This podcast explains how Seventh-day Adventism fits the BITE model of mind control. Nikki and Colleen discuss the Adventist beliefs and practices that reflect the classic Behavior, Information, Thought, and Emotional control that characterizes cults. Podcast was published October 8, 2019. Transcription by Gwen Billington.
Colleen: Welcome to Former Adventist podcast. I’m Colleen Tinker.
Nikki: And I’m Nikki Stevenson.
Colleen: And we’re here with our coffee. I guess you have your water too.
Nikki: Yes.
Colleen: You got the Health Message down correctly. This week, Nikki, you’ve been doing some research on how cults use mind-control to manage their members. I know to say that word “cult” is probably eliciting knee-jerk reactions in people, because I remember when I left Adventism, I remember being certain I did not leave a cult, at least I did not leave a cult. But, as time went on and I began to learn what I hadn’t actually understood about the religion that I left, I had to rethink whether or not it was a cult. So you’ve been reading from a man named Steven Hassan, who is a well-known expert on cults, and he has written quite extensively about how they operate. He has developed a model which he uses an acronym to describe, BITE, B-I-T-E, and this acronym, this method that he’s developed describes the specific methods that cults use to recruit and maintain control over people. Would you tell us a bit about that, Nikki?
Nikki: So the BITE model is an acronym, and the B stands for Behavior Control, the I is Information Control, the T is Thought Control, and the E is Emotional Control, and under each of these forms of control, he has a list of ways that cults will use what he calls undue influence to keep members in or things they use to recruit them into the cult. As I was looking through them, I couldn’t help but furiously write examples that I experienced and saw inside of Adventism, and like you, I was very unsure about that word “cult” when I first came out.
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: But through this research, over the last 10 years it’s become very clear to me, and not just to me. I see more and more people who have left Adventism comfortable with using the terms.
Colleen: I’ve noticed that too, yes. Well, why don’t we just talk about these four things, these four different kinds of control, and just examine, just from our own experience, how we might have seen this working inside of Adventism, and I think it’s worth explaining that this Steven Hassan sees cults as something separate from Christianity.
Nikki: Yes. Yes, he acknowledges that there is general religion and then there are cultic groups, and this is really about, really, mind-control and brainwashing techniques.
Colleen: So he is not describing – he is not describing something that we could say, “Well, you could say that about Christianity too.”
Nikki: Right, right.
Colleen: No, he is talking about specific groups that are modeled with mind-control and management of membership.
Nikki: Yes. This is intentional, and in a lot of cases, it is deceptive.
Colleen: Okay. So, why don’t we start with that first one.
Nikki: Okay. So under Behavior Control, one of the first ones that he mentions – and I do want to say that if you go on his website and you look at these, you’ll see that he has several things listed under each category, and he says that they don’t have to fit every single suggestion that he has in here. So under Behavior Control, the first thing listed there is that they promote dependence and obedience, and I really saw that happening with the authorities within Adventism. If you had questions, you went to the authorities to ask them.
Colleen: Absolutely, yes.
Nikki: Within Adventism, not outside.
Colleen: Right. Oh, absolutely. And I know that when I grew up, I grew up in a very observant Adventist family, and definitely, my parents functioned with me and my sister from a perspective of Adventism.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: And they explained it as Biblical. I realize now it was Adventist as opposed to Biblical, but I was not allowed to think outside the box. Obedience to them was tantamount to obeying God. In fact, I was taught that obeying what my parents said was the way I obeyed God, and if I did not obey them, I was not obeying God and I was a bad girl. And if I was a bad girl, I really would not be able to be saved ultimately. And I was also taught that God did not love naughty children, because Ellen White said that.
Nikki: She did. She wrote that. I remember reading that as I was leaving.
Colleen: So within the family structure, within the school structure, within just the culture of Adventism, dependence on the Adventist authorities and obedience to their interpretations of reality were important.
Nikki: Yes, um-hmm. So, the next one is modify behavior with rewards and punishments. You were sharing a little bit about that. Can you explain how that worked in your life?
Colleen: Well, in my life it again worked mostly through my family and through their interactions with our local church and, of course, Adventist schools for me as well, but I didn’t get so many rewards, but I did get a lot of punishments, and if my behavior was embarrassing to my mother or my father, or if I cast some sort of negative light on the family, there would be a punishment. There were lots of harsh punishments. That could be argued that that’s not specifically Adventist, but in my case, it was all wrapped up together, and it always was presented to me my disobedience or my need for punishment was about becoming good so that I would be acceptable to God. It was always framed that way.
Nikki: Now, this other one I didn’t know a lot about. We didn’t talk about this in my generation of Adventism. It wasn’t until I left that I learned that there was so much said about this. So the next one is restrict or control sexuality. Can you talk about how Ellen White did that in her writings?
Colleen: Well, she did write about these things. I remember my surprise – actually, I believe I was still inside Adventism when I first read this, but I remember my surprise when I realized that she had actually written that wives are not to undress in front of their husbands because it would excite their animal passions. She also wrote that communion in an Adventist church, and probably most of the people listening to us understand that communion in an Adventist church is preceded by footwashing.
Nikki: Right.
Colleen: So footwashing, she said, was not to be practiced with men and women in mixed groups. So from the get-go, sexuality was discouraged except for procreation. Many Adventists believed that sex was not to be engaged in on the Sabbath. Sabbath is holy, sex is fleshly. It may be allowed for procreation, but we wouldn’t want to defame the Sabbath with sex. Now, that wasn’t so much practiced even by my generation, but generations before me, it definitely was, and Ellen White definitely wrote about these things.
Nikki: Now this one, this next one, is control clothing and hairstyle, and I want to say I almost think that this is somewhat related to controlling sexuality.
Colleen: I agree.
Nikki: Because so much of what was stated about clothes was related to a perverted sense of sexuality.
Colleen: Absolutely. Adventist diet likewise, but go ahead with the clothing and hair.
Nikki: Well, you know, I don’t remember restrictions on hair. Do you?
Colleen: I do because I grew up in the age of the hippie movement.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: So it was very discouraged for boys to have long hair, and it was very popular when I was in high school and college. So there were a lot of fights between parents and kids over those hair lengths.
Nikki: That’s interesting. You know, I know my husband had a fight with his parents about his hair length.
Colleen: Interesting.
Nikki: Different generation.
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: But he did have – he had kind of the rocker hair.
Colleen: Yeah.
Nikki: And that created a lot of grief in his home, but for sure the clothing. Now, what is this “dress reform?”
Colleen: Well, dress reform was originally – it’s kind of an interesting thing. Ellen White visited a health reform institute and one point and loved the clothes that she saw on the workers, and she had, I guess, a vision, and she developed a pattern, which they sold to the members, and it involved for the women a dress, a long dress that kind of would hit below the knee, above the ankle, but underneath it you wore long bloomers –
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: – so that there would be no ankle showing, no leg showing, but the dress itself would not drag in the street. That was considered dress reform, and the pattern was sold through the Review & Herald for a period of time. It was the only approved pattern for this dress reform outfit, and then one day she quit selling it, and no one was sure why, and she quit talking about it, and it was no longer required, but that was the original dress reform, when you think about Adventist dress reform.
Nikki: Um-hmm
Colleen: But there are still pockets of Adventism in the self-supporting venues, such as Weimar, I presume places like Wildwood and Uchee Pines where there is still a nod to this idea. Even though it’s not an official pattern, there is a nod to wearing dresses, but always making sure that you’re – you know, there are still people who will occasionally wear pants under their dresses.
Nikki: I’ve seen this in New England.
Colleen: Interesting.
Nikki: I have seen people who have this kind of old-style dress, and I believe that my husband’s mother did for a while. She did the dress reform as well.
Colleen: Interesting. Well, of course, the whole thing is about covering up.
Nikki: Yeah.
Colleen: And I have never heard it explained as a way to manage sexuality, but it’s always sort of under the surface an assumption that you wouldn’t want to show skin.
Nikki: Now, another example that I can think of for this control clothing, I remember one afternoon we were watching a sermon over here on a Sunday. I don’t remember who was doing it, what church. Do you remember? We were watching a video where they were explaining different parts of dress that were just not allowed. You could not have tight clothes, it would restrict the lungs; you could not have –
Colleen: Oh, right.
Nikki: I can’t remember all of those things, but there are still Adventists today –
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: – who believe the health message that she attached to the clothing.
Colleen: Yes. Exactly. Well actually, talking of restricting clothing, my husband grew up always wearing suspenders because Ellen White had said it was constricting to wear a belt, it would constrict the organs, and it was not to be worn. So my husband went through the first few years of his school wearing suspenders, and he would be the only one in his Adventist class, but his parents were very observant, and his father always wore suspenders.
Nikki: So there were even crazy medical reasons.
Colleen: Oh, supposedly.
Nikki: Yeah. So the next one is regulate what and how much you eat and drink.
Colleen: Well, we did have our food regulations, didn’t we?
Nikki: Yes, we did.
Colleen: Oh, absolutely. I remember being told that it was not okay to let any morsel of food or drink, other than water, pass your lips in any less than four to five hours after the last meal.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: Nothing was to pass, no between-meal eating.
Nikki: Even for small children.
Colleen: Yes. I remember when our sons were young. They would come home from school, and they would be ravenous, but it wasn’t dinnertime yet, and still Adventist, my husband had been raised very rigidly with this no eating between meals rule. He didn’t want me feeding the boys snacks, and yet they were so hungry. We finally reached a compromise and agreed that I could give them apples and carrots and something to sort of tide them over, but it was frowned on even then, and we both felt slightly on the fringe of guilt. And another thing I remember, Ellen White also said we should eat — you know, we should probably only eat two meals a day.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: And we did try that when I was growing up for a while, but it didn’t work well. My mother was blessed with a very fast metabolism, and she couldn’t make it through the day, but we did try to do that, and I know families that did, and even with growing children, two meals a day. The observant Adventists will do that.
Nikki: And I know some of them will do dinner for breakfast.
Colleen: Absolutely.
Nikki: And breakfast for dinner. Is that from Ellen?
Colleen: Yes. Well, the big meal should be eaten in the morning, and then you end the day with the lightest meal, and we did try that for a while when I was, oh, 9 or 10, and it was hard to eat my, you know, vegetarian roast and broccoli before going to school, but I did, but we ultimately let that practice go because my mother started losing weight, and she had no weight to lose, so we went back to having our big meal at night, but it was in violation of the plan, of the blueprint, as we put it. What about exploiting us financially? That was another thing in Behavior Control. The way that manifested itself to me was the mandatory tithe.
Nikki: Yeah.
Colleen: Tithe was absolutely taught, and when I first began to teach after graduating from an Adventist college, the conference I taught in – I taught in the Idaho conference – they took the tithe out of our paycheck before we got the paycheck.
Nikki: Oh, my.
Colleen: Yeah. And my husband believed that observant Adventists would pay not 10% but 20%, and he did. Until he left Adventism, he paid 20% on his gross.
Nikki: Wow.
Colleen: So, Ellen White taught this, and even though it’s not talked about, even though today some of these practices aren’t quite so rigid across the board, it’s still in the Adventist worldview, and tithe is still considered to be a mandatory thing, even though not all Adventists pay tithe.
Nikki: And I want to say too about tithe, they connect that so much to how God treats us.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: I remember when my husband and I first were married, I was still in college, we were young, and the big struggle was do you put tithe on a credit card.
Colleen: Interesting.
Nikki: Because we were living paycheck-to-paycheck, and then there was the — is it net, is it gross, you know, how do you do this? And so we did, we put tithe on a credit card for a long time. I used to wonder why, even though we were trying to be faithful with that, why wasn’t God blessing us, because I really believed if you paid tithe, God would bless you and you would get out of financial debt.
Colleen: We were taught that.
Nikki: Yeah. And so, it was linked to how God interacts with us, how He thinks about us and blesses us.
Colleen: That’s true.
Nikki: And it was very confusing to me. I didn’t quite understand what I had to do to get blessed.
Colleen: Yeah. There was a lot of dissonance, and it’s worth mentioning, tithe is not something that you could just take 10% of your income and give to a worthy cause.
Nikki: Oh, no.
Colleen: It had to go to the church.
Nikki: Right.
Colleen: It had to go to Adventism.
Nikki: For that remnant message.
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: So, the other one under this is restricts rest or leisure and activities, and I’m not sure how they would have restricted rest.
Colleen: Well, Sabbath.
Nikki: They certainly imposed it.
Colleen: Yeah.
Nikki: But they definitely restricted activities on the Sabbath.
Colleen: Yes, they did. And Ellen White had very specific requirements for the Sabbath. Not that most Adventists even observe them, but many of the very conservative ones try to. And she said that Sabbath was not a day for sleep, Sabbath was a day for evangelism, Sabbath was a day for spreading the three angels messages, and she even said that one should not whittle away one’s Sabbath in sleep. And I do remember running into that. My parents didn’t worry about the sleep part, they did take naps on Sabbath, so I grew up not being guilt-stricken if I took a nap on the Sabbath, but I do remember early in my marriage visiting my very observant Adventist in-laws, and I was teaching full-time, and after Sabbath dinner I would be exhausted, and I would lie down to take a nap, and half an hour later I would be awakened, because it was time to go for a walk, and I would be so sleepy sometimes I could not become oriented. I felt like I was only half there, but there was no way out. Richard has since told me he so wishes he could go back and re-do that, because he would definitely say, “Don’t wake her” if that were now. But at the time, we were all trying to be good Adventists.
Nikki: Um-hmm. And you know, it just occurred to me that one of the ways, and I don’t know if this is from the top, because, like you said, your family didn’t worry about napping, so each family really does observe Sabbath differently.
Colleen: Absolutely.
Nikki: I know my husband wasn’t – as a child, he wasn’t even allowed to wade into a lake if there were girls in the lake.
Colleen: Oh, interesting.
Nikki: And as a child.
Colleen: Wow.
Nikki: So, there are all different ways that people do this, but what I was surprised by, when I married my husband, is there was more than just taking the Sabbath off. That text also says six days you do your work, so he didn’t rest on Sunday. He didn’t want to do things with the family because he had to work. You work six days –
Colleen: So interesting.
Nikki: – and then you take Saturday off.
Colleen: I remember hearing that from my mother-in-law, you know, as an adult, and I hadn’t actually heard it talked about that way before. It surprised me.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: My goodness. That is pretty controlling.
Nikki: Yeah. So, I never know how much of it is coming from people’s, you know, their putting rules around what was taught by Ellen, but it’s all very unique to Adventism.
Colleen: It is.
Nikki: So that’s the “B” in BITE, that’s the Behavior Control. The next one is Information Control, and the first one under that is that they deliberately withhold and distort information. This surprised me more than – I mean, it was one of the first things that I realized about Adventism that I never would have dared dream they did.
Colleen: Tell me about it.
Nikki: Well, I remember reading Dale Ratzlaff’s book, “Truth Led Me Out.”
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: I remember him sharing about conversations he had with various people high up in the organization –
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: – who were encouraging deception, and I believed Dale because he was naming people.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: You don’t do that if you’re – if you’re not being honest; you don’t want people to be able to check on you.
Colleen: Exactly.
Nikki: And he was calling people out by name and sharing these things, and as I was reading, it was kind of fitting with some of the stuff I had heard, and just not to that degree, but withholding information seemed to be somewhat of a pattern. And I didn’t understand it was all the way up at the top.
Colleen: Interesting.
Nikki: So that was just kind of my first peek, and that was heartbreaking to see.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: But the longer I’ve been out, the more I have seen that this is rooted inside of how the organization operates. They deliberately withhold information. I had no idea as an Adventist that this ministry existed –
Colleen: Interesting.
Nikki: – and I live 10 minutes from you guys, and my mentors inside of Adventism knew very well who you were. When I discovered you and I mentioned you to them: “Oh, yes, we know who they are.” But I had never heard about this ministry. It’s my belief that they’re very intentional inside Adventism to dismiss anything that exposes the error of their doctrines.
Colleen: I think they are too.
Nikki: And then they distort information. The way I understood Christians to believe was very similar to what we believed. We just had the Sabbath.
Colleen: Exactly.
Nikki: I did not know how different our gospel was from theirs, but everything I learned about Christians I learned from the Adventists.
Colleen: Yes! Me too. Absolutely. I believed that – like you said, I thought Adventism believed what Christianity believed, except we just had a little more.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: We had the Health Message, we had the lowdown on how Jesus was going to come back, and we had the Sabbath. Yeah. That’s very interesting.
Nikki: Which is why I believe that Adventists who hear what we’re saying can, you know, honestly say, “No, we’re not all that different.”
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: “We don’t have a different gospel, we believe like you.” Because we’re told in Adventism that we believe like the Christians do.
Colleen: That’s absolutely true.
Nikki: And we use the same language, we just have different definitions. How can a Christian expose our error if we’re using the same words –
Colleen: Exactly.
Nikki: – and thinking we’re thinking the same?
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: It’s really kind of –
Colleen: It is –
Nikki: – evilly brilliant.
Colleen: Yes! It’s totally deceptive. For example, also, I believed as an Adventist that Christians kept Sunday –
Nikki: Yes.
Colleen: – like we kept Sabbath. And they didn’t even do that properly, I would think with disdain.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: And imagine my surprise when I got out and discovered that most Christians do not keep Sunday. They don’t believe the time is holy.
Nikki: Right. So the next thing under this section is they forbid you from speaking with ex-members and critics. I don’t know if I would word that as strongly. No one ever told me I couldn’t.
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: But it sure was discouraged.
Colleen: It’s discouraged. Or if somebody does speak to an ex-member or a critic, they could be met with just disparaging language, such as, “Oh, they just have an axe to grind.”
Nikki: Right.
Colleen: Yeah.
Nikki: Right. And I don’t know where I got this from. So much of what I believed I think is unique to Adventists, I don’t even know where it came from, but I always had a sense that I had to be very, very careful when speaking with somebody who no longer believed Adventism because they might be influenced by Satan, and he might be using them to try to bring me into the apostasy.
Colleen: Yes. Yes, that makes sense.
Nikki: So I was very, very careful around them.
Colleen: Wow.
Nikki: So, the next one is discourage access to non-cult sources of information, and I know Adventism partners with Christians in a lot of venues.
Colleen: Yes, they do.
Nikki: And the church we went to actually used non-Adventist books for some of their book clubs. But where those authors go contrary to Adventism, we always heard, “Well, they didn’t have the truth.”
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: They didn’t have what we have, and so we could almost excuse it.
Colleen: Yes, yes. I had the same experience, although growing up in my generation it was even more extreme, and we actually were discouraged from reading religious sources that were not Adventist because we might learn the wrong thing. I definitely remember the highlight of my childhood experiences at campmeeting in the Oregon conference were the book sales in the Adventist Book Center on the last Saturday night of campmeeting. We had our own Adventist veggie novels, we had our Adventist religious books, we had the red books, Ellen White’s books, we had all of those things, and they’d go on sale, and for me, the highlight was getting the new story, the new – you know, I wouldn’t have believed they were novels at the time because Ellen White said not to read novels, and I believed that Adventist authors always wrote the truth. I have since learned, in speaking with book editors from Pacific Press, that many of those Adventist books are not the truth, they are heavily edited and many times invented, but as an Adventist I didn’t know that, and I believed that those books I read were all true. It’s interesting, I didn’t know until I left about well-known Christian missionaries like Nate Saint –
Nikki: Oh, yes.
Colleen: – and Jim Elliot.
Nikki: Right.
Colleen: Who were murdered by the Auca Indians in the ’50s. We’d never heard of them.
Nikki: Never.
Colleen: And they are heroes in modern Christianity. So, there are many things we were not told, they did not show up in our storybooks, and it was withheld from us.
Nikki: And one of the things that’s been really interesting to me when I talk to new formers who have questions, they want to know, “Who should I listen to, who should I read?” When I give them names of pastors and authors who the world knows, the secular world knows, they don’t know them. They say, “Who’s that?”
Colleen: That’s true.
Nikki: And I remember that same thing when I left: “Who’s that? I don’t know who that is.”
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: And even with speaking of apologists that the Christian world trusts, the only one that I know of that the Adventists know that isn’t Adventist was Walter Martin, and that’s because they felt validated by him.
Colleen: Exactly.
Nikki: But they don’t know who some of these other apologists are that the world trusts.
Colleen: Exactly. That’s a great observation.
Nikki: So the next one is that these groups will divide information into insider versus outsider doctrine. And I remember one of the last sermon series that Carel and I sat through in the local Adventist church we attended, I think the title of the series was called Walk Across the Room, and it was about going and sharing your testimony with I’m going to use the word “unbelievers,” but it was non-Adventists.
Colleen: Exactly.
Nikki: And we were specifically told in that sermon series not to lead with our unique, distinctives, don’t do that because you’ll cut them off, they’ll stop listening. You start with – and I don’t even remember what she said, but it wasn’t our distinctives. You save that for later.
Colleen: Oh, yes. And we were overtly taught that. You don’t lead with the fact that you’re Adventist because they won’t listen to your great information if they’re put off by your name.
Nikki: Right.
Colleen: You let them hear how great your information is, and then you tell them who you are, which is such a lie.
Nikki: And you know, these Christians who end up converted into Adventism very often don’t know exactly how important Ellen White is.
Colleen: That’s so true. We had a friend who became an Adventist when she met the man that she married, who was an Adventist, and when she was ready to be baptized, she asked the pastor who was baptizing her, “Do I have to believe in Ellen White to be baptized?”, and he said, “Oh, no. No, no, no.” So she was baptized and then found out Ellen White was at the base of everything Adventism believed.
Nikki: Right. She interpreted scripture for them only while in vision.
Colleen: Exactly. Exactly. And that was one thing this woman found out that devastated her when she found it out.
Nikki: So, the next one is that these groups generate and use propaganda extensively.
Colleen: Oh, my. Do you know anybody better at media and printing than the Adventists?
Nikki: And isn’t it true that if you were to stack all of the books that Ellen White ever wrote next to her, they would be taller than her?
Colleen: Oh, way taller than her. In fact, they’ve talked about how many times around the world Adventist publications could go if you stacked them all, and yes. And Ellen White’s writings, by the way, are not all original from her.
Nikki: Right.
Colleen: There are many Ellen White books that are just compilations of related things that she said in different sources, and they’re recombined into new books, so even though the poor woman has been dead over 100 years, they’re still producing new compilations, at least every now and then.
Nikki: And with some heavy cut and paste on the controversial issues.
Colleen: Yes. Oh, my goodness, yes. That’s a whole separate subject: How many times has the Great Controversy been revised for outsiders to read. Another thing that is an evidence of their using of propaganda and generating propaganda is their health expos and their community service projects. Through their Adventist Development and Relief Agency, ADRA, they have government contracts with many governments around the world, where they do famine relief, they bring relief when there are natural disasters, they dig wells, they do humanitarian work, and they lead with that. Many people in the world think of ADRA when they think Adventism. They aren’t thinking Sabbath and the Second Coming; they’re thinking this great humanitarian organization.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: And in reality, it’s just their frontline, it’s just their front presentation.
Nikki: Um-hmm. And it’s confusing because that kind of – I mean, they do good things.
Colleen: They do.
Nikki: They do help people with, you know, their basic needs.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: And that ends up somehow giving them credibility when they give you their doctrine.
Colleen: That’s true.
Nikki: When they give you their materials.
Colleen: Yes. And they feel somehow obligated, because if they have done this much good, how can you question the information.
Nikki: Um-hmm. Okay, so that was the “I” in BITE, and this is the “T,” Thought Control.
Colleen: Whoa.
Nikki: Yeah.
Colleen: That’s been a big – at least it was for me.
Nikki: Yeah, yeah. It’s interesting if somebody had accused them of thought control as I was leaving, I don’t know if I would have necessarily bought that.
Colleen: I know I wouldn’t have.
Nikki: You know, it’s so hard to hear some of the strong language and then think it had anything to do with your experience, but as we unpack the things underneath this, we begin to see a different picture. So the first one is that they instill black-and-white, us versus them, and good versus evil kind of thinking, and as I read this us versus them, I can’t help but think about the remnant church. We are the remnant church –
Colleen: Oh, yes.
Nikki: – and the rest of Christianity, they’re them.
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: They’re the ones who are being deceived by Catholicism, by Babylon.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: And at the end, it will surely be us versus them.
Colleen: Absolutely. And the “us” will be defined by Sabbath-keeping primarily.
Nikki: Yes. So then the other one under Thought Control – and this is interesting to me – they change your identity. This may not be the first thing you think of if you grew up inside of Adventism.
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: But when I left Adventism, I remember poring over the Church Manual. I was surprised when I saw that they require converts to be baptized as Adventists, even if they were Christian and had Christian baptisms.
Colleen: You have to be baptized as an Adventist, which should be a terribly big red flag for a Christian.
Nikki: Yes.
Colleen: Because a Christian knows that the Bible says there is one Spirit, one baptism, and if it is not a different gospel and a different religion, there would be no need to be re-baptized. But clearly, they’re being baptized into something different when they join Adventism.
Nikki: And this is where I can’t help but think about this dynamic I experienced inside Adventism, where I would hold two dueling views.
Colleen: Yes, yes.
Nikki: So, I don’t think I would have had an issue with a Christian being baptized Adventist as an Adventist, but I also would have said, “Oh, we believe the way you do.”
Colleen: Same here.
Nikki: And that didn’t even occur to me until I had somebody that I knew in Adventism say to me, “We’re just like you, we’re no different,” and I had just been reading the Church Manual, and I didn’t have the courage at that time –
Colleen: Oh, interesting.
Nikki: – but I would have loved to have said, “Then why do you require baptism of Christians if we’re the same.”
Colleen: That is a very good question. And that’s true. And you’re right about the cognitive dissonance. Inside Adventism, it doesn’t seem like a contradiction. We can hold those dueling ideas together as if they match when they don’t.
Nikki: Um-hmm. So another one is they use loaded language and clichés to stop complex thought.
Colleen: That’s a heavy statement.
Nikki: It is. They were clichés I don’t think I really remember thinking about inside Adventism, but when I left and I tried to talk to my Adventist friends and family and get them to think –
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: – “Let’s look at this, and let’s consider this, and I have questions.” The questions became offensive to them.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: And the responses were so clichéd, I didn’t even know how much until I’d hear it from other people unrelated to these.
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: They would say, “Well, all churches have problems, all of them.”
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: And, “Don’t look to the people, we don’t look to the people.” Well, imagine my surprise when I read Paul saying to imitate him.
Colleen: I know!
Nikki: Another one: “No group is perfect” or “Ellen G. White said people would leave.”
Colleen: Or “Our church is just – it’s the closest to the truth.”
Nikki: Oh, yes.
Colleen: “The closest to the truth.”
Nikki: And, “Everyone believes they’re the remnant.”
Colleen: Oh, yes. I heard that too, “All churches think they’re the only true church.”
Nikki: And all of these phrases were used to dismiss critical thought.
Colleen: Exactly. To shut us up if we were asking the wrong questions.
Nikki: They just don’t want to discuss it.
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: I remember asking my sister why she would no longer discuss these things with me when she spoke freely about them while I was Adventist.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: And she said, “Well, that was when you were in the family, but now you’re not; now you’re on the outside, and family doesn’t talk about family to outsiders.”
Colleen: It has always been kind of interesting to me that when I was an Adventist, there was so much discussion and disagreement within the ranks of Adventism. We had the Southern California Adventists –
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: – who we all believed in the Northwest to be liberal, wine-drinking winebibbers, and then there were the self-supporting Adventists, and there were – you know, we had all these subcategories, but if somebody left Adventism and came back to talk, boy, did those wagons get circled.
Nikki: Yes, they did.
Colleen: And you’d think there was no difference among them.
Nikki: That’s right. So the next one is similar. They teach thought-stopping techniques to prevent critical thoughts. So the first one was stopping complex thought with clichés and language.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: But this is stopping their internal thoughts –
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: – when they’re beginning to, you know, have that dissonance, to notice that dissonance.
Colleen: Yes. That’s interesting. That’s more subtle. I know that as an Adventist if I started having conflicting thoughts or uncomfortable questions or doubts, I would resort to frantic internal prayer: “Oh, please forgive me, forgive me, forgive me, forgive me. Please help me to be good. Forgive me, forgive me.”
Nikki: Yes.
Colleen: And just drown out and sort of zone away from the thoughts I was having.
Nikki: And I remember times too where I would cast Satan away from my presence. If I had doubts, I believed it was Satan, and I would send him away.
Colleen: Interesting. Did it work?
Nikki: No.
Colleen: Huh. I’m just seeing that this next one here was the positive thoughts one?
Nikki: Yes.
Colleen: Allow only positive thoughts. I can’t say that I was taught I was only to have positive thoughts, but I do remember that it was sort of implicit and subliminally taught. Ellen White did teach that in the home the mother was to be peaceful, calm, quiet, to bring a peaceful and calm and unruffled attitude to the family, to keep everyone happy and the children happy, and her voice was to be well-modulated and soft and sweet. Well, I don’t think it played out that way in families very often, and if it didn’t, I think there was a lot of guilt in the poor mom, who knew she was going against God’s revelation to her.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: But there was a big emphasis on being positive in terms of not giving in to doubts and not giving in to negativity, and I do remember as a child there was a song we would sing in Sabbath school that had the words in it “always cheerful, always cheerful,” and I’ve since thought back to that song and thought, “That’s just not real.”
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: That’s a brainwashing kind of thing.
Nikki: You know, one of the things I noticed when I would speak with formers, usually online, because there’s not a real concentrated group of them, but I would speak with them about issues in Adventism, and the ones who didn’t want to hear would often say, “Why are you so negative? Don’t be so negative.”
Colleen: Yes. Yes. Negative is a bad thing.
Nikki: Truth, reality, even when it’s hard, they would call it negative.
Colleen: That’s true. I’ve gotten that too. And it’s mainly – negative is a label assigned to something that says what the Adventist believes might not be true. That’s negative.
Nikki: Um-hmm. Or bashing.
Colleen: Or bashing, yeah.
Nikki: So the last one here is that these groups will reject rational analysis, critical thinking, and doubt. Now, definitely I was taught to reject doubt.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: I mean, the big deal in Adventism is that you will keep the Sabbath to the death in the last days.
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: And so you reject any doubt that might take you off course. But when I think of the rational analysis and critical thinking, I would say that they don’t teach us to reject that because they pride themselves on their thinking.
Colleen: They do.
Nikki: I would say they redefine it.
Colleen: I agree. I totally agree with that, and here’s how I experienced that redefinition. I learned, and I could not tell you when or how specifically, but I knew it like I knew the sun came up in the east that evangelical Christians were anti-intellectual. In fact, I remember hearing our Christian neighbor once say – I don’t remember exactly what the news story was, but it had something to do with the Mars Rover. And I remember him saying, “I don’t know why people are even asking these questions. Everything we need is here in the Bible.” Well, I’m not completely sure I would completely agree with him today, but I remember my visceral reaction when he said it: “Oh, there’s that anti-intellectual evangelical Christian bias coming up. You just can’t think outside the box.” So, I learned that biblical thought was defined within Adventism as fundamentalist and anti-intellectual. So if a Christian has a biblical worldview as opposed to a more agnostic worldview, if a Christian believes that the Bible is inerrant as opposed to the Adventist way of thinking, which is it’s infallible but may have errors that need to be explained, that that would be anti-intellectual, and it would be rejected. So, while Adventism will not say don’t be rational, don’t analyze, they would encourage it, they would at the same time redefine biblical thinking as close-minded, narrow, and fundamentalist.
Nikki: Almost like gaslighting.
Colleen: Yes, yes. Very much like gaslighting.
Nikki: So that’s the “T” in the BITE acronym. The last one is Emotional Control, and this first one we could do a whole podcast on if we wanted to.
Colleen: Yes, we could.
Nikki: It’s that these groups instill irrational fears and phobias of questioning or leaving the group.
Colleen: Oh, my. That is so true. I believed that if anybody left Adventism, that person would ultimately end up persecuting the Adventists during the Time of Trouble, and they would be the worst persecutors. Now, of course, I also learned that people who went to church on Sunday would ultimately be given permission to hunt and kill the Sabbath-keepers in the Time of Trouble, any Christian, but Ellen White did say that those who once kept the Sabbath and left it would be the worst persecutors of all. So, when we left, early in our days after leaving, Richard was speaking with his mother, who said to him in all seriousness, “So are you going to now kill me?” And I remember how that hit him and the pain that that caused him, but it came right from Adventism.
Nikki: I remember being taught that there was a chance in the last days – and I think it’s worth mentioning to our Christian audience that we’re not talking about the biblical Jacob’s Time of Trouble here.
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: We’re talking about a time where the Adventist church is targeted because of their Sabbath-keeping by the rest of the world.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: And so I was taught that a time would come where I would have to stand and watch my kids being tortured while I was asked the question, “Will you give up the Sabbath now?”
Colleen: Oh, good grief. Oh my.
Nikki: And the only way to stop the torture of my children would be to give up the Sabbath, but if I did that, I wouldn’t be saved.
Colleen: Oh, the double-bind of it all!
Nikki: And so even in my 20s I remember wondering – I wanted kids, but I remember wondering if it was a good idea while I was still an Adventist.
Colleen: You would have to think twice.
Nikki: Um-hmm. Several years ago there was a photograph that was circulating online that was taken at a camp in Michigan, an Adventist camp in Michigan, and it was a Sabbath day’s activity where they were taking these kids from station to station practicing for this time when they would be hunted. They had camp counselors dressed as soldiers, they were holding realistic-looking guns, and this one photograph was of a handful of young kids on their knees with their hands over their heads, and there were soldiers pointing rifles at them.
Colleen: And they were practicing for the last days when they would be hunted to the death for Sabbath-keeping, and they were practicing experiencing that fear and staying true to Sabbath.
Nikki: Yes.
Colleen: Practicing their loyalty to Sabbath.
Nikki: And when this picture went around, I remember thinking, “This is just – this is an offshoot, this is a weird group. I’ve never seen anything like this.” But with Facebook you can comment.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: And there was a scroll of endless comments from people, especially in the older generations, who experienced similar activities, where they were practicing, sometimes without their knowledge, sometimes really believing that there were soldiers in the church sanctuary ready to arrest them, and they were readying themselves for that, that Time of Trouble, and they were terrified. They’d have nightmares.
Colleen: It was not a unique experience. We were terrified of the last days. I did not look forward to Jesus’ coming. I would have to endure torture that I probably wouldn’t be able to endure, and Jesus’ coming just meant I would probably find out I was doomed to eternal death.
Nikki: The other thing that came out of that time was I learned about the book “Now” that you guys had to read.
Colleen: Oh, yes. I remember “Now”.
Nikki: And I purchased it, and I read it, and it helped me understand a whole generation of Adventism that I didn’t experience.
Colleen: That was very real. And it’s still Adventism. They may not teach it in quite the same way, but this picture that you described, that was taken in 2009 at summer camp in Michigan. So that is not an obsolete idea or experience. That is Adventism.
Nikki: So the next one under this category is that these groups will label some emotions as evil, worldly, sinful, or wrong.
Colleen: I pretty much thought most of my emotions were evil, unless I felt happy, happy, happy and always cheerful, which I frankly didn’t.
Nikki: So the next one under Emotional Control is teach emotion-stopping techniques to prevent anger. Now, I don’t remember being taught anything like that, but I do remember as a Christian reading, “In your anger, do not sin,” and staring at that text and thinking, “Wait a minute. I can be angry and that’s not sin? It’s what I do when I’m angry that’s sin?” It was surprising to me that anger itself wasn’t sin.
Colleen: I remember that feeling too. I did feel like anger was a sin when I was an Adventist, and as far as emotion-stopping techniques, I think that this is – I can’t say it’s practiced in every Adventist family, but I know it is in some, and I have known one-week-old babies being spanked for crying, being told “No, no, no,” because that crying was a sin, it represented a sin, it represented anger, it represented a negative emotion, and it was sin.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: I believe that some of this really cruel behavior grows out of not believing the biblical teaching that we are born dead in sin.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: If we’re not born depraved, if we’re not born dead in sin, then our goodness has to come from strict self-discipline.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: It’s just about perfecting our emotions and behaviors, and Adventists will even say, “Behavior isn’t adequate; it has to come from the heart.” That means you have to somehow learn to control your emotions, which I never learned to do well, but punishment for negative emotions, punishment for expressing them, was common.
Nikki: Yeah. I remember, after I had my son, speaking with some Adventists, one a pastor, and if I would go to him when he was crying after a nap or if he was hungry, I was told, “He’s manipulating you. You need to let him cry.” And I knew it was wrong.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: I didn’t understand where that came from, but that makes sense.
Colleen: You have to control that or you’re encouraging sin.
Nikki: So another thing that these groups will do is they will promote feelings of guilt, shame, and unworthiness.
Colleen: I can’t think of any part of my life as an Adventist child growing up in which I felt adequate or worthy or deserving of love. I grew up believing that my natural impulses and most of what I did was worthy of guilt. I felt guilty. I felt unworthy. I felt unworthy of – well, I remember even as a girl, clear through my teens, thinking, “I likely will never get married, because no one would want me.” I did not feel worthy to have people love me, and I can’t even put a definite teaching on something that created that feeling in me. It was just the general idea that I was not good, and if I was not good, Jesus couldn’t love me and I had to try harder, and if He didn’t love me, I wouldn’t get to heaven. It was all related to trying to be good and to not losing out on the possibility of salvation.
Nikki: You know, one of the things that I’ve found about the life after is that so much of unpacking being in a cult is being aware of truths that you held and then going on a research tirade to figure out where did that come from.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: And so it’s always very wonderful when we can figure that out. So I’m not entirely sure where I might have picked up these feelings of guilt and shame, where they were being promoted, but one thing that comes to mind is the children’s storybooks by Arthur Maxwell.
Colleen: Oh, my! That’s so true.
Nikki: So much of what I remember out of those, it was a plea to obey, and they would use shame to get you to do it.
Colleen: Yes, yes.
Nikki: Humiliation and shame.
Colleen: Um-hmm. The moralistic teaching in those stories was generally performed by parents and authority figures who were shaming the child into obedience. Definitely, I internalized those stories. I think you’re right.
Nikki: Um-hmm. I remember in particular the one – and I just read it again recently, I found it, it was left at a park – “The Two Carolines.”
Colleen: Oh, I remember it.
Nikki: And that was the story of the little girl who was obedient at school and loved by her teacher, and she would come home, and she would, I don’t know, have an attitude, and so her mother humiliated her and invited her teacher over and hid her so that the teacher could overhear Caroline’s bad behavior at home, and little Caroline was humiliated and horrified, and one of the last lines in that story is, “Could this be the same little Caroline that I have in my classroom,” and it just kind of ends there.
Colleen: Oh, I remember that story. It was horrifying. And you know, underlying all of this is likely the very implicit Adventist doctrine of perfection, because the underlying way we were saved, according to the investigative judgment, is to continue to keep the law more and more perfectly until, at the end of the investigative judgment, if we were still alive on the earth when that ended, we would be having to get through the Time of Trouble without any sin, without a mediator. The Holy Spirit would be withdrawn, and we were now perfect enough to stand on our own. And that was underlying everything. So of course I could never be worthy. I always was guilty. No matter how well I tried to do something, I knew I wasn’t perfect.
Nikki: So the next one is: Shower you with praise and attention, or love-bombing, and that one makes me think of their missionary efforts, their evangelism efforts.
Colleen: I don’t remember the love-bombing so much inside the church, but it was definitely how we would approach our neighbors.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: Take them bread. Ellen White said, “There’s more gospel in a loaf of well-baked bread than there is in a multitude of sermons,” so we had to always be reaching out to our non-Adventist neighbors – I’m not going to say “unbelieving,” but to us it was non-Adventist – and love-bombing them to get them interested in knowing what we know.
Nikki: And this too, I see them doing this in other countries when they go in with their medical missions.
Colleen: Absolutely.
Nikki: They go in and they offer a better life, and they do, they give them medical treatment, they give them an education, they meet those needs, and they bring them in that way.
Colleen: They even give them jobs that make them middle class.
Nikki: Yeah. So it really is a way to get people in. So the next one here is they shun you if you disobey or disbelieve.
Colleen: Now, I believed as an Adventist that Adventists did not shun.
Nikki: Right.
Colleen: Jehovah’s Witnesses shun. Everybody knows that.
Nikki: Yes.
Colleen: Perhaps Mormons shun, but Adventists, oh, no. I didn’t know until I left Adventism that they actually do, but it’s covert, not overt.
Nikki: Yes. Right.
Colleen: And gradually, they stop talking if, you know, “Why did you leave,” they might want to know. I always say to people there is about a six-month opportunity when you have a chance to explain what you learned, but after that, people quit talking.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: And they kind of drop away.
Nikki: Well, they were taught those techniques.
Colleen: Absolutely. With time, you know, you think, “Well, of course I won’t lose my family. Adventists don’t do that,” but in fact, I don’t have a lot of contact with my old Adventist circles.
Nikki: And you know, I think it’s worth mentioning that they’re not as prone even to covert shun their family members who leave for the world.
Colleen: Oh, that’s true. Good point.
Nikki: Because there’s still hope there.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: It’s the ones who leave because of doctrinal differences.
Colleen: Who find the gospel.
Nikki: It’s the ones who leave and become Christian and who are exposing Adventism. They’re the ones who then become dangerous.
Colleen: That’s so true. That was kind of an interesting surprise.
Nikki: So, the last one here under Emotional Control is that these groups teach that there’s no happiness or peace outside of the group.
Colleen: I certainly learned that. Ellen White said that to leave the Spirit of Prophecy, her writings, is ultimately to reject the Bible and ultimately to reject God. And we were taught that if you walk away from truth, you’re never going to be happy, you’re always going to feel – you will know you have been – you’re in intractable sin, and there’s, it’s hard to say a specific threat, but I know that I believed that if I left, I would never be peaceful and happy. I know that many people have heard of Mark Martin. When he left Adventism, his conference president told him, “Just think, you will never preach a sermon again on Sabbath, you will never be successful, you will not be able to do the things that you knew you would do as an Adventist, you will not sit at home on Friday night preparing for that sermon.” They basically told him as a non-Adventist, as a former Adventist, he would fail, he would not realize the success he was bound to have as an Adventist pastor. Well, time has proven that to be completely wrong. He has a very large church in Phoenix and has had for years. But they do teach that if you leave, you will pay for it with happiness and success that won’t come to you.
Nikki: And there is this underlying belief that if you leave Adventism, you leave God.
Colleen: Absolutely.
Nikki: Because you don’t leave Adventism to become Christian; that’s moving backwards, you know.
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: Because when you’re a Christian, then you become an Adventist. That’s the highest level of Christianity.
Colleen: Good point.
Nikki: So, if you’re going to leave Adventism, there’s this idea that you’re leaving God Himself. And the other thing too is I think that I believed as an Adventist that we kind of had a corner on peace, because we took a day off.
Colleen: Oh, that’s so true! Good point! Yes. We had the Sabbath.
Nikki: Yeah.
Colleen: How do people live without the Sabbath?
Nikki: I used to say that, especially in college.
Colleen: Oh, yes. We have a whole day where we don’t have to do a thing we don’t want to do.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: Well, this BITE model, Behavior, Information, Thought, and Emotional Control that is imposed on us by an organization and a set of beliefs actually is a fairly good description of life inside of Adventism, and it was kind of shocking to me when I started realizing that what I had thought was biblical reality was actually a deception.
Nikki: Yeah, meant to keep us in.
Colleen: Meant to deceive, meant to keep us in.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: Meant to keep us from asking.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: And when I started understanding that the Bible taught a worldview that was completely different from the worldview I had as an Adventist, it was disorienting, and to be quite honest, it was very upsetting.
Nikki: Yes.
Colleen: If you have questions, comments, or want more information, you can email us at formeradventist@gmail.com. Thank you again, Nikki, for doing this with me.
Nikki: Thank you, Colleen.
Colleen: We’ll see you all next week. †
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