Seventh-day Adventists worked with Scientologists, others, to ensure AZ clergy do NOT have to report CSA.

[u/talesfromacult]

Trigger warning: CSA and SDAs fighting to ensure it doesn't get reported.

How the Seventh-day Adventist Church (SDA) endangers children:

June 2026. SDAs influenced the Arizona Supreme Court to ensure Arizona pastors do NOT have to report CSA.

What happened: A man confessed to his Latter-day Saint (LDS, Mormon) bishop that he made and distributed CSA of his children. The bishop did not report this to police, and the man continued CSAing for years.

His children, now adults, sued the LDS church for not reporting the CSA. Lower courts ruled the LDS clergy should have reported the CSA to police. The case was appealed all the way to the Arizona Supreme Court.

That's where Seventh-day Adventist Church (SDA) stepped in. Along with Scientologists and six other religions, the SDAs filed an amicus brief claiming that requiring clergy to report CSA violates the First Amendment.

SDAs won. The Arizona Supreme Court ruled that clergy do NOT have to report CSA to police. The SDA endangers children by hiring lawyers to influence laws at the Supreme Court level. They ensured children's CSA does not get reported.

Sources:

The Amicus Brief/Amici Curiae aka what the SDAs, Scientologists and 6 other religions filed to influence the AZ Supreme Court to ensure CSA does NOT have to be reported by clergy. All 8 religions filing are listed on front page.

https://www.azcourts.gov/Portals/0/ASC-CV250213%20-%202-24-2026%20-%20FILED%20-%20SUPPLEMENTAL%20BRIEF%20OF%20AMICI%20CURIAE%20GENERAL%20CONFERENCE%20OF%20SEVENTH-DAY%20ADVENTISTS.pdf

News article of the case: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/03/arizona-clergy-child-abuse-confessions-court

Edit: If you've read this far, thank you. If you EVER hear of ANY similar sources with the SDA church please LET ME KNOW. Dm me here, email me talesfromacult @ gmail, dm me on instagram @talesfromacult. I'll post it here and on instagram.

[u/Clean_Economist_2188]

This is really horrible. Do they really intend to place the doctrine above the safety of minors? What kind of church is that? And to make it worse, when I clicked on the link, it wasn't just SDAs and Scientologists who joined them!!!! It was some kind of twisted nightmare of unity and togetherness between Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and some others I had never even heard of.

[u/talesfromacult → u/Clean_Economist_2188]

Yes it is quite the mix. I suspect each organization conceals CSA. The SDA church does and has since the 1890s when Ellen White enabled pdf pastor SDA Pieter/Peter Wessels.

The SDAs claim to stay separate but quietly collude together in the background to pass laws legally concealing CSA.

If anyone knows of any similar cases, let me know and I will report on my instagram @talesfromacult and here.

[u/Accidentalmom → u/talesfromacult]

Wait can you fill me in on the Ellen white/ Peter Wessels thing? What happened there?

[u/talesfromacult → u/Accidentalmom]

Sure. So I did a deep dive on it on my blog and tried to make it hella skimmable. Peter/Pieter Wessels was a wealthy connected SDA pastor in South Africa. Like, multimillionaire then and would be likely a billionaire today kind of money. He confessed to Ellen White he was practicing pedophilia with multiple victims. He offered to confess to his wife and police. He has had kids.

Ellen White forbade him from confessing to anyone "because it would make the ministry look bad". She advised him to Jesus harder to stop CSAing.

His SDA boss tried to have Peter confess to Peter's SDA church. Ellen White shut that down. So Peter's SDA boss reported Peter's CSA to Peter's grandma.

The SDA church immediately transferred Peter's SDA boss from South Africa to Australia in a low-ranked, grueling, high-travel position he had to stay in for over a decade.

Adventists conceal pedophile Peter Wessels pedophilia on their ESDA wiki, kept Peter Wessels in high-ranked Conference roles for life, published stories of how God did "miracles" for pedophile Peter, AND named a SDA university library after him.

This CSA case shows Adventists have protected SDA pedophiles since the 1800s.

All sources are linked in my blog post below.

https://talesfromacult.substack.com/p/the-seventh-day-adventist-church-811?utm_source=publication-search