Purity Culture, Predators, and End-Times Hysteria | Melissa Duge Spiers on Life Inside Adventism

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Melissa Duge Spiers is an award-winning essayist, screenwriter, and advocate for topics of religious and narcissistic abuse, utilizing her online platforms (TikTok and Instagram: “The Glory Whole”). Her memoir Holy Disobedience won the 2021 Book Pipeline Unpublished Nonfiction Manuscript prize, with excerpts featured in The Huffington Post. Melissa’s writing appears in magazines nationwide, and she’s a contributor to Take the Fruit: An Anthology of Religious Trauma.

Also a runner, cheese lover, and life-long vintage collector, Melissa holds a B.A. in English Literature from Barnard College at Columbia University and is based in California.

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About Holy Disobedience:

“Spiers’s writing is propulsive and intelligent.” —Tia Levings, author of the New York Times bestselling A Well-Trained Wife

Holy Disobedience is a gripping, unflinching story by Melissa Duge Spiers about growing up in the shadow of control, silence, and secrets within the strict, fundamentalist Seventh-day Adventist Church. When Melissa learns that her father, a respected pastor, was a serial child predator shielded by the church, her world implodes. But this revelation is only the beginning.

From being beaten for resisting a childhood home perm to seducing a forbidden public-school athlete to reclaim her autonomy, Melissa’s early years were shaped by repression, shame, and indoctrination. Her escape from high-control religion launched her into a life of risk: Wall Street jobs, New York nightclubs, Hollywood hookups, and a series of abusive relationships. And yet, in these extremes, she was searching. Through self-reflection and finding her voice, and through an unexpected friendship with her father's first victim, Melissa slowly reconstructs the self she was never allowed to know.

Holy Disobedience is not just a survivor’s tale. It’s a story of fierce honesty, radical freedom, and the beautiful mess of becoming whole.

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If you or someone you know has experienced abuse, visit courage365.org/need-help

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The content presented in this video is for informational and educational purposes only. All individuals and entities discussed are presumed innocent until proven guilty through due legal process. The views and opinions expressed are those of the speakers.

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Music by Lou Ridley — “Bible Belt” | Used with permission under license.

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