Who’s Protecting Adventists from Misinformation? Part 3: Prophetic Quackery
by Loren Seibold | 6 February 2024 |
Read part 1 here
Read part 2 here
Does anyone else remember a few years ago when Doug Batchelor came on a live social media video late at night from his home office in his Granite Bay mansion, saying that he normally didn’t do this, but this was an emergency and he had to let his followers know about it right away—he couldn’t wait to go to his office…. What was the emergency?
The pope had said something!
I don’t even remember what alarming thing the pope said; the emergency was decidedly anticlimactic. (I couldn’t help but remember a Martin Luther insult referencing the pope’s donkey which I can’t quote here, but if you know it, you know it.) But Doug presented this news with such eagerness that it got shared on Facebook by a number of my acquaintances. I don’t doubt Doug raised lots of money just by making a video in his house slippers.
Because Adventists love this stuff. There’s a small subculture of Adventists whose nonsense detectors don’t go off when they hear this kind of thing—who are, in fact, thrilled by it and who will bend their reality to believe it. Walter Veith, he of the conspiracy-of-the-week, and David Gates, who can produce miracle stories on the fly, are astonishingly fecund: they know precisely how to hit people’s crazy button dead on, the first time.
But few prophetic voices in recent memory beat Ernie Knoll.
Ernie Knoll
Ernie appeared on the scene in the mid-2000s with visions and dreams, implying that he was the next prophet for Seventh-day Adventists. His first revelations were the typical end-time jeremiads: predictions of Jesus’ imminent return, specific and dramatic descriptions of the Time of Trouble—with an emphasis on balls of fire falling from the sky—and affirmations of distinctive doctrines in anticipation of Jesus’ return. He threw in a few Ellen White-style dreams of touring heaven. So far, so good.
Ernie rather got a surprising number of followers and started a ministry: For My People Ministry (FMPM). It is unsurprising that to those with new light God will at some point grant permission to receive tithes and offerings. Ernie had that revelation, too.
So a year or two in, this odd item showed up: a prostitute named Candace had emailed Ernie, saying she’d been picked up in a car by an angel and told to seek out Ernie Knoll, though she had no prior connection to him or our church. It was a miracle! Someone on the FMPM board took the trouble to look at the IP address of the originating email from Candace and discovered that it was Ernie’s! After some blah-blah-blah from Ernie, he admitted that Candace didn’t exist. He’d made the whole thing up—at God’s behest, of course.
You’d think that would have been the end of Ernie’s ministry. But it got a heck of a lot weirder after that. It seems that some of those to whom Ernie had lied, but who had believed his excuses, became even more devoted to him!
The information about Ernie after the “ministry’s” board abandoned him is spotty and disorganized, but even what little can be gleaned from the available documents is astonishing. I am indebted to the website Surviving Ernie Knoll, where disaffected followers shared their experiences and communications with Ernie and his enabling wife, Becky. Here we discover how Ernie moved on into the two areas that characterize cults: money and sex.
As for money, Ernie’s “ministry” was good to him. The income listed on the required IRS Forms 990 from 2011 to 2017 range from $260,000 to $387,000 tax-free income. Also in the public record: a police report about Ernie’s stalking a woman, a protection application filed by a woman, and a birth certificate for a baby with a woman who is not Becky. The background to all of this might be unpacked in more detail if one were sufficiently interested in the distasteful details, but suffice it to say that God asked this fat old man to take many different women (possibly seven spiritual “wives,” one testimony implies) into his bed—and they (under pressure—scroll down to read one woman’s description here) complied.
Here’s a bizarre exhibit of how the “ministry” went off the rails while still getting hundreds of thousands of dollars from convinced followers: in 2013 Ernie sent out what he claimed was God’s new dress code. It required that women wear
provocative tops as well as dresses. She is to in all strive to wear as revealing clothes as she can. Becky has been told she is to have a mindset that she strives to be an exhibitionist.
Here is what was necessary “to be a part of the 144,000”: a “camisole …thin and that the coloration of her nipples is shown though the cloth but the cloth is not sheer or see through.” “The length of the skirt is to be short where it comes just below the butt cheek,” and he goes into some detail about how women are to sit directly on their bare bottoms without underwear because “The angel said where is the faith of being concerned of [sic] contaminants” and they are to “endure the cold” because
If the muscles contract it was explained that the this [sic] would facilitate the working of the muscles and the lymph system. If sitting in a place that is cool like a restaurant the individual is to endure. I was taken from this dream for a moment to be shown how those in prison would be made to sit and in some cases almost reach hyperthermia.
Read more only if you have a strong stomach.
You ask, why tell us all of this when surely such a stupidly immoral ministry must be totally washed up by now? Well, hold on to your hats: the FMPM Form 990 from 2022 still shows a total charitable income of over $276,000.
And right now, I’m pretty sure there are readers who are more angry that I quoted Ernie’s pornographic fantasies than that he still has enough Adventist followers that he gets in excess of $276,000 in contributions.
Our vulnerability
Let’s be clear: no church leader ever said, “This guy is our new prophet!” Actually, we never heard anyone in the church publicly addressing this cult at all—just as they said nothing about Wayne Bent and his Strong City cult, or the Waco group until that situation blew up. No one talks about why such cults spring forth from our denominational loins with some regularity.
(In fact, the denomination lied to the public when they said the Waco folks had nothing to do with us; Koresh taught from Ellen White, and nearly all of his followers came to the compound as Seventh-day Adventists. They were, like it or not, members of our family. We should have repented rather than denied them.)
Yes, the followers are refugees from the island of broken toys—but that’s the point! Why are our people so vulnerable? Why do you never hear about a Presbyterian cult holed up in a mountain retreat with a prophet having sex with all the available women? Because Adventists (and our fellow American sectarians, the Mormons) are unusually pregnable to these things in ways that others aren’t.
FMPM is at the extreme. But people followed Ernie, and apparently still do, just as they followed the anti-vaxxers such as Walter Veith and the Berrien Springs Village Church leaders—to their deaths, in some cases.
Cognitive dissonance
Back in the 1950’s, social psychologist Leon Festinger infiltrated a doomsday cult that claimed to have received messages from aliens forecasting the end of the world on December 21, 1954. Festinger and his team studied the reactions of the members when it didn’t happen. Some left the cult, but
Those who stayed instead looked for ways to explain the event in a way that would maintain their beliefs. Eventually they came to the agreement that the planet was spared because of their prayers and actions.
For believers who really, truly believe something, Festinger concluded, when their expectation fails they will—if given a rationalization and sufficient social support—be more devoted after the failure than they were before! This process, of people finding a way to harmonize their cognitive dissonance after a failed prophecy, is called disconfirmed expectancy.
Adventism started with a failed prophecy. We were given a rationalization that made us continue to hope. Jesus did not return back then, and in fact Jesus has not returned “soon,” either.
What grew out of the Adventist experience is valuable to us: we have, from that failed beginning, created something quite exceptional.
But that chapter in our church’s upbringing left us with a peculiar weakness. Our eschatology is a carrier of that original cognitive dissonance germ. Starting from the fearful eschatology of Uriah Smith and Ellen White, and nurtured into the present by Mark Finley, Doug Batchelor, Ted Wilson and others, these germs grew into diseases such as Ernie Knoll.
It has happened before, and it will happen again and again and again, until we confront the unhealth at the heart of our faith.
AT readers know that I refuse to countenance that narrow, exclusive, fearful Adventism built on speculation and untruths. But neither do I want to deconstruct my church out of existence. I have been blessed by it, and I love a great deal of what it is.
Which is why those of us who know better have to speak the truth—to protect our people and to protect what’s good about us. And I don’t think it’s going too far to say that to the extent we fail to deal with the untruths that flourish among us, whether in psychology, health, or prophecy, we will have to answer to God for it.
Loren Seibold is the Executive Editor of Adventist Today.
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