Leaving the Seventh-day Adventist Church - Melissa Duge Spiers Pt. 2 | Ep. 2150
Mormon Stories Podcast
Dr. John Dehlin
4.5 • 5.7K Ratings
🗓️ 21 May 2026
⏱️ 142 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In Part 2 of our series on Seventh-day Adventism, Melissa Spiers shares her personal story of growing up as a fourth-generation Adventist in a deeply religious family shaped by strict lifestyle rules, purity culture, and constant pressure to perform spiritually.
Melissa describes her experience navigating SDA education systems, thought control, and the intense expectations placed on young women within the church. She also discusses her eventual move away from Adventism, and the complicated relationship between religion, identity, and personal freedom.
Another major focus of this episode is Melissa’s discovery of abuse within her own family, the response from Seventh-day Adventist leadership, and the broader systems she believes protect abuse within high-control religious institutions. She shares how these experiences affected her relationships, mental health, and eventual religious deconstruction.
Throughout the conversation, Melissa reflects on healing, rebuilding life outside of religion, and the challenges many people face after leaving high-demand faith communities. We also discuss her new memoir, "Holy Disobedience: Sex, Sin, and Secrets in the Biggest Church No One Knows".
You can purchase it here.
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Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Attention all passengers. |
| 0:04.1 | The Uber ride for Jeff's rugby team will depart in five minutes from Platform 15. |
| 0:09.7 | Your ride comes with six toilets and a refreshment's carriage that you'll empty within five minutes. |
| 0:16.5 | Thank you for booking your tickets on Uber. |
| 0:20.3 | Trains on Uber. |
| 0:22.0 | Take this Holland and Barrett ad break to listen to your body. |
| 0:25.2 | Is your body after some energy support from Solgars magnesium citrate? |
| 0:29.0 | Or maybe it's after a kick of applied nutrition critical weight protein for leg day. |
| 0:34.2 | Is it looking to iron out tiredness with Vitabiotic ferroglobin? Or is your body simply saying, |
| 0:39.9 | You've got to show me love. Find the brands that help you back your body at Holland and Barrett. |
| 0:45.9 | Magnesium contributes to normal energy-yielding metabolism. Protein contributes to the growth |
| 0:49.2 | and maintenance and muscle mass. Iron contributes to reduction of tiredness and fatigue. |
| 0:52.3 | Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of Mormon Stories podcast. |
| 0:55.6 | I'm John DeLinn. It is May 13th, 2026, and we are here for part two of our, I'll say, |
| 1:04.2 | from a Mormonist story's perspective, groundbreaking series on looking into the Seventh-day Adventist Church. And we are here with a brilliant, |
| 1:15.0 | entertaining, fascinating, gripping storyteller. We are here with Melissa Dugie Spires. |
| 1:20.5 | Hey, Melissa. Hi. Thanks so much for joining us. So excited for part two. We had so much |
| 1:25.4 | fun in part one. So this is going to be good. |
| 1:27.7 | Yeah. |
| 1:32.9 | So if you're just joining us for the first part of this series, you need to know that we already recorded two and a half hours-ish part one where we did an extensive history of the Seventh-day Adventist |
| 1:40.5 | movement and hopefully not in too annoying of a way, drew a gazillion parallels between |
| 1:46.9 | the Church of Jesus Christ of Lattery Saints or the Mormon movement and the Seventh-day Adventist |
... |
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