The Visual Rhetoric of Jehovah’s Witness Iconography

by Joel Elliott

NOTE: This essay is based on a slide-show presentation I delivered in November, 1995, at the joint annual meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion / Religious Research Association, in St. Louis, MO. This is work-in-progress, and I would love to hear your responses to this essay.

Send me email at elliott@email.unc.edu

Please do not quote or reproduce this document without my permission.
© 1995 Joel Elliott
Minor revisions, October 1999

Introduction

Call attention to the pictures and illustrations that serve to impress the thoughts of the text on the mind of the student. Many of the pictures portray the international scope of Jehovah’s organization and the unity that exists among God’s people, without regard for race, social background, or nationality. Only such an organization [as the Watchtower Society] can truly fulfill the commission Jesus gave to preach the good news worldwide.-Matt. 24:14

"Directing Interest to the Organization," Our Kingdom Ministry, March 1987, p. 3

Kierkegaard once observed that while we understand our lives backward, we must live them forward (see Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, vol 1, #1030). He suggested that life can therefore never be completely comprehensible, since we can never achieve that plenary moment of "perfect repose" when we gain absolute retrospective insight into the meaning of life and history. But Jehovah’s Witnesses do claim to have that privileged retrospective insight. The regular iconographic invocation of life on a paradise earth functions as a kind of visual prolepsis, when the original Edenic paradise is remembered and restored. In those scenes of life in paradise that appear regularly and prominently in Witness literature, paradise is visualized as a present reality, an apocalyptic certainty whose redemptive and transformative power is currently available to the faithful. The visual rhetoric of Witness iconography nurtures the hope of this final, totalizing millennial perspective beyond the circumscribed horizons of bodies and time.

For Witnesses the millennial return to the paradise conditions of Eden means that Jehovah will reverse the curse of Babel, replacing the divisive cacophony of fallen humanity with the pristine concordance of life and language in paradise. A fervent desire to provide this evil world with a faithful witness before its imminent destruction dominates the lives of Jehovah’s contemporary witnesses. They wish to salvage a faithful remnant out of Satan’s kingdom and fulfill their prophetic destiny to proclaim the kingdom message to the entire world before its tragic end in the great eschatological purge of Armageddon.

Witnesses believe that Jehovah is now laying the organizational infrastructure for his millennial theocracy. Within God’s visible organization, the redemptive power of the millennium is already operative, transforming the confusion of tongues, the divisive claims of nationalism and the corrosive power of racial prejudice and ethnic identity into a global organization characterized by racial and ethnic harmony, universal brotherhood and ideological univocality. Jehovah’s Witnesses proclaim that the solution to the otherwise intransigent problems of racism, nationalism and ethnic tribalism lies in unequivocal submission to Jehovah’s theocratic direction and active association with his visible organization, the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society.

In God’s theocratic kingdom, those divisive particularities that have continually plagued human social existence are repudiated and dissolved. But that proleptic realization of racial and ethnic harmony among Jehovah’s Witnesses coexists with the Society’s conviction that the present world system is hopelessly corrupt, irredeemable by human means. While Society literature does occasionally acknowledge that racial prejudice is not completely eradicated from Jehovah’s contemporary organization, it insists that the harmony and unity within its righteous boundaries are unparalleled by all other religious and social institutions.

A special objective of this presentation was to explore specifically how Witnesses negotiate those complex and divisive issues of race and ethnicity. I chose to focus on the Watchtower Society’s iconography because it offers a significant yet unexplored dimension of Witness history and culture. This examination of Witness iconography provides an interesting index by which to observe the evolving international and multiethnic self-consciousness of the Watchtower Society.

Part One

The image of Jehovah’s theocratic organization as a transnational, multiethnic community is not a novel development in Witness history. The movement’s founder, Charles Taze Russell, clearly indicated his interest in spreading his message around the globe, touring not only in Britain and western Europe, but also in the Middle East, Africa, and Central and South America. While early Society illustrations were clearly dominated by persons of Anglo-Caucasian appearance, Witness iconography included persons of Asian, African and even Native American dress and physical appearance as early as the Rutherford era (1917-42).

The Cosmic Drama:
Rutherford era illustration from the Enemies book.
Notice the Native American in the left front row

Lee Cooper noticed, however, that even in the late 1960s African-Americans–by then a substantial constituency within the Watchtower Society–rarely appeared in Society illustrations and photographs.[1] But that changed significantly in the late 1970s and early 1980s, as the Society realized that the world had become "very picture oriented," and set about to make its publications "more visually appealing."[2] Since that time the major iconic motifs of Society publications routinely emphasize the interracial and multiethnic composition of Jehovah’s visible organization; the Society even regionalizes its iconography to enhance its local appeal.[3]

An illustration of life in paradise from the Knowledge book.

Perhaps the most important iconic motif in Witness literature is the representation of life on paradise Earth.[4] Many of the slides in this presentation focused on that Society leitmotif and illustrated how those scenes of paradise have become increasingly interracial and ostensibly multicultural in the last few decades.

Several tensions and polarities seem particularly salient in Witness culture, especially evident in the Society iconography as well as its pedagogical practices.

Part Two

There is a significant tension in Witness discourse between the Watchtower Society representation of itself as a global culture or international organization that has transcended the divisive particularities of race, ethnicity, nationality, language, etc., and the Society’s desire to encompass and accommodate various expressions of cultural diversity and local particularities. To express this global/local, transnational/provincial tension another way: not only are Jehovah’s Witnesses historically an "American religion" in that they originated in late nineteenth-century America, but Witness leadership–especially at its geographic and ideological center–is clearly overrepresented by an Anglo-American gerontocracy with American English as its privileged language of discourse. Witness literature and iconography indicates that uniformity and univocality within the Society exists not only at the level of explicit belief and formal practice, but that this homogenizing dynamic extends even to uniformity of dress and grooming, as well as a conspicuous tendency toward lexical univocality at least among American English-speaking Witnesses.[5]

That emphasis on uniformity and univocality stands in provocative contrast with the Society’s selective celebration of cultural and ethnic diversity in, for example, its contemporary iconographic representations of life in paradise and in the routine inclusion in Society publications of photographs taken at Witness assemblies and conventions around the world. The participants’ obvious ethnic dress and phenotypical appearance apparently signify the existence of ethnic and culture diversity within Jehovah’s global theocratic organization, present and future.

Note the ethnic / racial diversity in this
scene of the "great crowd"
ascending "the mountain of Jehovah"

A point that needs more development: I might also contrast the apparent indigenization of local Kingdom Halls, i.e., the standard practice of appointing local Witnesses to positions of responsibility at the congregational level. But the organizational reality is that those leaders are always directly appointed by the Society and that individuals with minimal connection to or investment in the life and culture of their subordinates populate the intermediate and higher levels of leadership (e.g., circuit and district overseer). It does appear, however, that at least in the US ethnic/racial minorities are significantly represented in those intermediate positions of leadership and responsibility above the congregational level (e.g., in the US, African-Americans and Hispanics appear to be well-represented among the Society’s Circuit and District Overseers, as well as by the large volunteer staff at Brooklyn "Bethel"). At this time, however, the Governing Body–the highest level of (human) leadership within Jehovah’s visible organization–is still clearly dominated by white males primarily of Anglo-American descent. That fact is likely to change with the announcement of new doctrinal developments by the Society, i.e., the revision of the 1914 / "this generation" doctrine (i.e., the insistence that Armageddon must occur within a literal generation of 1914) and the doctrinal legitimation of an ancillary leadership class (the Nethinim or "given ones") potentially eligible to serve on the Governing Body. That right was previously reserved only for the "faithful and discreet slave" or anointed class that primarily consists of individuals who were Witnesses before 1935.

Part Three

One of the most interesting contrasts in Witness culture is its apparent aniconic style, manifested in the simple, utilitarian aesthetic embodied in the architecture of Kingdom Halls and in the Witness ideal of ascetic moderation, discipline and "balance."

Samples of Kingdom Hall architecture
from the Proclaimers book.

But that apparent austerity of Witness culture contrasts sharply with the Watchtower Society’s lavish and pervasive iconography in which Witness ideology is visually inscribed. I have frequently observed the direct appeal to the pleasures and beauty of life in paradise both in the Society’s literature and in the pedagogical and proselyting practices of local Witnesses. The Society tract Life in a Peaceful New World (1987, 1994), adorned with a beautiful illustration of life on the paradise earth, begins with the following appeal:

When you look at the scene on this tract, what feelings do you have? Does not your heart yearn for the peace, happiness, and prosperity seen there? Surely it does. . .

Compared to the ascetic culture of discipline and moderation idealized in Society literature and pedagogy, the fertility and pleasures of life in paradise–frequently symbolized by the abundance of fruit and emphasized by Witnesses’ speculation about the delectability of that millennial fruit–appears to nurture a kind of millenarian sensuality reminiscent of early Christian chiliasm.[6]

Fruit is a major visual motif in
Witness scenes of paradise.

Perhaps this contrast is not as stark or incommensurable as one might initially imagine. The apparent aniconism of local Kingdom Halls is easily exaggerated and misunderstood. Rather than reject outright the persistent human "will to image," Witnesses have instead redefined "the rules of signification" and nurture a sectarian aesthetic that contests the dominant symbols and paganized architecture of corrupt "Christendom." The following iconic motifs are frequently inscribed in the architecture and organization of Kingdom Halls: the Watchtower symbol–perhaps embedded in the brickwork of the building’s exterior, the map of the congregation’s territory, the local congregation’s schedule of meetings, the information board with assignments and official correspondence from the Society’s Brooklyn headquarters, and the year-text printed on a banner displayed at the front of the auditorium.[7]

Jesus on the single-beam "torture stake."
From the Knowledge book.

The Witnesses’ sectarian aesthetic is singularly evident, for example, in the Society’s regular depiction of Jesus fastened to a single-beamed "torture stake" (the New World Translation’s translation of stauros). Witnesses regard the traditional t- shaped cross as a pagan fertility symbol and yet another example of the pervasive infiltration of paganism into corrupt "Christendom." The removal of that defiling cross-beam visually contests the traditional iconography of fallen Christianity and additionally manifests in condensed form the Watchtower Society’s historic anti-Catholicism.

A spirit of utilitarian moderation and disciplined pragmatism pervades Witness culture and practice. Society literature acknowledges that after WWII the world became more "visually oriented" and that the Society developed its lavish iconography as another practical strategy for marketing the Witnesses’ urgent message of the imminent apocalyptic purge of Armageddon and the healing beauty and global redemption of life in the millennial paradise.[8]

Part Four

Finally, an important tension that pervades Witness discourse is the transformative and revolutionary potential of the Society’s iconoclastic millennialism, contrasted with the Society’s posture of apocalyptic ennui and social resignation that rejects any attempt to reform or redeem the present world system hopelessly dominated by satanic power. The striking irony of this contrast is seen most clearly in the Society’s advice toward those who would consider interracial marriage. The Society counseled that: "A Christian, being realistic, must face life as it is–not as he wishes it might be."[9] An earlier column on the same issue instructed readers that:

Christians cannot change prevailing human customs, prejudices and laws but must put up with them. They should therefore take a very realistic view of matters [emphasis added] and recognize the added difficulties such a marriage will have to face.[10]

The Society concludes the issue by conceding that while such marriages are not formally wrong, they are usually unwise given the nature of popular prejudice and hence better avoided.

But surely the utopian hope that nurtures the vision of the total resolution of all evil and injustice in a millennial paradise on earth is precisely the consequence of the Witnesses’ obdurate refusal to accept "life as it is." It is instead the hope-indeed, the passionate certainty-of eternal life in an Edenic paradise when humanity’s fallen nature will be redeemed and Jehovah will finally harmonize the divisive cacophony of human voices into the perpetual theocratic harmony and univocal same-ness of life on a paradise Earth.

|

ENDNOTES:

1.See Lee R. Cooper, "’Publish’ or Perish: Negro Jehovah’s Witness Adaptation to the Ghetto." In Religious Movements in Contemporary America, edited by I. I. Zaretsky and M. P. Leone, 700-721. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974.

2.See Jehovah’s Witnesses: Proclaimers of God’s Kingdom. (Brooklyn, NY: Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, 1993) pp. 595- 6.

3.For an example, see Firpo Carr, A History of Jehovah’s Witnesses from a Black American Perspective (Hawthorne, CA: Scholar Technological Institute of Research, Inc., 1993), p. 204.

4.Other major iconic motifs include: scenes of loved ones rejoined at the resurrection; Adam and Eve in paradise; suffering and destruction at Armageddon; Jesus hanging on a single-beamed stake; various depictions of the "great crowd" (e.g., ascending "the mountain of Jehovah").

5.From my correspondence with Witnesses, ex-Witnesses and anthropologists, similar tendencies toward lexical uniformity and rhetorical iconoclasm (e.g., resisting the established vocabulary of dominant religious groups by developing idiosyncratic terms for apparently common practices, beliefs, etc.) exist among Witnesses outside the US. An invaluable source for Witness linguistic practice and jargon is Lynn D. Newton’s Glossary of American English Hacker Theocratese, available on the World-Wide Web at:

http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~lnewton/glossary

6.Cf. the depiction of the millennium in the fragment from Papias preserved in Irenaeus’s Against Heresies, V.33.3,4.

7.For this paragraph I am very dependent here on David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989). The quotes are from p. 55 where Freedberg is himself quoting Robin Cormack, Writing in Gold: Byzantine Society and Its Icons (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 105. See especially Freedberg’s chapter entitled "The Myth of Aniconism," pp. 54-81, as well David Morgan’s "Imaging Protestant Piety: The Icons of Warner Sallman," Religion and American Culture 3 (1993): 29-45.

8.Proclaimers, pp. 595-6.

9.The Watchtower, 12/1/73, p. 735.

10.The Watchtower, 7/15/60, p. 447.

Author: Joel Elliott
Email: elliott@email.unc.edu
World-Wide Web: http://www.unc.edu/~elliott
Please Do NOT quote or reproduce without permission
© 1995

© 2001 Posted with permission of Joel Elliott
on Watchtower Information Service

by Joel Elliott

A Paper Presented to the American Academy of Religion
Washington, DC, November 21, 1993

Send me email at elliott@email.unc.edu

Please do not quote or reproduce this document
without my permission.
© 1993

This paper is very much work-in-progress, and I would love to hear your responses to this essay as I begin to revise it.

Since their origins in late nineteenth-century America, the Jehovah’s Witnesses have evolved into a well-defined and efficiently organized religious group of global proportions. Recent Society statistics indicate that less than one fourth of contemporary Witnesses live in the country of the movement’s birth; the Society now claims a world-wide core membership of over four million.1 The Watchtower Bible and Tract Society–the movement’s legally incorporated name–takes special pride in its international membership. One of its recent publications proclaims that “Christian brotherhood unmarred by racial distinctions is a reality among Jehovah’s Witnesses in the 20th century.”2 Witnesses worldwide routinely gather together in their circuit and district conventions to “rejoice in the same- ness” that transcends their national, ethnic and cultural differences.3

Witness scholar M. James Penton acknowledged that the Watchtower Society “has emphasized the value of ethnic and racial tolerance among its adherents to a greater degree than is the case with most other religious organizations.”4 Even in the segregated American religious South, Witness congregations, assemblies and conventions have been fully integrated for decades.5 Based on his research on Witnesses in Africa, Bryan Wilson argued that Witnesses “are perhaps more successful than any other group in the speed with which they eliminate tribal discrimination among their own recruits.”6

Yet there are dissident voices that call into question those utopian claims to racial and ethnic transcendence proffered by the Watchtower Society. For example, Werner Cohn and H. H. Stroup (among others) noticed that for years the Witnesses maintained segregated congregations and assemblies in the United States and abroad.7 Barbara G. Harrison claimed that in fact the Witnesses “were among the last of all religious groups to be integrated in the South”; a claim difficult to sustain, given that the Christian church remains one of the most segregated social institutions in the United States.8 The integration of Witness congregations in the United States transpired silently and cautiously during and after the Civil Rights movement. The Society’s most recently produced history evidences no awareness of that inconvenient chapter in the American Witness experience.9 Although official statistics do not break membership figures down by ethnicity or color, Americans of African descent appear to be significantly overrepresented in the Watchtower Society; estimates in the 1960s placed African- American membership at 20-30% of their American constituency.10 Given the escalating presence of African- Americans among American Witnesses, it is curious that historically few Blacks have attained positions of prominence within the Society.11

But it is not my intention here either to accuse the Watchtower Society of racism or to exonerate it of such charges. I propose, rather, to explore conspicuous mechanisms within the Watchtower Society that appear particularly crucial to its mission of creating and sustaining its diverse global constituency. I intend, therefore, to draw critical attention to that global, inter-ethnic character of this originally American religious group and to inquire into the strategies by which the Society negotiates those complex and volatile human issues of ethnicity, color and race.

The Globalizing Strategies of an American Religion

The Society’s international vision is not a recent development in its 100-year old history. Charles T. Russell engaged in numerous preaching tours around the globe, and sponsored others anxious to distribute Bible Student literature in foreign lands. The Society’s second president, J. F. Rutherford, was equally committed to global missions. Under his guidance, numerous developments occurred in Society organization that proved crucial to its escalating international success. Perhaps the most important development during the Rutherford era was the 1938 announcement of theocratic organization that ensured the Society’s centralized control over local congregations and uniformity of belief and practice among all Witnesses.12 Under the presidency of N. H. Knorr (1942-77) the Watchtower Society experienced unparalleled growth and expansion. During his tenure of 35 years, the society’s worldwide membership grew from 117,209 to 2,248,390; the number of branch offices expanded from 25 to 97. Shortly after he assumed office, Knorr initiated the Theocratic Ministry School for the training of Kingdom Publishers in theocratic knowledge and rhetoric. President Knorr also established the Watchtower Bible School of Gilead (1943) to train missionaries for global service. Under Knorr’s guidance, the Society also completed its own translation of the Bible; that translation now appears in a dozen other languages.13

The Theocratic Deployment of Technology

From its unpromising origins as an informal, loosely organized group of Bible Students under the leadership of Russell in late nineteenth-century America, the Watchtower Society has evolved into well-organized global religious organization. That impressive growth is in part attributable to the Society’s enthusiastic embrace of innovative information technologies to further its evangelistic goals. Russell realized that “The newspaper has become the great factor in the daily life of the civilized world.” By 1904 his sermons were syndicated and by 1913 those sermons appeared in over 2,000 newspapers.14 In 1912 the “Photo-Drama of Creation” appeared, which was an eight- hour long presentation (viewed in four parts) that combined motion pictures and slides with synchronized sound.15 The Society also temporarily invested in radio. Rutherford’s sermons first aired in 1922; by 1924 the Society owned its own radio station in New York; and by 1933 over 400 stations were carrying the Society’s broadcasts.16 By 1940 over 40,000 portable phonographs were also in use by Kingdom Publishers, playing those radio sermons of Rutherford for the edification of interested householders.17

But it was under the presidency of the late F. W. Franz (1977-92) that the theocratic deployment of technology escalated most significantly. By 1980 the Society had committed itself fully to the computerization of its publishing operations. By the end of the Franz presidency, the Society’s central journal The Watchtower was translated into over 111 languages, sustained by a committed translation staff of over 800. The Society developed its own computerized system (MEPS =”Multilanguage Electronic Phototypesetting System”) to facilitate the publication of Watchtower materials in over 200 languages. By 1992 the biweekly magazine The Watchtower claimed an average print run of over 16 million copies.

In his provocative study of the emergence of modern nationalism, Benedict Anderson argued that the newspaper served a vital role in the rise of national self-consciousness. The appearance of regional papers contributed to the stabilization of vernacular languages and facilitated the emergence of substantial reading publics. The newspaper became a kind of one-day bestseller, rendered obsolete by the daily mass ritual of “almost precisely simultaneous consumption” in which the nation first conceived itself as an “imagined community.”18 The Governing Body similarly believed that “if Jehovah’s Witnesses could study the same material in their meetings week by week, and distribute the same literature in the field ministry, this would have a powerful unifying effect.”19 Sometime in the early 1980s Society leaders made the simultaneous publication of its two main journals, The Watchtower and Awake! in the major world languages a top priority. With the aid of the Society’s sophisticated new multilingual publishing capabilities, by January 1992, 66 out of 111 language editions of The Watchtower appeared at the same time as the English edition.20 Since The Watchtower magazine is a weekly source of spiritual nourishment for all Witnesses, that meant “95 percent of Jehovah’s Witnesses receive the same spiritual food at the same time.”21 This highly self-conscious mobilization of information technologies is intended to cultivate a sense of a global “imagined community,” in which persons of every nation, color and language are joined together by their theocratic same-ness.

But Jehovah’s global theocratic organization is inhabited by persons who currently reside in over 200 countries, speak a bewildering array of languages and manifest every imaginable variation in physical appearance and skin color. If the theocratic deployment of modern information technologies has significantly mitigated the disruptive potential of human language, the Society’s pervasive iconography reflects a similar attempt to transcend the potentially divisive effects of phenotypical variation within its global constituency. Current Society publications abound in idyllic depictions of earthly life in the millennial paradise. Humans of every distinguishable race and color constitute the “great multitude” of the redeemed who will enjoy that eschatological existence. In the last few decades Society iconography has become increasingly multi-ethnic, and it potentially serves as an index of the movement’s rising international composition and of its escalating self- consciousness as an international community.

Theocratic Organization and Discipline

The Watchtower Society functions as a global community, efficiently networked through the theocratic deployment of technology and knowledge. This international sense of community is in part accomplished by the Society’s bureaucratic organization, its centralized production of theocratic knowledge and literature, and by the carefully monitored flow of information between its Brooklyn headquarters and local assemblies of Witnesses.

The Watchtower’s model for an international, inter-racial society is the theocracy. Currently Jehovah’s theocratic kingdom appears on earth in the global network of congregations consisting of individuals representing almost every race and culture.22 Jehovah’s Witnesses maintain 98 branch offices in over 200 countries worldwide, with each branch overseeing a portion of the Society’s 69,000+ congregations.23 Through its circuit and district overseers, each congregation answers to its branch office, and that office operates under the direct oversight and authority of the world headquarters in Brooklyn. The Governing Body, located at the Brooklyn headquarters, is composed of contemporary representatives of the “faithful and discreet slave” class, those “anointed” ones of the 144,000 destined to reign with Christ in heaven over his millennial kingdom.

The members of the Governing Body are Jehovah’s apostolic emissaries on earth, and as such possess unequivocal–though apparently not infallible–authority within the Society. There is no professional clergy, although special pioneers, missionaries and circuit and district overseers may receive minimal remuneration. Local congregations are under the care of elders, but those men are chosen under the Governing Body’s supervision and are directly answerable to Society headquarters. Their major role consists of instructing local publishers, cultivating unquestioned loyalty to Jehovah’s visible organization. Communication in the Society is vertical and ultimately one-way: the Governing Body communicates its will and individual members accept and implement it. It possesses a totalizing exegetical vision that provides clear and unambiguous theocratic answers to all human questions. A recent Society publication warns that:

Do no conclude that there are different roads, or ways, that you can follow to gain life in God’s new system. There is only one. There was just one ark that survived the Flood, not a number of boats. And there will be only one organization–God’s visible organization — that will survive the fast-approaching “great tribulation.” It is simply not true that all religions lead to the same goal . . . . You must be part of Jehovah’s organization, doing God’s will, in order to receive his blessing of everlasting life . . . .24

Consequently, the responsibility of individual members is to accept, digest and proclaim that authoritative interpretation that flows down from that apostolic Watchtower.
The Watchtower Society functions as a kind of total community that provides its members with a totalizing life-world, where all questions are answered and life-saving Truth dispensed.25 Jehovah’s Kingdom tolerates no rivals; its claims are omnivorous; commitment must be absolute and unequivocal. Witness lives are thereby constituted by submission and obedience to the Truth revealed to them in scripture through the apostolic aegis of the Governing Body. And those divinely-supported decisions of Jehovah’s theocratic representatives encompass all aspects of Witness life, including family relationships, choice of marital partners, and potentially even sexual and reproductive choices.

If it is the Governing Body’s responsibility to provide authoritative theocratic guidance in the proper interpretation of God’s word, it is the task of local Kingdom Halls–under the careful supervision of Society-appointed elders–to ensure that individuals are properly indoctrinated in Bible Truths before baptism, and to provide opportunities for the education of its members. Each congregation holds five weekly meetings in which members are trained in theocratic knowledge.26 Based on fieldwork with an urban Jehovah’s Witness community in the 1960s, Lee R. Cooper confirmed that: “the Society is noted for taking people who are ill at ease in public and training them to be accomplished public speakers who have confidence and ability to articulate their faith to total strangers.”27 In their Theocratic Ministry School participants rehearse appropriate conversation introductions for their door-step sermons; they learn to anticipate and respond to potential “conversation stoppers.”28 Publishers receive counsel on proper grooming and dress; in Theocratic Ministry School they learn the proper use of gesture, analogy and the rhetorical arts.29 They are taught to keep careful logs on the number of homes visited, the amount of literature distributed and the number of hours spent in Service Ministry. As members mature in their faith, their minds and bodies are methodically transformed by the theocratic discipline. The claims of Jehovah’s theocracy are total; allegiance to Jehovah’s visible organization transcends all regional loyalties and ethnic identities. The Watchtower’s theocratic narrative is aggressive, omnivorous and monological; it has no room for local stories and ethnic particularities.

Countervailing Signals from the Watchtower

Certainly the Jehovah’s Witnesses are a rapidly expanding international group firmly committed to a theocratic organization that claims to transcend all national, racial or ethnic allegiances. But the Watch Society’s centrifugal dynamics of world mission and ethnic transcendence also reveal equally powerful–though perhaps less obvious–centripetal forces that qualify the Society’s otherwise universal claims and aspirations. For one, The Watchtower Society remains firmly centered–organizationally and ideologically–in the United States. James Beckford observed that:

The fact that all editorial facilities are concentrated in Brooklyn, critical decisions are taken there and economic resources are distributed from there accentuates the complete dependence of all Branch organizations . . . on the international centre of the movement. It is from Brooklyn that the unitary ideological thread is produced that links all the diverse parts of this vast organization and that suppresses most opportunities for the production and circulation of deviationist views.30

Predictably, this systematic centralization of theocratic power “has wielded [the Jehovah's Witnesses] into a more self- consciously unified and more determinedly united religious group than almost any other. . .”31

While the Society frantically publishes enormous amounts of literature in over 200 languages, the fact remains that their literature is still written in English in Brooklyn, NY, under their supervision of the exclusively male, white, and predominantly American Governing Body.32 The Society’s celebrated New World Translation was translated from the original biblical languages into English. But it subsequently appeared in a dozen or more world languages as a retranslation of the original English version.33 Apparently, only after composition in the Governing Body’s “truth language” (i.e., English) is theocratic literature cautiously translated into the less privileged world dialects and safe for global export and consumption.

The colorful illustrations that currently adorn Society publications routinely emphasize the multi-ethnic composition of Jehovah’s organization; persons of every color and physical appearance constitute the “great crowd” of faithful Witnesses and populate those idyllic scenes of the millennial paradise on the renovated earth. But this official awareness of Jehovah’s Organization as an ethnically diverse, international community has not always been obvious in the Society’s iconography. In 1969 Lee Cooper’s careful inspection of Society publications revealed that only occasionally did illustrations of Awake! or The Watchtower magazines include Black families or individuals.34 In her insightful autobiography of her life as a Witness in the 1950s and 60s, Barbara Harrison drew attention to what she perceived as the unmistakably American flavor of those utopian scenes of life in the millennium:

America gave birth to this religion; and it remains in essence American. The law-and-order God of the Witnesses is Middle American. . . . And Paradise restored, if the illustrations in Watchtower publications are to be taken literally, will look exactly like an endless Kansas picnic–or a Texas barbecue. Most of the survivors of Armageddon will be attired in clothes from Montgomery Ward; and they will have crew cuts and bouffant hairdos, and skirts decorously short. (Innocence, to the Witnesses, suggests a shirt and tie.) The Witness dream of Eden is a dream of American suburbia–with a few people in exotic foreign dress to lend exoticism to the proceedings.35

Society publications–including its new 750 page history–manifest a pervasive amnesia about those embarrassing ethnocentric traces that linger in its past. One cannot learn, for example, that the Society once required segregated congregations and conventions for Americans of color, or that it once maintained a separate so- called “Colored” Branch in the United States during the 1920s and 30s.36

Since its beginnings in late-nineteenth century America, the Watchtower Society has embraced the most advanced information technologies available. For the most part those technologies were treated as neutral media in the service of worldwide Kingdom proclamation. The Society’s unqualified investment in modern technology brings with it perhaps unforseen liabilities that threaten or compromise its claims to timeless, trans-cultural Truth. What becomes of utopian rhetoric and vision in the age of mechanical reproduction? The Society must delicately negotiate the accumulative, potentially transgressive, memories of the printing press and computerized text. A recurrent strategy has been to discourage researchers from digging too deeply in the past. And to explain that Jehovah has only gradually revealed his Truth to the faithful, strategically divesting the organization of claims to infallibility while conversely regarding anything less than unequivocal submission as heresy and grounds for disfellowshiping.

The Watchtower Society manifests a pervasive preoccupation with rational efficiency and technical competence. It is clearly pleased with its complex and sophisticated publishing operations. A recently produced videotape, “Jehovah’s Witnesses: The Organization Behind the Name” (1990) proudly rehearses the technological marvels of the Society’s massive publishing enterprise, claiming that in the last seventy years the Society had printed over eleven billion pieces of literature. Society officials fastidiously maintain attendance records of their weekly meetings, assemblies, conventions, and Annual Memorial. The organization’s yearbooks faithfully reproduce that year’s grand totals, followed by pages of statistics meticulously arranged by country. Other Society publications detail the number of journals, books, cassettes, and videos published by the inexhaustible Society presses and distributed by the organization’s dedicated members.

Those carefully nurtured statistics of the organization’s tangible operations provide quantified proof of Jehovah’s unqualified approval of his Watchtower Society. And That deliberately cultivated sense of institutional momentum not only underwrites confidence in the Society’s divine guidance, but it also potentially serves as effective medicine–preventative and therapeutic–against the Society’s unstable prophetic timetable.37 But there are those who contend that the Society’s pretensions of theocratic rationality and efficiency are more apparent than real. Regardless of the technological wizardry accomplished by the Society’s publishing enterprise, most copies of The Watchtower and Awake! probably wind up in the trash can–hopefully nowadays they find their way into recycling bins. And it is not unusual to find dusty boxes of unwanted Society books piled up in the corners of used book stores.38 Empirically-based research projects (Bryan Wilson in Japan and Kenya; James Beckford in Britain) suggest that the Society’s traditional technique of door-to-door ministry is also seriously overrated. Routinely no more than half of their respondents report that they first encountered the Witnesses in that manner; frequently just as many respondents recalled that they made their first acquaintance with the Society through informal contact with Witness friends and relatives.

That image of rationality is apparent not only in the Society’s global organization and operations, but in the individual’s gradual enculturation into the theocratic practice. Publisher’s are trained to keep careful logs of the number of home bible studies conducted, amount of literature distributed, number of return visits to interested householders, and total hours spent in field ministry. As Society missionaries encounter distant cultures and customs, not only must they teach the natives to forsake their pagan beliefs and practices, but they must “[help] the brothers to learn the value of a schedule, how to keep records, the importance of files.”39 During his extensive field research with British Witnesses, James Beckford noticed a pervasive ambience of “utilitarian moderation” in appearance, dress and grooming. He observed, for example, that male Witnesses tended “to wear rather sober suits of traditional design, white shirts and dark ties for congregational meetings,” to carry their literature in leather briefcases, and “adopt an air of business-like purposiveness” in meetings and field- ministry.40 The Society’s confident claims to have transcended those mundane issues of race, ethnicity and nationality perhaps obscure the wholesale exportation of western ideals and values, transforming Watchtower converts into models of middle-class Americans with impeccable western dress, well-groomed appearance, leather briefcases and–at least for English-speaking converts–Standard American English accents.

Conclusion

The Jehovah’s Witnesses appear remarkably successful in their attempts to sustain an ethnically diverse, yet spiritually integrated global community. Jehovah’s theocratic organization makes no concessions to the racial and social inequalities that exist outside its righteous boundaries. Witnesses deny all “worldly” distinctions based on race, skin color, ethnicity, nationality and class. In Jehovah’s theocratic kingdom ethnic particularities, political allegiances and socioeconomic distinctions are (ideally) repudiated and dissolved. Witness ideology declares that “soon God’s kingdom will destroy the present ungodly system of things,” and that persons “out of all nations and tribes and peoples and tongues” will assemble in that great millennial paradise on the newly-renovated earth.41 Within the Watchtower’s firm but loving embrace, Jehovah’s Witnesses congregate worldwide at the same times, speaking the same theocratic language, listening to the same Truth, proclaiming the same kingdom message to any and all who would listen and obey. But there is another, more complicated dimension, to this triumphalist millenarian rhetoric.

During public showings of the innovative “Photo-Drama of Creation” in New York City in 1914, Charles Russell noticed that as the number of blacks in attendance increased, his white audience diminished. When he realized that many whites resisted the idea of intermingling with blacks, Russell decided to segregate the blacks into the theater’s gallery. To those understandably offended by that compromising maneuver, Russell explained that he must place God’s cause over issues of race. He comforted them with the assurance that very soon all those issues would be resolved in the millennial kingdom, when the faithful would receive “new bodies”–presumably white–where color and sex distinctions would be no more.42

In a question-and-answer column in a 1973 issue of The Watchtower magazine, an anonymous Society writer pondered the submitted question: “What is the view of Jehovah’s Witnesses toward interracial marriage?” After carefully rehearsing all relevant biblical evidence, the writer assured his querist that interracial marriages are not intrinsically wrong. But, he added, deep-seated prejudices remain in the world and “A Christian, being realistic, must face life as it is–not as he wishes it might be.” One must be theocratically circumspect about such matters; while not wrong per se, if such a marriage would compromise one’s potential to give a witness for Jehovah, it might be theocratically imprudent to pursue the marriage.43 On the one hand the Watchtower Society’s millenarian discourse offers utopian visions of racial harmony, revolutionary images of the overthrow of existing world governments, idyllic scenes of life in an Edenic paradise. But from another perspective those radical claims seem to leave our troubled world relatively undisturbed. Jehovah’s revolutionary witnesses may then appear more as supporters of the status quo than as apocalyptic harbingers of a new world order, compromised by their complicitous silence and political indifference. Perhaps both dimensions of this millenarian discourse are to some extent true. Sylvia Thrupp has suggested that millenarian movements may offer their devotees an “imaginative perception” of another life in “dramatic contrast” with the mundane demands and troubled horizons of the present. But unlike the reader of a enchanting novel or the viewer of a mesmerizing play, the believer can enter that perfect world and collaborate in its construction.44 While dismissing all attempts to reform this corrupt and doomed world system, Jehovah’s Witnesses are certainly not a quiet and passive people. A Watchtower publication declares that:

a small preview of what will make living on the paradise earth after Armageddon such a pleasure. Truly, God’s kingdom will bring to pass what no human government could even hope to do.45

Witnesses imagine a perfect world on a renovated earth, ruled by a heavenly government of Jesus and his Anointed, in which all sin, suffering and discrimination are forever banished from human experience. They are fervently engaged in a world mission, harnessing every available resource and technology in their task of Kingdom proclamation and in their collective efforts to create and sustain an imagined theocratic community right here on earth.

ENDNOTES

1. The Yearbook reported the number of Witness Publishers in the United States in 1992 at approximately 860,000, with a 2% increase over 1991. 1993 Yearbook of Jehovah’s Witnesses (WTBTS, 1993), pp. 40-41. While most non-Witnesses (and Witnesses) do not have access to Watchtower records, Witness statistical criteria are rigorous and appear reliable. Raymond Franz remarked that “I have never known of any instance where statistics were altered, at least by the international headquarters. Individuals and “pioneers” might fluff up their figures for “hours,” etc., but branch offices were expected to be scrupulously accurate in the figures they forwarded on to the headquarters. I think one can accept published statistics as valid.” Personal correspondence from Raymond Franz, July 14, 1992. The Society urges individual publishers to average 10 hours a month in field ministry, Regular Pioneers 90 hours per month, Auxiliary Pioneers 60 hours per month, and Special Pioneers 140 hours per month. But Franz argues that “any person who reports even one hour a month is counted as a “publisher.’ 10 hours a month . . . is a sort of unspoken goal but not necessary for qualifying as a publisher.” Personal correspondence from Raymond Franz, July 14, 1992.

2. Reasoning from the Scriptures, p. 305.

3. Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, Visions of Glory: A History and a Memory of Jehovah’s Witnesses (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978), p. 268.

4. M. James Penton, Apocalypse Delayed: The Story of the Jehovah’s Witnesses (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), p. 286.

5. [Documenting the integration of Witnesses in the US South is extremely difficult. I make this assertion based on interviews with Witness experts like Raymond Franz and Jerry Bergman.] 6. Bryan R. Wilson, “Jehovah’s Witnesses in Africa,” New Society (12 July 1973), p. 75.

7. See, e.g., Werner Cohn, “They Hope for Armageddon.” [Review of Marley Cole, Jehovah's Witnesses: The New World Society] The New Leader, October 17, 1955, pp. 24-6; and Herbert Hewitt Stroup, The Jehovah’s Witnesses (New York: Russell & Russell, 1945), p. 29.

8. Given their resistance to any direct form of social reform, it is no surprise that the Witnesses did not participate in civil rights movement in the American South (or anywhere for that matter). See Harrison, Visions of Glory, p. 261; also pp. 159 (anti-Semitism), 254-5.

9. See Jehovah’s Witnesses: Proclaimers of God’s Kingdom (WTBTS, 1993).

10. This is based on a total African-American population of ca. 12% in the United States. Such estimates are simply an guesses, but the percentage could be significantly higher. See William J. Whalen, Armageddon Around the Corner: A Report on Jehovah’s Witnesses (New York: The John Day Co., 1962), p. 203; Lee R. Cooper,”‘Publish’ or Perish: Negro Jehovah’s Witness Adaptation to the Ghetto,” in Religious Movements in Contemporary America, I. I. Zaretsky and M. P. Leone, eds. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974), p. 705.

11. Firpo Carr’s claim that Bill Jackson, who served on the Governing Body until his death in 1981, was Black seems a rather desperate attempt. Others who knew Jackson personally (e.g., Raymond Franz, Randy Watters) confirm that not only did Jackson appear white, but to their knowledge he never claimed otherwise. See Carr, A History of Jehovah’s Witnesses from a Black American Perspective (Hawthorne, CA: Scholar Technological Institute of Research, Inc., 1993), pp. 45-8; see also Jackson’s birth certificate reproduced on p. 398, where both his parents are listed as “white” (sic!). See also the unpublished paper of Jerry Bergman, “Blacks and Jehovah’s Witnesses” which cites Randy Watters, “Was There a Black Man on the Governing Body?,” [review of Carr's book] Free Minds 12 (2, March/April, 1993), p. 11. 12. Other developments include: in 1931 the name “Jehovah’s Witnesses” was officially unveiled by Watchtower leaders as the Society’s proper designation. In 1935 it was announced that “new light” on Jehovah’s word indicated that membership was no longer restricted to that “little flock” of the 144,000 who would reign in heaven with Christ during the millennium. Rather, Society leaders revealed the existence of a “great multitude” or Jonadab class entitled to a glorious existence on the renovated earth. 13. The New World Translation of the Greek Christian Scriptures was completed in 1950, and the complete translation was available in 1961. For the most recent revision, see New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures (WTBTS, 1984 ed. [orig. 1961])

14. Proclaimers, p. 58.

15. By 1914 that production had appeared all over North America, Europe, New Zealand and Australia, thrilling audiences with its innovative panorama of the unfolding of God’s plan from the Creation to the Millennium. See Proclaimers, p. 60.

16. Proclaimers, pp. 80-1.

17. Proclaimers, pp. 565.

18. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 2nd ed. (New York: Verso, 1991), p. 35.

19. Proclaimers, pp. 597-8.

20. At the same time, the Society also claimed an average printing run of 13 million copies of Awake! magazine in 67 languages, 30 of which appeared at the same time as the English edition.

21. The Society also claimed an average printing run of 13,110,000 copies of Awake! in 67 languages; 30 of which appeared at the same time as the English edition. See the 1992 Yearbook of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, p. 18.

22. JWs are legally present 229 countries and are currently under legal restrictions in perhaps 25 countries (?).

23. See 1993 Yearbook of Jehovah’s Witnesses (WTBTS, 1993), p. 33.

24. You Can Live Forever on Paradise on Earth (Brooklyn, NY: WTBTS, 1982, 1990), p. 255 [italics added].

25. I am dependent here on Erving Goffman, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1961); and Lewis A. Coser, Greedy Institutions: Patterns of Undivided Commitment (New York: The Free Press, 1974). Goffman defines a total institution as “a place of residence and work where a large number of like-situated individuals, cut off from the wider society for an appreciable period of time, together lead an enclosed, formally administered round of life.” Asylums, p. xiii. Koser argues that greedy institutions rely, not on the physical sequestering of inmates, but on “non-physical mechanisms” that separate insiders from outsiders, and on the voluntary compliance of its subjects. Greedy Institutions, p. 6.

26. In accord with the Society’s unwavering commitment to transform every member into an accomplished Kingdom minister, the weekly Theocratic Ministry School was specifically “designed for the purpose of teaching and equipping Jehovah’s witnesses to preach the good news.”

27. Lee R. Cooper,”‘Publish’ or Perish: Negro Jehovah’s Witness Adaptation to the Ghetto,” p. 712.

28. See Reasoning from the Scriptures (WTBTS, 1985, 1989), pp. 9-24. Publishers are always persistent in conversation, and have a ready comeback for most any comment or question. 29. Raymond V. Franz relates his involvement in the Governing Body’s decision to forbid all forms of non-genital copulation in marriage. See his Crisis of Conscience: The Struggle between Loyalty to God and Loyalty to One’s Religion (Atlanta: Commentary Press, 1983), pp. 42-50. While the policy was reversed in 1978, for five years it was used to disfellowship sexually disobedient members. On dress and grooming, see “Why Do I Have to Be Different?,” Awake! (June 8, 1992), pp. 16-8. On rhetorical preparation, see the Theocratic Ministry School Guidebook (WTBTS, 1971). 30. James A. Beckford, The Trumpet of Prophecy: A Sociological Study of Jehovah’s Witnesses (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1975), p. 81.

31. Beckford, Trumpet of Prophecy, p. 96.

32. While all members of the Governing Body are white, several members were born outside the US, representing the British Isles, northern Europe, the Mediterranean, New Zealand, etc.

33. Proclaimers, P. 611.

34. Cooper,”‘Publish’ or Perish: Negro Jehovah’s Witness Adaptation to the Ghetto,” p. 710. Carr’s explanation that the omission of Blacks in the Society’s illustrations was inadvertent and an “oversight” surely misses the point. See Carr, A History of Jehovah’s Witnesses, pp. 201-18.

35. Visions of Glory, p. 50.

36. Carr has conveniently reproduced the activity records of the “Colored branch” in the United States, 1927-32, from the Society’s Yearbook. See Carr, A History of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, pp. 423-31.

37. See Beckford, Trumpet of Prophecy, p. 221.

38. While this may be true of their more recent publications, older society publications, especially those from the Russell and Rutherford eras, are now considered collector’s items. See Jerry Bergman, “Witnesses to a New Area of Book Collecting,” Book Collector’s Market 4 (May-June 1979), pp. 1-9.

39. Proclaimers, p. 539.

40. Beckford, Trumpet of Prophecy, pp. 144-5.

41. Reasoning From the Scriptures, 305.

42. The Watchtower, April 1, 1914, pp. 105-6.

43. The Watchtower, December 1, 1973, pp. 755-6. The texts of the articles referred to in this and the preceeding paragraph are reproduced in Carr’s A History of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, pp. 107-8, 224-7.

44. Sylvia L. Thrupp, “Millennial Dreams in Action: A Report on the Conference Discussion,” in Millennial Dreams in Action: Essays in Comparative Study (The Hague: Mouton & Co., Pub., 1962), p. 25.

45. [emphasis added] You Can Live Forever, p. 160.

Author: Joel Elliott
Email: elliott@email.unc.edu
World-Wide Web: http://www.unc.edu/~elliott
Please Do NOT quote or reproduce without permission.
© 1993

© 2001 Posted with permission of Joel Elliott
on Watchtower Information Service

THE DISCURSIVE STRATEGIES OF THE
WATCHTOWER SOCIETY

by Joel Elliott

Please do not quote or reproduce this document
without my permission.
© 1993

Send me email at elliott@email.unc.edu

This paper is very much work-in-progress, and I would love to hear your responses to this essay as I begin to revise it. 

A whole mythology is deposited in our language.
…. We must plough over the whole of language.

–Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough

For then I shall give to peoples the change to a pure language, in order for them all to call upon the name of Jehovah, in order to serve him shoulder to shoulder.

–Zephaniah 3:9, (New World Translation)

Witness discourse is heavily jargonized; it is filled with “buzz words” that immediately differentiate themselves from both the outside world and from other Christian groups. In some cases, common Christian words are appropriated and transformed. They call themselves “Witnesses,” and speak of “Jehovah’s Organization” or the “Theocracy.” Local congregations are called “Kingdom Halls,” not churches. Gary and Heather Botting argue that:

The ‘theocratic language’ includes the redefinition of standard English words, the emotional charging of words, the peculiar use of metaphor in argument, and the adoption of particular mannerisms of speech.[5]

In this arsenal of theocratic jargon, traditional words are subverted with special nuances, conventional ideas and concepts renamed, new terminology constructed. This theocratic language even permits Witnesses quickly to identify other Witnesses and evaluate levels of maturity.

Since their origins in late nineteenth-century America,[6] the Jehovah’s Witnesses have evolved into a distinct and mature American religious group.[7] The movement has grown at an impressive rate. In addition to their active and successful mission work in North America, Witnesses have also pursued aggressive missionary work globally. The Watchtower Society has become an international movement of significant proportions.

Witness literature regularly invokes their impressive statistics as proof of divine approval. Those statistics are “major symbols of success and proof positive of Jehovah’s continued blessing upon his organization.”[8] A recent issue of The Watchtower proclaims:

. . . the global work of witnessing about God’s Kingdom is strong evidence that we are near the end of this wicked system and that true freedom is at hand. The ones calling on people with the hope-filled message of God’s new world are described at Acts 15:14 as “a people for [God's] name.” Who bear Jehovah’s name and give the global witness about Jehovah and his Kingdom? The historical record of the 20th century answers: only Jehovah’s Witnesses. Today they number more than four million in more than 66,000 congregations all over the world.[9]

Recent statistics indicate there are over four million Watchtower members worldwide, with less than one-fourth now residing in the United States. The 1996 Yearbook of Jehovah’s Witnesses reports statistics from 232 countries (including 25 countries where Witnesses are banned), with the following totals:
 

The yearbook reported the number of Witness Publishers in the United States in 1995 as 956,346 (peak) / 912,002 (average) with a 3% increase over 1994.[10]

Witness statistical criteria are rigorous and generally reliable.[11] Individual Publishers are encouraged to spend 10 hours a month in field ministry — but to be considered active, Publishers must submit at least one hour per month. Regular Pioneers average 90 hours per month, Auxiliary Pioneers 60 hours per month, and Special Pioneers 140 hours per month.

 Witnesses argue that the divine name “Jehovah” identifies God in a way that generic titles like “Lord” and “God” do not.[12] They are, after all, witnesses for Jehovah, and they claim as one of the identifying marks of the “true church” its invocation of God’s personal name.[13] A Watchtower publication declares that:

. . . God’s people must treat his name as holy and make it known throughout the earth . . . There is only one people that is really following Jesus’ example in this regard. Their main purpose in life is to serve God and bear witness to his name, just as Jesus did. So they have taken the scriptural name “Jehovah’s Witnesses.”[14]

Witnesses abhor the systematic exclusion of the name “Jehovah” from the text of some modern Bible translations (e.g., the Revised Standard Version translates the Tetragrammaton consistently as “the lord”). In their New World Translation, Witness translators have not only restored the word “Jehovah” to the English text of the Hebrew Bible, but have also introduced it into their translation of the New Testament.[15] The word is familiar enough to those of Christian and Jewish background, but for Witnesses “Jehovah” is the special name of God. For them the divine name possesses an almost mantric quality; frequent invocation of God’s personal name is a regular feature of Witness discourse. One recent Watchtower publication even counsels pronouncing the divine name aloud as an effective strategy for warding off demons.[16]

Discursive Strategies of the Theocratic Order

In a recent publication, Scott Montgomery explored discursive strategies deployed in contemporary scientific discourse.[17] Building on the work of M. Bakhtin, T. Todorov and R. Barthes, Montgomery argued that this highly jargonized discourse effectively dichotomizes the speaking world into insiders and outsiders. While one normally thinks of language as a communicative system employed to bridge semantic gaps, this jargonized discourse is equally as effective at excluding and repelling, generating limits and maintaining boundaries. The discriminating power of language exalts and assures those inside this rhetorical space, while rejecting and offending discursive Others. Scientific discourse ideally purges itself of all social and private processes that condition and situate knowledge. What remains is pure Truth, exorcised of all historical and personal contingencies. Ideally, the author’s presence is excised; the reader glimpses the authorial presence only in moments of literary failure. Content is everything and discourse confronts the reading subject with disembodied, anonymous Truth.

Montgomery argues that in its approach to language, the natural sciences manifest a monological discursive strategy.[18] The so-called human sciences reflect a dialogical approach to language, since they necessarily converse with other discourses. But the natural sciences pursue a monological language game, vanquishing all other forms of discourse and establishing itself as the only legitimate means of excavating and representing genuine knowledge of the world. Witness discourse reflects a monological discursive strategy similar to Montgomery’s presentation of contemporary scientific discourse. I have pursued this analysis of Witness discursive strategies under three headings: (1) The Rhetoric of Sheep and Goats, (2) Speaking the Truth in Formulas, and (3) The Watchtower’s Cult of Anonymity. I argue that the heavily jargonized Theocratic discourse splits human society in two: the corrupt world system is dominated by Satanic forces, and the pure theocratic order is currently manifested in those faithful witnesses of Jehovah separated from the world, recognizable by their righteous lifestyle and pure theocratic speech.

I offer this essay as a perspectival rendering of some particularly salient dynamics operative in Witness life and experience. I do not claim that this analysis of Witness discursive strategies is total or comprehensive. With Nietzsche I believe that there is no knowing or seeing in general, only seeing in particular and embodied knowing that is perspectival and provisional.[19] Hopefully the questions raised and issues explored by this heuristic adventure into the rhetorical cosmos of Jehovah’s Watchtower will facilitate further inquiries and generate new perspectives.

Today people talk a lot about living together in peace, and have even set up a “United Nations” organization. Yet people and nations are divided as never before. What is needed? The hearts of people need to change. But it is simply impossible for the governments of the world to perform such a miracle. The Bible’s message about God’s love, however, is doing it.[20]

Witnesses also refuse participation in interfaith or ecumenical endeavors, since they cannot commune with the corrupt religion of Babylon the Great. Watchtower ideology demands nothing less than immediate and complete separation from the world.[21]

If their eschatology demands disengagement, it paradoxically compels Witnesses to confront the world in apocalyptic proclamation of Jehovah’s kingdom. The urgency of the times constrains Jehovah’s modern-day witnesses to adapt the privileged theocratic discourse to the apparently dialogical task of world-engagement. God’s will for his witnesses today is that they engage in the momentous task of preaching, since “Bible prophecy reveals unmistakably that we are living now during ‘the conclusion of the system of things.’”[22] With their discourse securely rooted in Jehovah’s monological cosmos, Witnesses engage in a separating work, proclaiming the message of the imminent kingdom and calling out those “sheeplike” ones who heed the voice of Jehovah. Those who listen and obey possess the hope of resurrection and life on the renovated “new heavens and new earth.” They may even avoid death altogether if they are alive when God ushers in his millennial kingdom.

Witnesses are suspended in a kind of liminality; they are “in Satan’s world, but still. . . no part of it.”[23] Witnesses exist “between the times,” subsisting in their righteous communitas, living with the knowledge that Jehovah’s kingdom has been inaugurated, and that the return of Jesus will occur before the generation alive in 1914 passes away. Despite the apparent delays and re-calculations of the End-time, Witnesses continue in their tenacious struggle to proclaim Jehovah’s imminent kingdom on earth.[24] Penton argues that in fact the Witnesses have “preached millenarianism longer and more consistently than any major sectarian movement in the world.”[25] The year 1914 is a pivotal date for Witnesses, as it signifies the time when Watchtower prophetic interpretation indicates that “Jesus Christ began to rule as king of God’s heavenly government.”[26] One Watchtower publication summarizes that:

Christ as King did not immediately proceed to destroy all who refused to acknowledge Jehovah’s sovereignty and himself as Messiah. Instead, as he had foretold, a global preaching work was to be done . . . . As King he would direct a dividing of peoples of all nations, those proving to be righteous being granted the prospect of everlasting life, and the wicked being consigned to everlasting cutting off in death . . . . In the meantime, the very difficult conditions foretold for “the last days” would prevail . . . . Before the last members of the generation that was alive in 1914 will have passed off the scene, all the things foretold will occur, including the “great tribulation” in which the present wicked world will end.[27]

Their unyielding devotion to the imminence of the End commits Jehovah’s latter-day witnesses to a kind of permanent liminal existence, in which their allegiances and connections to the social order are pared to a minimum.[28] Their earnest hopes and longings are focused on the return of Jesus, on the renovated earth and an eternally blissful existence in that Edenic paradise. The evil world order will immediately disappear at the great and climactic battle of Armageddon when Jehovah will install his new order of things. Jesus and the Anointed 144,000 will then preside in the heavens over that “great multitude” of the righteous faithful resurrected on the newly renovated earth.[29] Together Jehovah’s faithful will gradually and thoroughly restore the earth to its original Edenic tranquility. This posture of world rejection entails the rhetorical exorcism of Witness discourse in which words and doctrines are purged of their “Babylonish” associations. This purge of all vestiges of corrupt Babylon demands more than simple lexical correctness. Jehovah’s people must be theocratically correct in every way. This desire for theocratic correctness involves not only the eradication of the corrupt language of Babylon; it also requires the theological exorcism of ideological remnants of corrupt Babylon. Watchtower literature proclaims that:

A religion may claim to advocate worship of the true God of the Bible and it may use the name of his Son, Jesus Christ, but of what value is this if it is contaminated with Babylonish doctrines and practices? . . . . [W]e need to make a clean break from any and all organizations of Babylon the Great. We need to quit sharing in their activities . . . .[30]

Thus Witnesses reject the traditional Christian doctrine of the Trinity because it is neither rational nor scriptural, but also because the very notion of triune gods evidences pagan corruption. The traditional doctrines of the immortality of the soul and eternal torment in Hell are rejected by Witnesses because they too originated in pagan antiquity, not in the Bible.[31] What appears as a particularly gratuitous claim is the Witness’ insistence that Jesus was crucified on a single-beamed “torture stake,” not on a tau-shaped cross. Witnesses argue that the tau- shaped cross has ancient pagan fertility associations, although the obvious phallic imagery of a single-beamed stake gives them no pause.[32] The Watchtower declares that:

. . . there are common threads going through the confused tapestry of the world’s religions. Many religions have their roots in mythology. Nearly all are tied together by some form of belief in a supposed immortal human soul that survives death and goes to a hereafter or transmigrates to another creature. Many have the common denominator of belief in a dreadful place of torment and torture called hell. Others are connected by ancient pagan beliefs in triads, trinities, and mother goddesses. Therefore, it is only appropriate that they should all be grouped together under the one composite symbol of the harlot “Babylon the Great.”[33]

Witnesses likewise reject the traditional celebration of festivals and holidays (including Christmas, New Year’s Day, Easter, and personal birthdays) since–Witnesses argue–they actually originated in Babylon the Great. Witnesses believe that:

Those that make up the Christian organization of Jehovah’s witnesses are persons who have separated themselves from the many religions of both pagandom and Christendom. By attending meetings at one of their Kingdom Halls, you can see for yourself the difference this has made.[34]

Witnesses actively and creatively cultivate their so-called sectarian identity in a process of symbolic differentiation. This is accomplished in part by the construction of demonic Others (e.g., “the World,” “Babylon the Great”) and the identification of their own community as a proleptic manifestation of the pure theocratic order in the midst of the corrupt world system.[35] Jehovah’s Witnesses operate within a moral cosmos in which there is a clear and unambiguous contrast between God and Satan, right and wrong, good and evil. Everything is in principle polarized between these two extremes. Witnesses claim a monopoly on divine Truth; one Watchtower publication proclaims that:

Do no conclude that there are different roads, or ways, that you can follow to gain life in God’s new system. There is only one. There was just one ark that survived the Flood, not a number of boats. And there will be only one organization–God’s visible organization–that will survive the fast-approaching “great tribulation.” It is simply not true that all religions lead to the same goal . . . . You must be part of Jehovah’s organization, doing God’s will, in order to receive his blessing of everlasting life . . . .[36]

Almost every dimension of Witness life manifests strategies of symbolic differentiation and calculated distinctiveness in which Witnesses actively cultivate their identity. Joseph F. Zygmunt observed that while there has been some weakening of the Watchtower’s obstinate anti-worldly posture, “[the movement] has maintained its polarity vis-à-vis the world, actively striving, in fact, to cultivate new marks of distinctiveness, to put greater symbolic distance between itself and the world.”[37] Witnesses have produced their own translation of the Bible (the New World Translation, 1961, 1984), written their own hymns (their hymnals include only Watchtower-composed hymns, all ostensibly based on scripture passages); they spend enormous amounts of time faithfully reading and distributing the prolific literature generated by their profuse Watchtower presses.[38] Competing tensions permeate Witness life. They are at once compelled to proclaim Jehovah’s message to a doomed world, to salvage whom they can from the impending apocalyptic catastrophe. Their rejection of the World and corrupt Christendom requires disengagement from worldly activity. Yet their intense apocalyptic beliefs demand the imminent destruction of the corrupt world system and the eternal annihilation of everyone not protected by the redeeming love of Jehovah. The logic of their position appears to require communitarian withdrawal from the world into an enclave of theocratic righteousness and ideological homogeneity.

What fellowship do righteousness and lawlessness have? Or what sharing does light have with darkness? . . . “Therefore get out from among them, and separate yourselves,” says Jehovah . . . [2 Cor. 6:14-18 NWT]

Yet an urgent conviction demands that Witnesses announce Jehovah’s message to whomever would listen and accept God’s gracious redemption from the coming world destruction. Those centrifugal and centripetal dynamics of apocalyptic proclamation and world rejection are profoundly important for Witness life and identity. Witnesses are compelled to reject the world, yet must engage it in apocalyptic proclamation.

Having ideally rejected associations with the present evil world system, the Watchtower cultivates its own pure theocratic language supposedly exorcised of all vestiges of that corrupt system. The cultivation of the theocratic language facilitates the creation and maintenance of the homogeneous theocratic order in the midst of the Satanic world system. Those fluent in the theocratic dialect can bravely enter the discursive worlds of demonic Others. Beckford observed that:

the very obligation to engage in evangelism necessitates frequent interaction with people of widely differing outlooks and increases the risk that Jehovah’s witnesses will either compromise the purity of their outlook or replace it with an entirely different one.[39]

But the integrity of the Watchtower’s monological superstructure remains intact; the dangerous dialogical implications of evangelistic engagement are successfully mitigated by the deployment of theocratic discourse.[40] The remarkable generation of consensus found among Witness communities worldwide is accomplished in part by the cultivation and deployment of this theocratic language.[41]

Local Kingdom Halls appear to function as “total communities” for members.[42] The Watchtower encourages engagement with the outside world only for purposes of proselyting. Otherwise, the local Witness community ideally serves as the primary institution of reference for all dimensions of Witness life including recreation, friendship, marriage, and education. In this sense, most Witnesses become to a great degree “hermetically sealed” from the outside world.[43] The Watchtower has long harbored a pervasive ambivalence toward higher education; members are generally discouraged from pursuing post-secondary education.[44] A Watchtower publication explains that:

Even though Witness youths are interested in a good education, they do not pursue schooling with the intention of obtaining prestige or prominence. Their main goal in life is to serve effectively as ministers of God, and they appreciate schooling as an aid to that end. So they generally choose courses that are useful for supporting themselves in the modern world. Thus, many may take vocational courses or attend a vocational school. When they leave school they desire to obtain work that will allow them to concentrate on their principle vocation, the Christian ministry.[45]

But the Watchtower has no opposition to theocratic education; their five weekly meetings and the steady torrent of Watchtower literature provides most members with their entire diet of educational materials. Under President Knorr’s guidance, the Watchtower initiated (in 1943) theocratic ministry schools (held once a week at Kingdom Halls) to train all Witnesses (male and female) in rhetorical strategy and theocratic knowledge.[46] Lee R. Cooper observes that: “the Society is noted for taking people who are ill at ease in public and training them to be accomplished public speakers who have confidence and ability to articulate their faith to total strangers.”[47] Witnesses are therefore intellectually and educationally self-sufficient. Official Watchtower literature embodies the wisdom and insight of those representatives of the “faithful and discreet slave” class–the Governing Body–who present their flock with a totalizing interpretive framework that addresses all dimensions of Witness life and experience. The Governing Body has ruled on proper sexual conduct between marriage partners; it provides wise counsel for proper grooming and dress; and it guides Witnesses in the proper use of gesture, analogy and the rhetorical arts.[48]

The Watchtower magazine is more or less the official journal of the Society, and local Kingdom Halls regularly devote one hour per week studying its contents. The Watchtower publication entitled Awake! appears as a popular magazine in which Jehovah’s message is found alongside stories of current human interest. The publication claims that it is:

for the enlightenment of the entire family. It shows how to cope with today’s problems, It reports the news, tells about people in many lands, examines religion and science. But it does more. It probes beneath the surface and points to the real meaning behind current events, yet it always stays politically neutral and does not exalt one race above another. Most important, this magazine builds confidence in the Creator’s promise of a peaceful and secure new world before the generation that saw the events of 1914 passes away[49]

At first glance Awake! appears as the Society’s dialogical attempt at world-engagement. Yet its stories about Finnish ice bathing and hot saunas, the East African antelope called the Kudu, color blindness in humans, Alzheimer’s disease, acid rain, icebergs and AIDS provide a broad range of human interest stories permeated with pervasive allusions to distinctive Witness teachings. The broader educational or intellectual designs of the magazine–and for that matter, of all Watchtower publications–are unambiguously subordinated to the pedagogical monologue of theocratic discourse.

Speaking the Truth in Formulas 

Witnesses appear as biblical rationalists, rejecting such traditional doctrines as the Trinity as neither rational nor biblical.[50] They assert that they “believe that the entire Bible is the inspired Word of God, and instead of adhering to a creed based on human tradition, they hold to the Bible as the standard for all their beliefs.”[51] Watchtower literature insists that “Their beliefs and practices are not new but are a restoration of first-century Christianity.”[52] Witnesses contend that the cryptic apocalyptic material contained in biblical books like Daniel and Revelation are decipherable, since all scripture is inspired of God and is necessarily understandable and edifying. The Witnesses manifest a pervasive contempt for the mysterious and the inscrutable.[53] Beckford explains that the Society:

deprecates mystery and affect while explicitly lauding certainty and reason. . . . [Its] conception of Jehovah, . . . is an unemotional amalgam of all principles of truth, reason and goodness. Similarly, the idea of death holds no mystery for them: it means simply a period of total unconsciousness terminating in the process of resurrection.[54]

Individual Witnesses manifest what I call “scripted” or rehearsed behavior. Their lives are gradually and thoroughly systematized to the point where their very discourse appears to outsiders as a memorized and rehearsed performance.[55] Their lives ideally revolve around kingdom proclamation; members must literally publish or perish. Witness lives are constituted by submission to the Truth, by obedience to the revealed will of Jehovah. As members mature in their faith, their lives and morals are systematically brought under the control of Jehovah’s will. They are consumed with Jehovah’s work, devoting enormous amounts of time to reading their Bibles and Watchtower literature, constantly engaging in field ministry. Publishers are always persistent in conversation, and have a ready comeback for most any comment or question. They appear well-equipped for a type of pedagogical discourse frequently incompatible with the interrogative (or dialogical) strategies of ethnographic inquiry and historical investigation.

The Watchtower Society is an extremely efficient bureaucracy, and this concern with rational efficiency can be observed even at the congregational level.[56] All meetings are designed to last a specific amount of time, and meetings rarely, if ever, go overtime. At one Service Meeting I attended, the presiding elder actually spent about 10-15 minutes discussing why meetings should begin and end on time. Publishers are trained on how to make contact with the public and present Jehovah’s message in clear and palatable terms. They are taught to anticipate potential “conversation stoppers” and respond to them appropriately.[57] Publishers keep careful logs on the number of homes visited, the amount of literature distributed and the number of hours spent in Service Ministry. In the foyer of a local Kingdom Hall (Carrboro, NC), a large map of the local community and county appeared on the wall. Sections were marked off and territories assigned to different publishers in an attempt to ensure that Jehovah’s message was efficiently proclaimed to everyone in their district. The Watchtower also employs advanced electronic equipment to control their PA system and pre-recorded music, and publishers distribute videotapes and cassettes along with other printed materials. The Society apparently utilizes state-of-the-art computer and printing equipment in their massive publishing efforts.[58] Nothing is left to accident or chance in the business of Kingdom proclamation, and every attempt is made to ensure that one is indeed a faithful servant of Jehovah. Only then can one gain the certainty that they will survive the horrors of Armageddon and live forever on the renovated earth.

“Simple” questions posed to scrupulous Publishers often provoke long, rehearsed responses and extensive Bible quotations. Witnesses are masters of the rhetorical question, and learn to anticipate responses and counter them with rehearsed answers. Attempts to coax Witnesses into speaking “off the record” are usually unsuccessful. During public Bible studies at Kingdom Halls (e.g., the Watchtower study hour on Sundays), members faithfully look up references in their Bibles, although the entire text of the passage is usually printed in their study guide. During meetings open Bibles are everywhere on display, with pens in the hands of readers dutifully marking passages under discussion. This scripted behavior, this constant flipping of thin pages in search of the right biblical passage, manifests with singular clarity the ritual seriousness of Jehovah’s Witnesses.

The Cult of Anonymity

All Witness discourse–whether that employed in their printed literature or in the conversations of the persistent Witnesses at your doorstep–is in principle anonymous. Since 1942 all official Watchtower literature is published anonymously. Although all correspondence from the Watchtower Society is also anonymous, the Society actually signs “Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, Inc.” on all official correspondence with local congregations.[59] Even the names of the translators of the New World Translation have never been divulged publicly.[60]

The organization of the Watchtower Society greatly facilitates this de-personalizing tendency. The centripetal power of the Watchtower Society jealously protects its organizational omnipotence. Beckford observes that:

The fact that all editorial facilities are concentrated in Brooklyn, critical decisions are taken there and economic resources are distributed from there accentuates the complete dependence of all Branch organizations . . . on the international centre of the movement. It is from Brooklyn that the unitary ideological thread is produced that links all the diverse parts of this vast organization and that suppresses most opportunities for the production and circulation of deviationist views.[61]

This systematic centralization of theocratic power “has wielded [the Jehovah's Witnesses] into a more self-consciously unified and more determinedly united religious group than almost any other. . .”[62] Jehovah’s kingdom is, after all, a theocracy, not a democracy; therefore no single individual can lay claim to authorship or genuine creativity.[63] Harrison argues that for the Watchtower: “creative work has one’s personal signature; it is far better to labor anonymously, without credit . . . . Only God may have a name: Jehovah. For an individual to have a “name” is seen as a diminishment of God.”[64] The Governing Body as an apostolic institution possesses absolute authority within the movement. There is no professional clergy, although special pioneers, missionaries and circuit and district overseers may receive minimal remuneration. Local congregations are under the care of elders, but those men are chosen under the Governing Body’s supervision and theoretically wield no autonomous power. Their major role consists of instructing local publishers, cultivating unquestioned loyalty to the Governing Body. There appears to be “a relatively weak affective attachment” of Witnesses to their local congregations.[65] Communication in the Society is strictly vertical and one-way: the Governing Body communicates its will and individual members accept and implement it.

If the Bible is the central authoritative source for Witness life, its interpretation lies firmly in the hands of the Governing Body, God’s apostolic institution and interpretive agency on earth. For Witnesses the Bible is an organizational book whose meaning is not for private interpretation. The Governing Body alone possesses the right to discern Jehovah’s will as revealed in His scriptures; individual witnesses are not encouraged to engage in independent and creative biblical hermeneutics.[66] The Governing Body claims exclusive rights to all exegetical creativity by which they discern Jehovah’s “new light” on his scriptures. Consequently, the responsibility of individual members is to accept, digest and proclaim that authoritative interpretation that flows down from the apostolic Watchtower. Those representatives of the “faithful and discreet slave” class present Jehovah’s organization with a totalizing exegetical vision that provides clear and unambiguous guidelines for all relevant moral and religious issues. There is no moral uncertainty or ambiguity in Jehovah’s kingdom; there remains only Truth and certainty. Witness lives are thereby constituted by submission and obedience to the Truth revealed to them in scripture through the apostolic aegis of the Governing Body. All personal and subjective dimensions are removed from Witness discourse; only the pure truthful content remains. Penton remarks that “the Witness community [is made] to feel that it must be loyal to an organization, the Lord’s organization, rather than to any man.”[67] Witnesses are thereby animated by an “organizational mindedness” that systematically devalues the role of individuals and individual prominence.[68]

Race and Ethnicity at the Kingdom Hall  

One of the most intriguing dimensions of Witness life is its globally inter-ethnic and inter-cultural character. Penton acknowledges that the Watchtower Society “has emphasized the value of ethnic and racial tolerance among its adherents to a greater degree than is the case with most other religious organizations.”[69] Witnesses declare that humans of all races and cultures are to be united in faith. Ethnic particularities, political allegiances (Witnesses do no vote, salute the flag or serve in the military) and socioeconomic distinctions are repudiated and dissolved in Jehovah’s theocratic kingdom. Witnesses effectively deny all “worldly” distinctions based on race, skin color, ethnicity, language, nationality and class. They appear remarkably successful in their global attempts to establish and sustain racially/ethnically integrated communities. Even in the traditionally segregated American religious South, Witness communities are consistently inter-racial.[70] Lee R. Cooper’s ethnographic study of a Witness community in Philadelphia convinced him that the Watchtower Society provided “a functionally adaptive alternative life style for certain segments of [American Blacks] living in the urban ghettos of the U.S.”[71] In Africa, the Witnesses “are perhaps more successful than any other group in the speed with which they eliminate tribal discrimination among their own recruits.”[72] Individual witnesses manifest little concern with ethnic or racial issues, and display minimal interest in pursuing such apparently moot realities in conversation. The Watchtower takes special pride in its multi-ethnic fellowship. One of its recent publications proclaims that “Christian brotherhood unmarred by racial distinctions is a reality among Jehovah’s Witnesses in the 20th century.”[73]

The Watchtower’s model for an inter-cultural, inter-racial society is the theocracy. Currently Jehovah’s theocratic kingdom appears on earth in the global network of congregations consisting of individuals representing almost every race and culture. A Watchtower publication declares that:

Right now people of all races and nationalities who will make up part of the “new earth” are being gathered into the Christian congregation. The unity and peace that exists among them is only a small preview of what will make living on the paradise earth after Armageddon such a pleasure. Truly, God’s kingdom will bring to pass what no human government could even hope to do.[74]

The theocratic model serves as a master narrative that subsumes all regional and ethnic identities. The theocratic vision of the Watchtower–this eschatological metanarrative to be finally and eternally realized at the conclusion of the battle of Armageddon–has no room for local stories and ethnic particularities. The theocratic discursive strategy reveals an aggressive and omnivorous ideology that obliterates and consumes all other narratives. Its intent is not merely to displace or de-center existing narratives and identities, but to subvert and re-place them. The theocratic narrative embodies a monological language game that excludes all others and denies them legitimacy. This monocultural vision of utopian social existence embodies a critique of the dominant social order–the corrupt world system–pervaded by racial/ethnic prejudice and inequality. The theocratic language facilitates the generation of consensus required by this global yet astonishingly homogeneous organization. Thus in a special article on the progress of the theocratic Kingdom in Africa, the 1992 Yearbook proclaims that “Over a hundred languages are spoken in Ethiopia alone, including a ‘pure language’ that will unite not only Eastern Africa but the whole world.”[75] Indeed, Witnesses worldwide routinely gather together in their circuit and district conventions to “rejoice in the sameness” that transcends their national, ethnic and cultural differences.[76]

In practice the theocracy actually represents a hierarchical cosmos, with Jehovah as its chairman and Jesus as executive vice- president.[77] On earth, the Governing Body consists of those Anointed ones (the 144,000, the “faithful and discreet slave” class, the “little flock”) who appear as Jehovah’s apostolic representatives to that “great multitude.” That multitude consists of all those who will survive the ravages of Armageddon and participate in the Edenic paradise on the renovated earth.[78]

Epilogue 

From an unsympathetic perspective the Watchtower apparently demands nothing less than the sacrifice of autonomy, responsibility, freedom and self. But other voices within the Watchtower relate a form of life constituted by absolute obedience and unquestioned submission to the Truth. Individuals frequently relate their interminable exasperation with traditional religious institutions that provided no cogent solutions to their pressing questions. But if one has any questions, Witnesses stand ready with Bible in hand to provide theocratic answers. By resignation to the Truth and surrender to the wise and all-knowing counsel of Jehovah, many have discovered therein a kind of freedom and dignity unattainable elsewhere. Jehovah’s organization makes no concessions to the racial and social inequalities outside its righteous boundaries. Witnesses declare that “soon God’s kingdom will destroy the present ungodly system of things,” and persons “out of all nations and tribes and peoples and tongues” (Rev. 7:9) will assemble in the great millennial paradise on the renovated earth.

Drawn together by worship of the true God, by faith in Jesus Christ, and by love for one another, they will truly make up a united human family.[79]

Within its firm but loving embrace, the Watchtower harbors servants of Jehovah who congregate at the same time, speak the same theocratic language, hear the same Truth, and proclaim the same redemptive message to any and all who would listen and obey. The theocratic discursive strategy manifests a robust posture of rhetorical defiance and linguistic iconoclasm. It reflects a conviction that the management and manipulation of language is serious business for these devout messengers of Jehovah’s apocalyptic kingdom. Truly Jehovah’s Witnesses embody in a particularly cogent way Wittgenstein’s observations that:

A whole mythology is deposited in our language.
           * * * * * * * *
We must plough over the whole of language.[80]

Compressed in the jargonized lexicons and discursive strategies of Jehovah’s Witnesses is a militant ideology powerful enough to transcend national boundaries, subvert political allegiances and dismantle ethnic identities, reconstituting them in Jehovah’s theocratic image.

[1] The Witnesses exclusively used a lower-case “w” to spell “Jehovah’s witnesses” until 1976. On the significance of the change, see Heather and Gary Botting, The Orwellian World of Jehovah’s Witnesses (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984), pp. 84-5.

[2] The term “theocratic” is used “to describe the organizational structure of the Witnesses,” but it is also used “to modify any ‘godly’ or ‘faithful’ or ‘good’ behavior on the part of the Witnesses–behavior that sets them apart as Witnesses.” Botting, Orwellian World, p. 84.

[3] In this essay I use the terms “Watchtower Society” and “Jehovah’s Witnesses” synonymously. The movement officially adopted the name “Jehovah’s Witnesses” in 1931. Prior to that they were known as Bible Students, International Bible Students, Millennial Dawnists, and Russellites. See Jehovah’s Witnesses: Unitedly Doing God’s Will Worldwide (Brooklyn: Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York, Inc., 1986), pp. 10-11; M. James Penton, Apocalypse Delayed: The Story of the Jehovah’s Witnesses (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), p. 62.

[4] See Michel Foucault, “The Discourse on Language,” The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), pp. 225-6.

[5] Botting, Orwellian World, p. 84. See their “Glossary of Terms Used by Jehovah’s Witnesses” contained on pp. 187-94.

[6] Charles H. Lippy’s essay on “Millennialism and Adventism,” in Encyclopedia of the American Religious Experience: Studies of Traditions and Movements, eds. Charles H. Lippy and Peter W. Williams (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1985), II: 831-44, helpfully locates the Watchtower Movement within the larger context of American adventism.

[7] The most important historical work on Jehovah’s Witnesses is Penton’s Apocalypse Delayed. For recent important works on the Witnesses, see Botting, The Orwellian World (1984) [based in part on Heather Botting's "The Power and the Glory: The Symbolic Vision and Social Dynamic of Jehovah's Witnesses" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Alberta, 1982.)]; James A. Beckford, The Trumpet of Prophecy: A Sociological Study of Jehovah’s Witnesses (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1975); Alan Rogerson, Millions Now Living Will Never Die: A Study of the Jehovah’s Witnesses (London: Constable & Co., Ltd., 1969); Timothy White, A People for His Name: A History of Jehovah’s Witnesses and an Evaluation (New York: Vantage Press, 1967); Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, Visions of Glory: A History and a Memory of Jehovah’s Witnesses (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978). See also the dissertations by Joseph F. Zygmunt, “Jehovah’s Witnesses. A Study of Symbolic and Structural Elements in the Development and Institutionalization of a Sectarian Movement” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1968); Alberta Jeanne Brose, “Jehovah’s Witnesses: Recruitment and Enculturation in a Millennial Sect” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Riverside, 1982); Melvin Dotson Curry, “Jehovah’s Witnesses: The Effects of Millenarianism on the Maintenance of a Religious Sect” (Ph.D. dissertation, Florida State University, 1980). Institutionally controlled or approved histories include: Marley Cole, Jehovah’s Witnesses: The New World Society (New York: Vintage Press, 1955); idem., Triumphant Kingdom (New York: Criterion Books, 1957); [WBTS], Jehovah’s Witnesses in the Divine Purpose (Brooklyn, NY: WBTS of New York, Inc., 1959); [WBTS], Jehovah’s Witnesses: Unitedly Doing God’s Will Worldwide (1986). For a comprehensive bibliography, see Jerry Bergman, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Kindred Groups: A Historical Compendium and Bibliography (New York: Garland Press, 1984).

[8] Botting, Orwellian World, p. 52. Beckford also argues that the invocation of these impressive growth statistics has helped “to retain the commitment of Jehovah’s Witnesses for several generations,” and also serves “to obviate by anticipation the dangers of [prophetic] disruption in the future.” See Beckford, Trumpet of Prophecy, p. 221.

[9] “Hailing God’s New World of Freedom,” [italics added] The Watchtower (April 1, 1992), p. 12.

[10] [WBTS], 1992 Yearbook of Jehovah’s Witnesses (Brooklyn, NY: WBTS of New York, Inc., 1992), pp. 33-41. The annual service report is also included in the January 1 issue of The Watchtower magazine. See The Watchtower, January 1, 1992, pp. 10-13. For statistical information, see also Constant H. Jacquet, Jr. and Alice M. Jones, eds., Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches, 1991 (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1991), pp. 78-9, 262.

[11] On the other hand, there is no way to confirm Watchtower statistics since outsiders (and probably most Witnesses) do not have access to Watchtower records.

[12] Witnesses are aware that the original pronunciation of the tetragrammaton was not “Jehovah.” Watchtower literature explains that while the original pronunciation is unknown, “Jehovah” should be retained since it is commonly used and readily recognized. See WBTS, Reasoning from the Scriptures (WBTS of Pennsylvania, Inc., 1985, 1989), pp. 195-6.

[13] The “marks of the true church” is a standard topos in Watchtower literature. See, e.g., [WBTS], The Truth That Leads to Eternal Life (Brooklyn, NY: WBTS, 1968), pp. 122-30 (a chapter entitled “How to Identify the True Church”); Reasoning from the Scriptures, pp. 328-30 (in answer to the question, “How can a person know which religion is right?”); [WBTS], Mankind’s Search for God (Brooklyn, NY: WBTS, 1990), p. 377; [WBTS], You Can Live Forever on Paradise on Earth (Brooklyn, NY: WBTS, 1982, 1990), pp. 184-90.

[14] You Can Live Forever, p. 185.

[15] See New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures (Brooklyn, NY: Watchtower Bible & Tract Society, 1984 ed. [orig. 1961]), p. 1640-1. The translators acknowledge that “we have been most cautious about rendering the divine name in the Christian Greek Scriptures . . .,” yet the name “Jehovah” appears 237 times in their translation of the Greek Bible. One recent Witness publication even includes a photograph of a papyrus fragment of the Septuagint (a Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible) in which the tetragrammaton appears for the name of God. Mankind’s Search for God, p. 259. Witnesses reason that Jesus and the early Christian community knew and used God’s “unique name” (frequently represented in English as YHWH). “In spite of Jewish tradition at that time, Jesus would surely have used the name. He did not allow the traditions of men to overrule the law of God.” See Mankind’s Search for God, p. 258-9. That Watchtower publication explicitly cites for support George Howard’s “The Tetragrammaton and the New Testament,” Journal of Biblical Literature 96 (1977), pp. 63-8. For critical reviews of the translation, see Bergman, Jehovah’s Witnesses (1984), pp. 168-70, and Jack P. Lewis, The English Bible/From KJV to NIV (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1981), pp. 397-8 (bibliography), pp. 229-35 (analysis).

[16] See You Can Live Forever, p. 96.

[17] Scott L. Montgomery, “The Cult of Jargon: Reflections on Language in Science,” Science as Culture 6 (1989), see esp. pp. 46-55.

[18] See Tzvetan Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle, trans. Wlad Godzich, Theory and History of Literature, 13 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).

[19] See Nietzsche’s comments in Genealogy of Morals, trans. F. Golfing (Doubelday, 1956), p. 253 [III.xii].

[20] You Can Live Forever, p. 163.

[21] Witnesses in principle reject all attempts at social reform of the present evil world order. But their efforts to secure legal protection for the free exercise of their religion have resulted in significant reforms in civil liberties. Similarly, their strong stand against blood transfusions in any form has provoked invaluable medical research now relevant in the prevention and treatment of AIDS. See William Kaplan, State and Salvation: The Jehovah’s Witnesses and Their Fight for Civil Rights (Toronto : University of Toronto Press, 1989); David R. Manwaring, Render Unto Caesar: The Flag Salute Controversy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962); M. James. Penton, Jehovah’s Witnesses in Canada: Champions of Freedom of Speech and Worship (Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1976); Jerry Bergman, “Jehovah’s Witnesses and Blood Transfusions,” in Jehovah’s Witnesses II: Controversial and Polemical Pamphlets, ed. Jerry Bergman, Sources for the Study of Nonconventional Religious Groups in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century America (New York: Garland Press, 1990), pp. 453-631.

[22] The Truth That Leads to Eternal Life, p. 185.

[23] You Can Live Forever, p. 212.

[24] Timothy P. Weber declared that “No group in modern times has been more successful at surviving their prophetic disconfirmations than have the Jehovah’s Witnesses.” Review of M. James Penton’s Apocalypse Delayed (1985), The American Historical Review 91 (1986), p. 1279. Because of their tenacious millenarianism and resistance to disconfirmation, the Witnesses have drawn the attention of scholars interested in the long-term effects of apocalyptic expectation and its inevitable delays. The foundational work here is Leon Festinger et al., When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group that Predicted the Destruction of the World (New York: Harper & Row, Pub., 1956) which explores the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance and failed millenarian expectation. See also Joseph F. Zygmunt “Prophetic Failure and Chiliastic Identity: The Case of the Jehovah’s Witnesses” American Journal of Sociology 75 (1970), pp. 926-48; Bryan R. Wilson, “When Prophecy Failed,” New Society (January 26, 1978), pp. 183-4. Melvin Curry’s dissertation argues that the Witnesses’ “peculiar type of millenarian theology . . . has been a primary factor in maintaining their sectarian identity.” Curry, “Jehovah’s Witnesses: The Effects of Millenarianism on the Maintenance of a Religious Sect” (1980), p. 1. Penton (Apocalypse Delayed, p. 9) argues, in fact, that while the Witnesses’ “millenarianism has long been the basis of their growth and success, it is also their greatest weakness.”

[25] Penton, Apocalypse Delayed, p. 7.

[26] You Can Live Forever, p. 141.

[27] Reasoning from the Scriptures [italics added], p. 97.

[28] See Jean Comaroff’s discussion of the African Zionist churches and their existence in “permanent liminality.” Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: The Culture and History of a South African People (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1985), p. 231. See also Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1969), pp. 145-7.

[29] Witnesses believe that only the anointed 144,000 (the “little flock”) will actually reside in heaven, where they will exist as co-rulers with Jesus over his Millennial Kingdom. This belief is based on Luke 12:32 (the “little flock”); Rev. 7:4, 14:1,3 (the 144,000). In 1935 President Rutherford disclosed that the “great multitude” (Rev. 7:9) and the “sheep” class (Matt. 25) were in fact one class who would receive eternal life on the renovated earth. For the historical development of this idea, see Penton, Apocalypse Delayed, p. 72.

[30] The Truth That Leads to Eternal Life, pp. 134-5. [31] See The Truth That Leads to Eternal Life, pp. 134-5. [32] See Botting, Orwellian World, p. 26. They remark that “Most Witnesses have no knowledge of the world view of Freud; however, when it comes to concrete symbols, they are very Freudian in outlook, making a major issue of the decadent sexual symbology of Christendom.”

[33] Mankind’s Search for God, p. 369-70.

[34] The Truth That Leads to Eternal Life, p. 138.

[35] Roman Catholicism historically has functioned as the primary Other for the Watchtower. Ironically, ex-Catholics now make up the largest proportion of Jehovah’s Witnesses. Penton, Apocalypse Delayed, p. 254.

[36] You Can Live Forever, p. 255 [italics added].

[37] See “Jehovah’s Witnesses in the U.S.A., 1942-1976″ Social Compass 24 (1977), p. 54. Zygmunt argues that this trend is discernible in the group’s translation of the Bible (the New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures, originally published in 1961), and in their opposition to blood transfusions (which the movement embraced in 1945).

[38] For example, The Watchtower magazine claims an average printing 15,570,00 (sic!) for each issue. It is translated into 111 languages, and 66 of those appear simultaneously with the English edition. “In other words, 95 percent of Jehovah’s Witnesses receive the same spiritual food at the same time” [italics added]. Awake! claims an average printing of 13,110,000 issues in 66 languages; 30 appear simultaneously with the English edition. See the 1992 Yearbook of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, p. 18. A major portion of a recently produced videotape focuses on the technological aspects of Brooklyn Bethel’s publishing enterprise. See [WBTS], “Jehovah’s Witnesses: The Organization Behind the Name” (Brooklyn, N.Y.: WBTS of Pennsylvania, 1990). [39] Beckford, Trumpet of Prophecy, p. 89.

[40] So Beckford speaks of the dangers of “ideological contamination.” Beckford argues that the practice of witnessing door-to-door in pairs, and the pressing need to fulfill service- work quotas or objectives “help minimize the risks of ideological contamination from prospective converts.” Trumpet of Prophecy, p. 89. Beckford does not contemplate the rhetorical potency of the theocratic language as a protective mechanism.

[41] The presence of dissent within the apparently monolithic unanimity of the Watchtower Society has been amply documented by Penton, Apocalypse Delayed, pp. 117-23. Penton himself was involved in a schism that occurred in Lethbridge, Alberta. For information on his role in the controversy and his subsequent excommunication, see Apocalypse Delayed, pp. 122-3; Bart Testa, “Bearing Witness to a Mass Exodus,” Maclean’s (March 16, 1981), pp. 47-9; and James A. Beverley, Crisis of Allegiance (Burlington, Ontario: Welch Pub. Co., Inc., 1986). For bibliographic data (with some narrative introduction) on dissenting groups, see Bergman, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Dissenting Groups, pp. 242-352.

[42] So Harrison describes the Society as “an all- consuming religion.” Visions of Glory, p. 39.

[43] Attributed to ex-Governing Body member Raymond V. Franz. See Richard N. Ostling, “Witness Under Prosecution,” Time (February 22, 1982), p. 66.

[44] For Witness attitudes toward education, see Penton, Apocalypse Delayed, pp. 270-74. See also Barbara Harrison’s comments in Visions of Glory, pp. 92-6.

[45] [WBTS], School and Jehovah’s Witnesses (Brooklyn, NY: WBTS of New York, Inc., 1983), p. 5.

[46] Knorr was also responsible for the establishment of the Watchtower Bible School of Gilead (1943), a missionary training school. For the Society’s own account of the school’s founding and purpose, see Jehovah’s Witnesses in the Divine Purpose, pp. 202-5.

[47] Lee R. Cooper,”‘Publish’ or Perish: Negro Jehovah’s Witness Adaptation to the Ghetto,” in Religious Movements in Contemporary America, I. I. Zaretsky and M. P. Leone, eds. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974), p. 712. [48] Raymond V. Franz relates his involvement in the Governing Body’s decision to forbid all forms of non-genital copulation in marriage. See his Crisis of Conscience: The Struggle between Loyalty to God and Loyalty to One’s Religion (Atlanta: Commentary Press, 1983), pp. 42-50. While the policy was reversed in 1978, for five years it was used to disfellowship sexually disobedient members. On dress and grooming, see “Why Do I Have to Be Different?,” Awake! (June 8, 1992), pp. 16-8. [49] Awake!, Feb. 22, 1991, p. 4 [italics added]. [50] See The Truth That Leads to Eternal Life, p. 22. Beckford’s article on “Accounting for Conversion,” British Journal of Sociology 29 (1978), pp. 249-62, argues that Witness conversion experiences usually relate a gradual process of transformation in which the subject gradually learns and obeys “the Truth.” Sudden and emotional conversions are necessarily suspect. For Witnesses, becoming a part of Jehovah’s organization is a matter in which the cognitive facilities (”the head”) are initially convinced by Jehovah’s pure Truth, after which the emotions or passions (”the heart”) are gradually transformed.

[51] Reasoning from the Scriptures, p. 199.

[52] Reasoning from the Scriptures, p. 203. Restorationist themes frequently appear in Watchtower literature. See, e.g., Jehovah’s Witnesses: Unitedly Doing God’s Will Worldwide (1986), p. 5: ” . . .how can you identify the true Christian congregation? By examining the Scriptures about the first-century Christian congregation and then by seeing who today follow the same pattern.” See also pp. 7, 12-3, 26.

[53] Harrison declares that this is “a religion that fears magic, mystery, poetry–a religion that treats ecstasy as an aberration and flees from passion with a passion that is thoroughly small and dry.” Visions of Glory, p. 213.

[54] Trumpet of Prophecy, p. 202.

[55] See ex-Witness Harrison’s unflattering description of the “lobotomized good behavior” of Witness children. Visions of Glory, p. 90; and Botting’s assertion that such scripted action “obviates the necessity of thinking.” Orwellian World, p. 88.

[56] The rational self-sufficiency of the Society is a major motif in the Watchtower-produced videotape, “Jehovah’s Witnesses: The Organization Behind the Name” (1990). Witnesses are thoroughly modern, though they certainly reject the label or the ideology of modernism. See Bruce B. Lawrence, Defenders of God: The Fundamentalist Revolt Against the Modern Age (San Francisco: Harper & Row, Pub., 1990), pp. 1-3. Penton, however, argues that “this vaunted efficiency . . . is more apparent than real.” Apocalypse Delayed, p. 251. Quite probably most of their literature goes unread, and it is at least questionable whether their door-to-door proselyting efforts are really as effective as members (and outsiders) frequently believe. See Penton, Apocalypse Delayed, p. 231.

[57] See Reasoning from the Scriptures, pp. 9-24.

[58] E.g., at a recent service meeting, an elder announced that the New World Translation is now available in computerized form. The videotape, “Jehovah’s Witnesses: The Organization Behind the Name” (1990), frequently informs the viewer that the Society was integrally involved in the development of much of the advanced electronic and computer technology utilized in their enormous publishing enterprise.

[59] See Penton, Apocalypse Delayed, p. 78.

[60] Although Raymond Franz’s autobiography discloses the names of those Witness scholars actually involved in the translation process. See Crisis of Conscience, pp. 49-50. [61] Beckford, Trumpet of Prophecy, p. 81.

[62] Beckford, Trumpet of Prophecy, p. 96.

[63] See Harrison, Visions of Glory, p. 33.

[64] Harrison, Visions of Glory, p. 253.

[65] James A. Beckford, “Organization, Ideology and Recruitment: The Structure of the Watch Tower Movement,” Sociological Review 23 (1975), p. 897.

[66] See Botting, Orwellian World, pp. 65-6. So Botting argues that the decision to publish all Watchtower literature anonymously was “a reflection of Knorr’s insistence that all inspiration comes directly from God through the organization, led by the faceless ‘Writing Committee’ of the Governing Body.” Orwellian World, p. 41.

[67] Apocalypse Delayed, p. 78.

[68] Penton observes that the Society takes a generally dim view of individual Witnesses who take it upon themselves to publish anything related to their religion. He argues that it is now virtually impossible to publish anything as a Jehovah’s Witness scholar without risking the disciplinary wrath of the Society. See Penton, Apocalypse Delayed, pp. 105-6.

[69] Penton, Apocalypse Delayed, p. 286.

[70] Harrison’s claim that in fact the Witnesses “were among the last of all religious groups to be integrated in the South” is problematic, since most southern churches remain segregated. Given their resistance to any direct form of social reform, it is no surprise that the Witnesses did not participate in civil rights reform in the American South (or anywhere for that matter). See Harrison, Visions of Glory, p. 261; also pp. 159 (anti-Semitism), 254-5. Other attempts to document racism within the Watchtower movement include Werner Cohn, “They Hope for Armageddon.” [Review of Marley Cole, Jehovah's Witnesses: The New World Society] The New Leader, October 17, 1955, pp. 24-6; and Herbert Hewitt Stroup, The Jehovah’s Witnesses (New York: Russell & Russell, 1945), p. 29.

[71] Cooper, “‘Publish’ or Perish: Negro Jehovah’s Witness Adaptation to the Ghetto,” in Religious Movements in Contemporary America, p. 705. Cooper argues that Witnesses present credible responses and alternatives to commonplace criticisms of religion expressed by ghetto residents (including greed, hypocrisy, emotionalism, and the existence of personality cults that frequently develop around ministers).

[72] Bryan R. Wilson, “Jehovah’s Witnesses in Africa,” New Society (12 July 1973), p. 75.

[73] Reasoning from the Scriptures, p. 305. On the other hand, leadership of the movement–especially at the highest levels–is still primarily white, male and American.

[74] You Can Live Forever, p. 160.

[75] 1992 Yearbook, p. 68.

[76] Harrison, Visions of Glory, p. 268.

[77] See the “organizational charts” of the theocratic Kingdom in Penton, Apocalypse Delayed, pp. 212-3. Penton (p. 211) notices that the term “hierarchy” has pejorative overtones for Witnesses, as it is traditionally associated with the Roman Catholic Church. Penton’s work displays a polemical strategy apparent in his recurrent attempts to compare the society in different ways to Roman Catholicism (see pp. 13, 35, 40, 69, 160, 162, 164, 211-124!, 220-1, 234).

[78] Watchtower iconography consistently represents that “great multitude” as an ideal multi-racial or multi-ethnic community. For examples, see Botting, Orwellian World, pp. 101- 3.

[79] Reasoning From the Scriptures, 305.

[80] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough, trans. A. C. Miles, ed. Rush Rhees (Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1979).

Author: Joel Elliott
Email: elliott@email.unc.edu
World-Wide Web: http://www.unc.edu/~elliott
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© 1993

Last updated: May 12, 2000

© 2001 Posted with permission of Joel Elliott
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