Andrew Holden
Department of Religious Studies, Lancaster University, UK

ABSTRACT

Jehovah’s Witnesses are members of a puritanical religious movement that claims to be in but not of the world.  The Witnesses are zealous proselytisers who have expanded rapidly over the past 130 years and there are now more than 6 million devotees worldwide.
This paper examines the socialisation of second and subsequent generation members and describes how the movement deals with those who refuse to comply with its regime. Extracts are presented from interviews with young members who recall their childhood memories of growing up in the movement and explain what happened when they rebelled against its quasi-totalitarian doctrines. The main argument advanced in the paper is that parents who socialise their children in accordance with this particular creed are protecting them from a modern world of relativism and uncertainty.

Jehovah’s Witnesses are members of a world-renouncing religious movement officially known as the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society.  The Society was founded by Charles Taze Russell in 1872 and claims to monopolise the word of God.  Since the foundation of the movement, devotees have maintained that we are living in the Final Days.  Their eschatology is based on a literal interpretation of the Bible and almost all the movement’s literature makes reference to the New Kingdom which the Witnesses believe will be inaugurated by Jehovah at Armageddon.1  The Society’s worldwide membership rose from a mere 44,080 in 1928 to an impressive 6,035,564 in 2000, making an annual net growth of around 5 per cent (Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania 2001).2  Even the most conservative
estimates indicate that by the year 2020, there will be something in the region of 12,475,115 Witness evangelists (Stark and Iannaccone 1997:153-4).3 The Witnesses attribute their international success to the fulfilment of the prophecy of Matthew 24 which states that the gospel of the Kingdom will be preached to the ends of the earth. They espouse an exclusive message which declares that while a great multitude of righteous people (including those who do not necessarily share their faith), will be granted eternal life on earth, only 144,000 members of their own community (the figure mentioned in Revelation 14:3) will enter heaven. Their heterodox purity code which prohibits, among other things, sexual relationships outside marriage, blood transfusions, annual celebrations (including Christmas, Easter, birthdays and national festivals) and involvement in all political affairs means that they are highly unlikely, despite their worldwide ministry, to recruit anything other than a small number of zealous members. The Society (to which the Witnesses themselves refer as the truth) rejects all other religious creeds as heresy and supports its doctrines with biblical texts. The movement is fundamentally a rational, rather than a mystical one.  It is a religion of disenchantment and serious study of the Bible and Watch Tower publications, of which prospective recruits must demonstrate their knowledge before they can be baptised.  Spiritual activities comprise a series of weekly meetings at the local Kingdom Hall (the official name for the Witnesses’

place of worship) and aggressive door-to-door evangelism. The movement discourages devotees from associating unnecessary with non-members and are thus able to offer those who are willing to accept its millenarian message a plausible weltanschauung and the security of a tightly knit community.  In a modern secular world in which all manner of life options are available, the Witnesses stand out as calculating, conservative and authoritarian.  The movement’s demand of unquestioning loyalty means that those who violate its moral or doctrinal code risk disfellowship.  To the sceptical outsider, this is a movement that bears all the hallmarks of a totalitarian regime.

Despite their successful evangelistic mission, there is a dearth of academic literature on the Witnesses.  Beckford (1975a, 1975b, 1976), Wilson (1974, 1978, 1990) and Dobbelaere and Wilson (1980) have carried out the most extensive research, but these studies are now rather dated.  Moreover, the Witnesses seldom receive more than a brief mention in most of the key textbooks on the sociology of religion. There is, however, a larger number of published articles on the Watch Tower movement in journals such as Social Compass, Sociological Analysis, The Journal of Modern African Studies and The British Journal of Sociology, but even these tend to be written from a macro perspective and fail to give devotees themselves a voice. Where academics have addressed agency, it is usually in relation to conversion and/or continuation of membership. Search as I may in the sociological and anthropological literature on the movement, I find little discussion of the effects of Watch Tower teachings either on the Witnesses themselves or on their children. This paper addresses these caveats. Not surprisingly, most Witness couples introduce their children to Watch Tower principles very early on in life in the hope that this will result in baptism when the child reaches his or her late-teens. From the Witnesses’ point of view, involving children in worship serves two essential purposes. Firstly, it is an easy way of recruiting new members to the Society, thereby enhancing conversion statistics for the future and, secondly, it is a means of protecting what are arguably society’s most vulnerable people from the snares of the devil. What follows is an examination of the various ways in which second and subsequent generation Witnesses are socialised into the Watch Tower regime and what happens to those who rebel against it. I write as a sociologist with an interest in what the movement means to adult members who endorse its doctrines and to youngsters who defect. The data were collected in a recent ethnographic study in the North West of England and include extracts from a series of unstructured interviews.  The interview method was chosen in order that devotees and their disaffected children might tell their own stories.

Nurturing the innocent

From the moment of their foundation, Jehovah’s Witnesses have remained emphatic in their claim that they are in but not of the world, and they devote the whole of their religious ministry preparing for a Messianic Kingdom. Unlike other separatists such as the Amish, the Hutterites and the Plymouth Brethren, however, the Witnesses live in ordinary neighbourhoods, are employed in mainstream occupations and even occupy the same households as those who do not share their faith. This means that in the course of their everyday lives, they must manage their social relations in a way that enables them to live and work among outsiders and at the same time, remain true to their strict ascetic beliefs. The caution with which the Witnesses approach modern secular society can be seen in how they socialise second and subsequent generation members. Year on year, the movement circulates millions of tracts for young people containing advice about faith, morality, dating, marriage, personal happiness and much more. There is also a substantial amount of material for parents who are worried about how to bring up their children in what is regarded as a troubled and hostile world.  The movement’s teachings on childhood and parenting provide the ethnographer with rich information for the analysis of millenarian religion.

The Witnesses are zealous people who regard young people as a crucial resource. It would be wrong to suggest, however, that there is a uniform approach to parenting. Devotees deal differently with tensions between personal feelings and ascetic principles, and that there is no stereotypical Jehovah’s Witness response to life in the twenty-first century.  This also applies to the nurturing of children. While all Witness parents hope that their sons and daughters will continue to fight the Watch Tower cause long in to the future, there are significant differences in parents’ views on matters such as discipline, association with non-members and, perhaps most surprisingly, involvement in religious activities.4 The socialisation of children into the milieu of the Society occurs at both macro and micro levels. The macro level concerns the official precepts that are issued by the movement and communicated from top downwards, mainly in the form of tracts and magazines.5 Some of these are written specifically for children and contain advice about how best to achieve happiness in a world that is to all intents and purposes, secular. Others are aimed at parents, offering support and encouragement in times of trial and tribulation. Micro socialisation, on the other hand, is about everyday parenting and the scenarios to which this gives rise at grass-roots level. The Governing Body propounds the view that well-mannered children are the products of good adult example, and this means the constant monitoring and surveillance of their behaviour. Responsibility for this is considered to rest with parents. The nature of children’s activities and the dynamics of parent-child interaction are the empirical measures against which the effectiveness of micro socialisation can be judged.

Respect for adults, particularly for parents, is one issue about which the Witnesses have a great deal to say. The movement stresses the importance of child subservience even in cases where the example set by parents leaves much to be desired This reveals something important about the Witnesses’ concept of childhood.  Although it would be wrong to suggest that the movement adopts the Victorian view that children should be seen and not heard (Witness children are, after all, encouraged to take part in door-to-door proselytising), it is clear that it does not welcome dissidence or even mild questioning. This makes it difficult for young Witnesses, especially those under the age of 16, to refuse to undertake Bible study or to attend meetings with their parents at the Kingdom Hall. On the whole, youngsters display an extraordinary degree of politeness towards adults and a profound respect for the movement’s theology.  Only those who lapse in later life tend to confess that they found ‘studying’ laborious, but claim they had had little other choice than to acquiesce during childhood. Children’s involvement at meetings cannot go unnoticed. Those as young as 4 or 5 years of age can be seen contributing to some of the discussions, but more active involvement increases as children reach teenage years. Long before they are baptised, children partake in the rôle-play sessions (usually with adults) where they rehearse doorstep sermons. Adult members of the congregation usually accompany  the child in door to door evangelism. Parents, aunts and uncles are the driving force behind children’s participation, but like most millenarian communities, the strong emotional bonds that exist between devotees help to sustain motivation. Studying is, by and large, a family affair. The role of adult members is crucial if children are to be effectively socialised into the Watch Tower regime and if the movement is to survive in the longer term. In the short term, subjecting children to the study of Watch Tower tracts and the never ending programme of activities at the Kingdom Hall enables devotees to exercise control in a remarkably different way to that of other parents. Witnesses are, to all intents and purposes, strict disciplinarians who do not allow misdemeanours to go uncontested or their authority to be challenged. It is not uncommon to see children who step out of line at Watch Tower meetings being verbally and sometimes physically chastised. One former member told me how, in his former years as a congregational elder, he had taken his two sons outside the Kingdom Hall and beaten them when they had allowed their minds to wander off a sermon. At the micro level of socialisation, devotees go to considerable lengths to screen out undesirable associates by arranging activities for junior members. Large groups of Witness children are often taken to tenpin bowling allies, ice-skating rinks and the cinema. These pursuits usually take place at weekends and are arranged by parents who devise a supervision rota. Although teenagers are never allowed to go away on holiday alone with a boyfriend or girlfriend, they are generally free to join other Witness families on trips abroad with adults acting as chaperones. Consequently, young Witnesses form their closest ties with their siblings, cousins and friends of a similar age.

Children’s leisure is not the only thing Witness parents like to vet. The movement’s Governing Body is all too aware that once young children learn to read, the world is their oyster. Parents take great care in ensuring that where possible, reading materials, television programmes and more recently, data that can be downloaded on computers meet the approval of officials.

From an early age, children are weaned on infant reading schemes that reinforce the movement’s perspective on existential issues such as creation, the purpose of life, the path to salvation, the causes of suffering and what happens to us when we die. As one might expect, these books contain biblical stories, illustrations, puzzles and simple questions, all of which are designed to make children aware of the errancy of other belief systems and the presence of evil in the world. But perhaps the most subtle characteristic of Watch Tower literature for small children is the absence of conventional make-believe. One mother explained how she would not allow her seven year old son to read books that contained references to witches, fairies or magicians because of the movement’s rejection of superstition.  Moreover, the Witnesses’ refusal to celebrate Christmas means that children are aware that Santa Claus is a fictitious character and cannot, therefore, bring presents. While there is no knowing whether all devotees are as painstaking as this in their efforts to safeguard their children against surrealism, one could be forgiven for thinking that if the tenets of the Watch Tower are to be fundamentally upheld, no Witness child would ever encounter the vast array of nursery rhymes and adventure stories that are embedded in modern culture. It is only because fiction pervades the public sphere that parents cannot completely censor their children’s reading materials.

Older children, because they are generally allowed more freedom and are exposed to secular adolescent culture (particularly at school), soon become aware of adult literature. There is nothing more alarming to Witness parents than an inquisitive 13 or 14 year old with a desire to explore a world in which traditional authority and moral boundaries have weakened. At the same time, preventing children from hanging around on street corners does not necessarily avert their interest in teenage magazines, romantic novels and a whole host of other publications that the Governing Body deems inappropriate. Whatever steps parents might take to safeguard their children, literature of this nature is available in libraries and bookshops. In its concern about the so-called dangers of these sources and the relative ease with which they can be obtained, the movement has little other option than to appeal to the moral integrity of children who might be tempted to read it.

There is, however, one resource that has given children more freedom than ever before to access written and visual text – the worldwide web. This revolutionary technology has enabled young and old alike to search for information ranging from gardening to pornography, and this is a prospect that fills every Witness parent with horror. The movement’s response to the internet is ambivalent to say the least. At its most sanguine, Watch Tower literature has applauded international electronic communication since this is a facility from which the Society has itself benefited. The net not only provides devotees with a means of proselytising, it also enables them to e-mail their co-religionists and to keep abreast of what is happening thousands of miles away. On the other hand, at no other period in history has there been so much electronic data available and so little control over what can be downloaded. At present, there is little to prevent anyone from establishing their own website and from supplying potential browsers with whatever information they want. For this reason, surfing the net is dangerous business. This is one activity that parents are unable to police, and any attempt to do so might arouse a child’s curiosity.  Needless to say, this versatile technology continues to be a source of concern for the movement’s Governing Body.

Despite the large amount of reading involved in Watch Tower membership, it would be a mistake to assume that Witness children are high academic achievers. There are two reasons why this is not generally the case. Firstly, the passive ‘learning’ that takes place in the Kingdom Hall and at Book Study meetings fails to procure the critical thinking, less still the analytical skills, required for high level academic performance; and secondly, the Society’s unequivocal millenarian perspective means that whatever the academic potential of its younger members, evangelistic activities take priority over educational success. Young Witnesses who intend to undergo baptism rarely progress to college or university. This can be a source of regret in subsequent years among those who later defect. One former member told me:

Witnesses don’t push you with school work. If you’re a Witness, education just doesn’t seem to be an issue. Although my mum and dad always wanted me to do well, they didn’t show a great deal of interest in my school work because as far as the Witnesses are concerned, you’re going to become a pioneer when you leave school and work part-time. You can’t have a career because your ‘career’ is going to be in the Witness organisation. I started off at school with the best of intentions and I’d have liked to have done a lot better, but my parents never pushed me so I stopped trying. My sister who never questioned anything the Witnesses did went on to become a pioneer, worked part-time on a fruit and veg stall, has no direction, doesn’t own her own house and doesn’t have a pension scheme! I’ve been back to college since and done NVQs in Business Management and Administration.

This young woman’s comments suggest that the Witnesses pay lip-service to compulsory education and fail to use it as an avenue for upward social mobility.6 While the Governing Body wants its younger members to attain an adequate level of literacy, (if only to enhance their ministerial skills), it continues to worry that education for the pursuit of career success and material wealth might lead to the pursuit of personal interests at the expense of spiritual well-being.  To this day, Witness children abstain from all forms of non-Witness worship, school politics, nationalistic practices such as saluting flags and singing anthems and curricular and extracurricular activities for Christmas and Easter. Parents are requested to monitor the school curriculum (particularly performing arts and media programmes) in order to ensure that their children are protected from ‘unwholesome associations’.7  While the Society has no objection to Religious Studies syllabuses that contain factual information about world faiths, participation in worship is still strictly forbidden. This means that like the Muslim community, the Witnesses may choose to withdraw their children from school assemblies that include Christian prayers and/or hymn singing, although it is becoming increasingly common for Witness children to attend religious assemblies without partaking in rituals. Participation in after-school clubs continues to be discouraged because it is feared that it will leave less time for Witnessing activities and could lead to wayward behaviour. Witness parents, perhaps more than any others, find themselves in constant dialogue with governors, teachers and other educational administrators who work within a system that does not always operate in accordance with Watch Tower doctrines. Although a child from any background might wish to refrain from certain school activities, the larger than average number of objections made by the movement’s Governing Body means that it is difficult for young members to experience an education that is completely free from tension with school authorities. Although Witness pupils who attend non-denominational schools are usually spared from having to conscientiously object to religious worship, they must continue to jettison those aspects of school culture that contravene the Watch Tower code.8  The fact that the education system accommodates the Witnesses is, however, indicative of a pluralistic society that protects people’s citizenship rights.

It would be remiss of me to end this section without commenting on how parents deal with children who begin to express an interest in the opposite sex. Naturally, Witnesses in their mid to late-teens often form an attraction for someone of a similar age either in or outside the movement. But unlike many of their counterparts in the world, these young millenarians are not given the approval of adults. The Governing Body is critical of parents who allow children unlimited freedom, and premarital sex is forbidden. In turn, parents have strong reservations about nightclubs, town-centre pubs and other social arenas with which the movement associates hedonism. The Witnesses’ approach to romance resonates with what many would regard as a bygone age. Dating while still at school is discouraged, not only because of its possible effects on educational attainment, but also because those of school age are considered too young to enter into relationships. While the Watch Tower authorities have no objection to platonic friendships between young people, sexual activity is strictly forbidden. Parents who are worried that this might happen are advised to keep a watchful eye on proceedings.

Notwithstanding the Society’s objection to unsupervised romance, it would be more than a little surprising if the Governing Body were to issue an official age at which serious dating could commence. Generally speaking, young couples in their late teens are free to date each other without a chaperone. By this age, the tacit rules of courting are the same as for anyone else. But courting couples have a moral responsibility to show the rest of the world that chastity is not dead; hence, while they are free to meet each other in public, they are not usually allowed to meet in private.  Watch Tower guidelines for young people stress the importance of sexual purity and urge those in relationships to resist situations that may cause them to sin. Devotees in romantic relationships, including those engaged to be married, can face serious disciplinary action if there is any reason to suspect that they may be involved either in sexual activity or in immodest behaviour such as heavy petting or kissing. Engaged couples who buy houses in preparation for marriage must ensure that should they need to carry out repairs, a third party is always present. Though reminiscent of a bygone age, chivalry of this kind is an outward sign of clean living. The large body of Watch Tower literature with its persistent stress on the importance of celibacy outside and fidelity within marriage approaches sexual issues from a moral perspective that does not allow for deviation. Although some of this literature refers to issues such as puberty and hormonal changes, there is rarely any mention of birth control. Some parents with whom I spoke were vehemently opposed to sex education in schools on the grounds that it would encourage more teenage pregnancies, the rate of which they already deplored.9 The Witnesses’ unabated attacks on homosexuality and adultery serve to remind children that restrained heterosexual sex between married couples is the only acceptable form of sexual expression.10 In the meantime, it would take a courageous child to argue.

Growing up in the Watch Tower Society is something few non-Witness children would envy. While the effects of socialisation vary from one individual to another, there is little doubt that the Witnesses’ weltanschauung has a huge impact on the reality of second generation members. This may also be true of mainstream Christianity and other systems of belief, but a sizeable number of children reared in the Watch Tower community from a very young age often claim that their religion made them feel different from their non-Witness peers. This is seldom something Catholic, Anglican or even Muslim children experience, not only because there are many more of them in schools and local communities, but also because their beliefs do not prevent them from taking part in activities in which most other children engage. This is not to say that Witness parents do not buy their children toys, games and learning aids, but I have offered several examples of how the movement’s heterodox beliefs conflict with conventional concepts childhood. Wherever one might stand on this issue, Witness children have little other option than to honour their fathers and their mothers.

The ones who say ‘No’

Continued membership of a totalitarian organisation is never unconditional. When Russell founded the Watch Tower Society in the late-nineteenth century, his intention was to offer an alternative belief-system to mainstream Christianity, and one (the only one) that represented the revealed word of God. From the time of its inception, the movement was indisputably sectarian – it was small, it was intense, it claimed monopoly over truth; and consequently, its
members felt exclusive. Communities like this are dependent on those born into them for
ong -term survival. The movement owes much of its international expansion to horizontal and vertical recruitment. Mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, aunts, uncles, nephews, nieces, cousins, in-laws, grandparents and grandchildren are all prime candidates for baptism – a rite of passage that boosts the annual membership statistics. Were it not for the significance of kinship, the Witnesses would not have had anything like the amount of success they have either in recruitment or retention. But what about children who express disdain for a mission they have been brought up to believe is so sacrosanct? What do the parents do then?

In a world in which people are allegedly free to choose from a whole range of options, children’s acquiescence matters to the movement like never before. The available research suggests that the Witnesses are successful in retaining their children. For example, Beckford

(1975a) discovered that around two-thirds of second generation Witnesses over 16 remained active members. This corresponds with the General Social Survey of 1994 which showed a retention rate of around 70 per cent.11 The Witnesses nurture their young in accordance with Watch Tower doctrines because they believe it is the right thing to do, and as far as they are concerned, that is the end of the matter. At the macro level, the Governing Body has a responsibility to ensure that parents in every congregation are supported to the nth degree, not only because it shares the same spiritual objectives, but because it must consider long- term survival. So long as children tow the line, all should be well; but those who refuse baptism do damage to the membership statistics. Children are the movement’s bread and butter. Only a parent lacking in foresight would allow a child to miss Kingdom Hall meetings or to question the principles on which the theology is based. Only a foolish one would encourage excessive contact with the outside world or turn a blind eye to issues that could have serious implications. For the Witnesses, an expedient parent is a forbidding parent. It is someone who is able to recognise the seductive forces that will lead their child astray and who drives them away before they are able to strike. It is also someone who is aware that even the nicest outsider who appears to be kind to children may be a wolf in sheep’s clothing; skilled at making something sinister look glamorous. Witness parents everywhere must be on their guard.

Rebellion within the Watch Tower community can take a number of forms, all of which are worthy of sociological analysis, but space dictates that I be selective. The following account is not about feckless youngsters who go missing on a warm summer evening twenty minutes before they are due to set off with their parents to the Kingdom Hall, or those who ignore the elder’s request for silence when a meeting is about to commence. Nor is it about children who fail to take seriously the words of an angry parent when their preparation for a Book Study has been found wanting. Even for disciplinarians like the Witnesses, minor misdemeanours such as these constitute little more than naughtiness and present no real threat to the community.  Instead, I have decided to focus on children of around 15 upwards who have decided, without reservation, that Watch Tower life is no longer for them. These dissidents are the Society’s bête noire. Their behaviour poses a more serious challenge and has graver long term implications. A child who is unwilling to partake in worship is not like a child who does not want to go to bed. Children who wish to terminate their membership are raising a spiritual objection, the effects of which are catastrophic. Congregational elders hope that by the age of about 16, a young person who has received a Witness upbringing will make the decision to become an official evangelist, for which baptism is the appropriate requisite. But this is also the age at which children have reached legal independence, and there is nothing to prevent them from leaving home. As far as the Witnesses are concerned, this is not the issue. Those who abandon the Society, whatever their legal rights, are playing with fire; far more than those in the outside world who at least can be excused on the grounds that they know no better. In this respect, voluntary defection is like involuntary expulsion; the first step to mayhem, perhaps even to annihilation.

Whatever else might happen, the kind of rebellion to which I am referring begins or ends with the refusal to attend Watch Tower meetings. Although this is never well received either by loved ones or by other devotees, it can happen for a number of reasons. Some individuals may feel anxious about having to stand on a platform and rehearse doorstep sermons in front of the whole congregation; hardly an easy feat even for the most confident youngster. Others may be aware of events that are taking place elsewhere on the evenings when meetings are held, be it a game of football or an extracurricular activity at school. Or, less commonly, there could be an unbelieving relative at home (as in the case of mixed marriages) who has the luxury of staying in and watching television while the rest of the family is engaged in worship.  Whatever the reason, the alternatives to studying religious texts and listening to what seem like endless monologues can be very attractive indeed to someone for whom studying is an altogether too demanding way of life. This is not to say that second generation members who turn away from the movement necessarily renounce its principles. For all their objections, it would be surprising if these youngsters did not endorse some of the values that they had had their whole lives to internalise. In this respect, lapsed Witnesses are no different from lapsed Catholics or lapsed Methodists in that their defection usually signifies a rejection of the movement’s rituals and doctrines rather than its values of honesty, charity and integrity. The following excerpt is from an interview  with Laura, a 25 year old former member who, after several years of squabbling with her parents, left the community at the age of 16:

My earliest memories of childhood are of being dragged to meetings so often; it was the absolute centre of my life for two hours at a time, three times a week. By the time I was about 8 or 9, I started thinking ‘This is a bind. I’m not enjoying this’. You see, the truth makes parents stricter than parents who aren’t Witnesses; it keeps you in this little circle of people that you never go outside of, except when you’re at school.

… But leaving aside their religion, my parents are two very loving people who would give their best at all times. Most of what they say is true and I do believe it, I just can’t follow it … but being brought up a Witness has given me a good steady base. I know I’m a responsible person; I think about things before I do them, I take other people’s feelings into consideration … all sorts of things the Witnesses are, they’ve passed down to me.

Laura’s disdain for Watch Tower meetings is tempered with what seems like an apology for her defection. While it is difficult to ascertain how much of the movement’s theology former members like Laura accept, there was certainly a desire among the young people I interviewed to remain close to their parents for whom they expressed much affection. Whatever grudges against the movement these individuals might have held, I found no evidence of permanent estrangement from loved ones. For one thing, teenage defectors are likely to be living in their parents’ home during the initial stages of their defection (a situation that requires tolerance from all parties if the lid is to be kept on a simmering pot), and for another, the strong kinship ties for which the Witnesses are renowned cannot easily be severed between parents and children, whatever their grievances. But these might be the only factors that prevent a Witness family from falling apart in the short-term. Some of the ‘rebels’ I met regaled me with stories of how, in their bid for freedom, they would climb out of their bedroom windows in the evenings to be with their friends, smuggle alcohol and cigarettes into the house, take public transport to forbidden venues and, in some cases, engage in sexual activities. Tammy’s story echoes some of this:

When I was about fifteen, I had a large circle of Witness friends and we were all doing things we shouldn’t have been doing … we were all smoking, we were all drinking, we were all going out with the opposite sex, we all used to go home late. I remember one night, we were supposed to be going ice-skating and Martin, my cousin, had sneaked some Special Brew under his coat and we drank it together in the park … on that occasion, we got the bus back to his house cos we weren’t being picked up … I’d say a good half of us have now left the truth.

Tammy’s reminiscence of her deviant past suggests that second-generation dissidence among the Witnesses may be more widespread than parents realise. Regardless of whether they remain in membership, youngsters like Tammy are no different from most other teenagers in pursuit of adventure. Tammy’s rebellion is a response not merely to authority, but to her parents’ brand of authority; that is, to a value system that is governed by strict religious edicts. She was adamant that the conflict with her parents could have been greatly reduced had they been more liberal:

By the time I was at secondary school, I started thinking to myself ‘I could be going out with my friends tonight to the park, just messing about doing this and doing that, not to do anything wrong, but just to go out to the youth club and things like that; but instead I’ve got to go to a meeting for two hours, and by the time I get home it’ll be too late.’ When I was about 13, my parents wanted to mould me and limit my association with certain people. Even when I was older and I was allowed out, there was always a curfew of half past eight; everybody else was going home at ten … mind you, other Witness children weren’t allowed any association with any non-Witnesses apart from at school, so I suppose I had a lot of freedom! By the time I was in my final year at school, I was spending most of my time fighting my parents and at that point, I decided I wasn’t going to any more meetings. They were trying to control me and I didn’t want to be controlled; they weren’t willing to bend at all. If I’d just been left to do my own thing for a while with guidance rather than strict guidelines, I might still be a Witness now.

The lengths to which Tammy’s parents were prepared to go to ensure that she remained within the parameters of the Watch Tower – their insistence that she attend all meetings, the limited amount of time she was allowed to spend with her non-Witness friends and the curfews by which she had to abide – confirm their disdain for the secular world.  This is the consequence of no ordinary generation gap. A great many parents who live in the modern West make the claim that when they were teenagers, things were different; that it was safe to walk the streets without fear of attack, that they could leave their homes unlocked and know that they would not be burgled and that there was never any sex before marriage. But unless, like the Witnesses, they hold fundamentalist religious beliefs, their nostalgic memories do not generally cause them to impose anything like the same constraints on their children as those to which Tammy was subjected. It would be wrong to assume from this, however, that Tammy and her Witness friends are indifferent to religious matters. Rather, they see themselves as products of a system that views the world with far deeper suspicion than is justified – one that is premised on the belief that children who have too much contact with secular influences tumble interminably into some vortex of depravity. Witness children who show affinity with the mores of the present day fill their parents with anxiety. It is a sociological axiom that millenarian theologies thrive on the notion of things becoming progressively worse. Demonising the modern world enables the movement to affirm its exclusivity.

Tammy’s acts of defiance in her younger years – smoking tobacco, drinking alcohol and arranging illicit meetings with her friends in the park – are, however, minor aberrations compared with those of Natasha. Like Tammy, Natasha bickered constantly with her parents throughout her school years as a result of being made to attend Watch Tower meetings; but Natasha’s story is much more dramatic. She terminated her membership one evening after a violent quarrel with her mother at the Kingdom Hall. This was triggered by Natasha’s resistance to taking part a rôle-play session on the platform:

If you know anything about the Witnesses, you’ll know that we have what we call the Ministry School where we do little household talks on the platform. Anyway, this particular lady from the congregation, I was her ‘householder’ and I’d been round and practised it the previous week, and I wasn’t happy about it because of my age; I was quite self-conscious and I didn’t want to appear a fool. Anyway, it came to the actual night, and just before I was about to walk on to the platform, I had a massive outburst and I just ran off to the toilets and I said ‘I’m not doing it, I’m NOT doing it, and I’m not coming again!’ and my mum came running after me and she said ‘Oh yes you are!’ and all hell broke loose, but I’d got it into my head that I was sixteen and that if I didn’t want to go any more, I wouldn’t. I never went to another meeting after that.

Although both Natasha’s parents practised their faith earnestly, it was, in fact, her mother who claimed responsibility for ensuring that Natasha and her older sister completed their weekly Bible studies and door-to-door service work. Natasha’s father was, it seems, less authoritarian than his wife (an unusual scenario considering the patriarchal nature of the movement) which explains why it was with her mother that Natasha most frequently remonstrated:

Mum and I were at each other’s throats endlessly and it was a real hassle for my dad … he didn’t want to get involved really. I remember one night when we were having tea, my mum and I were at it hammer and tongues, and he just picked up his plate
and smashed it on the floor and he yelled ‘I’ve had enough of this!’ He’d got to the point where he didn’t know what to do next. My mum was so intense about things and he wasn’t. She just kept pushing and pushing and pushing.

For the next two years, Natasha formed a steady relationship with her boyfriend, Dominic, a lapsed Catholic who was four years older than she, and who was, to Natasha’s relief, indifferent to religion. Not surprisingly, Natasha’s parents disapproved of the relationship and insisted that while Natasha remained living with them, she came home every night and invite Dominic to the house only when they were present. They also forbade Dominic and Natasha from going away together on holiday. Natasha’s relationship with her parents finally reached an impasse when, a few weeks before her nineteenth birthday, she fell pregnant – a moral violation for which Natasha knew she would be evicted. With much foreboding, Natasha broke the news to her parents and went to live with Dominic’s sister. By the time Natasha had given birth to their baby girl, the couple had moved into their own home and planned to marry the following year. Meanwhile, Natasha’s mother, who was probably at her lowest point in the crisis, told me:

The problems we have had recently have taken their toll. This situation with Natasha has absolutely floored me. It all began when she said she didn’t believe Armageddon’s coming. We arranged for the elders from the congregation to come and talk to her, and since then, things went from bad to worse. She’s gone living with her boyfriend now which obviously we don’t approve of. She’s even said that she’s prepared to get married in a Catholic church and the thoughts of that just smashes my mind to bits! I mean, there’s no way we’d be able to go the wedding … I’ve felt at times like I’ve been going demented. I’ve even considered going and speaking to a psychologist. I got books from the library on how to deal with teenagers. I’ve gone wrong somewhere! I feel like I’ve bent over backwards to show her loving kindness and I’ve kept getting slapped down. I find it very hard to talk about. Our theory is that it’s the devil turning people away from doing what’s right.

This whole family scenario warrants consideration for a number of reasons. Here, we have a teenager who does not only break away from the Watch Tower community, but falls pregnant by and cohabits with someone who does not uphold its tenets – a bitter pill indeed for her parents to swallow. Natasha’s behaviour epitomises everything the Witnesses deplore. Her family life from start to finish shows how, even compared with other world-renouncing sectarians, the Witnesses have no mechanism for dealing with children who break the movement’s ascetic rules. Though there are many wilful teenagers in the world, those who have grown up in a world-renouncing movement offend their parents in a very different way than those who have not. The austerity of Watch Tower tenets allows little scope for children to embrace teenage culture without being considered at risk.  To those who do not understand the Witnesses’ worldview, this ‘risk’ has been constructed (and exaggerated) by a group of religious fundamentalists whose beliefs make it impossible for teenagers to experience normal adolescence. From this point of view, rebellion is more about unrealistic parental expectations than serious defiance.

As far as the movement itself is concerned, second generation defectors are not treated with anything like the same contempt as Witnesses who are disfellowshipped. Rather, Watch Tower literature appeals to parents to accept their ‘prodigal’ child’s decision to leave the community and to wait in hope for his/her return. The Watchtower (the movement’s most widely circulated magazine) periodically features stories of young people who defect from the truth and who return at some later stage. Defectors are depicted as frivolous, impressionable people who have taken leave of their senses, while those who are reinstated are portrayed as having learned a hard lesson in discernment. These stories are often accompanied by personal testimonies of ex-members who reflect on how their craving for excitement led them into lives of debauchery, but how, by virtue of their former wisdom, they saw the error of their ways and returned remorsefully to the fold. Parents, on the other hand, are presented as God-fearing people for whom their child’s departure is a devastating blow that affects them in much the same way as bereavement. It is not uncommon for parents to adopt a kamikaze approach to their child’s obstinacy by calling on the support of other members as well as congregational officials. Elders and relatives use Watch Tower aids, particularly tracts that contain biblical references, in an attempt to steer the offender back on course – a strategy that rarely produces success with those who feel they have had more than their fair share of indoctrination. Second generation Witnesses who do break away from the community usually manage to establish sufficient relations with the outside world to compensate for loss of contact with devotees. These defectors are likely to have formed close friendships with non-Witnesses at school or, like Natasha, they may be dating an unbelieving partner. Unlike many of their older relatives, and probably even their parents, they have not entered the movement as enthusiastic converts (see Holden 2002). These are youngsters whose defiant behaviour enables them to see that the outside world, for all its shortfalls, offers an alternative way of life.

Conclusion

The evidence presented in this paper suggests that children who violate Watch Tower principles are children who are struggling to express their frustration with authority. Whatever one might think about the Witnesses’ weltanschauung, few would deny that rebels are courageous individuals. The testimonies presented in this paper are of young people who dare to express their independence of thought; people who share with us their stories of what sympathetic onlookers would see as a recoil from an oppressive regime. But it is also clear that relationships are as volatile in Witness households as any other, especially where dissident children are at loggerheads with parents. While levels of parental discipline vary, the effective socialisation of second generation members is crucial if the movement is to continue to recruit. As far as parents are concerned, children who transgress ascetic boundaries cavort with the devil and thus lose the impetus to bequeath the movement’s sacred legacy to subsequent generations.

The strict milieu into which the Witnesses socialise their children can be seen as a means, conscious or subconscious, of deflecting the perceived problems of a modern world.  While the rest of humanity struggles with the ambiguities that the twenty-first century presents, the Witnesses are able to avert these problems through the provision of a protective community. The difficulties in constructing a meaningful identity in a dislocated world are made easier in totalitarian communities.  This option denies all ambiguity and releases the individual from what sociologist Peter Berger describes as ‘the terror of chaos’ (Berger 1977:109).  The Witnesses’ relentless adherence to biblical literalism poses a serious challenge to the claim that as societies move towards secularisation, religious movements may adopt a ‘this-worldly’ orientation. To the disappointment of the children I have quoted and many others like them, there is little or no evidence that this was happening in their own religion.12 Parents continue to use anachronistic language when bemoaning the current state of the world, and their persistent resistance to ecumenicalism shows that they are as determined as ever to prevent external forces, sacred or secular, from invading their rituals and beliefs. The movement’s exclusivity is a powerful armoury for protecting its children from the moral dangers of a pluralistic and atomised society.

By offering a glimpse into the lives of Witness children, I have highlighted some of the general dilemmas that the modern world poses for the movement at both macro and micro levels. The available evidence exposes all the difficulties of belonging to a movement that espouses heterodox beliefs at the beginning of the twenty-first century. There is little reason to think that the Witnesses will become more liberal as the new millennium evolves. For all its conservatism, orthodox Christianity is better equipped than the Watch Tower community to respond to these changes, particularly where children are concerned. Catholic, Anglican and other church leaders are acutely aware of the difficulties they face in encouraging young people into their parishes, and most recognise that teenage culture has changed remarkably over the past few decades. At a time when mainstream churches have begun to provide drop- in centres for drug users, temporary accommodation for homeless adolescents, pastoral support for unmarried mothers, help lines for gays and lesbians, health advisory clinics for pregnant schoolgirls and a whole host of confidential counselling services for young people living on the margins of society, the Witnesses hold fast to a monosemic theology that they insist holds good for all people and for all time. As the world becomes increasingly fragmented, the Watch Tower movement shows little sign of relaxing either its fundamentalist doctrines or its demand for absolute loyalty. Its greatest challenge is to prevent the enemy without from becoming the enemy within.

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Endnotes

1The Witnesses always use the name Jehovah from the Hebrew translation Yahweh when referring to God. They regard this as a scriptural requisite. Armageddon is Jehovah’s victory over Satan at the end of time.

2 This represents the ‘peak’ figure. The ‘average’ figure for 2000 was 120,592.

3 This is based on a projected growth rate of 4 per cent.

4 For example, children who are reared in families in which only one parent is a member of the movement generally attend fewer meetings and spend less time in ministerial activities than children who are not.

5 At present, there is also a section for children entitled Young People Ask … in the movement’s magazine Awake!

6 Since so few adult Witnesses are employed in professional occupations, their failure to encourage their children to remain in education beyond the statutory leaving age corresponds with lower socio-economic groups in general.

7 One young Witness explained how her parents disapproved of her studying sociology at school because it addressed ‘worldly’ issues.

8 The movement’s objection to religious worship in schools means that most Witness parents select non-denominational state education for their children.

9 Attitudes towards school sex education programmes vary among Witness parents. While few object to the teaching of human reproduction and pregnancy in biology classes, most regard sex education as a matter for the family and exercise their legal right to withdraw their children from classes that include discussions of birth control and sexually transmitted diseases.

10 Adultery and sexual relations outside marriage are among the most common reasons for disfellowship.

11 Moreover, the American National Survey of Religious Identification found in the early

1990s that American Witnesses are more likely than other members of the general population to be married and to have large families. Around one third of married Witnesses have four or more children.

12 On the other hand, the fact that the Witnesses have steadily gained recruits does not necessarily mean that religious thinking, practice and institutions are losing social significance

(Wilson 1966:xiv). It could be that heterodox religious movements are able to resist secularising influences and prosper at a time when orthodox Christianity has weakened.

Posted with permission of Andrew Holden
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Andrew Holden
Department of Religious Studies, Lancaster University, UK

ABSTRACT

Jehovah’s Witnesses are members of a puritanical religious movement that claims to be in but not of the world. The movement has expanded rapidly over the past 130 years and there are now more than 6 million devotees worldwide. This paper examines the ways in which the movement promotes its millenarian message to prospective recruits. It also considers how the Witnesses are able to hold futuristic beliefs and at the same time, lead active lives in the present. The methods of data collection include unstructured interviews with devotees and content analysis of the movement’s own literature. The paper concludes that while the Witnesses’ futuristic symbolism is a form of escape from the modern world, it is also part of their own pseudo-corporate ‘branding’ which has contributed to their international success.

Jehovah’s Witnesses are members of a world-renouncing religious movement officially known as the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society. The Society was founded by Charles Taze Russell in 1872 and claims to monopolise the word of God. Since the foundation, of their movement, devotees have maintained that we are living in the Final Days. Their eschatology is based on a literal interpretation of the Bible and almost all their literature makes reference to the New Kingdom which they believe will be inaugurated by Jehovah at Armageddon.[i]

The movement boasts huge international success. The Society’s worldwide membership rose from a mere 44,080 in 1928 to an impressive 6,035,564 in 2000 – a total net growth of more than 5 per cent per year. (Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania 2001).[ii] Although these are the movement’s own figures, there is no reason to doubt them. For one thing, they are consistent with government estimates as well as those of independent scholars and for another, the Society publishes losses as well as gains.[iii] Even the most conservative estimates indicate that by the year 2020, there will be around 12,475,115

Witness evangelists (Stark and Iannaccone 1997:153-4).[iv] The Witnesses attribute their international expansion to the fulfilment of Matthew 24 which states that the gospel of the Kingdom will be preached to the ends of the earth. They propound an exclusive millenarian theology which declares that while a great multitude of righteous people (including those who do not necessarily share their faith) will be granted eternal life on earth, only 144,000 members of their own community (the figure mentioned in Revelation 14:3) will enter heaven. All other religious creeds are rejected as heresy, and devotees make extensive use of biblical texts and Watch Tower publications to attract new members. In this respect, the movement is a rational rather than a mystical one.

Despite their successful evangelistic mission, there is a dearth of academic literature on the Witnesses. Beckford (1975a, 1975b, 1976), Wilson (1974, 1978, 1990) and Dobbelaere and Wilson (1980) have carried out the most extensive research, but these studies are now rather dated. Moreover, the Witnesses seldom receive more than a brief mention in most of the key textbooks on the sociology of religion. There is, however, a larger number of published articles on the Watch Tower movement in journals such as Social Compass, Sociological Analysis, The Journal of Modern African Studies and The British Journal of Sociology, but even these tend to be written from a macro perspective and fail to give the Witnesses themselves a voice. Where academics have attempted to address agency, it is usually in relation to conversion and/or continuation of membership. To date, there is a serious shortage of material on Watch Tower millenarianism and its effects on the lives of devotees. For the past 130 years, the Witnesses have remained steadfast in their claim that they are in but not of the world, and they devote the whole of their religious ministry preparing for a Messianic Age. This paper examines the various ways in which futuristic beliefs are reified within the Watch Tower community and their impact on the consciousness of its members. Images of the utopian Kingdom to come are present in the movement’s language and in its visual representations. These images play a key role in sustaining membership and validating beliefs. I write from a sociological perspective, and this calls for an understanding of the cultural dynamics involved in the construction of a millenarian identity and of how those who hold futuristic beliefs live in the present. My aim is to offer an analysis of the Witnesses’ brand of millenarianism and its significance in the twenty-first century. In so doing, I hope to chart some of the territory that has been neglected. The data were collected in a recent study of the movement in the North West of England and include extracts from a series of unstructured interviews with devotees and content analysis of the movement’s own tracts.

The symbolic construction of the post-Armageddon Kingdom Millenarian movements like the Watch Tower Society are characterised by explosions of discontent and have emerged within the major world religions, including Christianity and Islam. Equally, some modern political ideologies such as the European socialist vistas of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries have been interpreted as millenarian in the sense that they promise radical social and economic change for which there exists no immediate feasible means. These ‘new societies’ are constructed as egalitarian and just. It would be wrong, however, to suggest that apocalyptic visions like those of the post- Armageddon paradise are a recent phenomenon. Historian Norman Cohn (1957) traces the origins of millenarianism to Western Europe in the middle ages. During this period, prophecy was a device used by Jews and Christians alike to console, fortify and assert themselves in an attempt to deal with their persecution. The Book of Revelation predicts that after his Second Coming, Christ will reign for a thousand years in his earthly Kingdom before the Last Judgement. The citizens of this Kingdom will be the resurrected Christian martyrs – a prophecy which, according to Cohn, later Christians interpreted in a much more liberal sense to include themselves as the suffering faithful. Cohn goes on to describe the historical development of millenarian beliefs and their various characteristics. Millenarianism was always collective in that the visions of the Messianic Kingdom depicted large numbers of faithful people enjoying salvation. This salvation would be realised on this earth rather than some extra terrestrial place such as heaven, and the event would be imminent and sudden. Transformation of life would be total, in the sense that eternal bliss would replace suffering and imperfection. Cohn documents a variety of millenarian movements throughout medieval Europe ranging from rigorous ascetics drawn from the dominant classes to the rootless involuntary poor of town and country whose lot was relentless insecurity. This latter group demonstrated the most violent and anarchic forms of millenarianism, largely in their struggle to improve their material conditions. Apocalyptic visions provided peasants and artisans with spiritual ammunition for annihilating the ruling classes, and this provided the basis for collective action (as in the case of peasant revolts). Cohn also maintains that millenarianism had its greatest impact in expanding urban areas that were characterised by rapid social change.[v] In much the same way that Weber argued that charismatic leaders would emerge to give a new moral basis to society, Cohn emphasises the tendency of the poor to offer deference to leaders who presented themselves not simply as holy individuals, but as prophets and saviours who promised salvation. This might help to explain why, in late- nineteenth century America, there was a huge proliferation of evangelical movements. Conquering evil is the one theme that places the Witnesses’ experiences into a framework of order and meaning. Over and above their involvement in public events like Kingdom Hall meetings and annual conventions, the Witnesses conceptualise their relationship with the world by evoking symbols such as artefacts, modes of dress, speech patterns, ceremonial rites, purity codes and bodily expression, all of which are an important part of membership. The Watch Tower symbols to which I refer here include visual images, metaphor and linguistic exchanges between devotees themselves. The representations of good and evil in the movement’s published materials depict a world that is about to undergo a dramatic transformation. The Witnesses use language and imagery to construct social boundaries, and these boundaries accentuate difference between members and non-members. Symbols enable devotees to draw around themselves a kind of mental map to affirm who belongs to the community and who does not. Since symbolic representations help to affirm millenarian beliefs and carry with them a message of hope for the future, they are a repository of meaning and a frame of reference for the Witnesses’ identity. These images appear in most of the movement’s literature. In addition to photographs of Watch Tower evangelists actively announcing Jehovah’s Kingdom, every copy of The Watchtower and Awake! (the movement’s own magazines) and most tracts and hardback publications depict positive images of devotees in a variety of forms. Other pictures are sketched by artists and portray the beautiful world of post-Armageddon. These illustrations are always idealistic and utopian. Deliriously happy characters surrounded by emerald green slopes, clear blue skies and bright sunshine set the scene in the delineation of the world of Jehovah’s Witnesses. All artwork is presented in vivid colour and is designed to depict the theology in the most positive visual form. Some pictures show devotees in the New Kingdom reunited with their deceased loved ones, while others portray animals such as lions and tigers (presumably once wild and ferocious) at play, at rest, or being caressed by children. Future-oriented symbolism reminds Witnesses everywhere of their millenarian vision and impresses upon them the need to minister to others. This exaggerated version of contentment conveys a subtle but powerful message to all who peruse the literature – that infinite happiness, justice and peace can be achieved through membership of the Watch Tower movement.

If positive images promote millenarian doctrines, negative ones warn of the presence of evil in the world. The same publications are filled with pictures of women being murdered, children abusing drugs, thieves breaking into houses, heretics worshipping idols and couples acting promiscuously – all of which show life outside the movement as debased. Unlike the pictures of millenarian bliss, these images are presented in dark colour and portray characters with unattractive features. This antithesis of salvation on the inside and depravity on the outside suggests that there can be nothing in-between the two systems and that it is impossible for morality to exist beyond the Watch Tower community. This depiction of sin contrasts sharply with millenarian idealism and the doctrine of salvation. These polarising concepts of sin and righteousness provide an authenticity which some scholars argue people yearn in a fast- changing world. This has some similarities with Hall’s analysis of the representations deployed by patriots in the construction of national identities (Hall 1992). Like nationalism, millenarianism is dependent on a narrative that emphasises origin, continuity and timelessness – all of which are essential features of the imagined community.[vi] Since it would be impossible for all the Witnesses in the world to know each other (as it would all people in a nation), the whole community can only be imagined. Imagery enables the movement to romanticise the evangelistic activities of Witnesses everywhere, and at the same time offer its devotees a glimpse of what life will be like when the present world has passed away. The uniformity with which these symbols are presented authenticate the Watch Tower community in the same way as national emblems authenticate patriotism.

It could equally be argued that the Witnesses’ romantic vision of the future is a response to one of the most widely documented features of the modern world; namely, disenchantment. Weber’s theme of the ever-increasing rationalisation of the modern world was centred on the notion that the Enlightenment failed to bring about the liberation that people had expected. The application of instrumental reason robbed the world of mystery and excitement, and this led to the increasingly pessimistic view that the costs of modern civilisation outweighed the benefits. In his analysis of cultural change in the post-Enlightenment period, sociologist Robert Bocock argues:

The project, set in motion by the Enlightenment, of increasing progress, wealth and happiness through the application of science and technology, first to industry and then to social life as a whole, and the weakening of the hold of custom, magic, superstition and other supernatural taboos over which the philosophes rejoiced, has been put in question. In the traditional culture of Europe before the Protestant Reformation, religion provided the moral framework for everyone. Everyday life was punctuated by saints days, fairs, pilgrimages, festivals, seasons of feasting, atonement and celebration. The culture of ordinary people was saturated with folk customs, magical spells, rituals and religious occasions. Springs and wells provided healing waters, the relics of saints offered safe journeys or protection to relatives and friends. (Bocock 1992:261)

If Bocock’s analysis is correct, utopian thinking can be seen as a reaction to the demystification of culture (part of what modernity theorists suggest has given rise to secularisation) that has existed in various forms since the Reformation. In this sense, utopian imagery is a cultural resource used by the Witnesses to counter the soullessness of the modern rational world. But here lies a paradox. I have already mentioned that the movement promotes calculable doctrines and aims to recruit by essentially rational means. It is this combination of romantic idealism and rational calculation that makes the movement distinctive. The simultaneous usage of the rational and the romantic has contributed greatly to the Witnesses’ success, since both resources appeal to people’s emotions as well as their intellect. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that in its visual representations of the post- Armageddon world, the movement makes little use of mystical symbols such as angels, heaven, mist or haloes. Instead, its publications contain scenes of lush valleys and flowing streams.[vii] These images portray an earthly rather than a mystical afterlife, illustrating the Witnesses’ belief that the overwhelming majority of the faithful will return to Eden – the place that God originally created for humankind. They support this with the prophecy of Daniel 7:13 which they believe foretells the eternal worship of Jehovah on paradise earth. The usage of scriptures to substantiate a millenarian vision of the future seems to suggest that like the rationalists of the eighteenth century who, despite their quest for verifiable knowledge, continued to hold religious beliefs, the Witnesses synthesise faith and reason. Bland though they might seem compared with mystical representations, illustrations of earthly beauty allow the New Kingdom to be easily imagined. The Witnesses’ association of a beautiful landscape with eternal peace conveys their preoccupation with tranquillity.

In addition to pictorial representations, metaphor, allegory and analogy are also part of Watch Tower symbolism. These linguistic props create an impression of a community united in Brotherhood, and play a subtle rôle in the Witnesses’ evangelistic mission. Socio-linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argue that everyday language is full of metaphors which give meaning to the world. Metaphors deepen human experience because of the meanings they are intended to convey and the actions that follow (Lakoff and Johnson 1980). Metaphors and allegories are embedded in the Witnesses’ weltanschauung. The most pervasive of these is, of course, The Watchtower, which provides a caption for published literature as well as the official name of the movement. This term is central to millenarian ideology and appeals to devotees to be ever on their guard. More generally, metaphors, allegories and analogies are one of the principal means by which the Witnesses communicate their reality to each other and to prospective converts. The following passage from a Watch Tower publication contains an abundance of these:

Sometimes a young person may say that he or she associates with another of questionable ways and reputation so as to help that one. To want to help others is a fine thing. But if you go along with them in their selfish pleasures, how much help are you giving them? For example, if you saw a child in a mud puddle, would you take some soap out into the puddle and try to clean the child with it? You would only get yourself dirty as a result. You would first have to try to encourage the child to come out of the mud puddle before you could hope to do anything about cleaning him up at close range. Actually, to accept a person with bad habits as a close associate will often have a bad effect on that person (as well as on yourself). Why? Because it may encourage him to keep on in the same way, feeling that he can always rely on your backing him up. Wouldn’t it be of far greater help to limit your association to times when you can really aid the person by pointing out good counsel and by inviting him to accompany you to places where that counsel is explained? (Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania 1976:64-5)

While other metaphors and analogies could have been used to illustrate the Witnesses’ desire to purify the impure, the analogy of the mud puddle is significant because of the way in which it is used to warn against self contamination. Equally important is the suggestion that ‘good counsel’ and ‘places of good counsel’ can be provided by Jehovah’s Witnesses. The scenario of the casualty of evil being delivered to salvation by the righteous reaffirms the importance of seeking only the friendship of those already in the movement or non-members who are willing to be cleansed.

Metaphor is present not only in the Witnesses’ written publications, but also in their verbal utterances. In one interview, an elder used metaphor to illustrate how people who join the movement ‘grow’ at different rates and how they vary in their response to Watch Tower teachings. New recruits were equated with horses being drawn to water, trees bearing fruit and athletes preparing for a race. Witnesses use figurative speech interchangeably with biblical parables both to win converts and to renounce the outside world. Among the titles of the sermons for the Annual District Convention held in the summer of 1997 were ‘Walking by faith, not by sight’, ‘Considering the daily text builds faith’, ‘Put up a hard fight for the faith’ and ‘Keep your eye simple’. The evangelists who delivered these sermons made constant use of metaphor and aphorism to impart their message of salvation. When the Witnesses refer to outsiders as ‘goats’ and ‘devil worshippers’, they exaggerate the unworthiness of others and present their own belief system as unblemished. Conversation often centres around articles in The Watchtower, sermons at meetings and experiences on the door-to-door visits.

References to ‘the world’, ‘the Kingdom’, ‘the ministry’, ‘Armageddon’ and ‘the truth’ are commonplace. Equally, the terms ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ are dominant terms of reference during door-to-door ministry and at the Kingdom Hall. Images, metaphors and verbal exchanges are the symbolic tools for the construction of the perfect community in a world of ambiguity and moral danger.

Temporality: apposition or anachronism?

Mormons, Seventh-day Adventists and Jehovah’s Witnesses all espouse remarkably similar millenarian doctrines. These three communities are unequivocal in their evangelistic messages concerning the end of time, and all see their mission as an essential part of the fulfilment of biblical prophecy. Although the belief in the Second Coming of Christ is steeped in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, orthodox Christianity has very little to say about how the event will occur, or when it is likely to happen. Consequently, those who belong to established churches and denominations are less vociferous than world-renouncing sectarians in their eschatological ministry. Indeed, one of the main sources of tension between Christian millenarians and modern-secular society is the expectation of things to come. Like the Witnesses, Mormons believe that their proselytising efforts are essential for the inauguration of a Messianic Age. The gathering of the people of Israel from other nations, the return of the Jews from Jerusalem and the restoration of the lost tribes prophesied in Isaiah 2:2-3 will, according to the Mormons, be brought about by their current worldwide missionary activities, after which, Christ will return in glory and exact his vengeance on the wicked. Similarly, the Seventh-day Adventists believe that Christ’s Second Coming will consign the unbelieving to destruction on earth, while the righteous will be taken up to heaven. The Adventists predict the annihilation of Satan and the subsequent transformation of the earth into a place of eternal bliss.

The Witnesses’ millenarian prophecies are based on a salvation narrative of past, present and future. According to the Watch Tower movement, human misery was triggered long ago when Adam and Eve ate of the forbidden fruit. This literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis substantiates every conceivable human experience in unambiguous terms. Though the Witnesses acknowledge that life can bring happiness as well as sadness, the success of their ministry lies in their ability to persuade the rest of humanity that good fortune is both arbitrary and short-lived. Biblical mythology provides them with an explanation for why life does not always run smoothly. One devotee explained:

What you’ve got to remember is that the world is imperfect and we’re imperfect, because Jehovah never intended it to be like this. We’ve inherited our imperfection from Adam and Eve. Jehovah wanted us all to be happy, but we decided to be disobedient and we’ll never be truly happy until he steps in and we go back to what he wants it to be like.

This woman’s analysis of life’s struggles derives from her concept of original sin; something she believes we have all inherited from our ancestral parents. The story of the Fall is central to all Christian belief, but unlike those who follow orthodox Christianity, the Witnesses regard it as a factual event rather than a myth that is intended to introduce humankind to a creator God and/or to the idea that God gives us free-will. Their literal reading of Genesis, Daniel and Revelation characterises their rational belief system. Substantive doctrines enhance the plausibility of the movement and help devotees to contextualise their spiritual mission. But temporal beliefs do much more than this. They equip the movement with the ability to explain the present and predict the future. The occurrence of world events becomes the fulfilment of prophecy so that the Witnesses are, in a very real sense, marking time.

According to modernity theorist Peter Berger, one of the most profound changes in human experience over the centuries is the way in which time is conceptualised; particularly the shift away from concerns about the past and the present towards those of the future (Berger

1977). Berger suggests that the transformation of time has taken place on three levels, the first of which he calls the level of everyday life. Here, clocks and wristwatches are used both to arrange and to calculate the length of daily activities. The second level is the level of biography, on which the individual perceives and actively plans his/her life as a ‘career’. On the third level – the level of an entire society – national governments and other large-scale institutions plan long-term projects, examples of which might be the advance of global capitalism or the management of public expenditure. Berger suggests that these three levels of transformation present ways of conceptualising time that contrast sharply with those preceding modernity. This futuristic concept if time is precise, measurable and in principle, subject to human control. Since time governs the functioning of the whole of modern life from employment to military strategy, it has become something to be mastered. Scientists, intellectuals and technical experts will make life and death decisions by using allegedly objective methods of prediction. Berger argues that we have become time engineers in the most intimate aspects of our lives such as family planning, guidance counselling and sex therapy (ibid.:104-6). There are philosophical issues about modern futurity, however, that Berger brings to our attention. For example, we may need to weigh our preoccupation with time against the detrimental effects of the pace of modern living on our mental and physical health:

Futurity means endless striving, restlessness and a mounting incapacity for repose. It is precisely this aspect of modernization that is perceived as dehumanizing in many non-Western cultures. There have also been strong rebellions against it within Western societies – a good deal of both youth culture and counterculture can, I think, be understood as insurrections against the tyranny of modern futurity, not to mention the current vogue of ‘transcendental meditation’ and similar mystical aspirations towards a liberating, timeless ‘now’. (ibid.:105)

Berger’s analysis provides some useful suggestions for why Jehovah’s Witnesses are the subjects of biblical eschatology rather than futurity. Although the Watch Tower movement must plan future events such as annual assemblies and conventions months ahead of schedule, the Witnesses regard time only as a short-term entity. As individuals, they conceptualise everyday life time in much the same way as any other citizen in that they live in accordance with the twenty-four hour clock, but their belief in the imminence of the end of time as we know it prevents them from making advanced plans for the future. The movement’s prediction of Armageddon in 1975 had a profound impact on the long-term plans of most devotees. Some made a conscious decision not to have any more children and to cancel all voluntary pension premiums and insurance policies. Others continued to enter into marriage and apply for mortgages, but did not expect to see ripe old age or watch their endowments mature. To this day, most Witnesses think along these lines.

The ‘striving, restlessness and a mounting incapacity for repose’ to which Berger refers are among the more negative features with which people associate futurity. But modernity theorists also claim that people’s reluctance to face the future derives from their discontentment with the present and a pessimistic view that things are becoming progressively worse – a pessimism that often manifests itself in the form of concern about moral decline and a lamentation that the orderly, peaceful past has gone forever (Pearson 1983, Sked 1987, Bailey 1988). Such nostalgia results in moral entrepreneurialism and an attempt to restore tradition.[viii] Christian fundamentalists engage in political affairs, demanding the ‘return’ of law and order and the prohibition of homosexuality, abortion, pornography and anything else they believe undermines moral decency and traditional family life. While secular society has jettisoned religious versions of temporality that offer millenarian hope for the future, the Watch Tower movement clings to its eschatological explanations of world events. Although few Witnesses tend to bemoan the loss of a great golden age (not least because the movement teaches that Satan has led humankind astray ever since Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden), concern about worsening morality is widespread. Unlike those who come from a more orthodox Christian tradition, however, the Witnesses are prevented from lobbying MPs and organising public demonstrations because of their belief that true devotion to Jehovah is apolitical. Consequently, they remain deeply pessimistic about the present and about people’s ability to bring about meaningful social change. Until such time that the world will be transformed by divine intervention, they maintain that the future holds bleak prospects. During the 1980s, the Witnesses frequently referred to the threat of nuclear war as a means of disseminating their belief in the inevitability of self- destruction and the arrival of the New Kingdom. In so doing, they are prevented by their own doctrines from romanticising the past and the present, but they do romanticise the future in a way that is typical of most millenarian movements. Sociologist Roy Wallis argues:

The world-rejecting movement expects that the millennium will shortly commence or that the movement will sweep the world, and, when all have become members or when they are in a majority, or when they have become guides and counsellors to kings and presidents, then a new world-order will begin, a simpler, more loving, more humane and more spiritual order in which the old evils and mistakes will be eradicated, and utopia will have begun. (Wallis 1984:9)

Wallis’s commentary suggests not only that millenarian communities are romantic in their vision of the future, but that they are precise about the conditions that will transform their hopes into reality. Millenarians are in constant dialogue with time inasmuch as they reflect on past events such as wars, famines and earthquakes in their prediction of the Last Days, and it is this temporal view of the cosmos that enables them to sustain their utopian expectations.

Temporality is crucial to the Witnesses who, in their hunger for Armageddon, use the prophecies of Revelation to predict the demise of all other religions and worldly institutions. According to the movement’s Governing Body, the prophecies in Matthew 24 have all now been fulfilled. Watch Tower literature persistently claims that Armageddon will occur within the generation of those who were alive in 1914, when Christ returned invisibly to establish Jehovah’s Kingdom. These constant references to keeping alert have a huge impact on the minds of members. At Watch Tower meetings, articulate speakers deliver sermons urging congregations to be vigilant and to keep up the good work of door-to-door evangelism; for that it is only when this work is complete, they claim, that the end will come. This exemplifies the symbolic effect of the anticipation of Armageddon and the way in which it impacts on the Witnesses’ concept of time. So convinced were they that 1975 would bring eternal glory that in that year, many abandoned their homes and pitched tents in remote areas. One life-long member told me:

I once remember visiting a brother in 1975 to talk over some congregational matters, and when I arrived, he was patching up his house. He said ‘I’m only giving this a lick of paint ’cos it’s no good giving it a thorough job.’ I said ‘What do you mean?’ He said

‘Well, it’s 1975’, but I still burnt the paint off my house when it needed it and I still bottomed it and sanded it. I thought ‘Why should I do a botch job, I like doing things well.’ Now then, I went to see him in ’78 and there he was taking the plaster off and putting a new damp course in! We work with a split mind. One is, it could start tomorrow, two is, it might be years, so we’ve a split mind … so each day has its anxieties and you cope with them; you plan to continue, but you also realise that if half way through building another extension on the house Armageddon comes, don’t cry about it! The Society is living by the same principle. They’re putting up buildings galore all over the world, and they’re not worried about whether Armageddon’s going to come this year, next year; they’re just going to go on allowing for expansion as long as the world continues. We are a progressive, forward looking organisation and our time, our efforts, our energy, our thinking and our finance all goes into carrying out Jehovah’s work until he is ready for stepping in.

Hence, the Witnesses’ expectation of Armageddon is not incompatible with pragmatic activities such as erecting headquarters and ministering to the world. This part alertness, part denial suggests that millenarian beliefs must coexist with evangelism if the principles on which the movement operates are to be put into practise. The Witnesses are living in a twilight world of transition between an unworkable present and an eagerly awaited future – a future that is conceptualised in terms of timelessness and continuity. The twenty-first century encourages a secular image of time either by treating it as a commodity or as a resource that contains no special meaning. Millenarians, on the other hand, maintain that time promises immortality and that death is the fulfilment of a romantic narrative. The events of one’s life such as birth, adolescence, employment, marriage, parenting, ageing and finally death, are all part of a large cosmic drama, the finalé of which the Witnesses hope to see.

Conclusion

Millenarian movements are, by their very nature, disruptive since they challenge all other systems of belief and patterns of behaviour, religious and secular. By attributing world catastrophes such as war, famine, murder, environmental pollution, genocide and terrorism to biblical prophecies, the Witnesses are able to support their promise of an imminent utopia in a way that is missing in the esoteric doctrines of Christendom. It is a sociological axiom that in societies where people are allowed the freedom to negotiate their own lifestyles, millenarian communities prosper by presenting themselves as exclusive organisations that affirm unambiguous boundaries between members and non-members. Since they are critical of mainstream religion, their appeal lies in their alternative way of life. The Witnesses recruit others to their cause by offering hope, self-confidence, support and direction in a world they believe is on the brink of chaos. Although their utopian dream can appeal to those who are experiencing personal difficulties, it also has a tacit rôle to play in enabling people to cope with some of the insecurities and uncertainties that the modern world presents. This is particularly true for those who are inclined towards pessimism. The movement’s vision of the future reinforces the pessimistic orientation in its presentation of itself as the perfect antidote to the worst conditions of secular society.

In this paper, I have argued that the Witnesses employ a variety of cultural resources to promote their millenarian creed. Temporal concepts are used by the Watch Tower movement to support its version of reality and its message of hope. The salvation narrative of past, present and future appeals to certain kinds of people at the beginning of the twenty-first century, particularly those who see the world as fragmented, confused, and morally reprehensible. I have also suggested that it is not so much the promises contained in this message as the way they are imparted that strengthens the movement’s appeal. If the Witnesses are to fulfil their eschatological mission (which is, after all, their raison d’être), they must bring their apocalyptic message to the attention of the widest possible audience. To date, the movement has been remarkably successful in recruiting new members and in using its funds to erect gigantic headquarters in almost every country in the world for the purposes of distributing its millenarian literature and centralising its spiritual activities. These long-term building projects are an important part of the Witnesses’ international ministry, the completion of which they believe will accelerate the New Kingdom. This combination of millenarianism and pragmatism raises some interesting questions about their religious identity. For example, how do they juxtapose their enthusiasm for their evangelical ministry with their expectation of an impending holocaust? More importantly, how do they go about the daily business of living in the meantime?

Curiously enough, the Witnesses’ rational, business-like approach to their mission is not as incongruous with their belief in the Final Days as one might think. Indeed, these two facets of their religious lives exemplify what devotees themselves refer to as ‘the split mind’ – a psychological strategy that enables them to plan a future they do not expect to see. Their belief that nothing can be done by outsiders to solve the world’s problems means that long- term planning gives way to immediate concerns; hence, they remain trapped in the present. Their refusal to embrace the future in secular terms (in the way described by Berger, for example) is indicative of a people who are acutely aware of moral danger. No doubt, modern living poses anxieties for everyone, but while others approach the new millennium and all its uncertainties with optimism, trepidation or indifference, the Witnesses retreat into their own world of safety – a world in which time is suspended and fear suppressed. At the same time, the Witnesses are very like ‘moderns’. The evidence from this paper suggests that they are instrumental people with a utopian imagination. The fact that they pivot between the rational and the idealistic demonstrates the versatility of their beliefs, as well as their willingness to make use of a wide range of resources in a world they find repugnant.

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[i] The Witnesses always use the name Jehovah from the Hebrew translation Yahweh when referring to God. They regard this as a scriptural requisite. Armageddon is Jehovah’s victory over Satan at the end of time.

[ii] This represents the ‘peak’ figure. The ‘average’ figure for 2000 was 120,592.

[iii] The annual membership statistics are published in the 1 January copy of The Watchtower.

[iv] Thisis based on a projected growth rate of 4 per cent.

[v] Other literature suggests that millenarian beliefs are most common among those under colonial rule (see, for example, Smelser 1962, Lanternari 1963, Aberle 1965 and Worsley

1968).

[vi] Hallborrows this notion of the imagined community from Benedict Anderson (1983).

[vii] All pictorial images are of the New Kingdom on earth rather than in heaven. Since the movement teaches that heaven is reserved for only 144,000 Witnesses (of whom only a small number remain), these images would appear to depict future life for those other than the chosen few.

[viii] Theme parks, museums and The National Trust are examples of how people attempt to compensate for the loss of the past. The heritage industry centres around the artificial reconstruction of history and shared memories.

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Andrew Holden
Department of Religious Studies, Lancaster University, UK

ABSTRACT

Jehovah’s Witnesses are members of a puritanical religious movement that claims to be in but not of the world.  The movement has expanded rapidly over the past 130 years and there are now more than 6 million devotees worldwide. This paper examines the ways in which the movement has managed to retain a millenarian orientation in a world that is, for the most part, indifferent to its beliefs. The Witnesses reject many commonly recognised accoutrements of sacred practise such as mystical concepts, awesome rituals and transcendental symbolism in favour of a rationalised form of religion based on the study of published texts.  Ethnographic analysis reveals the dependency of this quasi-totalitarian movement on the very physical and cultural resources it condemns.  The paper concludes that the Witnesses’ anti-mystical faith is both an inverted form of corporate ‘branding’ and an anti-modern quest for certainty in a hostile world of relativism. The movement’s relationship with the modern world is, therefore, ambivalent and paradoxical.

In 1872, a Pittsburgh draper by the name of Charles Taze Russell (1852-1916), founded what became known as the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society – the official name for the organisation of Jehovah’s Witnesses. This world-renouncing religious movement is now a huge international corporation with over six million members who claim to monopolise truth. Since the foundation of the Society 130 years ago, the Witnesses have maintained that we are living in the Final Days. Their eschatology is based on the texts of the New Testament and almost all their literature makes reference to the annihilation of evil at Armageddon; hence, they are on a mission to evangelise to as many prospective converts as possible.[i] The movement boasts huge international success.  Its worldwide membership increased from a mere 44,080 in 1928 to an extraordinary 6,035,564 in 2000 making an annual net growth of more than 5 per cent. The 1 January 2001 issue of The Watchtower recorded 126,297 Witnesses in Britain alone in 2000 (Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania

2001).[ii]  Although these are the movement’s own figures, there is no reason to doubt them. For one thing, they are consistent with government estimates as well as those of independent scholars and for another, the Society publishes losses as well as gains.[iii] Even the most conservative estimates indicate that by the year 2020, there will be something in the region of

12,475,115 Witness evangelists (Stark and Iannaccone 1997:153-4).[iv]  The Witnesses attribute their international expansion to the fulfilment of Matthew 24 which states that the gospel of the Kingdom will be preached throughout the whole world.

Despite the success of their evangelistic mission, there are surprisingly few academic studies on the Watch Tower movement.  Beckford (1975a, 1975b, 1976), Wilson (1974, 1978, 1990) and Dobbelaere and Wilson (1980) have carried out the most extensive research, although these studies are now rather dated.  There is a slightly larger number of articles on the movement in journals such as Social Compass, Sociological Analysis, The Journal of Modern African Studies and The British Journal of Sociology, but most of these are written from a macro perspective and make little reference to the Witnesses’ ministerial activities.  As far as major texts are concerned, the most comprehensive study of the Witnesses is undoubtedly James Beckford’s The Trumpet of Prophecy cited above (1975a), but even this book offers little ethnographic detail of how devotees sell their theology to others.  In recent years, social scientists have devoted their attention to the religions of the New Age (see, for example, Bruce 1995, 1996 and Heelas 1996) at the expense of authoritarian movements that have grown much more rapidly.  For all its conservatism, the Watch Tower Society is still managing to win converts in numbers of which any religious organisation offering an alternative to mainstream Christianity would be proud.  For this reason, the movement warrants our attention. This paper examines the movement’s style of worship and ministerial activities and contains data from a recent ethnographic study of the Witnesses in the North West of England.  The principal methods of inquiry include analysis of Watch Tower literature, observations of activities in Kingdom Halls (the official name for the Witnesses’ place of worship) and unstructured interviews with practising members. I write as a sociologist with many years interest in how members of religious movements come to see the world in a particular way and how they convey their version of reality to others.  It is, however, impossible for sociologists to understand any such organisation without knowing something about its mission. I begin, therefore, with a brief overview of Watch Tower doctrines and some details of what exactly the Witnesses are trying to achieve.

The end is nigh

Despite its success in winning new recruits, the movement has had a chequered evolution caused mainly, though by no means exclusively, by a series of embarrassing prophecy failures. The years of 1874, 1914, 1918, 1925 and 1975 were all earmarked, to a greater or lesser extent, as times for the Second Coming of Christ, yet all brought disappointment. It is all the more surprising, therefore, that the Society has continued to recruit and expand with the success that it has.  The Witnesses propound an exclusive message which declares that while a great multitude of righteous people (including those who do not necessarily share their faith), will be granted eternal life on earth, only 144,000 members of the Watch Tower community (the figure mentioned in Revelation 14:3) will enter heaven. Moreover, their heterodox purity code prohibiting among other things blood transfusions, Christmas celebrations and unnecessary association with non-members means that they are highly unlikely, despite their worldwide ministry, to recruit anything other than a small number of zealous devotees. When people convert to the Watch Tower movement, they defer unquestioningly to the authority of its Governing Body (a small number of presidential officials in Brooklyn) and every member is expected to contribute to the recruitment effort.

Over the years, reactions towards the movement (to which devotees refer as the truth) have ranged from sympathy to hatred.  Several years of social disruption and military catastrophe both in Europe and the United States in the late-nineteenth century seemed for Russell to point towards the Second Coming of Christ predicted in the Book of Revelation. His strong disdain for orthodox Christian explanations of the ills of late nineteenth century America provided the context for his new movement and its teachings. The escalating international arms race, the spread of famine and the outbreak of war were all events for which Russell’s prescription for cure (that is, the annihilation of the wicked at Armageddon) differed from many of his Christian contemporaries.  For him, the appeal of world-renouncing doctrines during this period lay in the hope they gave for social justice. The movement was founded at a time not only of great social unrest, but one that was characterised by the birth of a number of other world-renouncing movements.  The Mormons had entered and settled in the valley of the Great Salt Lake in the late 1840s and early 1850s, by which time the Seventh-day Adventists had begun their missionary outreach and in the 1870s, Mary Baker Eddy founded Christian Science. While immigration was of key significance in the expansion of the Mormon church, the renunciation of the world appealed largely to those for whom social and political agitation were signs of the end.

Witnesses everywhere are expected to adhere to a strict fundamentalist code.  To this day, they see themselves not just as members of a religious movement, but one that monopolises truth.  They take most of the Bible literally (including the stories in Genesis) and dismiss all other religious creeds as heresy.  For this reason, they feel they are called upon to proselytise.  Non-conformist ideas that were widespread during the period in which the movement was founded provided the basis for some of its teachings. The one imperative belief, however, is that the Bible, from beginning to end, is the inspired word of God.[v] Scriptural texts are used by the Witnesses to substantiate their narrative of past, present and future.  World catastrophes such as war, famine, murder, environmental pollution, genocide and terrorism provide them with empirical evidence with which to support their theology. When ministering on the doorstep, devotees often use biblical texts to explain recent world events – events that they claim signify the Last Days. By attributing world events to biblical prophecy, the Witnesses are able to support their promise of an imminent utopia in a way that orthodox Christianity is not.

The movement rejects annual events such as Christmas, Easter, birthdays and national festivals. According to the Witnesses, the only two people mentioned in the Bible to celebrate their birthdays are a Pharaoh of Egypt and the Roman ruler Herod Antipas (Genesis 40:18-22; and Mark 6:21-28), neither of whom were true believers.  Though the movement recognises that the birth of Christ is presented as a joyful occasion by the synoptic writers, it forbids its members to partake in Christmas celebrations on the grounds that the precise date is unknown and that the festival has become tainted with secular images.  As far as Easter is concerned, the Witnesses maintain that the egg is a pagan symbol for the celebration of the return of spring and the rabbit is an emblem of fertility, neither of which are connected with the resurrection of Christ (Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania 1989:179). Moreover, they associate annual celebrations with immodest behaviour and excessive alcohol-consumption – practises which they believe violate biblical principles.

The Witnesses object both to jury and military service (on the grounds of pacifism and neutrality), and refuse to support local or national charities; although some do join leisure clubs and progress to post-compulsory education. Rules about physical and moral cleanliness are used to establish lines of demarcation between good and evil and act as a powerful armoury for resisting those aspects of modern life which they regard as sinful.  When individuals undergo baptism, they are committing themselves to a way of life that has huge implications for how they live and with whom they will spend their time in the future. The Witnesses have never been able to accept sexual freedom as a basic human right and their allegiance to a strict puritanical creed tends to attract people who see the modern world as permissive. Sex is regarded as a strictly heterosexual affair that should only be practised within marriage – an injunction that is rooted in the Judaeo-Christian tradition.  This approach regards sexual desire as hedonistic and contrasts sharply with the libertarian position in which sexual gratification is regarded as benign and life enhancing. While the 1960s reforms concerning homosexuality, obscenity, family planning and theatre censorship were arguably little more than an attempt to regulate behaviour that had previously been subjected to unworkable laws, the appeal of the Watch Tower movement in Britain owes much to the Witnesses’ persistent condemnation of a world they believe is on the brink of chaos.  Drug abuse, smoking and the excessive consumption of alcohol are also believed to be offensive to Jehovah.  Blood transfusions are condemned by the movement on the grounds that they are both symbolically and physically polluting. Like many other religious movements, the Society imparts a theology that embraces a large number of complex issues and each member usually has at his or her disposal several tracts containing hundreds of biblical references substantiating beliefs.  These strict moral precepts belong to a group of religionists whose loyalty is first and foremost to an organisation that secures their salvation.  But before salvation can be achieved, devotees must try to sell their millenarian message to a sceptical crowd.

Eschewing mysticism

If there is one feature of the Kingdom Hall that occupied my thoughts in the initial stages of my fieldwork, it would have to have been the absence of mysticism. I had not known what to expect before I sought permission to attend my first Witness meeting and my Catholic upbringing could never have prepared me for what I was about to experience. During my first observation, I was bewildered by what seemed like a numbing dullness of the Kingdom Hall compared with the awesome ambience of the Catholic Church. It was as though my childhood memories of penance, rosaries, plenary indulgences, novenas, transubstantiation and benediction belonged to a different world.  Here, no one meditated or lit candles and the elders never burned incense. Nor did they wear vestments or stand before an altar. Though they contend that Jehovah loves all people and cares about what happens to them, the Witnesses’ anticipation of Armageddon seems to prevent them from beseeching him for world peace or good fortune.[vi]  Their failure to spend much time in meditation, prayer, healing, and other such rituals demonstrates their unwillingness to recognise that God will intervene in human affairs.[vii]  I could not help being struck by the stark contrast between the awesome symbols of a church with which I was familiar and the rationalism of the Watch Tower movement.

Rationalism is an essential characteristic of the modern world that stems from the Enlightenment tradition. It involves a qualitatively new way of thinking concerned with innate ideas independent of experience.[viii]  Weber (1970) regarded the rise of science and technology in industrial capitalist societies as evidence of a whole process of rationalisation. He argued that this would manifest itself in the economic distribution of goods and services, in the ordering of work and in social life in general. Weber also suggested that rationalism would lead to tension with traditional cultures in which ordinary people for whom religion had been an important influence would not easily adapt to laws and procedures that were devoid of human emotion.  Communities that operate on rational precepts cannot easily accommodate charisma or individual creativity. Rational systems are generally purposeful and pragmatic, eschewing all arbitrary performances and events. Religious beliefs are, however, based on faith; and since this is something that cannot be quantified, a certain amount of tension between these two phenomena is inevitable.

The Witnesses pose a challenge to traditional religion, not least because they undermine the beliefs and rituals of established churches.[ix] Their rational system of beliefs equips them with strategies for recruitment and enables them to prove beyond all doubt that their theology is the word of God.  The contrast between this and mystical religion manifests itself in visual imagery and styles of worship. Biblical texts are consulted not only for the substantiation of doctrines but as a blueprint for everyday conduct.  Scriptural literalism is a rational means by which the world and its problems can be explained. The Witnesses believe that Jehovah created the world in seven days and intended Adam and Eve to live in a state of eternal happiness.  However, it is as though they believe that since the fall, he has gone into semi- retirement until such time that humankind reaches the point of its own destruction. This is perhaps one of the reasons they spend little time in prayer. Glossolalia, creed recitation, even periods of silent meditation are so far removed from the Witnesses’ activities that someone claiming to have had an experience of a transcendental nature are unlikely to find solace in a Kingdom Hall. At no point in meetings is time devoted to individual prayer.  Spontaneous prayer and prayer by invitation are also absent. Unlike the Roman Catholic tradition in which relics, crucifixes, statues, pictures, holy water and tabernacles are an indispensable part of the spiritual ethos, these places of worship are sparse and disenchanted. Although they are always clean, tastefully decorated and well maintained, Kingdom Halls are essentially functional places.[x] The spatial layout of formally arranged chairs and an elevated platform on which devotees delivered their well-rehearsed sermons exemplify the Witnesses’ rational style of worship.  Elders in the background who quietly confirm the order and content of the meeting from their official itineraries enhance the atmosphere of order and precision.

The Watch Tower movement does not only eschew mysticism, it openly condemns it. Its magazines repeatedly warn devotees of the dangers of apostasy by showing pictures of Catholics praying before images of saints (particularly the Virgin Mary) for intercession. Elders propound the view that venerating anything or anybody other than Jehovah constitutes false worship and is forbidden in scripture.[xi]  This idea is nothing new (it was, after all, one of the arguments that came out of the Protestant Reformation), but what is significant is that the Witnesses’ style of worship resonates with the idea that religious superstition is contrary to modernity. In his work on the Enlightenment in The Crooked Timber of Humanity, Isaiah Berlin writes:

The rational reorganisation of society would put an end to spiritual and intellectual confusion, the reign of prejudice and superstition, blind obedience to unexamined dogmas, and the stupidities and cruelties of the oppressive regimes which such intellectual darkness bred and promoted. All that was wanted was the identification of the principal human needs and discovery of the means of satisfying them. (Berlin 1990:5)

Berlin is suggesting here that rationalisation would bring about the death of superstition and the rise of human emancipation.  Few people would regard the Watch Tower movement as liberating in any sense of the word, yet the Witnesses’ unabated attack on saint-cults and their refusal to accept the “unexamined dogmas” to which Berlin refers could be seen as freedom from what many regard as the oppressive forces of traditional religion. Though they are religious in the sense that they believe in the supernatural and offer their allegiance to a deity, the Witnesses’ one true interpretation of scripture eradicates superstition, drawing instead on the principles of modern reason. This suggests that the ‘knowledge’ required for membership of the Watch Tower community is fundamentally different from the emotional intensity often associated with, for example, evangelical Christianity.[xii] Reading textual material is more intellectually demanding and time-consuming than making a sudden decision to offer one’s life to God at a charismatic revival meeting. This is not to suggest that the Witnesses do not believe what they ‘know’, or that evangelical Christian ministers are always sure that those who step forward to be saved have genuine conviction, but rather that preparation for Watch Tower ministry is devoid of supernatural invocation.[xiii] One indicator of this is the fact that the familiar stories in which born-again Christians declare how lost they were before they saw the light are absent in the testimonies of Witness converts. The Witnesses’ failure to acknowledge grace or even their own unworthiness reflects their belief that salvation can be earned by taking the time to read about God and adhere to the way of life prescribed by the Governing Body of his earthly Society. The people I interviewed referred to the uniformity of Watch Tower doctrines and their complete scriptural basis, but what was significant about their reasons for joining the movement was the consistency with which they claimed the Witnesses were able to offer them ‘facts’ that were free from dogma. Here are two such examples:

When I first read some of the literature and started a study with the Witnesses, every question I had ever thought of when I was growing up like ‘Why are we here?’ and ‘What happens to a person when they die?’ The Witnesses showed me in the Bible what happens to people when they die and I knew then that other religions had got it wrong. So, that started me thinking. To tell you the truth, when I started studying, I tried to prove them wrong if you know what I mean. I started to read the Bible for myself then, and when I went for my weekly study, I used to have question after question after question and I tried to pull them up, but I couldn’t. They could show me in the Bible the facts.

When I first started studying, I tried to prove it wrong actually. They answered the questions I asked in a reasoning way. The answer was always shown to me from the Bible. I’d never used the Bible before as a Catholic, but the Witnesses always showed me from the Bible.

Although these two converts reveal a highly simplistic notion of right and wrong, their accounts contain a concept of (biblical) reason.  Those who express an interest in the movement must demonstrate a willingness to familiarise themselves with its theology and undertake serious study of its publications.  It is not uncommon for recent converts to ask each other how long they have been in the truth or when they first began to study.  Since becoming a respectable Witness involves reading large amounts of textual information in preparation for a never-ending series of meetings, learning (or studying) is a more appropriate description of their weekly activities than worship.  In this sense, studying implies disdain for superstition.

The Witnesses are expected to attend three weekly meetings, two of which are held at the Kingdom Hall, while the third (known as the Book Study) is held in a member’s home. The two Kingdom Hall meetings each last approximately two hours. The first meeting is held on a weekday evening and centres around sermons, ministry and discussions of moral and theological issues from various publications. The second (held by most congregations on Sundays) comprise a public talk and a Watchtower study. Each congregation is responsible for conducting its own meetings. Book Study meetings last one hour and consist of groups of around twenty devotees.  Although a number of groups meet at different houses on the same evening, it should be possible for every Witness to attend a meeting at a house near to where he or she lives.  The meetings I attended were formal events that followed the schedule of the Watch Tower itinerary to the letter. These standard procedures for conducting meetings adds to the movement’s coherence. Male Witnesses in positions of seniority attend the entrance of the hall at every meeting to welcome the members with a handshake. Copies of The Watchtower are printed in most languages for Witnesses worldwide, and are used at these meetings in almost every country in the world. So uniform is the movement’s theology and content of meetings that, in principle, every active Witness in the world will read the same literature during the same week in preparation for the same programme at their local Kingdom Hall.

Despite the Witnesses’ claim that the Bible is their only source of authority, they make constant use of a huge welter of hard and paperback publications, tracts and The Watchtower and Awake! magazines. In fact, without these aids it would be impossible for devotees to standardise their meetings or to recruit new members. Materials such as The Watchtower are as significant as the Bible, since the information they contain is regarded as the inspired work of theologians. Of all the literature published by the movement, articles from The Watchtower and various extracts from a circular entitled Our Kingdom Ministry provide the Witnesses with their weekly reading material. The meetings are structured around these articles which devotees are expected to read as part of their weekly preparation. These texts provide an important topic of conversation before the meetings begin and after they have ended. Some devotees highlight certain paragraphs and key phrases in their tracts while others prepare their answers to the attached questions on notepaper. Not surprisingly, scriptural references are used to support the discussion.  Publications serve to enhance sermons and appended questions are used to invite responses from the audience. The responses are elicited by microphones offered by congregational attendants. These question and answer sessions seem to be viewed as the most effective way of studying and are analogous to the didactic teaching and learning styles commonly employed by teachers in classrooms. Despite the fact that the Witnesses claim to reason from the scriptures, their theology is taught in a highly mechanistic fashion and written publications encourage learning by rote. One woman in her early thirties who had defected from the community two years before I interviewed her had vivid memories of how she was trained to prepare for meetings:

You had to read it through, read it through again, answer the question and then read it through again. So by the time Sunday came, you were an expert at it. You were a fully trained parrot! Everybody had their answers underlined. You could see everybody looking at each other’s Watchtower to check if the answers were underlined. Everybody comes out with the same answer. You virtually repeated the answer out of the book … it’s like ‘learn with mother!’

Mid-week Book Study meetings also involve this kind of learning. Although the size of the groups and homely setting of the meetings would suggest that these are informal occasions, chairs are arranged in three or four rows in order that the congregational official can be seen at the front. On entering the house, people chat in a friendly manner and supply the host with packets of biscuits and home-made cakes for the refreshment period at the end. Once the meeting is about to begin, the twenty or so people sit attentively with their books opened at the correct page. For the next hour, the selected passage is read from the tract paragraph by paragraph. In a similar way to the Watch Tower meetings, the accompanying questions are read out one at a time by an official who co-ordinates the responses. Personal contributions are discouraged and devotees may only volunteer an answer by raising their hands.  The absence of mysticism does not seem to prevent officials from achieving a high level of commitment from the congregation.  Though literal biblical interpretation may not constitute rational thinking to outsiders, it is, in fact, a rational means by which devotees make sense of the cosmos. Their objective search for truth and their ability to run meetings in a business-like fashion demonstrate their willingness to make use of modern resources in order to create a mood of certainty and to protect themselves from the seductive forces of the outside world.

Learning to minister

One of the peculiarities of the Watch Tower movement is that faith in its millenarian position is not enough to constitute being a Witness. Belief in the doctrines must also be expressed in religious participation and in this sense, devotees are not only believers, they are also activists. Those who take the step of becoming full members of the community and publicly acknowledge this in baptism are automatically ordained as ministers. This means that they have a moral obligation to disseminate Watch Tower doctrines as evangelists of the truth. The Witnesses claim that ministering and believing must coexist if their principal mission of accelerating the New Kingdom is to be achieved.[xiv]  Door-to-door proselytising is considered the most appropriate means of alerting the rest of the world to ‘the signs of the end’; that is, of disseminating the prophecies of Matthew 24:14.

Evangelism can be a great source of inspiration for millenarian communities. The capacity of the movement to stir devotees into action is achieved mainly through its delegation and calculation of religious activities. The Governing Body centralises the worldwide ministerial effort of devotees and publishes annual reports (including statistical information) on the success of door-to-door proselytising in gaining new members.  The onus is on every congregation in the world to improve its previous year’s recruitment performance and is the reason for the large amount of time spent at the Kingdom Hall in the practice of effective ministry. Every Witness has a personal responsibility to spread the good news and to monitor their performance by logging the total number of monthly hours allocated to the ministry.  The specific amount of literature left with the householder, the number of return visits made to a prospective convert’s home and the number of home Bible studies conducted are meticulously recorded. These details are submitted on a monthly basis to the congregational secretary. Those who fail to devote the minimum amount of time to doorstep evangelism (currently around seventeen hours per month in Britain and the United States) soon lose the respect of their co-religionists and may even be disfellowshipped. Though the Watch Tower authorities acknowledge that factors such as old age, infirmity and family responsibilities mean that some people are unable to devote as much time to the ministry as others, all Witnesses are expected to do what they can to win converts and are thus forced to think quantitatively about their salvation.  Those whose activities might be hindered for any of the above reasons are expected to write letters for the movement to publish or to Witness by telephone. This is an extremely resourceful movement in which everyone is a missionary. This is no place for anyone wishing to tag along as a free-rider.

The Witnesses’ eager anticipation of the Millenarian Age is epitomised in the industry with which they approach their evangelistic mission. Their endless ministerial efforts (vis-à-vis the scepticism with which their message of salvation is often received) echo the work ethic of the Calvinists in the sixteenth century. Weber’s famous work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism conveys how Calvin’s high regard for the virtues of self-discipline, purity and industry encouraged a rational and efficient approach to work. Weber argued that these virtues sowed the seeds for the development of modern capitalism (Weber 1930).[xv] But the Protestant ethic did not only produce a spirit of capitalism, it also produced a new spirit of labour which is reflected in the Witnesses’ dedication to their ministry. The precise calculation of the time spent by devotees in their door-to-door proselytising and the planning and rehearsing required for success bear all the hallmarks of Calvinist rationalism. Ministering to the general public at their homes and out on the streets is something devotees are ever trying to improve. Photographs of Witnesses from all ethnic backgrounds happily evangelising to prospective converts appear in a large number of the movement’s publications and demonstrate an unreserved anti-racist stance.[xvi] Some of this literature also contains pictures of the huge buildings in which the movement’s tracts are printed and from which they are distributed. These images echo the Witnesses’ rapid expansion.  Annual Yearbooks are packed with information about the various activities that have taken place since the last edition including the number of Kingdom Halls built around the world (making a grand total of 89,985 in January 2000), the tens of thousands of books printed in various branches, the number of baptisms conducted, the millions of dollars spent on overseas travel and the total number of hours recorded for missionary work (1,096,065,354 in 1995 alone). While success of this kind confirms the fulfilment of prophecy, it also serves to remind devotees that this work must be complete before the arrival of Armageddon and that no one can afford to rest on their laurels. Doubtless, the Witnesses face rejection upon rejection at the majority of their house calls, but it would be wrong to think that their doorstep proselytising is fruitless. On present performance, if the number of worldwide annual Witnessing hours are divided by the total number of new recruits, each publisher would need to devote an average of only twenty hours per month to achieve a 7 per cent rate of growth. Although this means that it would take the collective effort of fourteen evangelists per annum to produce just one baptism, the end result is nevertheless impressive.

The Witnesses spend an inordinate amount of time learning to deliver doorstep sermons. At each weekly Ministry School meeting, one full hour is devoted to platform rôle-play where missionary skills are honed in front of enthusiastic congregations. Every possible reaction from householders is met with Watch Tower rhetoric. Rôle-play activities include doorstep sermons, street proselytising, home Bible studies and workplace ministry – all contexts in which the Witnesses are encouraged, should the opportunity arise, to share their faith. At the end of each activity, the congregational officials assess the quality of the rehearsal and provide the individual with comments on which s/he is expected to reflect. Criteria such as ‘fluency’, ‘pronunciation’, ‘use of biblical references’, ‘audibility’, ‘speed’ and ‘eye contact’ ensure that the participant makes a constant effort to fine-tune his or her delivery. A personal assessment report is then given to the evangelist at the end of the session as an indicator of his/her performance.[xvii]  These ministerial strategies show how, despite their constant verbal attacks on the modern world, the Witnesses depend on its resources.  The training involved in effective communication for the sole purpose of winning recruits is not unlike that undertaken by sales personnel in the secular world of business.[xviii] The close attention to style and presentation exemplified in the wearing of suits and the carrying of briefcases characterises a rational, professional people who know exactly how to sell their message; hence, it is not difficult to see that the Witnesses’ way of ministering is conducive to their belief that magic, miracles, and superstition do not belong to the twenty-first century.[xix] Over and above the formal assessment of presentations at Kingdom Hall meetings, devotees are expected to reflect on their evangelistic skills when they are engaged in door to door ministry.  The success of presenting Watch Tower beliefs to the general public might, for example, be measured by considering the effects of the sermon on the recipient. The willingness of the householder to listen attentively and to accept a copy of The Watchtower is regarded as a successful first visit.  Witnesses who manage to persuade their host to agree to a second visit can commend themselves on having made progress, for it is at this point that a prospective convert beckons. Ultimately, the aim of every Watch Tower evangelist is to make a series of visits to the same householder in the hope that it will result in a Bible study and a subsequent invitation to the Kingdom Hall.  When the Witnesses cannot even persuade a householder to accept a free pamphlet or a copy of The Watchtower, they concede to the knowledge that rejection is a sign of people’s unworthiness. Doorstep rebuffs are regarded by the movement as the fulfilment of New Testament prophecy; namely, that ‘Christ’s true followers will be the objects of hatred on account of his name’ (Matthew 24:9). Hostility merely confirms the Witnesses’ negative perceptions of the outside world and supports their rational biblical logic. This predictive value of Bible-like science makes possible the precise calculation of the Last Days and an unambiguous explanation of the whole of human existence from the beginning to the end of time. These are the tools with which the Witnesses are able to make sense of the world in its present state.

Conclusion

Until recently, sociological literature has tended to propound the view that world-renouncing sectarian religion cannot survive the onslaught of modernity which is, among other things, rational, secular and materialistic. But these theories offer scant empirical analysis of millenarian movements. The rise of the modern state, modern capitalism and modern science have no doubt been the cause of great tension between faith and reason, but they can in no way be shown to have brought about the death of God. The Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society is an example of a movement that has managed to maintain a piety that is as ascetic and puritanical as any version of orthodox Christianity. At the same time, it is a religion of disenchantment that involves the systematic study of textual material.  This requires skills of literacy, reason and learning by rote. The Witnesses’ style of worship, their meticulous collation of statistical data and their ministerial methodology reveal an indubitable dependency on modern rational principles.  In an age in which social movements articulate expressive and aesthetic identities, the Watch Tower Society stands out as rational, calculating and conservative. Its style of worship and ministerial procedures reflect a community that operates on the basis of what Weber called ‘technical reason’. Weber argued that in the post-industrial period, Western societies had become governed by rules and regulations deriving from legal-rational authority (Weber 1922).[xx]  While some devotees find the movement’s demand for loyalty difficult to satisfy, however, it would be a mistake to suggest that they find its appeal for service oppressive. Its rational-authoritarian nature produces both the conformity and the strong feeling of unity that enable it to function.

Watch Tower evangelism succeeds because of the technological and cultural resources that are available in the twenty-first century. The Witnesses’ recruitment methodology requires the use of modern communication techniques as well as sophisticated technology such as multi- media software. The movement operates an international business enterprise for the production and dissemination of tracts and magazines and the expansion of its membership. Photographs of gigantic office blocks representing its headquarters and printing works appear in glossy reading materials. These photographs do not, in any sense, depict an organisation that is anti-modern or anti-materialistic, but rather one that prides itself on its modern rational image. This is, to all intents and purposes, a global, multicultural corporation. The modern world the Witnesses ostensibly oppose is the world they also mimic.  Notwithstanding the tension between faith on the one hand and reason on the other, the Witnesses are remarkably successful in utilising rational means for their equally rational ends.

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[i] Armageddon is the battle at which God will defeat Satan at the end of time.

[ii] This represents the ‘peak’ figure. The ‘average’ figure for 2000 was 120,592.

[iii] The annual membership statistics are published in the 1 January copy of The Watchtower.

[iv] This is based on a projected growth rate of 4 per cent.

[v] The Witnesses believe that God has a personal name – Jehovah (taken from the Hebrew word Yahweh). In orthodox Christian terms, this is God the Father.

[vi] The Witnesses’ belief in free-will rather than predestination suggests that this pessimism derives from their knowledge that Jehovah has prepared a place for them as part of a much greater plan.

[vii] One interesting feature of Watch Tower theology is that expressions such as ‘Good luck’

are banned by the movement because they imply superstition.

[viii] Hamilton (1992) traces the origin of reason back to the seventeenth century philosophers

- particularly Descartes and Pascal who used the concept to support their work on empiricism.

[ix] Wilson offers some examples of ‘therapeutic’ sects that adopt rational patterns of organisation. His two most interesting examples are Christian Science and the Church of Scientology (1982:108-10).

[x] It would, however, be misleading to suggest that the Witnesses do not hold a concept of sacredness. Rather, their rejection of mystical accoutrements is a rejection of what they see as idolatrous worship. Their ‘sacredness’ is thus expressed in a Protestant form.

[xi] The Witnesses quote biblical texts such as Exodus 20:4 and Deuteronomy 27:15 to support this injunction. In addition to idolatry, the movement teaches that fortune-telling constitutes superstition as indicated in Acts 16:16.

[xii] Psychoanalyst Carl Christensen (1963) provides a fascinating description of the psychological effects of mystical conversion among born-again Christians.

[xiii] Hence, the theological debate about whether faith, works or a combination of the two provide the route to salvation.

[xiv] In her work on New Religious Movements, Eileen Barker refers to this as kingdom building (Barker 1982).

[xv] This work has been criticised by historians such as Tawney (1926) and Eisenstadt (1967), both of whom argue that Weber’s account is chronologically incorrect. Notwithstanding this, it is Weber’s description of the work ethic that is important here.

[xvi] The movement is successful in recruiting from a wide range of ethnic groups. In the United States alone, African, Hispanic and Asian-Americans form the majority of self- identified Witnesses. This may enhance the success of the movement in Latin America, Africa and Asia (see Stark and Iannaccone 1997:150).

[xvii] Newly baptised Witnesses usually learn to minister by accompanying established members, but it may be a long time before they acquire the necessary skill and confidence to present their own sermons. In some cases, this can be several months after baptism.

[xviii] Similarly, Bruce (1990) discusses the ways in which Christian fundamentalists in the

USA have made use of the electronic media as in the case of televangelism.

[xix] Although they are scriptural literalists, the Witnesses do acknowledge the miracles of Jesus in the synoptic gospels. However, they maintain that these miracles were performed only for the purpose of spreading the kerygma. The Witnesses believe that, once Jesus had died and the ministry had expanded, miracles were no longer necessary.

[xx] Weber suggested that legal-rational authority gives rise to modern bureaucracies. He also identified two other types of authority. These were traditional and charismatic.

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Andrew Holden
Department of Religious Studies, Lancaster University, UK

ABSTRACT

Jehovah’s Witnesses are members of a puritanical religious movement that claims to be in but not of the world.  The movement has expanded rapidly over the past 130 years and there are now more than 6 million devotees worldwide. This paper examines the effects of Witness conversion on the family lives of non-Witness relatives.  Interviews with couples in mixed marriages reveal discrepancies in how devotees deal with the dissonance between personal feelings and religious principles, and demonstrate that there is, in effect, no uniform or stereotypical Jehovah’s Witness response to domestic scenarios in which beliefs may need to be tempered. The paper exposes some of the problems that arise in a modern secular society for those who hold millenarian convictions.  It concludes that mutual tolerance is essential for amicable domestic relations.

Jehovah’s Witnesses are members of a world-renouncing religious movement officially known as the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society.  The Society was founded by Charles Taze Russell in 1872 and claims to monopolise the word of God.  Since the foundation of the movement, devotees have maintained that we are living in the Final Days.  Their eschatology is based on a literal interpretation of the Bible and almost all the movement’s literature makes reference to the New Kingdom which the Witnesses believe will be inaugurated by Jehovah at Armageddon.[i]  The Society’s worldwide membership rose from a mere 44,080 in 1928 to an impressive 6,035,564 in 2000, making an annual net growth of around 5 per cent (Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania 2001).[ii]  Even the most conservative estimates indicate that by the year 2020, there will be something in the region of 12,475,115 Witness evangelists (Stark and Iannaccone 1997:153-4).[iii] The Witnesses attribute their international success to the fulfilment of the prophecy of Matthew 24 which states that the gospel of the Kingdom will be preached to the ends of the earth. They espouse an exclusive message which declares that while a great multitude of righteous people (including those who do not necessarily share their faith), will be granted eternal life on earth, only 144,000 members of their own community (the figure mentioned in Revelation 14:3) will enter heaven. Their heterodox purity code which prohibits, among other things, sexual relationships outside marriage, blood transfusions, annual celebrations (including Christmas, Easter, birthdays and national festivals) and involvement in all political affairs means that they are highly unlikely, despite their worldwide ministry, to recruit anything other than a small number of zealous members. The Society (to which the Witnesses themselves refer as the truth) rejects all other religious creeds as heresy and supports its doctrines with biblical texts. The movement is fundamentally a rational, rather than a mystical one.  It is a religion of disenchantment and serious study of the Bible and Watch Tower publications, of which prospective recruits must demonstrate their knowledge before they can be baptised.  Spiritual activities comprise a series of weekly meetings at the local Kingdom Hall (the official name for the Witnesses’ place of worship) and aggressive door-to-door evangelism. The movement discourages devotees from associating unnecessary with non-members and are thus able to offer those who are willing to accept its millenarian message a plausible weltanschauung and the security of a tightly knit community.  In a modern secular world in which all manner of life options are available, the Witnesses stand out as calculating, conservative and authoritarian.  The movement’s demand of unquestioning loyalty means that those who violate its moral or doctrinal code risk disfellowship.  To the sceptical outsider, this is a movement that bears all the hallmarks of a totalitarian regime.

Private beliefs and public disapproval

Paul went on to explain how his atheistic worldview prevented him from accepting the Witnesses’ vision of the Last Days or their doctrines of life after death.  His optimistic view of secular society enabled him to regard scantily-clad girls entering nightclubs as young people in pursuit of fun.  He believed that although crime existed, it was carried out by only a small number of wayward individuals.  Paul’s secular outlook allowed him to embrace the modern world, for all its discontents, in positive terms.  Margaret’s perspective, on the other hand, is premised on the view that the world has deteriorated because it has become secular.  She was emphatic in her belief that young people who entered nightclubs had questionable motives and that such places were reprehensible.  She expressed grave concerns about the influences to which her own child could later be exposed and hoped earnestly for the arrival of Armageddon before things got worse.  As far as Margaret was concerned, whatever small concessions the world could offer, be it success in careers, material wealth or a happy marriage, real contentment could only ever be achieved, and sustained, in the Eden-like

realm of Jehovah’s New Kingdom. Margaret and Paul’s heated dialogue shows how contrasting views that may already exist between two people become accentuated when one spouse enters a religious movement that propounds an absolutist creed. This is no ordinary scenario. If Margaret and Paul were to remain married and living in the same household, they had to find a way of managing their different perspectives and all the potential conflicts to which these could give rise.  It seems that in situations like these, tolerance is imperative. Paul had no other choice than to allow Margaret the freedom to practise her religion, even if meant that there would be many occasions when she would not be at home. Conversely, Margaret needed to temper her zeal and keep her spiritual activities to a minimum if she was to prevent Paul from complaining that her involvement in the movement was having a damaging effect on the family.

secularisation theorist who argued that religious institutions have been progressively forced to withdraw from the modern capitalist economy and occupy a peripheral position in a world that has become increasingly abstract, impersonal and narcissistic. Luckmann refers to this as the privatisation thesis.  Luckmann’s thesis is based on the claim that non-religious rôles which are both specialised and functionally rational, now dominate the public sphere. In the modern West, this has led many people to adopt a secular view of the world, while those who

continue to embrace religious beliefs find themselves moving from secular to sacred activities in routine fashion. Whatever the consequences of modernity, people are left to negotiate their way through a whole series of conflicting ideas and demands. In crude terms, ascetic religion has become an increasingly private matter.[v]

for taking into account personal motives for action. The Witnesses know only too well the tensions, potential and actual, between public mores and private belief, and recognise that where certain behaviour is prescribed or prohibited, their loyalty is to their co-religionists. But in domestic settings, the ‘public’ teachings of their community often conflict with the wishes of unbelieving relatives. Even movements with unambiguous boundaries cannot always control the domestic lives of those who defer to its authority, and it is here that devotees must balance their obligation towards their loved ones with their sense of religious duty. Although the Witnesses are corollaries of the privatisation of religion, there are times when their world- renouncing theology costs them their individual privacy.

Stretching the boundaries: tension within the family and marriage

Another woman gave a more traumatic account:

to counter disapproval. It is a sociological axiom that world-renouncing religion has grown and prospered on hostility, real or putative. Biblical texts such as Matthew 12:48 where Jesus puts salvation before his own family are used by the Watch Tower community to prepare new recruits for opposition from their nearest and dearest who may have little sympathy for the movement’s beliefs.  These three testimonies can thus be seen as mythic autobiographies in which new converts are conceived as having carried out a heroic act which involves subjugating their loved ones to the devil. In this respect, opposition from sceptical relat
ives affirms the Witnesses’ view that the ordinary world is sinful and serves to show the individual that s/he is right. Be this as it may, the above testimonies show how difficult it can be for devotees to avert their faith from their relatives. For one thing, remaining silent about millenarian convictions defeats the whole object of evangelising to others, and for another, the movement’s heterodox theology and the fervour with which it is upheld is bound, at some stage, to impact on family life. One young woman told me of the dilemma she faced when she had to decide how to acknowledge her mother’s birthday without compromising the movement’s teachings. Her saving grace was the fact that the movement does not renounce social gatherings and on this basis, she agreed to attend the party. She explained to her mother that although she would be unable to buy her a present or sing Happy Birthday along with the rest of the family, she would treat her to lunch and buy her a gift later in the year. This is one of many scenarios in which Witnesses find themselves having to balance their religious principles with their affection for outsiders.

get her mum to have the kids. We do still spend time together, and I’ve got more used to it now, but at first I was really resentful. I just wanted to walk out and never come back. But even now, I’ll never condone what she does.

‘unbelieving mate’. The first book of Corinthians chapter 7 says that if the unbeliever

is happy to stay with you in that state – because it may be that later on he’s won to the faith without you speaking a word because of your conduct; so stay put – so we recommend that wives or husbands who come into the truth stick to their mate.

In another account of a spouse’s reaction to a Witness conversion, I learned:

years. But I got the strength and the determination to carry on because I knew what I

was doing was right.

to remain silent about her beliefs enabled the marriage to survive as long as it did. This shows that in domestic settings where emotional tensions rise, there is a level at which Watch Tower beliefs necessarily become a matter of individual privacy. Sandra proceeded to tell me that over a long period of time, Colin had become less hostile:

The Watch Tower Society and the Unification Church are only two examples of world- renouncing religious communities, but it would appear that once unbelieving relatives begin to understand the movement’s worldview and/or get to know other devotees, the doctrines appear less strange and bewilderment begins to subside. Indeed, a great many religious converts even publish testimonies claiming that that their new found faith brought their families closer together (see Barker 1989:87).

 Mutual tolerance seems to be the key to survival when an individual becomes a Witness, but this takes time for all parties. Tolerating a secular worldview is a lot to ask of someone who has internalised Watch Tower doctrines, particularly in the initial stages of membership when enthusiasm for a new way of life is difficult to quell. None the less, Sandra’s efforts to undertake door-to-door ministry only when her husband was at work, keep discussions about her beliefs and activities to a minimum and prevent her Witness friends from ringing her unnecessary suggest that while the movement’s prescription for salvation is absolute, devotees are not always in a position to discuss their faith openly with their relatives. Sandra’s reticence of her religious convictions enabled her, to some extent, to appease her husband and to meet the demands of the movement.

There are dozens of domestic scenarios in which the Witnesses could find themselves having to balance religious principles with family obligations; and what might be an acceptable level of worldly contact to one member might not be acceptable to another. Conversely, what one unbelieving spouse might be willing to tolerate, another might consider unreasonable.  If there is one aspect of Watch Tower theology that could impinge heavily on family life, however, it is the celebration of Christmas. Christmas, more than birthdays and Easter, involves contact with close relatives and the exchange of gifts for those who celebrate it. I asked the congregational elder how devotees with unbelieving relatives should approach the festival. This was his reply:

If it’s a woman with an unbelieving husband and he wants a Christmas tree and his children to hang up stockings and turkey and Christmas pudding, then the wife should support him in providing what he needs, even though not celebrating it. In other words, if he says ‘I’m going to put a Christmas tree up and put flashing lights on it and I’m going to buy my kids some presents and I’m going to buy a turkey and a plum pudding and I want you to cook it’, then she will provide that meal and sit down and have it because he’s the head of the house. He wants it for his family and he has the right to it, so she will be supportive, although in her heart not celebrating Christmas because she knows that Christ wasn’t born on Christmas day. Now then, if it was the other way round and a woman wanted it all, the husband would say ‘Well, if you want to do that out of your housekeeping money, then that’s up to you but I won’t help you to prepare for it.’ She can get the tree, she can buy the turkey and she can cook it.

tension; and secondly, mixed marriages are, as the elder’s comments above suggest, another way of winning recruits. Ultimately, there is no knowing whether the Governing Body’s hunger for converts lies behind its advice, but what is clear is that devotees with unbelieving spouses do not always follow official teachings to the letter when negotiating marital relations. One Witness who was divorced from her husband told me of the problems her religious status had caused at Christmas some years earlier.  While I am uncertain about whether this played a significant part in the termination of the marriage, she informed me that during the last Christmas she and her husband spent together, she had refused to decorate the tree and trim the house. Margaret, on the other hand, managed to negotiate Christmas in ways she felt were not detrimental to her religious principles. Devotees who help their husbands with the Christmas preparations claim to eschew the celebratory aspects of the event such as going to parties and visiting friends. Sandra explained that Colin had reached the point where he had been prepared to sacrifice Christmas celebrations at home, though he always visited his family during the festive season. The evidence suggests that Christmas, while having the potential to cause conflict, can be managed by Witnesses in mixed marriages, so long as the time they spend with their unbelieving spouses allows them to retreat from the celebrations. To outsiders, this is an exercise fraught with difficulty.  Witnesses who help their non-Witness families prepare for Christmas and who partake in the meal along with other relatives (none of whom may themselves be members), are, to all intents and purposes, celebrating Christmas; yet, those who find themselves in this position insist that this is not the case.  These individuals claim they compensate for Christmas by buying their relatives gifts at other times

in the year.

Christmas or allowing their children to receive blood transfusions because of pressure from unbelieving relatives?  Douglas writes:

is not to say that Watch Tower theology does not have implications for domestic life, but in the absence of other members, there is no knowing what compromises devotees might make. Reliable methods of investigation would, I suspect, reveal some fascinating data.

Conclusion

with outsiders. Although there is no denying that the movement’s teachings have a significant impact on the private sphere, relationships in which there is an emotional bond between Witnesses and non-Witnesses expose all the incongruities of principles and practise. The data presented in this paper confirm that family relations vary according to circumstances and

to the personality of the individual. For some devotees, the freedom to allow one’s conscience to dictate one’s actions makes life easier, while for others, it causes anxiety.  I have argued that Watch Tower rhetoric cannot always override the individual’s sense of duty towards those with whom they have long been bonded or for whose welfare they are responsible. Where children are present, spouses are often dependent on each other for financial and practical support. It is here that peace and conflict hang in the balance. While there are no standard strategies employed by the Witnesses for dealing with situations in which their religious principles might be compromised, their membership of the Watch Tower community is usually source of distress for relatives, particularly when the individual joins the movement in later life. In all the conversion cases I have studied, reactions from loved ones have always been negative. The reason for this, it seems, is because Watch Tower heterodoxy is unsuited to modern western societies at the beginning of the twenty-first century. When people make the decision to become Jehovah’s Witnesses, it is not like converting to Roman Catholicism or the Church of England (or even orthodox Islam). Like Judaism, the appeal of the Watch Tower movement from the point of view of the convert is its exclusivity, and this places a considerable strain on mixed families. Whatever misgivings devotees of other faiths might air about the state of the modern world, few vilify it with as much passion as the Witnesses, and even fewer are prepared to sacrifice their rights of citizenship. Being a Witness involves studying literature, attending meetings, proselytizing

and, to a greater or lesser extent, the willingness to renounce one’s former life. At present, the movement shows few signs either of relaxing its quasi-totalitarian doctrines or of slowing

down its evangelistic mission. In the end, if devotees and their unbelieving relatives wish to live amicably together, they may be forced to do tolerance.

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Bruner, E.M. 1986. ‘Ethnography as narrative’, in Turner, V. and Bruner, E.M. (eds) The

Anthropology of Experience, Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.

Dobbelaere, K. and Wilson, B.R. 1980. ‘Jehovah’s Witnesses in a Catholic country: a survey of nine Belgian congregations’, Archives de Sciences des Religions 25:89-110.

Douglas, M. 1966. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo,

London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Douglas, M. 1978. ‘Judgements on James Frazer’, Daedalus 107, 4:151-64. Douglas, M. 1992. Risk and Blame: Essays in Cultural Theory, London: Routledge.

Goffman, E. 1959.  The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Goffman, E. 1963. Behaviour in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings, New York: Free Press.

Goffman, E. 1967. Interaction Ritual: Essays in Face-to-face Behaviour, New York: Anchor

Books.

Goffman, E. 1971. Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order, New York: Basic

Books.

Luckmann, T. 1967. The Invisible Religion: The Problem of Religion in Modern Society, New

York: Macmillan.

McGuire, M. 1987. Religion: The Social Context, Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

Macklin, R. 1988. ‘The inner workings of an ethics committee: latest battle over Jehovah’s

Witnesses’, Hastings Center Report 18, 1:15-20.

Maduro, O. 1982. Religion and Social Conflicts, translated by Robert R. Barr, New York: Orbis.

Montague, H. 1977. ‘The pessimistic sect’s influence on the mental health of its members: the case of Jehovah’s Witnesses’, Social Compass 24, 1:135-48.

Ritzer, G. 1996. Modern Sociological Theory, London: McGraw-Hill.

Robbins, T. 1988. Cults, Converts and Charisma: The Sociology of New Religious

Movements, London: Sage.

Rogerson, A. 1969. Millions Now Living Will Never Die: A Study of Jehovah’s Witnesses,

London: Constable.

Saliba, J.A. 1995. Perspectives on New Religious Movements, London: Geoffrey Chapman. Seggar, J. and Kunz, P. 1972. ‘Conversion: evaluation of a step-like process for problem solving’, Review of Religious Research 13, 3:178-84.

Singelenberg, R. 1988. ‘ “It separated the wheat from the chaff”: the “1975” prophecy and its impact among Dutch Jehovah’s Witnesses’, Sociological Analysis 50, 1:23-40. Singelenberg, R. 1990. ‘The blood transfusion taboo of Jehovah’s Witnesses: origin, development and function of a controversial doctrine’, Social Science Medical 31, 4:515-23.

Stark, R. and Bainbridge, W.A. 1985. The Future of Religion: Secularization, Revival and Cult

Formation, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Thompson, K. 1986. Beliefs and Ideology, London: Tavistock. Turner, B. 1983. Religion and Social Theory, London: Heinemann.

Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania 1997. The Watchtower, 1 January, New York: Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of New York, Inc.

Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania 1998. The Watchtower, 1 January, New York: Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of New York, Inc.

Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania 1999. The Watchtower, 1 January, New York: Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of New York, Inc.

Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania 2000. The Watchtower, 1 January, New York: Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of New York, Inc.

Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania 2001. The Watchtower, 1 January, New York: Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of New York, Inc.

Wilson, B.R. 1974. ‘Jehovah’s Witnesses in Kenya’, Journal of Religion in Africa 5:128-49. Wilson, B.R. 1978. ‘When prophecy failed’, New Society, 26 January pp. 183-4.

Wilson, B.R. 1990. The Social Dimensions of Sectarianism, Oxford: Clarendon. Wilson, B.R. (ed) 1992. Religion: Contemporary Issues, London: Bellow. Woodhead, L. and Heelas, P. (eds) 2000. Religion in Modern Times: An Interpretive Anthology, Oxford: Blackwell.

Endnotes

[ii] This represents the ‘peak’ figure. The ‘average’ figure for 2000 was 120,592.

[iii] This is based on a projected growth rate of 4 per cent.

[iv] The Witnesses use the term ‘unbeliever’ to refer to those who do not share their faith, be they atheists or people who hold alternative religious beliefs.

[vi] The Book Study comprises a small group of Witnesses who meet at a member’s home on a weekly basis. These meetings involve studying religious tracts and arranging door to door ministry.  These are usually much shorter meetings than those held at the Kingdom Hall.

[vii] The movement has also expressed concern in recent years about the increasing numbers of young Witnesses who are dating non-members and failing to attend Kingdom Hall meetings. Those who do this often fail to reach the point of baptism. But since the movement does not collect official data on young people who defect, it is impossible to comment on the extent to which this is happening.

[x] A state which anthropologist Victor Turner calls liminality.

[xi] For this reason, Douglas rejects binary distinctions as a useful tool of analysis (see

Douglas 1978).

Posted with permission of Andrew Holden
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Andrew Holden
Department of Religious Studies, Lancaster University, UK

ABSTRACT

Jehovah’s Witnesses are members of a puritanical religious movement that claims to be in but not of the world.  The movement has expanded rapidly over the past 130 years and there are now more than 6 million devotees worldwide. This paper examines the major causes and consequences of defection.  Personal testimonies from unstructured interviews with former members reveal that leaving the movement is characterised by emotional trauma and existential insecurity.  The data also suggest that defectors often come to replace their Witness weltanschauung with a new religious identity that enables them to renegotiate their relationship with the modern world. The paper advances the argument, however, that these alternative systems of belief do not represent a fundamentally different reality and tend to affirm the basic view that modern secular society is soulless and hostile.

Jehovah’s Witnesses are members of a world-renouncing religious movement officially known as the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society.  The Society was founded by Charles Taze Russell in 1872 and claims to monopolise the word of God.  Since the foundation, of their movement, devotees have maintained that we are living in the Final Days.  Their eschatology is based on a literal interpretation of the Bible, and almost all their literature makes reference the New Kingdom which they believe will be inaugurated by Jehovah at Armageddon.[i] The Society boasts huge international success. Its worldwide membership rose from a mere

44,080 in 1928 to an impressive 6,035,564 in 2000, making an annual net growth of around 5 per cent (Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania 2001).[ii] Although these are the movement’s own figures, there is no reason to doubt them. For one thing, they are consistent with government estimates as well as those of independent scholars and for another, the Society publishes losses as well as gains.[iii] Even the most conservative estimates indicate that by the year 2020, there will be something in the region of 12,475,115

Witness evangelists (Stark and Iannaccone 1997:153-4).[iv]  The Witnesses attribute their success to the fulfilment of the prophecy of Matthew 24 which states that the gospel of the Kingdom will be preached to the ends of the earth.

Despite its expansion, the movement has had a chequered evolution caused mainly (though by no means exclusively), by a series of embarrassing prophecy failures. The years of 1874,

1914, 1918, 1925 and 1975 were all earmarked, to a greater or lesser extent, as times for the Second Coming of Christ, yet all brought disappointment. But people who convert to the Watch Tower movement defer unquestioningly to the authority of its Governing Body (a small number of presidential officials in Brooklyn) and every member must continue to contribute to the recruitment effort.  The Witnesses espouse an exclusive message which declares that while a great multitude of righteous people (including those who do not necessarily share their faith), will be granted eternal life on earth, only 144,000 members of their own community (the figure mentioned in Revelation 14:3) will enter heaven. Moreover, their heterodox purity code which prohibits among other things blood transfusions, Christmas celebrations and all political activities means that they are highly unlikely, despite their worldwide ministry, to recruit anything other than a small number of enthusiasts. The movement rejects all other religious creeds as heresy and uses biblical texts and Watch Tower publications to substantiate its narrative of past, present and future.  Devotees make extensive use of these textual aids when delivering their doorstep sermons on the Last Days. By attributing world events to biblical prophecy, they aim to persuade all those to whom they minister of Satan’s wickedness and to make them a promise of an imminent utopia.

The Society (to which devotees refer as the truth) is fundamentally a rational, rather than a mystical one.  It is a religion of disenchantment and serious study of the Bible and Watch Tower publications of which prospective members must demonstrate their knowledge before they can be baptised.  Spiritual activities comprise a series of weekly meetings at the local Kingdom Hall (the official name for the Witnesses’ place of worship) and aggressive door-to- door evangelism.  Though they do not detach themselves completely from the outside world, devotees are discouraged from associating unnecessary with non-members.  In so doing, they are able to offer those who are willing to accept their millenarian message a plausible weltanschauung and the security of a tightly knit community.  In a modern secular world in which all manner of life options are available, the Witnesses stand out as calculating,

conservative and authoritarian.  The movement’s demand of unquestioning loyalty means that those who violate its moral or doctrinal code risk disfellowship.  To the sceptical outsider, this is a movement that bears all the hallmarks of a totalitarian regime.

Within any religious movement of this size, there will always be a percentage of people who decide, for one reason or another, to terminate their membership. From the Society’s own perspective, however, there is never any valid reason for defection.  Its monopoly over truth does not allow devotees to claim that their search for salvation is causing them to seek new pastures or that their spiritual hunger has not been satisfied.  Defection is the ultimate betrayal since it signifies the individual voluntarily entering the world of Satan. This paper offers an examination of why some members leave the movement of their own accord – an issue that has been neglected by scholars.  While there are a small number of empirical studies on the movement (Beckford 1975a, 1975b, 1976, Wilson 1974, 1978, 1990 and Dobbelaere and Wilson 1980), most academic researchers have focussed their attention on the issues of conversion, recruitment and tension between devotees and secular authorities. Search as I may in the sociological and anthropological literature, I find nothing other than scant reference to defection. There is no shortage, however, of autobiographies of former members who lament the years of personal turmoil they claim they felt when they realised they could no longer accept the movement’s teachings, or that the conflicts that arose between everyday life and the Witnesses’ theology became overwhelming.[v]  It is also worth noting that at the time of writing, several websites have been established both by lapsed members who seek the support of those who claim to be equally traumatised, and by those still in practise who fear the consequences of defection.  Needless to say, data of this nature need handling with caution.  Like new converts, defectors ‘rehearse’ their confessions and testify to anyone who is willing to listen. More seriously (at least as far as validity is concerned), these accounts often contain the kind of rhetoric adopted by anti-cultists who are on a mission to protect so-called vulnerable people from the seductive powers of religious extremists.  Notwithstanding these caveats, sociologists of religion cannot afford to ignore defectors’ testimonies.  For one thing, these accounts contain rich data that convey first hand the poignant experiences of the disaffected devotee, and for another, they represent the main primary source on which academics are dependent in the pursuit of objective research.

There is little doubt that the Witnesses have many defectors. This is clear from the movement’s own annual statistics which indicate year on year that the ‘peak’ number of active devotees outweighs the ‘average’ number. Moreover, the aggregate number of baptisms over a given period soon surpasses the reported increase in the number of members. But a high drop-out rate does not mean that the movement is dwindling or that its beliefs are weakening. An annual growth rate of 5 per cent is impressive by anyone’s standards and can be seen as evidence of a community that is successful in replacing apathetic members with committed ones. None the less, the figures also suggest that people leave of their own accord. Close examination of autobiographical testimonies reveals that defection comes in various forms. For example, there are those who undertake Bible studies with the Witnesses and attend their meetings for several months, but never reach the point of baptism. Others are baptised members who, for one reason or another, stop attending meetings and lapse for while, only to return at a later stage. Some of these may even have been disfellowshipped several years earlier. Then there is a third group comprising fully baptised Witnesses who have been active in the movement a considerable period of time and leave never to return. It is to these defectors that most of this paper applies. What follows is an analysis of the testimonies of six former Jehovah’s Witnesses who were contacted through an advertisement in the local press. The fieldwork was carried out as part of a recent ethnographic study of the movement in the North West of England.

Suppressing ambivalence

The Society has an extensive history of prophecy failure that has played no small part in defection. Devotees expected the invisible return of Christ in 1874 (which was later changed to 1914 – the original date for Armageddon), the destruction of Christendom in 1918 and the

return of the Old Testament prophets Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in 1925 (Barnes 1984, Quick

1989 and Reed 1989a, 1989b). But it was the failure of the arrival of Armageddon in 1975 that caused over 1 million members to abandon their faith between 1976 and 1981.  The anticipation of this event had featured in the movement’s publications since the mid-1960s:

This seventh day, God’s rest day, has progressed nearly 6,000 years, and there is still the 1,000-year reign of Christ to go before its end (Rev. 20:3, 7). This seventh

1,000-year period of human existence could well be likened to a great sabbath day … In what year, then, would the first 6,000 years of man’s existence and also the first

6,000 years of God’s rest day come to an end? The year 1975. (Awake! October 8

1966:19)

One man who had been in the movement since the early 1970s, explained how the 1975 prophecy failure made it impossible for him to remain an active member.[vi]  In a detailed testimony of how the prophecy governed his life in his former years as an active member, he told me:

Our main teaching book was called The Truth Book and there was a little graph in there which ended in 1975. I said it from the platform! We told everyone the end was near. When I became a Witness I gave up my insurance policies, I cancelled all my insurance endowments, I never bought a house because I knew I wouldn’t need one, we didn’t even want to put the kids’ names down for school.

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Andrew Holden
Department of Religious Studies, Lancaster University, UK

ABSTRACT

Jehovah’s Witnesses are members of a puritanical religious movement that claims to be in but not of the world.  The movement has expanded rapidly over the past 130 years and there are now more than 6 million devotees worldwide.  This paper examines the ways in which the Witnesses conceptualise the modern world and how they resist the secular forces that threaten their religious identity. Close analysis of the testimonies of current members reveals that the movement’s millenarian weltanschauung is a reaction to a world that is perceived as hostile and ambiguous. The paper concludes that the Witnesses’ allegiance to this quasi-totalitarian movement signifies an escape from a modern age that hedonistically celebrates individual freedom.

There could be no period more appropriate than the beginning of a new millennium in which to consider the activities of those who hold beliefs about the end of the world. In 1872, Charles Taze Russell (1852-1916), a Pittsburgh draper, founded what became known as the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society – the official name for the organisation of Jehovah’s Witnesses. Russell had a fascination for biblical eschatology – a fascination that would play a significant part in the expansion of what is now a huge international corporation with over six million members. The Witnesses are members of a world-renouncing puritanical movement which claims to be the sole guardian of truth and refuses ecumenical relations with all other religious denominations. In a modern age in which people are free to construct their own aesthetic identities, the Witnesses stand out as authoritarian, calculating and aloof, and this makes their organisation distinctive from other social movements.  This paper examines the appeal of movement and its strategies for averting the ‘risks’ posed by the modern world.  For the Witnesses, the outside world is one in which dangers of all kind loom large and this calls for a system of prescriptive boundaries.  Despite their belief in Satan’s earthly presence, however, the Witnesses do not go as far as members of religious organisations such as the Plymouth Brethren in isolating themselves from outsiders.  They do, in fact, live in ordinary neighbourhoods and are employed in most mainstream occupations.  None the less, their persistent refusal to engage in many cultural and political activities including voting in elections, joining trade unions and partaking in annual celebrations is indicative of their disdain for secular society.  An empirical analysis of the testimonies of practising members provides rich insight into their perception of the cosmos and uncovers the ways in which they are able to fend off what they see as dangerous forces.  This kind of analysis is essential if we are to understand the movement’s success.

The movement boasts huge international expansion.  Its worldwide membership increased from a mere 44,080 in 1928 to an extraordinary 6,035,564 in 2000 making an annual net growth of around 5 per cent.  The 1 January 2001 issue of The Watchtower recorded 126,297 Witnesses in Britain alone in 2000 (Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania 2001).1  Although these are the movement’s own figures, there is no reason to doubt them. For one thing, they are consistent with government estimates as well as those of independent scholars and for another, the Society publishes losses as well as gains.2 Moreover, the Witnesses are loath to include anyone other than active evangelists. Even the most conservative estimates indicate that by the year 2020, there will be something in the region of 12,475,115 members (Stark and Iannaccone 1997:153-4).3  The Witnesses attribute their worldwide growth to the fulfilment of Matthew 24 which states that the gospel of the Kingdom will be preached to the ends of the earth. For the last 130 years, the Witnesses have maintained that we are living in the Final Days.  Their eschatology is based on the texts of the New Testament and almost all their literature makes reference to the annihilation of evil at Armageddon; hence, they are on a mission to proselytise to as many prospective converts as possible.

The Watch Tower Society has had a chequered evolution. From the moment of its foundation, devotees have lived in anticipation of a new Messianic Kingdom in which all earthly wickedness would be destroyed and Paradise be inaugurated by Jehovah.4  The years of 1874, 1914, 1918, 1925 and 1975 were all earmarked, to a greater or lesser extent, as times for the Second Coming of Christ, yet all brought disappointment. It is all the more surprising, therefore, that the Witnesses have continued to recruit and expand with remarkable success. The movement espouses an exclusive message which declares that although a great multitude of righteous people, including those who do not necessarily share their faith, will be granted eternal life on earth, only 144,000 members of the Watch Tower community (the figure mentioned in Revelation 14:3) will enter heaven. Moreover, the Witnesses’ heterodox purity code prohibiting among other things blood transfusions, Christmas celebrations and unnecessary association with non-members means that they are highly unlikely, despite their worldwide ministry, to recruit anything other than a small number of zealous members.  When people convert to the Watch Tower, they defer unquestioningly to the authority of those who are appointed to enforce its doctrines and the individual becomes the property of whole community. This tightly bound movement provides new recruits not only with a ready-made explanation of their life experiences, but also an opportunity to contribute to a worldwide spiritual mission.

Over the years, reactions towards the movement (to which devotees refer as the truth) include fascination, compassion, anger and hatred. Although the available literature confirms that their world-renouncing theology and adherence to millenarianism have been the sources of strain in terms of their liaison with secular bodies (particularly the legal system), the Witnesses have still managed to gain converts at a time when other movements have collapsed. The passing of several years of turbulent disruption and military catastrophe both in Europe and the United States in the late-nineteenth century seemed for Russell to point towards the prophecies of Revelation. His strong disagreements with orthodox Christian explanations of the ills of American society provided the context for his new movement. The escalating international arms race, the spread of famine and the outbreak of war were all events for which Russell’s prescription for cure (that is, the consignment of the wicked at Armageddon) differed from many of his Christian contemporaries; hence, the appeal of world- renouncing religion during this period lay in the hope it gave for social justice. But the Witnesses were by no means the only heterodox movement, nor the earliest, to be founded during this period. The Mormons had entered and settled in the valley of the Great Salt Lake in the late 1840s and early 1850s, by which time the Seventh-day Adventists had begun their missionary outreach and in the 1870s, Mary Baker Eddy founded Christian Science. While immigration was significant in the expansion of the Mormon church, the renunciation of the world appealed largely to those for whom social and political agitation were signs of the end. To this day, the Witnesses see themselves not just as members of a religious movement, but one that monopolises the word of God. For this reason, they feel they are called upon to proselytise.  Non-conformist ideas that were widespread during the period in which the movement was founded provided the basis for some of its teachings. The one imperative belief, however, is that the Bible, from beginning to end, is the inspired word of God. This means that all Watch Tower teachings are scripturally supported and most, but not all, the Bible is interpreted literally. The exceptions are the recorded visions in the Books of Daniel and Revelation. The rest, the Witnesses regard as historically accurate, including the stories in the book of Genesis.  Scriptural texts are used by the Witnesses to substantiate their narrative of past, present and future.  World catastrophes such as war, famine, murder, environmental pollution, genocide and terrorism provide them with empirical evidence with

which to support their theology. By attributing these events to biblical prophecies, devotees are able to support their promise of eternal bliss in a way that is missing in the esoteric doctrines of Christendom and thus validate their monosemic worldview.

The movement forbids its members to participate in annual events such as Christmas, Easter, birthdays and national festivals. It teaches that Jehovah does not acknowledge these events since, wherever they are cited in the scriptures, they are always in the context of sin or apostasy. According to the Witnesses, the only two birthday celebrations mentioned in the Bible involve people who were not true believers. These are a Pharaoh of Egypt and the Roman ruler Herod Antipas (Genesis 40:18-22; and Mark 6:21-28), whose celebrations ended in misery. Though they recognise that the birth of Christ is presented as a joyful occasion by the synoptic writers, devotees refuse to partake in the celebration on the grounds that we do not know the precise date of an event that has, in any case, become tainted with secular images such as lights, trees, tinsel and mistletoe. As far as Easter is concerned, the egg is historically a pagan symbol for the celebration of the return of spring and the rabbit was an emblem of fertility, neither of which are connected with the resurrection of Christ (Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania 1989b:179). Furthermore, the movement associates annual celebrations with immodest behaviour and excessive alcohol-consumption – which it claims are contrary to biblical principles.

The movement objects both to jury and military service (on the grounds of pacifism and neutrality), and refuses to support local or national charities. Although some Witnesses join social and leisure clubs and progress to post-compulsory education, Watch Tower officials encourage Kingdom interests and forbid activities that detract from the movement’s teachings. The Governing Body (that is, the board of elected officials based in Brooklyn) officially condemns behaviour that violates these teachings. This explains why, in addition to eschatological beliefs, devotees adopt a puritanical lifestyle. The dualistic nature of Watch Tower theology means that in principle, Witnesses everywhere are expected to adhere to a strict fundamentalist code. Rules about physical and moral cleanliness are used to establish lines of demarcation between good and evil and thus act as a powerful armoury for resisting those aspects of modern life which they regard as sinful.  When individuals undergo baptism, they are committing themselves to a way of life that has huge implications for how they will live and with whom they will spend their time in the future. The Witnesses’ allegiance to a puritanical creed strengthens their pride in their ascetic community and helps to attract people who see the modern world as permissive.

Watch Tower teachings on sexual conduct provide one of the best examples of the usage of purity to combat the risk of contamination posed by modern liberal society. The Witnesses have never been able to accept sexual freedom as a basic human right.  The belief that sex is a strictly heterosexual activity that should only be practised within marriage suggests that the Witnesses are heirs of an absolutist model of sexual morality rooted in the Judaeo-Christian tradition.  This approach regards sexual desire as morally dangerous and contrasts sharply with the libertarian position in which sexual gratification is regarded as benign and life enhancing. While the 1960s reforms concerning homosexuality, obscenity, family planning and theatre censorship were arguably little more than an attempt to regulate behaviour that had previously been subjected to unworkable laws, the appeal of the Watch Tower movement in Britain owes much to the Witnesses’ persistent condemnation of a world they revile.  Drug abuse, smoking and the excessive consumption of alcohol are also believed to be offensive to Jehovah.  Blood transfusions are condemned by the movement on the grounds that they are symbolically and physically polluting. Like many other religious communities, it imparts a theology that embraces a large number of complex issues and each member has at his or her disposal several tracts containing hundreds of biblical references substantiating beliefs. In the last analysis, the Witnesses’ loyalty is first and foremost to an organisation that secures their salvation.

Risk: the Watch Tower perspective

Despite their successful evangelistic mission, there is a dearth of academic literature on the Witnesses. Beckford (1975a, 1975b, 1976), Wilson (1974, 1978, 1990) and Dobbelaere and Wilson (1980) have carried out the most extensive research, although these studies are now rather dated.  Moreover, the movement seldom receives more than a brief mention in most of the key textbooks on the sociology of religion. Other than the small amount of literature that addresses Watch Tower conversion and recruitment, the best known works focus on tension of one form or another between the Witnesses and secular states. With the exception of the historical examples of persecution of Watch Tower evangelists (which was often a result of their own attacks on official authorities), this tension mainly derives from the Witnesses’ refusal to participate in activities pertaining to citizenship. There is, however, a larger number of published articles on the movement in journals such as Social Compass, Sociological Analysis, The Journal of Modern African Studies and The British Journal of Sociology, but even these tend to be written from a macro perspective and fail to give the Witnesses themselves a voice.  They also fail to examine the various ways in which devotees deal with the outside world in the various contexts of their daily lives.  Where academics have attempted to address agency, it is usually in relation to conversion and/or continuation of membership.

As far as major texts are concerned, the most comprehensive study of the Witnesses is undoubtedly James Beckford’s The Trumpet of Prophecy cited above (1975a). The first three chapters of this book are devoted to the historical development of the movement. These chapters tell us about the movement’s social composition and its post-war expansion in Britain and the USA . Beckford’s work contains both quantitative and qualitative data collected from ten congregations representing the geographical divisions of England , Wales and the Scottish Lowlands. Although the book is largely empirical, Beckford offers some theoretical analysis of conversion that aids our understanding of the Witnesses’ worldview.5 Whatever the strengths of Beckford’s work, however, the fact remains that it is now more than twenty- five years old. There is a serious shortage of current material on the Witnesses that makes anything other than scant reference to the ways in which they protect their members from what they see as the dangers of modern secular forces.  Search as I may in the sociological, anthropological and historical literature, I find no attempt to link the beliefs and activities of the Witnesses to the general characteristics of modern secular society. This is where I believe the concept of risk is useful.  Testimonies of converts reveal that the movement attracts individuals who have had little instrumental success and who hold a pessimistic worldview. The Watch Tower idiom of modern society as risky is, I would suggest, one of the main catalysts for the Witnesses’ international expansion.

Posted with permission of Andrew Holden
on Watchtower Information Service

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