Hidden Bondage Revealed (An Excerpt from "The Naked Truth: Exposing the Deception of Adventism"

By Hazel Holland

Beyond its obvious sexual connotation, incest in essence is an abuse of the legitimate authority that a parent or guardian has over a child. It is a generational family dysfunction, passed down through the generational genes, destroying trust and distorting the healthy parent-child relationship.

For example, in the normal order of things, a parent or guardian is in the position of exercising control and authority over a child by virtue of age, knowledge and experience. The parent is presumed to know better than the child does what is right and wrong, what is safe and unsafe— essentially what is good for the child. Until the child is old enough to be accountable for his or her own decisions, choices and behavior, the parent or guardian stands in the place of God for the child.

Following this line of reasoning we begin to see that parental authority becomes abusive when the parent uses the position of power to satisfy selfish wants or needs at the expense of the child. Because the child is dependent upon the parent or parent figure, the child becomes the victim. Since the victim has generally been taught to admire, trust and respect the one who has abused him, the victim unknowingly becomes a collaborator in the abuse cycle. The conflicting emotions of love and hate, courage and fear, trust and distrust, towards the offending parent leave an indelible mark of fear and shame on the child as the child is forced to deny his or her own reality.

Just as incest was a generational sin, passed down through the generational genes on both sides of my biological family, so spiritual incest is a generational sin passed down through the denominational genes of the SDA church. As incest is the abuse of parental authority, spiritual incest is the abuse of spiritual authority exercised by spiritual parents and those in authority over us in the church.

Another way of saying this is, “Spiritual abuse is the misuse and abuse of spiritual authority by church leaders who set themselves up as gate keepers, using religious performance rather than faith in Jesus as the criterion for accepting or rejecting their followers.”

For the purposes of this book I am dealing specifically with the generational sin of spiritual incest in the SDA church. In fact generational spiritual incest has been the best-kept secret within the SDA church for the past one hundred and fifty years. Understanding our spiritual roots and the process our spiritual forbearers used to arrive at their system of beliefs will help us understand why this present generation of Adventists shown in the dream is behaving like incest victims.

As we look at our church history it will become crystal clear how our spiritual forbearers set themselves up to become not only victims but also perpetrators of spiritual incest, and why this cycle of spiritual abuse continues to be experienced in the lives of many of its members to this day."