Jehovah's Witnesses

A New Introduction

George D. Chryssides

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781350190900
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Dénominations chrétiennes

What would happen if I accepted an invitation to Bible Study from Jehovah's Witnesses? What would attending a Kingdom Hall meeting involve? And if I invited door-knocking Witnesses into my home? This book introduces Jehovah's Witnesses without assuming prior knowledge of the Watch Tower organization. After outlining the Society's origins and history, the book explains their key beliefs and practices by taking the reader through the process of the seeker who makes initial contact with Witnesses, and progresses to take instruction and become a baptized member. The book then explores what is involved in being a Witness – congregational life, lifestyle, rites of passage, their understanding of the Bible and prophetic expectations. It examines the various processes and consequences of leaving the organization, controversies that have arisen in the course of its history, and popular criticisms. Discussion is given to the likelihood of reforms within the organization, such as its stance on blood transfusions, the role of women and new methods of meeting and evangelizing in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

1 Researching Jehovah’s Witnesses

Jehovah’s Witnesses and academia

When I was a student many years ago in a Scottish theological college, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons were never mentioned in class sessions. Teaching mainly focused on Christianity, and ‘comparative religion’, as it was then called, had only begun to take off. We had one lecture per week on the subject, and our lecturer, who obviously felt the need to start at the beginning, began with ancient Egyptian religion, moving on to the archaeological finds that were believed to be the origins of Hinduism. Although the classes were mildly interesting, they did little to prepare budding ordinands, who were much more likely to encounter a pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses at the door than someone seeking to revive the worship of Horus or Osiris. Occasionally one would hear a preacher launching a tirade against Jehovah’s Witnesses from the pulpit, and we gained a small amount of knowledge about the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society through our extracurricular reading of Walter Martin’s Kingdom of the Cults, which was first published in 1965.

The relative lack of academic study of Jehovah’s Witnesses is no doubt due to a number of factors. Until around the 1960s the teaching of other major world religions had barely commenced, and in the mid-1960s and early 1970s the mainstream churches were only beginning to define their attitudes to other religions. The Second Vatican Council (1962–5) expressed a desire to develop relationships with other traditional religions, and it was only in 1967 that the World Council of Churches began to expand its ecumenical agenda beyond Christianity, and serious consideration was not given to new religious movements (NRMs) until around fifteen years later.

The serious academic study of NRMs only began when newer groups gained public attention in the West, notably the Unification Church, the Children of God (subsequently The Family International), the Church of Scientology and the Hare Krishna movement. The neglect of NRMs in theology faculties was no doubt due to the contempt with which their ideas were held, and it was left to sociologists to treat them as social phenomena. As a result, the older minority religions, sometimes called the ‘old new religions’, were left behind, and attention tended to be focused on societal issues, often at the expense of beliefs and practices. For those who belong to a minority religion, its teachings and lifestyle are of much greater importance than societal issues such as demographic factors, members’ socio-economic background and patterns of conversion and disaffiliation.

Of all the ‘old new’ religions, Jehovah’s Witnesses have probably given rise to the largest quantity of published literature, quite apart from their own in-house material. Almost from the inception of the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society, its detractors put their criticisms into print. The first critiques were written mainly by clergy, who were offended by founder-leader Charles Taze Russell’s departures from mainstream Christian doctrine, and this marked the beginning of countercult Christian literature – a genre which continues to the present day. Some of these books specifically targeted Jehovah’s Witnesses, while others included the Watch Tower organization among chapters addressing a variety of new – and not quite so new – forms of spirituality. The aim of Christian critique was to rebut the doctrinal claims of groups such as Christian Science, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormons), Jehovah’s Witnesses and more recently the Unification Church, comparing their doctrines with those of mainstream Christianity, or suggesting what one might say to a Mormon or Jehovah’s Witness who called at the door. It is difficult to evaluate the effectiveness of such literature either in discouraging seekers or persuading existing members to leave; for Jehovah’s Witnesses, such comparisons with the rest of Christianity serve to reinforce their conviction that they are ‘in the truth’ and that Christendom is in error.

As time progressed, a number of Jehovah’s Witnesses became disenchanted with the Society and wrote about their experiences, adding a further category of literature to mainstream Christian apologetic – ex-member testimony. This genre has proliferated recently for a variety of reasons: evangelical publishing houses had become saturated with countercult critique, and the decline of mainstream Christianity resulted in diminished interest in doctrinal deviations; also, the ease of self-publishing provided a relatively easy platform for ex-members to tell their story, although the frequent absence of a refereeing process has caused such works to vary considerably in standard. Many such accounts are written as autobiographies, while other ex-members’ experiences have been transformed into works of fiction and others have combined fact and fiction in a way that is impossible to disentangle. Although a number of scholars have disparaged ex-member testimony (e.g. Wilson 1994; Kliever 1995), these writings frequently give valuable insights into aspects of the organization to which the average researcher cannot be party. Particularly in the case of authors such as William J. Schnell (1959), Raymond V. Franz (2000) and William and Joan Cetnar (1983), all of whom attained high positions of responsibility – including membership of the Governing Body (the Society’s central authority) in the case of Franz – we have insider testimony about the Society’s organization and history which could not otherwise be obtained.

In contrast to this proliferation of negative accounts, a small number of faithful Watch Tower members have written about the society. A. H. Macmillan (1877–1966), one of Russell’s early disciples and a director of the Society, wrote a history of the organization, and journalist Marley Cole’s (1916–2009) writings included two introductions to the Watch Tower organization, as well as an autobiography (Cole [1955] 1985; 1957; 1966; Macmillan 1957). Although the Society invariably promotes its own writings, it took the unusual step of advertising Cole’s Jehovah’s Witnesses: The New World Society (1955). Max and Simone Liebster each told their stories of their experiences during the Third Reich (Liebster, M. 2003; Liebster, S. 2000), and Bernhard Rammerstorfer’s Unbroken Will (2004) is a remarkable account of Leopold Engleitner (1905–2013), an Austrian Bible Student who refused military service and was the oldest male concentration camp survivor. Jehovah’s Witnesses typically focus on the Society’s own accounts of its history and teachings, which they often call ‘spiritual food’. Since its inception, the Watch Tower organization has published more than a hundred books, as well as yearbooks, songbooks and smaller booklets and pamphlets, with at least some of its material available in over a thousand different languages, making it probably the world’s most prolific religious publishing house. It is also one of the world’s largest religious organizations, claiming 8.47 million followers who were actively engaged in its evangelizing work in 2019 and over 20.5 million attendees at its annual Memorial service in that year. (This exceeds the number of Jews worldwide, for example.)

One factor that militated against scholarly publication on Jehovah’s Witnesses was the lack of cooperative relationships between scholars and the Watch Tower Society. Anyone who writes to the organization will usually receive a reply, but the communication will be unsigned by any identifiable individual, bearing only the Society’s official stamp. Establishing personal contacts with workers in branch offices and in the Society’s headquarters can prove difficult. The Society’s prime interest is its evangelizing work, coupled with the belief that Armageddon will come soon, thus diminishing the value of academic study. When H. H. Stroup began his research for The Jehovah’s Witnesses, which was published in 1945, he initially approached Nathan H. Knorr, who was the Society’s president at the time, seeking cooperation, only to find that it was denied.

The first scholarly publication was Milton Stacey Czatt’s The International Bible Students: Jehovah’s Witnesses (1933), originally a thesis in part-fulfilment of a PhD degree at Yale University: it is a short dissertation of less than 15,000 words. Stroup’s 1945 volume was more substantial, being a full-length book, and was followed almost a decade later by Royston Pike’s Jehovah’s Witnesses: Who They Are, What They Teach, What They Do (1954). Pike’s brief volume is written as short encyclopaedia-style entries, but while he attempts to be objective, he tends to present Jehovah’s Witnesses as the religion of the dispossessed. He writes:

The gospel of the Jehovah’s Witnesses … is highly material – and most people find it distinctly difficult to imagine the spiritual. The heaven that is preached in Kingdom Hall [sic] is the sort of place that may well appeal to the man who knows what unemployment means, who has had to tighten his belt, who works at a monotonous job, who has tried to bring up a family in a smelly little box of a house. It is the sort of place that will appeal to the woman who has had to share a kitchen and has had too many children when she didn’t want them, and has had to nurse a girl with polio or mourn a baby that hardly lived to breathe. (Pike 1954: 134–5)

A small number of academic studies followed: Alan Rogerson’s Millions Now Living Will Never Die (1969), James A. Beckford’s The Trumpet of Prophecy (1975) and Melvin D. Curry’s unduly neglected Jehovah’s Witnesses: The Millenarian World of the Watch Tower (1992). Until recently, the most oft-quoted studies have been M. James Penton’s Apocalypse Delayed ([1985] 2019) and Andrew Holden’s Jehovah’s Witnesses: Portrait of a Contemporary Religious Movement (2002). A prominent Witness until 1981, Penton was disfellowshipped, and his hostility towards the Society is evident. Holden’s study is based on a doctoral thesis and focuses on one single congregation in Blackburn, England. The twenty-first century brought about an increase in serious scholarly study, and in 2016 the organization CESNUR (Center for Studies on New Religions) convened a conference in Antwerp, attended by over thirty scholars with a professional interest in Watch Tower Studies. This was followed up by the creation of an online network called JW Scholars, which continues to serve as a forum for discussion and exchange of information on the organization.

If one were merely to read the popular Christian critiques and the ex-member accounts, one might readily draw the conclusion that Jehovah’s Witnesses suffer deprivation and pursue a lifestyle based on a naive understanding of the Bible. Undoubtedly there are those who have had bad experiences while they belonged, but they form part of a spectrum: while the more highly committed members are the most visible to a researcher, there are those who are less enthusiastic and those who have doubts and who are wavering. However, if everyone shared the experiences described by the ex-member testimonies, the organization would now be well and truly defunct. Instead, it continues to grow, and hence it is important to examine the beliefs and the lifestyle that continue to appeal to those who remain insiders. What follows therefore aims to focus on what it means to be a Jehovah’s Witness. Previous publications on the organization have addressed its history or selected themes such as political opposition or legal challenges. The ensuing chapters explore the lifestyle of those who belong to the Watch Tower Society: how one becomes a Witness, what kind of everyday life is expected, how they worship, how they celebrate life cycle events and what happens if a member fails to live up to the Society’s expected standards. The present study is not based on defined sampling or systematic interviewing: formalizing the scholar-practitioner relationship can often cause subjects to be nervous, and answers obtained can be confined to limited interview situations. Instead, it is the result of nearly three decades of a continuing relationship with Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Becoming acquainted with Jehovah’s Witnesses

It may be helpful to mention something of the history of my acquaintance with the Watch Tower organization. Initially, like most people, I encountered Jehovah’s Witnesses who came to our door, accepting their literature, but paying only cursory attention to their work. In 1992, on taking up a post in Religious Studies at the University of Wolverhampton, I initiated a module on new religious movements. This had three consequences. First, there was insufficient material in the library to sustain the topic, so a quick temporary solution involved writing around various minority religious groups to ask if they would donate some of their literature which we could use as primary source material. Several organizations sent books and pamphlets directly, but someone from the Watch Tower branch office telephoned to say that this was not their normal policy and that they preferred to initiate personal contact first, asking if the City Overseer might call at my office. I agreed to this, and this began a continued relationship with Bill – the overseer – and his family. The second consequence, resulting from this relationship, was that Bill was invited to talk to our students. In teaching traditional religions in higher education it is common practice to invite adherents to speak to students, and I saw no reason why more controversial newer religions should be different.

One problem about inviting a religion’s exponents to speak to students is that they do not always cover the tutor’s agenda, and some visiting speakers are not so accustomed to speaking in public. Not quite knowing what to expect from our informant, I suggested that I should introduce the topic in the first half of the session, and then Bill would take over in the second. As things turned out, Jehovah’s Witnesses are well trained in public speaking: it was a normal expectation that members undergo training at the Theocratic Ministry School (now called Christian Life and Ministry), which takes place weekly on a designated evening. My own attempt to explain Jehovah’s Witnesses in Bill’s presence was a valuable exercise, making me realize that what I might have said in their absence could be inadvertently disparaging or inaccurate. The third consequence was that it became apparent that there was no good academic book in the early 1990s either on minority religions generally, or Jehovah’s Witnesses in particular, and this gap in the market prompted me to author Exploring New Religions (1999), which contained a modest amount of material on the Watch Tower Society, and later my Historical Dictionary of Jehovah’s Witnesses ([2012] 2019) and Jehovah’s Witnesses: Continuity and Change (2016).

At an early stage in our relationship, Bill informed me that his wife and daughter ran a haberdashery stall in the Dudley market; he jokingly said that they were following in the footsteps of Charles Taze Russell (1852–1916), the founder of the Watch Tower organization, whose family ran a haberdashery business. He suggested that my wife and I should look out for them when we were next in Dudley and introduce ourselves. We were slightly hesitant about presenting ourselves at a stand at which we had no intention of buying their merchandise, but out of politeness we complied, and we found his wife and daughter very friendly and welcoming. Being new to the area, we needed tradespeople to carry out work on the property we had recently bought. Bill had remarked to the students that Jehovah’s Witnesses ‘come from all walks of life’, and we enquired whether that included window cleaners, scaffolders, builders and painters. Window cleaning, as we discovered, is a popular occupation for Jehovah’s Witnesses, who often elect to run small businesses, allowing themselves flexibility to pursue their house-to-house work when needed, as...