Jehovah Lives in Brooklyn: Jehovah's Witnesses as a Model of Fundamentalism

Copyright © 2000 by Richard S. T. Francis.

Library of Congress Number: 00-191586

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

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Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

AUTHOR’S PREFACE:

Alien Landscapes, Secret Societies

CHAPTER 1

We Are Not Everyday People:

Hatred of the Satanic World

CHAPTER 2

Strict Obedience to Jehovah:

Avoiding Evil Spirits and Everybody Else

CHAPTER 3

Conversion and the Destructive Transformation

of Personality Dismantling

CHAPTER 4

Satan, Satan Everywhere:

A Devil of a Story

CHAPTER 5

A One of a Kind Religion:

Beliefs Designed to Make JWs Feel Special

CHAPTER 6

You and Me Against the World

CHAPTER 7

Through Thick and Thin:

Lemmings United

CHAPTER 8

Duplicity and Double-talk:

The Truth Made Unclear

CHAPTER 9

False Prophecies of the End and the

Expulsion of High Quality People

CHAPTER 10

Where is the Love?

CHAPTER 11

Escape from Freedom: God’s Government and the

Desperate Longing for the End of Civilization

CHAPTER 12

The Elder Catastrophe: A Spiritual Hurricane

CHAPTER 13

Clash with Reality: Study and the Subculture

CHAPTER 14

Why Is Studying the Bible A Sin?

CHAPTER 15

Dogmatism and Fluctuation:

Walking a Perilous Tightrope

CHAPTER 16

Misfits, Mediocrity, and Madmen:

Inmates Running the Asylum

CHAPTER 17

Mental Turmoils and Storms:

On the Imitation of Jehovah

CHAPTER 18

Keeping the Mask On:

Impressing Others at All Costs

CHAPTER 19

The Conversion of the World or the

Mass-Slaughter of Humanity:

Between a Rock and A Hard Place

CHAPTER 20

The Kingdom of God and the

Old Men in Brooklyn

CHAPTER 21

Under My Thumb: The Clergy of JW’s

CHAPTER 22

Can the System be Changed?

CHAPTER 23

Education and Unity, JW Style

CHAPTER 24

A House Divided: Dissidents and Dissonance

CHAPTER 25

We Know Their Secrets:

The Threat of Ex-Members

CHAPTER 26

Up In Smoke: Denial of the Pursuit of Liberty

EPILOGUE

Thanks A Lot:

How Jw’s Have Enriched My Life

To the woman with whom I escaped

the insidious snare of cult-psychology,

and who supported me all the way,

Maria, and to Pat,

this book is lovingly dedicated.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A book such as the present one is never the result of the work of only one person; instead, it represents a synergy of many minds, many hearts, and much collective experience. Here, then, I wish to acknowledge the invaluable aid and assistance of dozens of Jehovah’s Witnesses, who have provided much valuable and useful data. Even more important to the presentation, however, has been the crucial contribution of ex-members and ex-member networks all over the country.

While both groups contain far too many people to list—and I fear that such a list would leave some out inadvertently, those who have given their inspirational support and important data for the completion of this work know who they are, and that they will be rewarded for their good work.

More specifically, my deepest and most sincere thanks go to Maria Francis, for her patient and consistent work on completing the final manuscript, which was professional and beautiful all the way.

I also wish to thank Pat Fields, who in many ways has made my continued work possible, and to whom my personal debt will always be great.

Special thanks to Frank Meriman, the finest teacher in Dublin, for his suggestion that the work be shared with the public, which started the path that led finally to this point in the development of the project.

Thanks to Ann Bluefeather, whose help in proof reading (several times, in several versions) proved invaluable.

May love continue to bless the lives of all of you.

AUTHOR’S PREFACE:

Alien Landscapes, Secret Societies

Aliens from space can be terrifying, but aliens from earth are dangerous. No, what is being discussed here is not the xenophobic response of nativist conservatives and fundamentalists to the influx of European and other immigrants. Instead, the object of our concern is people who have decided that society itself is evil, even demonic or satanic, and in that sense everyone in society is alien. For these people voluntarily make aliens of themselves, bewildering and mystifying outsiders. Why would an otherwise sane person seek to increase his/her alienation to the point of actual hostility?

This is a question that I never really asked myself as a Jehovah’s Witness, and most fundamentalists never ask it either. For me, as for them, alienation seems the normal or natural state of things; it’s just the way things are, or perhaps even the way that God has decreed them to be.

In the course of time, alienated people tend to find and to be attracted to, other social aliens, who have also, for various reasons, found society to be distasteful and who have therefore rejected it actively. Most extreme right-wing fundamentalist groups are actually such enclosed, encapsulated societies, as was the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of Jehovah’s Witnesses, the group to which I once gave full and unqualified allegiance. For such extremists, the identity with the group is the most important thing in life, and everything else revolves around that central fact. He or she is a Jehovah’s Witness or other fundamentalist first, and a human being a distant second. In such a group, every detail of one’s life is regulated by uniformity and conformity to the group. Obedience is stressed as a supreme virtue, and this obedience belongs to a single leader or small group of people—almost always men.

In the case of JW’s (Jehovah Witnesses. In this book we use this common abbreviation simply for the convenience of the reader. This is to avoid having to write out the rather long title over and over again. No disrespect is intended), the leadership group was a small echelon of octogenarians and other elderly types who lived in Brooklyn. One might as well have said, for all practical purposes, that God himself lived in Brooklyn, for everything that this small cadre said was accepted and received as though directly from the mouth of God. Since this group referred to themselves continuously and in print with considerable pride as older men we will in this book use the phrase old men in Brooklyn to refer to them. In this their own phraseology is being used, and so no disrespect is referred or implied. Whatever these men said was regarded as the truth, and this truth was unquestionable. Indeed, in most fundamentalist groups, anyone who dares to question the prevailing teachings of the local pastor or the body of elders, or some other governing group, is said to be dangerous, falling victim to doubt, flirting with apostasy, or even actively falling into the clawed clutches of Satan himself.

Even the most minor and insignificant aspects of one’s life are monitored and regulated by fundamentalist leaders; one’s style of hair or clothing might well become an object of immense concern, if they are not conformist enough. Often, short hair on men and long skirts on women are a must, in order to avoid the styles of the contaminating world ruled by evil spirits.

Ever since I was a toddler, I was reared as a JW, and was expected to conform my very thought-patterns to their unusual paradigm, which I successfully was able to do until I grew old enough to think on my own. In my early twenties, I began to have some serious questions about whether the JW’s had a kind of monopoly on the commodity of truth. I was taught that all other religions were false and Satanic and I began to question this fearsome dogma. While it did untold damage to my earlier perspectives, being reared in a cultist and fundamentalist environment also served as a valuable tool. For one thing, it provided me with a very rare opportunity to experience metaphysical metamorphosis, which still includes a deep understanding and memory of what it felt like to be a right-wing extremist.

That experience served as the matrix for the present work. In the following pages, the attempt has been made not simply to explain, but to capture the very essence of being locked into a right-wing perspective. No quantity of mere intellectual analysis by an outsider can ever hope to accomplish this difficult task. It is analogous to the difference between having the taste of a lemon described in five pages of text as compared with actually putting a slice of lemon in your mouth. The actual experience of having been a JW might be said to be quite indescribable by an outsider, for it too has its own flavor. And it does very much leave the proverbial bad taste in the mouth as a residue of the past.

This book, then, is designed as a kind of informal and experiential guidebook to alien psychological terrain and landscapes. A warning: You will be taken to some very unusual, and not very pretty places during your journey. But you will learn a great deal, especially about the behaviors and motivations of fringe groups.

This book is designed within a format of informal and nontechnical analysis. Thus, it is not heavily documented and footnoted; for its most important goal is not simply to teach, but to synthesize within the reader a kind of experiential grasp or feel of what it is like actually to think the way extremists think to create a kind of empathic association with those who exist in the alien subculture described. The book represents over thirty-five years of my personal spiritual journey, from the dark recesses and caverns of primitive exclusivity to the dazzling illumination of the principles of universal compassion.

As we enter the new millennium, we come into a time of frenzied expectation for many extremist groups—particularly those of the apocalyptic or Armageddonist variety. People will be waiting with literally bated breath for the skies to split open, and for Christ to descend on a white horse, carrying a blood-stained sword with which to murder all the bad guys—anyone, in short, who is outside the various fundamentalist groups. Exaggerations of the events of our time will be rampant, and attempts will proliferate to squeeze every minor occurrence into some kind of crackpot prophetic system, in a futile endeavor to prove, once again, that we are living in the last days of human civilization. (JW’s have tried for a hundred years to prove this, and the Adventists for years before them, and the Puritans before them, and various Protestant and Catholic groups all the way back to the time of Jesus.)

Leaders of fundamentalist groups complain that they are being persecuted when charged with misbehavior and wrongdoing; but this is only a transparent attempt to hide their own sins, and to divert attention from a closer analysis. For example, the JW practice of disfellowshipping, or formal rejection (shunning) of former members, is now being legally challenged, with some success. Elders are now more afraid than ever to indulge in the practice, and seem to be a bit on the run.

People are coming out of the woodwork with horror stories of injustice, shattered dreams, ruined lives, crushed hopes, destroyed relationships, and crumbled families—all due directly to the cruelty and inhumanity of formal excommunication or disfellowshipping, as JW’s call it. Abused people are giving interviews to newspapers and magazines everywhere, and writing books exposing the fragility and stupidity of a truth so weak that it must be defended by immediately issuing gag orders to shut up dissidents. And leaders can no longer keep a lid on this organizational crisis, which threatens to blow to pieces all their cover-up.

Psychologists and sociologists have long speculated on the nature of the forces that coalesce to transform a normal person into a fanatic or extremist, and in the following pages, we hope to make some of these clear. For a careful study of JW’s can serve as a microcosmic model for all exclusive fundamentalist groups. Many of these groups are not organized into viable churches, but, when this is so, it might be said that fundamentalism, like its components Armageddonism and Jehovism represents a mind-set, paradigm, or world-view. It is characterized by a sense, often subconscious, of superiority; a crisis-mentality that gives urgency to the religion, and an expectation that some coming catastrophe will bring relief and liberation to the chosen.

This is, then, the inside story of a multifaceted, covert religious and political force, much of which has been carefully concealed from the public. Every effort has been made to present the data with both relative clarity and reasonable equity. Yet the underlying sense of an Orwellian world of mind-control is ubiquitous, and can hardly be ignored. Extremist groups consider it absolutely necessary to exercise an often unskillful but unqualifiedly totalitarian control over members’ thought and lives, and to do this effectively, they must do all within their power to highlight a sense of alienation. At times, this sense can be extraordinary, and at times subtle; but either way, it increases the power of the us versus them psychology that polarizes members against a satanic or dangerous world. If members realized that the world was filled with normal, decent, spiritual people, they would leave the extremist group. So, this secret must be hidden behind campaigns of incessant demonizing of culture, society, education, government, and other facets of normal but imperfect society. (In this context, normal imperfections so common in society are mistaken for commitments to deliberate evil, and damned.)

Converts, as per instructions, often erect an impenetrable barrier between themselves and the normal world. For to them, to become normal is anything but desirable; in many ways, it is to give in to temptation, if not to become a servant of the lord of darkness. Proudly, they stand out; they do not want to be normal. Yet, perhaps subconsciously, JW’s tend to realize just how odd their religion really is, and so attempt to pretend to be as conventional as possible; they are known for being ultra-conservative in dress, entertainment, and other areas of life. Like the Victorians, they prize respectability above most other virtues, partly in concealment of their inner oddity.

Among JW’s, as among some others, even the word world is a pejorative, a portrayal of spiritual uncleanness or contamination. Thus, they are capable of automatic, mechanistic responses to the world, which do not involve cognitive participation in every event or situation. It is kind of shorthand, in which they do not have to question their conscience, for if an activity is worldly, or does not conform to the JW way of doing things, it is already automatically bad or dangerous.

Fortunately, mainstream Christianity as a whole seems to be moving away from partisan bickering and sectarian squabbling, from parochial divisions and the idea that we alone have the truth. However, fundamentalists do not see this as progress, as a good thing, at all; if anything, they see it as a kind of betrayal, a sign of weak will, a compromise with temptation, a dilution of truth. They actually decry any attempts at ecumenism, which they see as a subtle deception on the part of Satan. JW’s and many other right-wingers suffer from the chosen people syndrome, in which their church or organization has a kind of monopoly on truth. Nothing upsets judgmental, socially isolated, separatist groups more than a universal, eclectic, interfaith approach to a broad and tolerant spirituality.

This new openness creates a depolarizing effect within thoughtful individuals, which tends to drive them outside the barriers of minority religions that insist that closed-mindedness and narrow thinking are really virtues to be cultivated. (For example, one out of every three person who has ever been a JW is now an ex-JW.) Thus, minority faiths that take a dogmatic, inflexible stand tend to drive out the very best of their own intellectually aware members, not in leaks, but in floods.

Further, these fundamentalists, who feel so divided from the world, hate each other and are divided even from each other. To an outsider, they look very much alike, objectively. (For example, few outsiders can discern meaningful distinctions between JW’s and their Adventists ancestors, and yet the two groups look down on each other.) But minor and even microscopic variations exist among them, and they continuously damn each other; JW’s damn all other religions to eternal annihilation, which they believe will be activated by Jehovah at the final battle between good and evil, Armageddon.

After having been one of those most ardent and committed workers among the JW’s (I was serving as a pioneer [full-time salesperson], missionary, and elder), not very long ago, I would have seen the writing of this book as a heinous sin, an act of rebellion against Jehovah. But I discovered to my immense disappointment, that not only could problems not be solved from within the organization, but that every fundamentalist group is absolutely obdurate in resistance to the recognition of, or solution to, problems. Each insists that it is already perfect. If one works to make things truly better, one is faced with an unyielding obstinacy and intimidation by a monolithic leadership. This uniformity causes many members to fear speaking publicly about the many problems that they know or see in the organization. A good and loyal JW, or fundamentalist, is expected to behave as if the organization, or church, were absolutely perfect and always existed in smooth, flawless harmony. For it is the reputation of Jehovah himself that is at stake. Anyone who attempts an objective, realistic appraisal is instantly marked as a kind of spiritual leper, a doubter with weak faith, to be avoided. To disagree with the organization, or church, is an act of rebellion against God.

So, I attempt to write no cheap expose, although much of an expository nature is intrinsic to analysis; in fact, I strongly dislike the hate literature often produced by fanatics of one camp against the fanatics of another. This book is not the place for mere angry judgmental polemics, but is an arena for objective critical discussion of psychosocial issues that affect the fundamentalist mind-set. Vituperation is not vindication, and the intent of these pages is not to spill blood, but instead, to diagnose potentially harmful patterns and to provide alternatives when appropriate. It is a call for moderation, balance, and reasonable priorities.

If I felt no indignation or emotional involvement at all with these issues, I would be something less than fully human, fully alive. But these forces of criticism must not burn angrily for their own sake; instead, they should lead to more positive orientations and suggestions for viable, feasible improvements. The inner soul cannot soar to its highest on anger, but must do so on the snow-white wings of the dove of peace and love. Thus, motivated by love for JW’s and others, I call for reconciliation with the world on the part of all-separatist groups and exclusive organizations. I call for abandonment of the polarized and ferocious clinging to the right or to the left, and for the loving, joyful compromise found in the middle way of moderation. This implies leaving behind the view that all that are outside the organization are evil or satanic, or misled by demons or evil spirits. Instead, I call upon all everywhere to join in, to actively reaffirm universal brotherhood and sisterhood, to turn swords of hate into plowshares of peace. I call for the complete elimination of religious and holy wars, even if these take place only with printed and spoken words, and a return to the Way of compassion, forgiveness, and universal love advocated by Jesus.

So, I do not want to add to the conflagration by disproving the doctrines and dogmas of JW’s and other fundamentalists, for neither side ever wins that interminable squabble. You would think that, after twenty centuries of quibbling, we would have learned that lesson by now. Besides, other books have already taken up this issue, with both more interest and more zeal that I can personally generate. Also, other books have already done lengthy, even academic, studies of the history of fundamentalist thinking, and of the JW’s. Instead, then, of cheap expose, theatrical histrionics, historical polemic, technical analysis, or doctrinal refutation, we present for the reader’s consideration an unblinking gaze into the very mind of the JW, and, in so many ways, of the fundamentalist in general.

Being neither traitor nor apologist, the very most that I can hope to do in these pages is to speak honestly of my own limited perspective and experiences, with a sincere quest for objectivity. I do not stand above, but among, the human beings that receive positive criticism here. I speak out of love for what they might have been, and out of heartfelt regret for what they have not become.

CHAPTER 1

We Are Not Everyday People:

Hatred of the Satanic World

JW’s and other rightist groups have effectively disfellowshipped themselves from the world, for, in joining the group, you make a tacit and implicit statement that you have left behind many if not most of your interactions with the ordinary and regular world. In fact, one feels strongly that the JW vision of a perfect world would be one in which a non-JW would never have to be encountered. I personally remember the warm glow that would come over me after spending a week at an assembly—a temporary congregating of tens of thousands