Ask enough Adventists about church politics and sooner or later someone will lower their voice and mention the Jesuits.
The idea has deep roots. In The Great Controversy, Ellen White describes the Jesuit order of the Reformation era as “the most cruel, unscrupulous, and powerful of all the champions of popery.” She writes that “under various disguises the Jesuits worked their way into offices of state, climbing up to be the counselors of kings.” That chapter describes sixteenth century Europe, not the General Conference.
The jump to Adventist headquarters came much later. Adventist Today writer Aage Rendalen traced one wave to the early 1980s, when Alberto Rivera, a non-Adventist who falsely claimed to be a former Jesuit priest, was promoted through Jack Chick’s comic books. Rendalen reports that an evangelist named Mike Clute taped Rivera naming Adventist scholars as Jesuit agents, and later circulated a claim that five GC men had been killed and replaced by doubles. A Spectrum listing for a talk by Kevin Burton, director of the Center for Adventist Research, says many leading Adventist conspiracy theorists rely on Rivera.
So what evidence is there? We could not find any. In 2018 Loren Seibold, now executive editor of Adventist Today, asked believers to produce “one actual, verifiable case. Just one.” When Seibold had earlier challenged Colin Standish to name the infiltrators, Standish replied, by Seibold’s account, that “they would be too clever for me to identify them.”
Church voices have been plain. In 2016 Ted Wilson, then General Conference president, called Jesuit infiltration “a conspiracy theory that has been passed around for decades” with “no basis in reality,” and urged members to “assume the best of our fellow believers.” In 2026 Adventist Review associate editor Shawn Boonstra wrote that if Jesuit spies are sabotaging the GC, “they are some of the worst agents in the world.”
The Great Controversy asks readers to watch for real threats to freedom of conscience. Suspecting our own leaders without evidence does not do that work, and it hurts people we are called to love.
Image: Saint Ignatius of Loyola, engraving, Wellcome Collection, CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), via Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Saint_Ignatius_of_Loyola._Engraving._Wellcome_V0032199.jpg (cropped, toned, text added)
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