never heard of Seventh Day Adventist private schools.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:33:45] Nobody's ever heard of the Adventists. I know. It's really bizarre, isn't it? Where are you?

John Dehlin [01:33:49] And I also saw there's. You don't have, like, a necessarily. Even though Loma Linda's mentioned. You're not known for having a geographic center. Even though Michigan. You say Michigan was a big deal, but, like, it's not. Like, y' all don't cluster in a state.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:34:03] That's right.

John Dehlin [01:34:03] But then I've heard nothing in Utah. How about Seventh Day Adventists in Utah? So they must not be a lot here, or are they just super low key?

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:34:10] They're very low key.

John Dehlin [01:34:11] Under the radar.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:34:11] They are always under the radar. And I think that's very much by design.

John Dehlin [01:34:15] Do they not compete, like, in high school athletics?

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:34:18] They don't. They're not allowed. They're not allowed.

John Dehlin [01:34:20] Oh, that's huge. Cause in Salt Lake, you would hear about Judge, which is a Catholic private school. Yes, you would hear about the Catholic private schools through the athletics.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:34:31] Right.

John Dehlin [01:34:32] So y' all avoid that by not. Not involved.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:34:35] Yes. They don't compete in anything. Ellen White said that competition, again, incited the baser. Whatever evils. But also, so much stuff happens on Saturdays and it's not so, you know, they don't do debate societies. They don't do any athletics. They don't do. And athletics were an. Ellen White. No, no.

John Dehlin [01:34:54] Also because they're fun, right? No fun.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:34:56] That's right. They're fun. Plus they're sweaty bodies. I mean, who knows what happens with sweaty bodies? I guess so. Yeah. There was no kind of. I'm trying to think if there was any kind of competition in my high school. You know, we belong to the National Honor Society and stuff like that. But that generally didn't involve mingling with others. I mean, it's definitely. Adventists do not encourage mingling with others at all.

John Dehlin [01:35:20] Okay, so that's huge. So with Mormonism, there's this idea of being in the world, but not of. Of the world.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:35:25] We have that very same phrase. Yes, but we don't do it.

John Dehlin [01:35:28] But okay. Yeah. Because we do go to public schools and we do do athletics and we do do, you know, hyper achievement in, you know, extracurricular stuff.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:35:38] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:35:39] So y'. All. An orthodox Seventh Day Adventist in the United States would start K12 in a private school and never really intermingle with the home host town population.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:35:53] Exactly, exactly. It's enormous. I mean, that is huge. And. And you are very looked down on if you allow your children to go outside of the Adventist system, no matter how. I mean, it is expensive. I mean, it is private school education.

John Dehlin [01:36:09] Okay, but people getting Scientology vibes. So it's really expensive to get educated.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:36:13] Right, but people.

John Dehlin [01:36:14] Which is indoctrinated.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:36:15] Right, right, right, exactly. Oh, yeah. But people are guilted, shamed, etcetera, into making sure that their children go. Do not set foot in a public education institution or home school.

John Dehlin [01:36:29] It's not homeschooling.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:36:30] We were encouraged. The more fringy, freaky people. I was homeschooled until fourth grade, as was my sister. The more fringy freaky people do homeschool their kids pretty much primarily. But Adventist schools are generally considered the way to go at this point. And people will be obsessive about. I mean, I know my grandparents, when my grandfather, my mom's parents, when my grandfather got out of World War II service in the army, they had a choice of where they would move. And they were looking at Santa Barbara, which is the absolutely most beautiful place in the world, or Chula Vista, California, which was like a dirt pit.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:37:11] And they chose Chula Vista because there was an Adventist school for their children. And I mean, those. Those are the kinds of choices that people make. And then a lot of people. And thank goodness I didn't have this experience, but once you graduate, there are all These K through 8 schools pretty much anywhere you live in the United States. You can probably, if you organize your life right, be close enough to an Adventist K through through eight thing, or you can homeschool. But for high school, a lot of people had to go to Adventist boarding schools. And there are some good ones, and then there are some really bad ones where a lot of bad stuff happens.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:37:51] And then there are what they call self supporting. And those are the really fringy freaky ones. Those are ones where a Dr. Phil actually sent some, like, troubled kid teen kids to some of the Adventist ones that have really horrific track records of really awful. You know, the troubled teen industry is just rife with awful stuff.

John Dehlin [01:38:12] Which Utah's big in, by the way.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:38:13] Yes, Utah's huge in. I actually know a few kids who were sent to Utah for troubled. Yes, exactly.

John Dehlin [01:38:21] How much does it cost, on average, would you say, in the US Annually to send your kids to, let's just say K through 5 versus middle school versus high school school. Do you know what a parent might shell out.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:38:32] I should have, I should have looked up. But I mean, it's, it's comparable, I know, to just your average private school, to a Catholic school, to anything else I'm imagining, you know. Yeah, multiple. Multiple grands per year. Yeah. I don't know. And again, college, I'm not sure. And colleges. We were all supposed to go to Adventist colleges, particularly women, because how would you meet an Adventist husband if you didn't go to an Adventist college? And when we talk about my book, I'll talk about the ways that they tried to prevent us from being able to apply to public colleges or private colleges that weren't Adventist.

John Dehlin [01:39:10] Okay.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:39:10] Yeah, they had lots of sneaky ways to make it hard for us.

John Dehlin [01:39:15] So I'm seeing this is just Google. Elementary range is 4 to 9,000 annually. Can you imagine? Oh, you don't have a lot of kids, so that's helpful.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:39:26] But still.

John Dehlin [01:39:27] Yeah, no, no, I'm saying a Seventh Day Adventist family wouldn't have necessarily six or eight kids, but even a couple could be 10 to 20 grand a year just for K through 8. And then it's saying junior high is 4 to 11,000 and then high school is 8 to 14,000 plus.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:39:51] Yes. And boarding schools I know are like 20. 20 grand or so.

John Dehlin [01:39:55] Boarding schools?

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:39:56] Yeah, for the boarding schools.

John Dehlin [01:39:57] Wow. Okay, That's a big deal.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:39:59] And a lot of kids have to go to boarding school because they don't live close enough to. So yeah, it's big. It's kind of.

John Dehlin [01:40:08] And then also BYU weirdly, is super cheap. It's super affordable for members. Yeah. So your. How many Seventh Day Adventist colleges or universities do you think there are in the US? Like 2 or 10 or.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:40:25] Yeah, I'd say between 10 and 20.

John Dehlin [01:40:27] Okay. A lot.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:40:28] There are a lot.

John Dehlin [01:40:29] What's the biggest, most well known one do you have like a Notre Dame,

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:40:33] La Sierra, which is associated with Loma Linda. It's in that blue zone area. La Sierra College. Then also Andrews University, which is in Michigan when the kind of the center. So there. There's several. We were talking about this. Whether it's centralized. There are several big hubs of Adventists. One of them is Loma Linda. The General Conference is in. Outside of Washington D.C. gotta keep your fingers in the politics.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:40:57] And then there's still a big hub in Michigan and it moved from Battle Creek to a place called Berrian Springs, which is very close to Lake Michigan and kind of around the bottom of the lake there from Chicago. And they have the seminary There. And so there's a huge university there that's kind of like a seminary culinary feeder and that's called Andrews University. And so that's another big, big college. But there are a couple in the south and there was one in Maryland. I don't know, probably 10 to 15, probably in the United States, I would say.

John Dehlin [01:41:30] And the annual tuition of one of Those top notch Seventh Day Adventists got

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:41:35] to be 20 grand or more, I would think so.

John Dehlin [01:41:38] Private school.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:41:39] It's private school, yeah. Absolutely.

John Dehlin [01:41:41] Interesting. Wow. So very insular. Okay. The other thing is, and I guess I want to. If it's okay. Like, I don't. I never know. Like, I notice a Baptist church or Catholic church or even a Greek Orthodox church or a temple or a mosque or Mormon church. Like, you see those around. I don't ever note, like, oh, there's a Seventh Day Adventist chapel. Do they have signs? Am I just. Just not looking for them?

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:42:11] They do, but of course they're very low key. They're very plain buildings. And they. Again, I swear to God, it goes back to the Catholics, like ornamentation and idols and this and that. We're not that. We're not the Catholics. So, like, the Adventist churches are very plain. There are no creches with Mary's or. Or really not even any crucifixes. Like, they take the. Do not have any graven images really seriously. And so even their stained glass windows are very discreet. And it's just like kind of abstract flowers.

John Dehlin [01:42:49] So y' all don't do the cross as a main symbol?

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:42:54] If. So it's discreet. It's not. Yeah, there's. And there's no gruesome like, Jesus bloody and dripping type of stuff. Generally there's. You can find it, but it's not a big theme there. But there are crosses, like kind of stylized crosses with roses and whatever, you know. But the churches are generally kind of. Just kind of 60s looking. They're very easy to miss.

John Dehlin [01:43:20] Interesting.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:43:21] But I don't. I see them and I flip them off every time I see them.

John Dehlin [01:43:24] Y' all are so under the radar.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:43:27] So under the radar.

John Dehlin [01:43:28] Which is interesting because like, like, again, Mormons are going for GY these days, so our temples were building them everywhere.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:43:35] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:43:35] And they're the gaudiest buildings in any town. And the inside is super gaudy and chandeliers and gold and. Yeah. So it's interesting how like, culture, high demand religions can be like, all right, what do we do with jewelry? Jewelry or no jewelry. Alcohol or no alcohol Saturday or Sunday, you know, like discrete, insular, integrated, like. And there are ramifications, but y' all are almost twice as big as we are. Started at a similar time. So it's interesting how some of the decisions you've made. I don't think you're as wealthy as we are.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:44:14] Definitely not.

John Dehlin [01:44:14] You're not as well known as we are, but you have a stronger worldwide membership than we do.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:44:21] Yeah. It's interesting. Yeah. Adventists are definitely not encouraged. There's a frowning upon chasing mammoth. Right. You don't want to be too rich, but then you don't. You definitely don't want to be poor either. So there's this fine line that they. And it's.

John Dehlin [01:44:36] Mormons love it if you're rich. Marriotts and Romneys and like Huntsmans, we're all about becoming a billionaire if you can. Yeah, yeah.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:44:45] Which is definitely different. And Adventists, if they are rich, are very kind of still dowdy and not very showy.

John Dehlin [01:44:53] That's why y' all aren't as rich as us.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:44:55] There you. Exactly.

John Dehlin [01:44:55] You got to get on the. Get on the billionaire bandwagon.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:44:58] I know we messed up.

John Dehlin [01:45:01] Why would you. Why would you discourage billionaires?

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:45:04] I know, yeah. And paying. Paying double tithe.

John Dehlin [01:45:07] You know, tithing.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:45:09] Tithe is 10%. I mean, I had to start paying tithe on my allowance when I was 4 or 5 years old. Jesus and I have had a beef, I think, since about then.

John Dehlin [01:45:20] But what's double double tithing?

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:45:22] So double tithe is 20%.

John Dehlin [01:45:24] Who does that?

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:45:25] My dad.

John Dehlin [01:45:26] Just the ultra devout.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:45:27] The ultra devouts. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:45:31] What's a Sunday? What's a local congregation? How many people? Who runs it? How is it managed? What's a Sunday? Sorry? A Saturday service and, you know, activities. Youth activities, women's activities, kids activities.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:45:47] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:45:47] What's all that structure like?

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:45:49] You know, I mean, I'm sure it's changed since I left the church, so I can only speak as to what I was familiar with. But you have everything from the little rural 25 to 100 person little churches with one pastor to where I went to school. In high school, I went to the Pioneer Memorial Church, which was the one associated there in Baran Springs, Michigan, which with the seminary and with Andrews University. It was huge, thousands of people, gigantic building. Again, very plain, like a mega church. But a mega church pretty much. And I remember it being a huge thing. So it was the late.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:46:26] The very last gasp of the 80s when I was checking out and the pastor that everybody loved was proposing televising the show the. And it. That was a huge scandal. How dare he go Hollywood. And he was just, he was, I think, just proposing putting a camera so that people could watch it on their TV at home if they were sick or something.

John Dehlin [01:46:47] Oh my gosh.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:46:49] Yeah, it was a no go for a long time, but then eventually they did and they got video screens up there and everything. So they did eventually join the technology generation. But it's very sober, as with everything Adventist organ music. Music, Choir, same piano.

John Dehlin [01:47:09] Not like hyper charismatic preaching.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:47:12] Yes. Oh, no, no. Hyper. Yeah. There is no. Nobody is even allowed to say amen or anything loudly. It's very pious.

John Dehlin [01:47:23] And no clapping.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:47:25] No clapping.

John Dehlin [01:47:25] Oh my goodness.

Congregational Life, Worship, and Ordinances

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:47:26] People would have, you know, which was, which was crazy to me because of course that was my only experience. Adventist Academy graduations are held in your church generally. And so it was always this dignified, solemn, like, you know, we got our diplomas and we went and we sat down and then, you know, organ blasted. Pomp and circumstance and out we walked. And then to contrast that, when my kids graduated from public school and like the riotous celebration of it all and people screaming and air horns and like bagpipes, like, I was like, oh my gosh. You know, this is, this is what it's like to have fun in high school, school and graduate. But yeah, Adventist churches, no, no, no, they don't host any other functions. I know Catholic churches now will. Will host like drama or whatever inside. Adventist churches are not available for anything except for weddings, funerals and church services.

John Dehlin [01:48:21] And that's pretty similar to us. Yeah, yeah, we do, we do marriages in temples, but we do wedding receptions in chapels.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:48:29] Okay, okay.

John Dehlin [01:48:31] But yeah, the church is pretty much only for church services. Really quickly, did y' all start with like Pentecostal speaking in tongues kind of stuff during Ellen White's time? And then it was filtered out because that's how it was for us. We're dour now, but we didn't used to be.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:48:50] Apparently not. Apparently Ellen had her little Pentecostally thing when she was whatever the Pentecostal Methodist type of hybrid was. But once they even had some kind of kissing, religious kissing or something. I don't know. She was very scandalous at that period. But by the time it was the Adventist church, it was very sober and grim and dour.

John Dehlin [01:49:16] How's the congregation organized or managed in terms of duties, responsibilities, leadership positions?

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:49:22] Ah, yes. So there are, there's a lead pastor and if it's a huge church, there are several sub pastors. Of course, there's always A youth pastor. There are elders and deacons, and elders have some sort of function that I'm not quite sure. They kind of function between the pastoral staff and just the regular church people. Then the deacons do just the church administrative stuff, like dismissing rows of people after church. They pass the offering plate. They do, you know, that kind of labor sort of stuff. And they are, I think elders and deacons are volunteer only women. I guess women are now allowed to preach and even be like sort of pastors of a church, but they're not allowed to be ordained.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:50:11] Go figure. But other than that, they really don't hold much church. I know there are women who work for the General Conference, there are treasurers and whatever. And I'm sure that happens in the regular church stuff too, that women are allowed to have behind the scenes things. But as far as front facing, other than maybe a choir director, possibly, women are not, they are not seen or heard.

John Dehlin [01:50:36] So we have elders, we have deacons, we have male leadership and women mostly behind the scenes.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:50:43] Yeah, yeah. Oh, communion. Let's talk about communion. Because again, not the Catholics.

John Dehlin [01:50:50] So no transubstantiation.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:50:53] Right, right. And, and no wine. So Adventists. Adventists use grape juice. You guys use grape juice?

John Dehlin [01:50:58] We used to use grape. We used to use wine. Then we use grape juice. Now we use water. But.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:51:02] Oh, water.

John Dehlin [01:51:02] But originally, originally it was, it was grape juice and wine. Yeah.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:51:06] Okay, so Adventists use grape juice and little wafers. And there's no. Yeah, no transition substantiation. This is the symbol of. And they always make a big point of saying that. And you don't go up like the Catholics and the, the preacher doesn't give it to you. It's just passed in trays. And of course, as a kid you're

John Dehlin [01:51:25] like, why does everybody else get them

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:51:27] juice and crackers in church today? And you can't have it until you're baptized. And Adventist baptized at around 12,8. Okay, there you go. When, when. And I'm sure it's very similar for you guys. We aren't allowed to make any of our own decisions until we're out of the house. Right. If I were to choose at the age of 12 to say, decide I want to eat shrimp or bacon. Oh, hell no. That would never be allowed. But they give you this false autonomy at 12 to, you know, you can't get baptized before then because you have to make a conscious decision. It has to be your decision that you're choosing the church and God and

John Dehlin [01:52:02] all of that, because there's no influence no parental or social influence.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:52:06] None whatsoever. You are choosing of your own volition, your own adult full choice. So, yeah. So communion. And it only happens every 13 weeks? I think 12 or 13 weeks.

John Dehlin [01:52:21] We're weekly.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:52:22] Oh, okay, yeah. And then do you guys do foot wash?

John Dehlin [01:52:27] We do, but it's a super secret service called the second anointing, and most Mormons don't know about it, but we've covered it on Mormon stories. But Joseph Smith did foot washing, Jesus did foot washing, and elite, rich, select Mormons get the second anointing, which includes foot washing. What do y' all do with foot washing?

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:52:46] Do they. Do they wash each other's feet? Do we know how that works? Or is it like the Jesus washed other people's feet?

John Dehlin [01:52:56] I think at least a wife washes a husband's feet in the second anointing ordinance in the temple. But I'm unclear whether an apostle washes the wife and the husband's feet or that the wife just washes the husband's feet. But some of that goes on in the temple as part of a secret ordinance that most Mormons don't even know about, let alone receive. How does it work for you?

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:53:18] Oh, my gosh. So. So footwashing is usually associated with communion. I don't think it always happens on communion day, but somehow they are often done on the same day. And it's the grossest thing ever. It is. Basically they divide into men, a men's room and a women's room. And what you're supposed to do is choose someone that you don't know, or they chose to choose you and you're supposed to just humble yourself and wash your feet. And so. Or you just get paired up. They'll just like grab two people who come through the door and assign you over there with your basin of water and stuff. And so of course, as like 13, 14 year old kids, we ended up washing like 85 year old women's feet with their, like nasty pantyhose on or whatever. Oh, my God. It was the grossest thing. I mean, we still, a lot of us have nightmares.

John Dehlin [01:54:04] Corns and bunions.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:54:05] Yes, corns and bunions. And. Oh, I mean. And boys have the same stories about like old men's crusty feet or whatever and their toenails. And I mean, it was the most traumatic.

John Dehlin [01:54:14] Teenage girls aren't washing old men's feet.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:54:16] Yes, well, that's it. And apparently now they have couples rooms where you can go in with your. I don't know if you can do it. If you're probably not if you're not married, but married couples can go do it for each other so that. At least they don't. Yeah. But, yeah, it was just random.

John Dehlin [01:54:34] Interesting. Yeah. Well, we share that in a way.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:54:37] In a way we do that.

John Dehlin [01:54:38] Interesting.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:54:38] Funny.

John Dehlin [01:54:39] Yeah. Wow. But that's. It's way more ubiquitous for y', all, so. Yeah, interesting. How often was the foot washing thing?

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:54:47] It, I think, happens every 13 weeks, along with the communion. It seems like foot washing didn't happen quite as regularly, so maybe twice a year or something.

John Dehlin [01:54:58] Okay. Okay.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:55:00] I think it's kind of at the discretion of the pastor and the management, so I'm sure there are some weird creepies out there that make it. It happen more often.

John Dehlin [01:55:08] Do y' all have healings of the sick through laying on of hands?

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:55:13] Oh, my gosh. I remember hearing about that. And they do do it when people are dying. They do an oil. Oil and anointment.

John Dehlin [01:55:23] We do oil. An ointment. Yeah.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:55:24] Okay. It always makes me giggle because my mom, when her father was dying, they asked for olive oil. I guess it has to be olive oil, right? And my grandmother kept olive oil in the fridge, so they didn't have any available that was liquid. It was hard. And so my mom just grabbed some Crisco out from my mom's, a very practical woman. Grabbed the Crisco out from underneath the whatever. And she was like, this will do. This is fine. And we were all like, mom, it's supposed to be olive oil. Like, what are you doing to your father? He's dying and you're gonna.

John Dehlin [01:55:58] But it sounds like that's being kind of de. Emphasized. Synthesized over time.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:56:02] I think so. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:56:03] Interesting.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:56:04] Yeah. And the healing and laying on of hands. I definitely remember that. It feels like my father was involved in that because he was both a doctor and a pastor. And seems like they did do that kind of stuff. I just don't have much recall of exactly what it was.

John Dehlin [01:56:17] Interesting, interesting. But choirs, yes, Choirs, yes.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:56:22] Yeah. Choir is definitely. But again, no, like, super exciting. You know, you see these. These robust, amazing, like, African American churches who have these, like, incredible choirs. Ours were never that incredible. They were just kind of sober singing.

Positive Aspects of Adventist Community and Culture

John Dehlin [01:56:39] Okay. So if it's not too aversive for you, I do want to talk about maybe some of the perceived positive things about at least a few of them about your culture or practice.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:56:53] Okay.

John Dehlin [01:56:54] So, I mean, obviously, do you feel like by the time an average Seventh Day Adventist in the United States reaches adulthood, they have a pretty good education, even if it's Kind of a little bit culty or brainwashy.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:57:07] You know, I felt like I got a very good education. You know, I went on to a really great college that was not Adventist. And it was a positive. The education was a positive experience for me. Even though, of course we had creationism. So there was no. Sciences were pretty light, but I wasn't a science kid anyway.

John Dehlin [01:57:29] So no evolution.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:57:30] No evolution at all.

John Dehlin [01:57:31] What about how old was the Earth? Was it younger? So we have that. We have 6,000 years and no evolution.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:57:37] No evolution.

John Dehlin [01:57:39] Literal Adam and Eve.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:57:40] Yes, literal.

John Dehlin [01:57:41] Literal. Global flood with Noah's ark.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:57:44] Yes.

John Dehlin [01:57:44] Okay. Exactly.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:57:47] Dinosaurs were kind of a don't ask, don't tell. I've heard that you guys have a strange thing about dinosaurs, right?

John Dehlin [01:57:53] That dinosaurs lived on other planets, but when God reorganized Earth, he took material from other planets because material is eternal, created Earth. And the dinosaur fossils were remnants of animals because obviously dinosaurs don't meet the 6,000 year right timeline.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:58:12] Right.

John Dehlin [01:58:12] So a lot of us were taught that kind of weird folk doctrine growing up.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:58:17] So as far as I recall, we ignored the whole 6,000 year, like, deadline that the dinosaurs were killed in the flood.

John Dehlin [01:58:25] Okay.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:58:26] And. But now I'm sure they've had with carbon dating and all that stuff because, you know, I left in the late 80s, so there was not that much disproving that Adventists had to be faced with, like, had to be smacked upside the head with that has happened since. So I think they were just ignoring science at that point and saying dinosaurs were killed in the flood. But now I think. I think they accept that dinosaurs and the. And that the Earth is probably not just 6,000 years old.

John Dehlin [01:58:56] Yeah.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:58:56] And then what other. I don't think I never heard anyone be flat. Earthy.

John Dehlin [01:59:02] No, we're not that.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:59:03] But see what other kinds of strange. So, so we had. So I felt like we got a great education in, you know, like, I learned to write well ob. And those kinds of things. We had all the great math and whatever. Science was light and of course, classics. We weren't allowed to study the classics because the Greeks were all gay and they were. And they were sinful and were, you know, debauched. You know, we. So we. We weren't allowed to study Latin. We studied a lot of languages, but no Latin and no reading the classics.

John Dehlin [01:59:40] Stay away from Rome and Greece. Caligula and the Romans.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:59:44] Right, exactly. Bacchus.

John Dehlin [01:59:46] Pedophiles in the Roman legion.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:59:48] No, only homegrown pedophiles were not.

John Dehlin [01:59:52] That's so dark.

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:59:53] The classical ones.

John Dehlin [01:59:55] But

Melissa Duge Spiers [01:59:57] but so, I mean, I didn't feel like I got a very broad education, but what I did get was good, was good quality. I have heard from others, though, that, I mean, I think I was very fortunate because we were probably in that university and seminary setting that we had a lot of really good teachers who had come there for one thing or another. I've heard from others that their Adventist education was abominable and they felt like they got to college and knew nothing. So I don't know. I guess it was luck of the draw, maybe. But I certainly. That's one of the few things that I really value.

John Dehlin [02:00:33] Y' all have a thing about passivism, is that right? Yes. Now, that seems good to me in my values. Talk about that.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:00:40] Yes, we were actually. The only thing that I think is not so great about it is it was basically kind of forced. So we were taken away on a retreat, all of us, even the girls, our senior year, when ostensibly most of the boys were turning 18. And we had a weekend, basically lecture about pacifism and do not kill and blah, blah, blah. And they were all encouraged. And I don't know if they even had their selective service paperwork that they could fill out then or not, but they were encouraged to be.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:01:13] What do they call that? Conscientious objectors. And, you know, there's that very famous movie about the Seventh Day Adventist, Desmond Doss, I think his name was, that was made into Hacksaw Ridge, that was about him, good Adventist boy, being a conscientious objector and saving a million people in World War II.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:01:35] And of course, that wasn't out when we were taken for art. But I'm sure they heavily use that movie now as their propaganda. But I do. I think it's. It's wonderful that I. I don't know that I. I would ever even known that that was an option at that age if. If the school hadn't made us aware of it, that you could say, no, I'm not gonna take a gun and go kill people.

John Dehlin [02:01:58] Yeah. And then other than we've already talked about the Blue Zone kind of health, you know, I mean, how can it be to have a general prohibition of alcohol and tobacco and minimal meat and lots of vegetables? That's just flat out gonna lead to healthier society. So I'm sure you would say that's a relatively positive thing.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:02:24] Yeah, I think, you know, again, it's the control part of it is. The issue for me is that it was so heavily weighted as an ethical issue, as a moral issue, that we kids were terrified of overstepping it. And so that caused a lot of anxiety and caused a lot of eating disorders. A lot of, you know, when we talk about my book, I had an older sister and she was tortured for her food. She liked food a lot more than I did. And so it became this huge thing that she still has not gotten over. And she's nearly 60. And a lot of that was extremism of the Adventist health message. And so it can be taken to extreme. But the, but the basics, the fundamentals, other than the fact that spices are bad and inflame your lust. But, you know, like the fundamentals.

John Dehlin [02:03:14] Oh, so y' all are today not so good on spicy foods?

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:03:18] Well, you know, it's changed because they've, they're, they're so targeting the mission field where, again, everyone generally has more spicy.

John Dehlin [02:03:26] So things are getting watered down. But 20, 30, 40 years ago, spicy foods were discouraged.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:03:34] Like, you know, like I said, hot sauce. Yeah. We had no mustard even. We weren't allowed to use mustard. We weren't allowed to use pepper, what pepper was from the devil, etc. And now when I talk to younger, much younger ex Adventists who were from like, you know, Argentina or Peru or whatever, and they're like, we, we never in a million years ever heard in Adventist school that spices were bad. And I was like, yeah, yeah, you probably didn't, because that message didn't sell there, so they just forgot it.

John Dehlin [02:04:02] That's so wild. Yeah. It really is like a business.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:04:06] It is a business. It is a business.

John Dehlin [02:04:08] You just, you figure out your market.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:04:11] Yep.

John Dehlin [02:04:11] You know your market.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:04:12] Yep.

John Dehlin [02:04:13] And you tailor your product for your local market.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:04:16] Yeah. I even saw one of the Adventists, the more liberal Adventist publications was just publishing a couple of days ago, something like that, where I was like, wow, they're just saying the quiet part out loud, aren't they? Where it was, basically. Maybe our message about end times isn't selling well. Like, it, it brings people in during bad times, but it doesn't seem to sell well in good times, so maybe we should revamp that. And it was like, was it a message from God or was it not? Because why are you all of a sudden like, yeah, oh, maybe it's not sad, so perhaps we'll set it aside.

John Dehlin [02:04:47] Yeah. In 2026, ex Mormons are up in arms because the church is in this very. Because of the Internet and the global expansion the Mormon Church is, and the contraction of membership in the United States, the Mormon Church is in heavy adaptation mode. And so you know, like, all of a sudden, women can show their shoulders, and all of a sudden, Coke is served at byu. You. And, you know, the temple ceremony keeps changing. And ex Mormons now are furious that, like, things that were really bad and forbidden when they were growing up is now allowed.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:05:26] Right.

John Dehlin [02:05:26] Instead of being happy for all the positive changes, they're kind of angry.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:05:30] Yeah. Yeah. Because again, I think it was sold as a moral and an ethical issue. And it wasn't about the Coke after all, was it? You know, it was about, you told us we were going to hell for it, and now it's. So that's my only beef with the dietary rules and. And the fact that I don't know about more. Well, yeah, there's hypocrisy just baked into it. Like, the Adventists are really. They make this, which I think is really tasty. I love some of it. And they have for a hundred years made fake meat. They made fake meat way before it was a health thing. Worthington Foods. Oh, my God. Gosh. Fried chick. I will. I will jump over large objects for fry chick. It's basically. I think it's soy based, but it

John Dehlin [02:06:16] was like a chicken substitute.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:06:17] Yeah, like a chicken substitute. And they're these little patties and you can fry them up and they're like chicken nuggets, but they're really good.

John Dehlin [02:06:22] Who made them?

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:06:23] It's, I think, Worthington Foods. And now I think it's called Loma Linda Foods.

John Dehlin [02:06:27] Were they Seventh Day Adventist?

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:06:29] Seventh Day Adventist from the get go. And they've been making them for, literally, I think, 100 years. And, you know, way back before vegetarian food was a thing, they had all these veggie meats and so, like, impossible

John Dehlin [02:06:42] meat kind of stuff.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:06:42] Right. Impossible burgers. Since way before. And so that's. You'd think that's a great thing. But I mean, fried chick. A can of fried chick, which I can down in one sitting, has, I think, like three days worth of sodium in it. It has such high saturated fat. It's got so many ingredients that I can't even pronounce, you know, and it's just like, is that health food? You know? Okay, so again, the hypocrisy is sort of. And sugar. Oh, my gosh. You know, my mother will not have meat in her house. But the cupcakes and cookies and things stacked everywhere. Can't have lard in any of the cookies or cupcakes because that's a pig product. But you. You can have high saturated fat out the wazoo. You can have icing this thick. So again, the hypocrisy. Is it a healthy diet if you really follow it? Yes. But how many actually follow it?

John Dehlin [02:07:36] Yeah. Mormons have a huge sugar problem. They don't do alcohol, but they surely do sugar. And we all know now very large sodas and dirty sodas, that's becoming a national thing. But we also have. Yeah, we have this irony that we won't drink coffee or tea, but we'll have huge Diet Cokes or monster drinks and energy drinks. Which are way worse for you than a coffee. Right?

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:08:02] Yes. Oh, which I've never even had because they scare me.

John Dehlin [02:08:05] Yeah, but y' all have an obesity problem because we do. We. We have an obesity.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:08:09] Definitely. Definitely. I mean, places like Loma Linda, again, California has a, you know, not. It's a healthier place out there where the sun always shines and people are outdoors. But. But in general. Absolutely. I think the obesity problem is probably fairly similar to the general American population. Maybe a little bit lower.

John Dehlin [02:08:29] Okay.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:08:29] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:08:30] Okay. Okay. And I do want to ask about one last thing that I'm guessing is actually very positive. Whenever they've studied why actively religious people on average are a little bit happier, healthier than non active religious people. It's almost always the community element that's teased out. I'm guessing Seventh Day Adventist communities locally can be very beautiful. Tell me if that's right or wrong and describe what an average growing up as a child into adulthood. And we can talk about yours in the next episode. But generally speaking, do y' all do community pretty well with caveats?

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:09:12] Ooh, again, that's a hard one for me to answer because our family was very different and weird. We were not the average Adventist family in that way. So we'll. We'll talk about that. There are a lot of fun elements. Like the Adventists have something called Pathfinders for kids, which is basically a Girl Scout, Boy Scout hybrid. It's both sexes, you know, just everybody can join the same crew. They do a lot of the same stuff. They have the little sashes with the badges and you learn to tie knots and you learn to, you know, whatever. And they go on camping trips and they learn survival skills for end times, you know, and so that seems like that's really positive. I was never allowed to do that, but it seems like that's a really fun thing when. When kids aren't allowed to do other stuff. With non Adventists, that's a really cool.

John Dehlin [02:10:03] Was that ever offered outside your church? Because the Mormon Church had to jettison Boy Scouts because of all the child sexual abuse. But they haven't been able to come up with a good replacement. I'm surprised they didn't borrow your program.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:10:13] Well, as far as I know, it's only been an Adventist institution. I don't think they've opened it to anyone else or, or like SEED programmed it anywhere else. It also has a big sexual abuse problem. Just like the boys go and we'll cover that more. That is why I was not allowed to do it, but.

John Dehlin [02:10:31] Oh really? Yeah, your parents.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:10:33] But I only. I only found out much, much later why. But okay. Yeah, that's our teaser in this episode for join us next time. But so that part is good. You know, Adventists are just not as far as I ever saw, not terribly social, you know, with each other. With each other either. I mean there are potlucks after church, which is really fun time.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:10:56] Potluck was always a great thing to look forward to. And schools did wonderful social things. We had banquets because of course we couldn't have proms because proms involve dancing. But so you just got together and ate and got all dressed up.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:11:16] But Adventists are so. And again, maybe this is my family coloring it a bit, which I'm sure is true. But Adventists are so steeped in judgment. You know, judgment is righteous and it doesn't just stop with Jesus in the whatever millennium and whatever. It's judgment is a good thing in general. And so I just remember everyone being in the Adventist community being secretly just judgy, just judging everybody. People weren't doing this, people weren't doing that. That these people were this and that.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:11:51] There was a constant hierarchy of who was good, who was bad, etc, Mrs. So and so thinks she's too fancy. She always sits in the same place in church. I mean, you know, it was just endless like. But that again, might have just been the environment that my immediate environment.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:12:13] But I do think that it came down from Ellen White a bit where being social in general and having fun was not allowed. It was not encouraged. That's a waste of time. It could better be spent praying and reading your Bible and reading your Ellen White. And so having a great time was not a priority for Adventist culture ever.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:12:43] And also there was this whole thing, particularly with women, that. And I think maybe it's biblical that women getting together, bad things happen. It's gossip. And so there were no major women's circle fun things that I can remember seeing. Really encouraged.

Youth Programs, Missions, and Global Growth

John Dehlin [02:13:08] Do y' all have robust youth program kind of thing?

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:13:11] Youth programs again, There was always a youth past master. And then pathfinders. Pathfinders could go up to like teenage years if you wanted it to. Kind of like the Eagle Scout or whatever thing. But usually that was kind of an elementary school thing. And then usually the youth stuff centered around your school more than your church.

John Dehlin [02:13:31] Oh, cuz you're. Yeah. Because you're at school with all.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:13:33] Yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [02:13:34] Seventh Day Adventists.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:13:34] Yeah, exactly. So we had all kinds of school programs and volunteer stuff that we did to together and we would go out and, you know, weed the garden for the local old people's home or you know, just all that kind of stuff that we were. We did together.

John Dehlin [02:13:49] Do you have weird rules about dating as teenagers?

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:13:51] Oh, yes. Oh yes. Marriage and family. Class gave. We really weren't supposed to be to date. Seriously, that was just a bad thing. But people did. And there were no hard and fast, like no touching or side hugs or whatever. A lot of that I think is codified in other religions. We never had that particular stuff. It was always just very tightly watched over by school administration. Anytime there was a field trip or there was a banquet or anything, because again, no proms, but banquets, you had to sit a certain amount of width apart and no holding hands. They would go around and do hand checks and that. That kind of stuff. So.

John Dehlin [02:14:39] Okay, and were y' all okay with. I know Joe's witnesses have a problem with birthdays and Pledge of Allegiance. You were okay with those things?

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:14:46] No, we. We had no rules on either of those.

John Dehlin [02:14:49] Yeah, patriotism's okay.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:14:50] Yeah, patriotism was okay. In fact, a lot of Adventists are very MAGA now. Very. But yeah, we did the Pledge of Allegiance in school and they. Yeah, birthdays, Christmas, everything is celebrated. We weren't allowed to believe in Santa or the Easter bunny. That was like false. False idling or whatever. But you could still do the Easter egg hunt. And as long as you went to church and they talked to you about what the real meaning every year it's the real meaning of Easter. And same thing for Christmas. But we had Christmas trees and presents and, you know, birthdays.

John Dehlin [02:15:28] Now wait, was your Easter on Sunday or was your Easter.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:15:30] Easter was on Sunday, but they do church on Saturday and there's a whole all of Saturday before is looking. You know, often there's the emphasis of this is when Jesus was dead. And they talk about the fact that, you know, and tomorrow he will rise and we will all celebrate his rising. But we didn't have to have a service on that day.

John Dehlin [02:15:51] Okay, okay, okay. So that explains youth programs. That makes a lot of sense. Okay, but what about somebody sick? Casserole, food trains, that kind of thing, like member support of each other when people are poor or sick or needy or afflicted or there's a death, funerals, that kind of stuff.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:16:16] Yeah, those were as far as, again, as far as my experience, those were always just kind of, kind of locally organized with just the people who knew them. It was never like a stand up in front of the pulpit and say, okay, everybody on Wednesday we're going to do a this and that. But there are, there are lots of outreach organizations forever. My mother worked in what was called Dorcas, which was the kind of like the equivalent of Goodwill or Salvation army, but they just gave things away. It wasn't a shopping thing, but that's where all Adventists would donate their goods and then the Adventist ladies would sort them and glean them and then give them out to people in the, in the church that they knew needed them or anyone who was poor in the church could come and get things.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:17:03] So most of the larger church areas has a Dorcas, where that's just known and food is there also. So that must have. And again, I was never old enough to participate in those, but that must have some official structure of running and organizing those things because it is pretty ubiquitous.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:17:27] And they even do some outreach to non Adventists. Dorcas is primarily to benefit Adventist members, but they do do organized outreach to. Right now they're sponsoring. I know my parents church a few years ago had been sponsoring immigrants and they would be, I guess anyone from the mission field that was deemed worthy is brought over for a sponsored immigrant visa and then is. They devote a lot of time and money to. They get them places to live, they get them job training, English lessons, etc. Get them all set up to be a functioning immigrant just sliding right into society, which is really admirable. But of course they have to be Adventist or I'm sure they lose all those benefits. Right.

John Dehlin [02:18:15] Do you all happen to have a online university system to bring people outside the US to get them a college education? We've pivoted towards that.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:18:25] I'm sure they do. I haven't looked it up, but I'm sure they do. Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:18:30] What about. Oh, missionary work. Who's a missionary?

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:18:34] Ooh. Oh, yeah, that's because that's, I think, totally different. There used to be, it was called Cole Portering. C O L P O R T E U R I think Cole Portering. And that was the old School door to door knocking like. Like Mormons and JWs do. Like you took your great controversy copy and you knocked on people, people's doors and you tried to either give them or sell them a copy and you tried to talk to them about Jesus Christ. You know, same old door to door thing that, you know, has been done forever. Adventists don't really do that anymore. They've been cold mailing these great controversy books to people, which I'm sure has a very low rate of success.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:19:13] And then mission field, like going either outside the United States or to the native reservations within. In the United States, anybody can sign up to be a missionary, but there is no requirement to ever serve a mission term.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:19:31] So when we were teenagers and stuff, there really was not that much emphasis made even on going mission to the mission field. It was kind of if you feel the calling. And I never felt the calling and I always thought it was really horrible and racist. So I didn't. But.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:19:50] And people go. And it's this very classic colonizing in the name of Jesus where they go sweeping into an underserved community of any sort at home or abroad. And they offer English lessons, good old Adventist healthcare and education. They build churches, they build hospitals or clinical clinics. They dig wells. And in exchange they get a bunch of very grateful Adventists because they're offering a lot of things that aren't available.

John Dehlin [02:20:28] Yeah. So English lessons and water and sanitation. That's just smart. We've had that in our work. We're moving away from proselyting, but service seems like a really smart way to get converts.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:20:43] Yep.

John Dehlin [02:20:44] Yeah.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:20:44] Yep.

John Dehlin [02:20:44] And y' all do that?

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:20:45] Absolutely.

John Dehlin [02:20:46] So. Yeah. So how are you growing in Africa? In leaps and bounds. If you don't have mandatory missionary work. Who's. Who's growing the church in Africa or is it locally grown at this point

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:20:57] because it's been going for so long? I think a lot of it is local.

John Dehlin [02:21:00] Fascinating.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:21:01] There are certain. I can't remember. I know Uganda, I think maybe Ghana. A couple African countries even have very hot tie up Adventist officials in their official government.

John Dehlin [02:21:16] That's smart.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:21:17] Yeah. And they are very active on the local politics as well. So, I mean, some. Some of the African countries are very Adventist eyes, just in general. Places like Jamaica, I think Jamaica is like 70 Adventist or something. Now, the last time I heard the statistic, I was like, what?

John Dehlin [02:21:36] We've got and Tonga covered, But sounds like y' all have Jamaica.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:21:41] We have Jamaica, apparently.

John Dehlin [02:21:42] Yeah. Interesting.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:21:44] Interestingly, Usain Bolt was an Adventist. Had to leave the Adventist church So that he could compete.

John Dehlin [02:21:51] No, I had no idea. I was gonna just say that. In my prep, I noticed y' all don't have like Tom Cruise or John Travolta for Scientologists or Donny Marie Osmond.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:22:03] Right.

John Dehlin [02:22:04] Or Steve Young for the Mormons. Y' all don't have well known Seventh Day Adventist celebrities.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:22:13] Right. Because they basically can't do anything that would be celebrated. It's all forbidden by the church. Right. So we have entertainment.

John Dehlin [02:22:21] Entertainment?

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:22:22] Oh, hell no.

John Dehlin [02:22:23] No, I mean, dancing is bad.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:22:25] We weren't even allowed to have a television. We weren't allowed to listen to popular music. It's all from the devil. That. No movies, no anything. Oh, gosh. So we have a lot of celebrated ex Adventists, like Usain Bolt, a couple of NBA basketball players. Were. Magic Johnson was raised Adventist.

John Dehlin [02:22:43] No, I did not know that. In Michigan. Oh, he was from Michigan.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:22:48] Oh, I didn't even know where he was from. But apparently he was raised Adventist. Prince, Little Richard.

John Dehlin [02:22:55] I thought Prince was Joe's Witness.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:22:57] He did. Later in life he became a Jehovah's Witness, but he was raised in his young years as Little Richard as. And Little Richard. Our famous one right now who's still Adventist is Ben Carson.

John Dehlin [02:23:10] Okay, wait, remind me who he was.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:23:12] A presidential candidate who then became a Trump lackey.

John Dehlin [02:23:15] He was. Is he black? Okay, yeah.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:23:17] Okay.

John Dehlin [02:23:18] Okay.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:23:18] And he now is. He was.

John Dehlin [02:23:21] He was like Attorney General. General or something.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:23:22] Yeah, he was in the Trump. First Trump administration. He became Department of Transportation or something.

John Dehlin [02:23:28] I think I'm confusing.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:23:30] And then he wrote a. A chapter or more in Project 2025.

John Dehlin [02:23:34] Okay, all right, but.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:23:38] And who else? Ex Adventist notable. Famously Black Sabbath. Supposedly none of them were Adventists.

John Dehlin [02:23:47] Osborne.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:23:48] Yeah, but they got the name Black Sabbath from some encounter with Adventism somehow. And I'm not sure how that translates, but. But yeah, you can't really have current Adventists who are famous for anything because it's all forbidden. Really?

John Dehlin [02:24:04] Google's telling me that Malcolm X was originally a seventh day.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:24:08] Yes, yes.

John Dehlin [02:24:09] And he grew up in Michigan, so that.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:24:11] Yes, that's right. Malcolm X. And also we have a lovely number in the Adventist. Hate for me to say this, but serial killers. Robert Lee Yates was an Adventist deacon while he was murdering and killing people, burying them in his yard, where he had all of his little Adventist raised children running and playing.

John Dehlin [02:24:32] David Koresh was the Adventist.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:24:34] David Koresh and the Branch Davidians, they were both Adventist, and that was two separate things until Koresh took over the Branch Davidians. But they were All Adventist. And anyone who survived the Branch Davidian debacle, Pretty much everyone says most of them went back to Adventist churches. Marcus Wesson, the famous awful family cult guy who ended up killing a lot of his children. Anthill Kids, another really, really awful cult that started Adventist.

John Dehlin [02:25:07] I see that RFK's assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, was a Seventh Day Adventist, apparently.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:25:12] Oh, I forgot about that, too. Oh, my gosh. Oh, my gosh.

John Dehlin [02:25:18] That's funny, buddy.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:25:21] Oh, my goodness.

John Dehlin [02:25:23] Reducults have really dark true crime kind of connections.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:25:27] Totally, totally makes sense. You know, they just.

John Dehlin [02:25:31] We've got our own, of course.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:25:33] Yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [02:25:33] Jodi Hildebrandt, Ruby, Frankie. What?

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:25:36] Ted Bundy.

John Dehlin [02:25:37] Ted Bundy. Yep, yep, yep. And probably all cultures have, you know, serial killers and child molesters.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:25:44] Yeah, yeah.

Salvation, Heaven, and Comparing the Two Churches

John Dehlin [02:25:45] Okay, really quickly, what about what gets you into heaven? Who goes to heaven? What happens with marriages in heaven and what happens with families in heaven? For you guys.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:25:58] Oh, my goodness. Marriages and families are allowed to stay intact. As far as I remember and recall, that is all fine and dandy. Ellen White did write a very nasty letter to someone at one point and told them that God had killed their children here on earth because they were insufficiently giving their tithes and weren't being good enough Adventists. So she believed that God would separate families on Earth? Apparently. But. But yeah. How do people get into heaven? It's faith by grace, not by works. Right. So as long as you ask for forgiveness, you will always be able to get into heaven, is their basic line.

John Dehlin [02:26:51] Do non Adventists make it into heaven?

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:26:55] I believe so. If they have accepted Jesus and the Adventist proselytization before they die, but they didn't have to be officially baptized or anything.

John Dehlin [02:27:09] What happens if people didn't even hear about Seventh Day Adventism in their lifetime?

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:27:13] Yes. So the way it was told to me anyway was if they've never heard the message, then they're able to go to heaven. If they were good people. But if they've ever heard the message and rejected. No matter how good they were, they are not.

John Dehlin [02:27:30] We have that. It's called a Son of Perdition. If you've received the witness and then denied it or, you know, turned it down, but then somehow, if you never. You could be a serial killer. But if you've never heard of it.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:27:42] Right.

John Dehlin [02:27:42] Somehow you get a pass.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:27:44] Right.

John Dehlin [02:27:44] None of that makes sense.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:27:45] Right. Or if you were a serial killer and then you converted at the last minute, suddenly you're okay to go to heaven.

John Dehlin [02:27:52] That's so dumb.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:27:53] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:27:54] What's Heaven, like for a Seventh Day Adventist. What do you do?

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:27:56] Oh my gosh, it's so funny that I, I remember people talking about in, in sermons even. We'll all meet at the eighth palm tree down the gold road on the right, inside the heaven's gates. I'll be waiting for all of you. You know, they have this weird like little child vision of there are gonna be lions and tigers, tigers that you can play with. Although they tell you that your pets aren't allowed to go to heaven. But there will be. It won't matter because there will be. You'll be able to have dolphins as pets if you want. And there are. It's just. But yeah, the streets paved with gold.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:28:34] And I don't. There's not a whole lot of harp playing and cloud sitting. I don't know, it's just basically kind of. It's just going to be all good and praising Jesus. Everybody, everyone's going to sing Jesus praises every day, all day into eternity. As if that's.

John Dehlin [02:28:52] How is that compelling to anyone?

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:28:54] I have no idea. It sounds like absolute hell to me.

John Dehlin [02:28:57] And what type of God just wants people spending eternity worshiping and adoring?

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:29:00] Right, Right. Well, what kind of a narcissist is it? Yeah, totally.

John Dehlin [02:29:05] Okay, interesting.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:29:08] And you'll just have all the food you can eat. Anything you can, you know.

John Dehlin [02:29:14] Wow. Yeah. What a lame heaven. But somehow people don't think it through. Yeah, interesting.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:29:19] I guess if you're telling people they cannot have any fun in this life, you have to make it sound like it's this weird like Pollyanna, you can have anything, do anything thing. Because since you're telling them they can't have or do anything here, it's the weirdest, weirdest dynamic.

John Dehlin [02:29:34] So you're kind of anti fun. It's kind of an anti fun thing.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:29:37] Very anti fun.

John Dehlin [02:29:38] I don't think that. I don't think I dropped Drew that point out enough, but that sounds characteristic of your religion. Is like fun is bad.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:29:46] Very. And that was an Ellen White thing. Absolutely. For sure. And I, I can remember even not this last general conference meeting because that was. They have it every four years and the one before this. So six years ago people were complaining because the general conference president literally sat and droned onward for like two hours reading Ellen White's diets on health about like, have more fiber, eat more, blah, blah. I mean, just talk about not fun. People flew from all over the world for this conference meeting. And that's what he decided to.

John Dehlin [02:30:23] I mean, no, our church services can often be very, very boring. And our general conference talks can be very, very boring. Yeah. And interesting. Yeah. And just to contrast, like, probably the most joyful part of my upbringing was church dances.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:30:43] Oh, yeah.

John Dehlin [02:30:44] Where in our local congregation. But then across the city we would have these banger dances every Saturday night.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:30:52] Sounds amazing.

John Dehlin [02:30:53] Yeah. Where we would dance and sing and get to know each other and have fun. Like, dances were so central to my Mormon youth experience.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:31:01] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:31:01] I can't imagine not having that going.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:31:03] We didn't have anything even equivalent at all. The only wonderful thing that I associate with church itself was the organ music. And we had a really good organist who was literally like Phantom of the Opera. And he would just go off and you could just feel it vibrate in your body. And that's about the only thing that I remember looking forward to about any of our. Our religious anything as a kid, you know.

John Dehlin [02:31:28] And is divorce discouraged?

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:31:30] Divorce is highly discouraged, absolutely. I mean, I think it was pretty forbidden for a long time, but is now occurring.

John Dehlin [02:31:39] Yeah. Okay. And I'm sure abortion's bad.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:31:42] Abortion is bad, yes. Oh, absolutely. And again, it always divorce. And abortion, of course, weighs heavily on the wind. Women divorce is usually the woman's fault in some way. She should have just stuck by her man because he was the head of the household. And abortion, of course, is always the woman's thing because she should have just kept her legs closed. So, you know, they ignore all the fine points there.

John Dehlin [02:32:09] Corporal punishment.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:32:10] Oh, yes, yes.

John Dehlin [02:32:11] So parents spank kids.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:32:13] Yes, absolutely. Ellen White advocates it to some extent. Mostly she advocated psychological abuse of children, but. But Adventists did. Like my parents, My mom was definitely a James Dobson reader of, you know, just Dare to discipline and the. The strong willed child. I was the strong willed child. You know, I got beat with hairbrushes and cello bows and, you know, belts, so.

John Dehlin [02:32:42] Okay, well, I think. I think we have a pretty good overview of the Seventh Day Adventist. Well, not just the Seventh Day Adventist. Oh, how wealthy? Do you have any? Is there a number? Like, globally? Our church is. The Mormon Church now is estimated to be somewhere between 300 and $500 billion in assets and wealth. Do y' all have any idea what your number. Cause you say we're in the top five.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:33:07] Yeah, I don't. I'm sure those lists say a number and the number. Numbers are always so absurd to me that I just don't even. I just look at the. The place number in the list and I haven't looked at. Yeah, that would be an interesting.

John Dehlin [02:33:24] I'm Just googling it right now. And it's. Okay, so y' all are better than Scientology. Nowhere near Mormons. So it's saying 15 to 16 billion worldwide.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:33:36] Okay, I was going to say maybe 15 to 20 billion, but that was just spitballing and that's.

John Dehlin [02:33:40] But you know, normally that would sound like a lot of money, but that's chump change.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:33:44] Chump change to the Mormons.

John Dehlin [02:33:45] Yeah, yeah.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:33:46] Especially since you guys are, what did you say? Almost half as small as we are.

John Dehlin [02:33:50] So I mean we have like 4, 4, 4 million active self identifying members at this point.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:33:57] Oh, wow.

John Dehlin [02:33:58] Now we claim 17 million.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:34:00] Okay, got it.

John Dehlin [02:34:00] But that's funny numbers.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:34:02] Okay.

John Dehlin [02:34:02] Because two thirds of the people that convert to the church or race in the church. Leave it. Okay, so. So we're a shrinking church with empty buildings and a stock stock portfolio that beats most Fortune 500 companies out of control. Yeah. That's amazing because we like billionaires.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:34:21] You like billionaires?

John Dehlin [02:34:21] Unlike you guys. Yeah.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:34:23] I seem to get with the program. They're so last year.

John Dehlin [02:34:27] Maybe y' all can massage that part of your future.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:34:31] Exactly.

John Dehlin [02:34:33] All right, well we have to end with money because that's what it really is all about at the end of the day is religions or businesses. Too often. So anyway, what a wonderful two and a half hours. I learned so much. And are you surprised at the similarities?

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:34:49] I am shocked. In a delightful way. Just again.

John Dehlin [02:34:53] And meaningful differences. But yes, way more similarities than differences.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:34:57] Way more similar similarities. It just makes me giggle to no end because that whole we're so special, we're the only ones, blah, blah, blah is just a bunch of crap. And it's very fun to go through it.

John Dehlin [02:35:08] Yeah. The structures are so similar, but there's just some cafeteria menu items that are exactly like dancing for us. No, dancing for you. Sunday observance for us. Saturday for you. But like the shame, the obedience, the sexual purity, the guilt, the money, like you know, exclusivity, exclusivity, end times, like that's all you know that that's unites us, right?

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:35:36] It does, absolutely.

John Dehlin [02:35:37] And the abuse, don't forget the abuse.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:35:39] And the abuse which we're going to

John Dehlin [02:35:40] talk about next is a great segue. Okay, so thank you for joining us for part one of this epic interview. Male Melissa. Again, I'm gonna pronounce your name right. Melissa Doogie Spires.

Melissa's Book, Closing Reflections, and Farewell

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:35:53] Look at you.

John Dehlin [02:35:54] Thank you so much for educating us. Can you please show us your book one more time?

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:35:59] Absolutely.

John Dehlin [02:36:00] And plug it. We'll do that at the beginning of end event. Tell Us, the book again.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:36:03] Holy sex, sin and secrets in the biggest church. No one knows. Okay, we're gonna talk about that next time.

John Dehlin [02:36:11] So next episode will be your story.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:36:13] Yes.

John Dehlin [02:36:14] Yeah. Your upbringing and your personal story.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:36:17] Fourth generation. Now, now, Ex Adventist. All the gruesome details about what it's like to leave and then go through life and discover that you really haven't gotten it out of your system.

John Dehlin [02:36:30] Yeah, because, like, it doesn't wash off, as I like to say. Yeah.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:36:34] It's embedded and unless you really dig it out, it just keeps popping up. It's like, you know, chopping off one head and the next one grows. It's.

John Dehlin [02:36:42] And y' all are called Adventists? Is that how you self describe? Yep.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:36:46] People call it the SDA Church for short or Seventh Day Adventists, but we just call them Adventists because it's.

John Dehlin [02:36:52] You call yourself Adventist? You would say I'm an Adventist.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:36:54] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:36:55] Okay. All right, well, thanks again. Please buy, buy your book. Share it with everyone. Is there an audiobook?

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:37:02] There is an audiobook and I got to read it and maybe I can talk a little bit about that because it was a really fun experience. I was. I was dreading it. And now it just, it. It feels so intimate to be able to just like connect with a reader that way and know that they're hearing my voice, talk, say, my experience. I love it.

John Dehlin [02:37:19] How many total hours did you spend

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:37:21] recording and re recording the audiobook is 8 and a half hours long, I think. And so I probably spent twice that. I would imagine. Yeah, it was quite intense, which is mostly why I was dreading it. But I also, I didn't know if I was going to cry through half of it. You know, I just didn't know. And so it was a fun. I totally. Somebody told me that they were listening to the audio as they read the print or the ebook copy and I thought, wow. She said, I'm doing an immersive experience. And I thought, wow. Not even sure I could do that. But that's really cool.

John Dehlin [02:37:54] That's cool. All right, so buy the book, buy the audiobook. Buy them both. Read them. Listen to them both. Share it with friends. Melissa, thank you so much for joining us on part one of youf Mormon Stories episode. Let's take a little break. Come back. Don't forget, come back. Because her story is epic. It's got all of the things, unfortunately, including child sexual abuse coverups, which is pretty much every high demand religion or cult these days as well. So stay tuned. Come back for part two of our Interview with Melissa Doogie Spires. Thanks, Melissa.

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:38:29] Thank you.

John Dehlin [02:38:29] Thank you. All right, and thanks for joining us today on Mormon Stories. Please email us@mormonstoriesmail.com we love your feedback. Please subscribe and like and share this channel. You know that we're on Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, all the different social medias, Spotify. Please give us positive reviews, like us, subscribe to us, share us, et cetera. And again, we exist through the generosity of our donors, so. So if you're a donor, thank you. We couldn't do this without you. If you value this content and you're not a donor and you want to see us continue, please go to mormonstories.org donate and become a monthly donor. We are currently being sued by the Mormon Church. You're laughing. Why in the world would you laugh at that?

Melissa Duge Spiers [02:39:12] Because we were talking about how our churches were so litigious.

John Dehlin [02:39:15] Oh, your church is litigious as well? Okay. All right. Well, in spite of Melissa's laughter, we are being currently sued by the Mormon Church for alleged trademark and copyright violations. When in reality, it's my personal belief, based on the church's behavior in mediation, that they want to silence, bankrupt, and destroy Mormon Stories podcast. So if you don't want to see a Goliath bully, a small nonprofit with its hundreds of billions of dollars, and you wanna support us, you can go to mormonstories.org legal and donate to our legal defense fund. And it's a two or three million dollars lawsuit to defend, so I can pretty much guarantee you that your donations are gonna go towards our legal fees.

John Dehlin [02:40:03] So, anyway, thanks for supporting us. Tune in next episode for another episode with Melissa. Be good to each other. Be kind to each other. Thanks to Julia Brooklyn for all you do behind the scenes. And we'll see you all again soon on another episode of Mormon Stories podcast. Take care.

Transcript © 2026 John P. Dehlin. All rights reserved. Brief quotations are welcome with attribution and a link to mormonstories.org; all other use requires written permission.