I. Personal Beginnings: 1944

JEH0VAH'S WITNESSES are believers in a fundamentalist, apocalyptic, prophetic religion which has been proclaiming, since the 1930s, that "Millions Now Living Will Never Die." The world will end, they say, with the destruction of the wicked at Armageddon, in our lifetime. Only the chosen will survive. They intensify their preaching efforts in order to increase the number of survivors (there are now more than two million Jehovah's Witnesses in 210 countries). They are also increasing their property holdings. [Yearbook, 1977,* p. 30]

The Witnesses are a widely varied group of individuals who subject themselves to total conformity in practice, outlook, and belief. To the extent to which they are knovvn-their notoriety follows from their refusal to receive blood transfusions, salute the flag, or serve in the army of any country, as well as from their aggressive proselytizing--they are perceived as rather drab, somewhat eccentric people and dismissed as an irrelevant joke. Little is known of their motives, their anguish, their glorious surges of communal happiness, and little thought is given to the comment their existence makes on the larger society.

In February, 1944, the Supreme Court of the United States affirmed the conviction of Mrs. Sarah Prince of Brockton, Massachusetts, who had been fined for allowing her 9-year-old niece Betty Simmons to distribute the literature of Jehovah's Witnesses on the streets. The Court, by a 5-4 decision, upheld the Massachusetts Child Labor Law under which no girl under18 (and no boy under 12) could sell magazines or newspapers in a public place; the law could be validly enforced, the Court ruled, against those who allow young children under their care to sell religious literature on the streets.

Hayden C. Covington, legal counsel for the Witnesses, who had, since1939, come before the Court with sixteen major constitutional issues involving religious liberty, freedom of speech, and freedom of the press, contended that the Massachusetts law was in violation of both the constitutional guarantee of religious freedom and the basic rights of parenthood.

On the basis of past decisions, Covington might reasonably have expected to win his case. The Witnesses’ bitterly controversial cases had produced twenty-seven Court opinions [See American Political Science Review, 1944, 1945], almost all of them ultimately favorable to the Witnesses and many of them strengthening the First and Fourteenth Amendments (and, therefore, the cause of civil liberties in the United States).

In the Prince case, however, Covington's arguments did not prevail. Justice Wiley Rutledge voiced the majority opinion that "neither rights of religion nor rights of parenthood are beyond limitation." "Parents may be free to become martyrs themselves," he said, "but it does not follow that they are free ... to make martyrs of their children before they have reached the age ... when they can make that choice for themselves."

Ironically, the Witnesses, bitter foes of the Catholic Church-which they refer to now, as they did then, as "the scarlet whore of Babylon"-found support from the only Catholic on the bench, Justice Frank Murphy. In a separate dissent, justice Murphy insisted that the sidewalk "as well as the cathedral or the evangelist's tent is a proper place, under the Constitution, to worship." [Prince v. Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 351 U.S. 158 (1944)]

In 1944, in a small town in the Southwest, a jury returned a verdict of not guilty in the trial of Mary Lou Smith, a 15-year-old girl who had pumped seventeen bullets into her father and brother, killing them both. She had had, defense counsel said, periodic vivid dreams since the onset of menstruation; she was adjudged temporarily not responsible for her acts because she had committed her murders while hallucinating.

These events are unrelated, except in my mind. I have never met Betty Simmons or Mary Lou Smith, nor do I know what has become of them. But I feel, somehow, as if we are siblings. They wander, like ghosts, in the baggage of my mind.

In 1944, when I, like Betty Simmons, was 9 years old, I became one of Jehovah's Witnesses. Whatever effects the Supreme Court's ruling may have had on children of Jehovah's Witnesses in Brockton, Massachusetts, it is certain that nobody thought to enforce the Court's ruling in Brooklyn, New York. After my baptism at a national convention of 25,000 Witnesses in Buffalo, New York, in the summer of 1944, I became an ardent proselytizer, distributing The Watchtower and Awake! magazines on street corners and from door to door, spending as much as 150 hours a month in the service of my newly found God-under the directives of the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, the legal and corporate arm of Jehovah's Witnesses. I

As I had been immersed in water to symbolize my "dedication to do God's will," I became, also, drenched in the dark blood-poetry of a religion whose adherents drew joy from the prospect of the imminent end of the world. I preached sweet doom; I believed that Armageddon would come in my lifetime, with a great shaking and rending and tearing of unbelieving flesh, with unsanctified babies swimming in blood, torrents of blood. I believed also that after the slaughter Jehovah had arranged for His enemies at Armageddon, this quintessentially masculine God-vengeful in battle and benevolent to survivors-would turn the earth into an Eden for true believers.

Coincidentally with my conversion, I got my first period. We used to sing this hymn: "Here is He who comes from Eden/ All His raiments stained with blood." My raiments were stained with blood too. But the blood of the Son of Man was purifying, redemptive, cleansing, sacrificial. Mine was proof of my having inherited the curse placed upon the seductress Eve. Mine was filthy. I examined my discharges with horror and fascination, as if the secret of life-or a harbinger of death-were to be found in that dull, mysterious effluence.

I was, in equal measure, guilt-ridden and-supposing myself to be in on secrets of the cosmos-self-righteous and smug. I grew up awaiting the final, orgasmic burst of violence after which all things would come together in a cosmic ecstasy of joy-this in a religion that was totally anti-erotic, that expressed disgust and contempt for the world.

My ignorance of sexual matters was so profound that it frequently led to comedies of error. Nothing I've ever read has inclined me to believe that Jehovah has a sense of humor; and I must say that I consider it a strike against Him that He wouldn't find this story funny:

One night shortly after my conversion, a visiting elder of the congregation, as he was avuncularly tucking me into bed, asked me if I was guilty of performing evil practices with my hands under the covers at night. I was puzzled. He was persistent. Finally, I thought I understood. And I burst into wild tears of self-recrimination. Under the covers at night, I bit my cuticles-a practice which, in fact, did afford me a kind of sensual pleasure. (I didn't learn about masturbation-which the Witnesses call "idolatry, "because "the masturbator's affection is diverted away from the Creator and is bestowed upon a coveted object" [TW, Sept. 15, 1973, p. 568], until much later.)

So, having confessed to a sin I hadn't known existed, I was advised of the necessity for keeping one's body pure from sin; cold baths were recommended. I couldn't see the connection, but one never questioned the imperatives of an elder, so I subjected my impure body to so many icy baths in midwinter that I began to look like a bleached prune. My mother thought I was demented. But I couldn't tell her that I'd been biting my cuticles, because to have incurred God's wrath-and to see the beady eye of the elder steadfastly upon me at every religious meeting I went to-was torment enough.

I used to preach, from door to door, that an increase in the number of rapes was one of the signs heralding the end of the world; but I didn't know what rape was. I knew that good Christians didn't commit "unnatural acts"; but I didn't know what "unnatural acts" were. (And I couldn't ask anybody, because all the Witnesses I knew began immediately to resemble Edith Sitwell eating an unripe persimmon when these abominations were spoken of.) Consequently, I spent a lot of time praying that I was not committing unnatural acts or rape.

Once, having heard that Hitler had a mistress, I asked my mother what a mistress was, (I had an inkling that it might be some kind of sinister super-housekeeper, like Judith Anderson in Rebecca.) I knew from my mother's silence, and from her cold, hard, and frightened face, that the question was somehow a grievous offense. I knew that I had done something wrong, but as usual, I didn't know what.

The fact was that I never knew how to buy God's-or my mother's-approval. There were sins I consciously and knowingly committed. That was bad, but it was bearable. I could always pray to God to forgive me, say, for reading the Bible for its "dirty parts"; for preferring the Song of Solomon to all the begats of Genesis. But the offenses that made me most

horribly guilty were those I had committed unconsciously; as an imperfect being descended from the wretched Eve, I was bound, so I had been taught, to offend Jehovah seventy-seven times a day, without my even knowing what I was doing wrong.

There was guilt, and there was glory: I walked a spiritual tightrope.

I feel now that for the twelve years I spent as one of Jehovah's Witnesses, three of them as a member of the Watchtower Society's headquarters staff, I was living out a vivid dream, hallucinating within the closed system of logic and private reality of a religion that relished disaster; rejoiced in the evil of human nature; lusted for certitude; ordered its members to disdain the painful present in exchange for the glorious future; corrupted ritual, ethics, and doctrine into ritualism, legalism, and dogmatism.

I was convinced that 1914 marked "the beginning of the times of the end." So firmly did Jehovah's Witnesses believe this to be true that there were those who, in 1944, refused to get their teeth filled, postponing all care of their bodies until God saw to their regeneration in His New World. (One zealous Witness I knew carried a supply of cloves to alleviate the pain of an aching molar which she did not wish to have treated by her dentist, since the time was so short till Jehovah would provide a new and perfect one. To this day, I associate the fragrance of cloves with the imminence of disaster.)

More than thirty years have passed, but though their hopes have not been fulfilled, the Witnesses have persevered with increased fervor and conviction. Their attitude toward the world remains the same: because all their longing is for the future, they are bound to hate the present-the material, the sexual, the fleshly. It’s impossible to savor and enjoy the present, or to bend ones energies to shape and mold the world into the form of goodness, if you are waiting only for it to be smashed by God. There is a kind of ruthless glee in the way Jehovah's Witnesses point to earthquakes, race riots, heroin addiction, the failure of the United Nations, divorce, famine (and liberalized abortion laws) as proof of the nearness of Armageddon.

The God I worshiped was not the God before whom one swoons in ecstasy, or with whom one contends: He was an awesome and awful judge, whom one approached through his "channel," the "divinely appointed Theocratic organization"-the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society. The Christ in whose name I prayed was not a social reformer, nor was he God incarnate, the embodiment of the world's most thrilling mystery, God-made-man. He was, rather, merely a legal instrument (albeit the most important one) in God's wrangles with the Devil. All the history of the world is seen, by Jehovah's Witnesses, as a contest between Jehovah and Satan:

God's primary purpose is the vindication of [His] supremacy. In carrying out this purpose, God sent Jesus to earth.... The beginning of the end for Satan came when Christ took power in heaven as King. This happened in 1914. Christ's first act was casting Satan out of heaven, and this was followed by great troubles on earth. This will be climaxed in God's battle, Armageddon: the complete destruction of the Devil and his system of things, his world.... Christ is now in his second presence. He will always remain invisible to humans, but his presence is proved by world events since 1914. [Who Are Jehovah's Witnesses? by Milton G. Henschel, Secretary to Nathan H. Knorr, third President of the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society]

Hayden Covington once described the beginnings of the world in the Garden of Eden: "It was a legal matter. The [forbidden] tree served as a legal sign, a guidepost between the God-King and man in their governmental dealings with each other. Adam and Eve failed to fulfill their contract." It is a contractual, not an ecstatic, religion.

I rehearse, I jealously preserve preconversion memories; they flash before my mind like magical slides. I treasure a series of intense, isolated moments. I hoard happy images that are pure, unsullied by values assigned to them by others. Afterward, there was nothing in the world to which I was permitted to give my own meaning; afterward, when the world

began to turn for me on the axis of God’s displeasure, I was obliged to regard all events as part of God’s plan for the universe as understood only by Jehovah’s Witnesses. Afterward, meanings were assigned to all things. The world was flattened out into right and wrong; all experience was sealed into compartments marked Good and Evil. Before my conversion, each beloved object and event had the luminosity and impurity of a thing complete in itself, a thing to which no significance is attributed other than that which it chooses to reveal.

Images of innocence: dark, cool, sweet rooms and a mulberry bush; fevers, delirium and clean sheets and chicken soup and mustard plasters; summer dusk and hide-and-seek; Hershey Kisses in cut-glass bowls; Brooklyn stoops; sunlight in a large kitchen, the Sunday gravy cooking; the Andrews Sisters singing "I'll Be with You in Apple Blossom Time."

Saturdays I played with the beautiful twins Barbara and Violet, who mirrored each other's loveliness, like Snow White and Rose Red. I thought it was impossible that they should ever be lonely or frightened. I wanted the half of me that had escaped to come back, so that I could be whole, like Barbara-and- Violet.

Sunday afternoons I went to my father's mother's house. I sat at Grandma's vanity table-pink-and-white, muslined and taffeted, skirted and ribboned-and played with antique Italian jewelry in velvet-lined leather boxes and held small bottles of perfume with mysterious amber residues. From the trellised grape arbor of the roof garden Grandpa had built I imagined I saw Coney Island and the parachute ride. One day, in an attic cupboard, I found a pearl-handled revolver; it belonged, they said, to the distant cousin who smelled of herbs and spices and soap-the old lady who cried when Little Augie Stefano was shot in a barber's chair.

The house of my mother's family, near the Brooklyn Navy Yard, always smelled of fermenting wine and of incense to the saints; its walls and tin ceilings were poverty-brown and -green; but there was always a store-bought chocolate cake waiting in the icebox for my visit. And my grandfather sang me the Italian Fascist Youth Anthem as he hoed his Victory Garden: Mussolini had made the trains run on time, but the good soil of Brooklyn yielded better tomatoes than the harsh soil of Calabria.

These are the fragments I jealously preserve like the creche from Italy (sweet Mary, humble Joseph, and tiny Jesus-always perfect and new) that adorned each Christmas morning.

After my conversion, I began immediately to have a dream, which recurred until I released myself from bondage to that religion twelve years later, when I was 21. In the dream, I am standing in my grandmother's walled garden. At the far corner of the garden, where the climbing red roses shine like bright blood against the whitewashed wall, stands a creature icy, resplendent, of indeterminate sex. The creature calls to me. In my dream its voice is tactile; I feel it flow through my veins like molten silver. I am rendered bloodless, will-less; the creature extends its arms in a gesture that is at once magisterial and maternal, entreating and commanding. I walk toward its embrace, fearful but glad, unable not to abandon myself to a splendid doom. The creature seizes me in its arms and I am hurled out of the garden, a ravaged Humpty-Dumpty flying through dark and hostile space, alone.

I understand that dream to have been telling me my truest feelings, which my conscious, waking mind censored for long hard years: I understand it to be my soul's perception that my religion had isolated and alienated me from the world, which it perceived as evil and menacing, and which I regarded, at the bedrock level of my being, as imperfect but not un-good; my religion savaged those to whom it offered salvation. For twelve years I lived in fear.

In 1944, the world was at war. Patton had landed with the Fifth Army at Salerno. The covers of news magazines were decorated with Bombs for Hitler. Places named Mindanao and Madang briefly stained the American consciousness. A novel called Two Jills in a Jeep appeared on the best-seller lists. Gandhi was in jail. The West Coast having been designated by Executive Order 9066 as a military area, all persons of Japanese ancestry, aliens and citizens, had been evacuated and were confined to camps. The War Production Board had promised civilians that more hairpins would soon be available, but announced regretfully that the shortage of "mechanical refrigerators" was likely to continue. Six million Jews were dead or dying.

Of all these events I had an almost perfect innocence. I perceived the war in terms of daily realities: sand in a regulation red bucket outside the vestibule door; dark-green air-raid curtains; rubber bands and tinfoil balls and old newspapers competitively offered to my fourth-grade teacher for the war effort. Uncle Tony was Somewhere-in-Burma and would send me the ear of a Jap. Dick Tracy and Uncle Don told us how to recognize Japanese secret agents; but Hirohito was less real than The Shadow (who knew), the threat of enemy missiles less to be feared than the creaking door of the Inner Sanctum, and the conflict between the Allies and the Axis of less moment than the continuing debate between me and my friend Lorraine over whether real beauties had auburn hair and blue eyes or blond hair and gray eyes.

When I became a Witness, I began to take the war seriously. The Witnesses certainly took it seriously. For one thing hundreds of Witnesses who regard national emblems as "graven images" were imprisoned for not saluting the American flag. Over 4,000 male Witnesses spent the duration in federal penitentiaries for refusal to join the armed services.

In the midst of wartime fervor, the Supreme Court, in an unpopular decision, found a state regulation requiring schoolchildren, under penalty of expulsion, to salute the flag invalid. [West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette, 1943] An earlier decision of the Court [Minersville District v. Gobitas,1940] which had resulted in the mass expulsion of Witness children from schools all over America, was thus reversed. The Court ruled that the Gobitas case had been "wrongly decided" and that to oblige children to salute the flag was an infringement of the Fourteenth Amendment. Also, in 1943, in the case of Taylor v. Mississippi, the Court unanimously set aside the conviction of three of Jehovah's Witnesses under a statute that made it a felony "to teach or preach orally any principles, or distribute any printed matter, calculated to incite violence, sabotage, or disloyalty to state or nation." The Court, refusing to uphold the claim that the Witnesses had created "an attitude of stubborn refusal to salute, honor, or respect the flag or government of the United States and the State of Mississippi," ruled that the Witnesses are not guilty of "evil or sinister purpose," that they were not shown "to have advocated or incited subversive action against the nation or state.

Unfortunately, the news that the Witnesses were not subversive had not filtered down to P.S. 86 in Bensonhurst. Having to remain seated, in my blue-and-white middy, during flag salute at school assembly was an act of defiance from which I inwardly recoiled. I wanted desperately to be liked-despite the fact that the Witnesses took pleasure in anything that could be construed as "persecution, " viewing any opposition as proof of their being God's chosen. Not saluting the flag, being the only child in my school who did not contribute to the Red Cross (the Witnesses consider preaching the gospel the only act of charity worth performing), and not bringing in tinfoil balls for the War Drive did not endear me to my classmates. I wanted to please everybody-my teachers, my spiritual overseers, my mother (above all my mother); and of course, I could not.

I had learned as a very small child that it was my primary duty in life to make nice." (Even now, when I hear Italian mothers exhorting their small girls to "make nice"-which means not so much to be good as to maintain the appearance of goodness-I cringe.) When I was little, I was required to respond to inquiries about my health in this manner: "Fine and dandy, just like sugar candy, thank you." And to curtsy. If that sounds as if it were from a Shirley Temple movie, it is. Brought up to be the Italian working-class Shirley Temple from Bensonhurst, I did not find it terribly difficult to learn to "make nice" for God and His earthly representatives. Behaving well was relatively easy and a passionate desire to win approval guaranteed that I conformed. But behaving well never made me feel good-in part, no doubt, because I couldn't have two sets of good behavior: one for the Witnesses, and one for my teachers at P.S. 86. I armed myself against the criticism of teachers and peers by telling myself that they were wicked and anyway scheduled for destruction. That didn't work either. I felt as if I were the bad person, unworthy to live forever, yet superior to those who wouldn't consent to listen to my preaching about living-forever-on-a-perfect-earth. Very messy, indeed.

I believed that I had The Truth. One of the things I had The Truth about was the war. In 1944, if one read, as I did, only the literature of Jehovah's Witnesses, one was given to believe that World War II was a plot hatched by Satan and the Vatican to stop the Witnesses from preaching the gospel. And the Witnesses' neutrality often led to their being arrested, and sometimes to their being victims of mob violence. The Witnesses' view of the global conflict was, in its own way, as narrow and parochial as my little-girl's view had been. The war was perceived in terms of their realities. (in 1945, a group of Witnesses of whom I was one was surrounded by a hostile and threatening group in Coney Island. Coney Island was then populated almost entirely by Jews, and we had come to preach the second coming of Christ on a High Holy Day, at a time when the papers were full of news of Nazi atrocities. We were delighted with our day's measure of "persecution"--never stopping to think about the people to whom we were preaching, and never supposing that there might be anything undesirable in our timing.)

All history, as seen by the Witnesses, revolves around them. They are guilty of what theologian Charles Davis calls "pride of history": they "reject temporality as man's mode of existence or else close that temporality against the transcendent; either history has no meaning at all or it means everything." [Davis, Temptations of Religion (New York: Harper and Row, 1974)]

The Witnesses were able, without irony, to remark in their 1945 Yearbook, "Today men and women are living in marvelous times . . . a most joyful time." Convinced of the meaning of the war (it was one of the signs given by Jesus as proof of the impending end of all evil and all suffering at Armageddon), they were able to disengage themselves from the bloody facts of the war. Between themselves and terror stood their interpretation of Bible prophecy-and numbers: numbers pulled from the Bible books of Matthew, Daniel, and Revelation and contorted into the shape of a chronology to prove that we were living in the last days; to prove that that all was part of a divine scheme.

On September 14, my birthday, all over the world-in Dresden, London, Hiroshima-Witnesses opened their day with this obligatory daily text from the 1945 Yearbook:

It is a marvelous day. Though it appears partly dark because of persecutions and oppression by enemies, yet Jehovah's clear light of truth is shining and his blessings upon his people help to brighten the situation and prevent it from being altogether dark. It is a day by itself, for it precedes the 1000-year reign of his beloved Son. It is a particular day that Jehovah God has reserved for himself for vindicating, his name.... At the evening of his day he will rise up and go forth by his King to give his own testimony to his supremacy and universal sovereignty. Then the day will be light. It will be lightened with the blaze of his glory by his complete victory over all Satan's organization.

In the 1945 Yearbook, an account of the Witnesses' worldwide preaching activities for that year, one looks in vain for a mention of the genocide against the Jews-although there is no shortage of detail of the "persecution" of the Witnesses. Witnesses are "haled before magistrates and judges"; but except for one brief mention of one "publisher [preacher] zealously proclaiming the message" in Palestine [p. 90], the reality of the Jews is disregarded. The Yearbook informs us that a ban imposed on the work of the Witnesses by the Government of South Africa was removed in 1943, and the Witnesses rejoice; but apartheid is not mentioned. Social and political realities are ignored except to demonstrate the fulfillment of Bible prophecy. There are complaints that the Witnesses' literature is banned in India under Defense of India rules; but Gandhi is not mentioned, nor is the struggle for Indian independence seen to be of any significance.

Even Hitler is dismissed, or seen through their rabid anti-Catholicism as a lackey of the Roman Catholic Church. Vatican City is blamed for the rise of fascism not only in Italy and Germany, but in Argentina as well. The bombing of Britain:

At times there have been attacks from the air that have made regular Kingdom service extremely difficult.... The Lord's protecting care has been marvelously demonstrated, for none [of the Witnesses] have lost their lives although in the midst of destruction on every hand.... On several occasions home Bible-study meetings have been in progress when bombs have struck either the home or nearby dwellings and both the brethren and the newly interested in whose homes the studies were being held have had marvelous escapes.

For those who did not respond to the "preaching of the good news of the Kingdom," there is no pity [pp. 110-11). And the Witnesses, who court persecution as proof that they are God's chosen, also expound upon their "marvelous escapes" as proof that they are God's chosen, and see no contradiction in offering up these mutually exclusive claims. "While the demons are carrying out the policy of the Devil through their agents on the earth . . -the horrors brought by the robot bomb, day and night, did not retard the witnesses, because the servants of the Lord in the British Isles were determined to reach as many people of goodwill as possible."

Bombs exist only as obstacles in the path of the monomaniacal preachers of "good news." "At this time it is very difficult to reach some nations, because of the raging war.... Every nation under the sun is affected by the war, but God's message concerning the end of this 'present evil world' and the establishment of the New World cannot wait until men get done fighting.... This sort of thing has been carried on for generations and ages." Human suffering is understood as "this sort of thing."

In the 1945 Yearbook (distributed only among Witnesses, and not among "outsiders" in an "alien world") they hold the mirror to themselves, fascinated by their objectified image. "Why is it," they ask, "that Jehovah's witnesses are so different from everybody else? It is not because of the way they walk or talk or how they dress or how they act in general. The only thing that makes them different is the way they worship."

And indeed, the way in which they worship is different. All of Jehovah's Witnesses are proselytizers. All preach from door to door . . . and fill out, for their local congregations, little yellow slips on which they write the number of hours spent each week at work in the fields of the Lord, and the number of books and booklets "placed" with householders for a "contribution", and the number of return visits. For the Witnesses there is salvation, and comfort, in numbers.

In 1944, according to the 1945 Yearbook [p. 56], there were fewer than 5,000 "publishers of the Kingdom news"-that is, Witnesses-in the United States. These publishers distributed 15,298,997 books and booklets, and 7,448,325 copies of the society's magazines-one of them to my father. They made 4,803,084 "back-calls" upon interested persons; one of these interested persons, or "people of goodwill," as they would have it, was my father. My father was a potential "sheep"; he had not, when a Witness first approached him, demonstrated a "goat-like disposition."

I should explain about "sheep" and "goats": Like any closed society, Witnesses have their own peculiar terminology. They talk to one another in a code that is impenetrable to outsiders. (The year of our conversion, my brother, who was then 4 years old, told a notoriously quick-tempered uncle that one of our cousins was not "In The Truth" but was "of goodwill." My uncle, unused to being diminished by 4-year-olds, slapped him in the face. My brother, reporting to my mother, said he would keep his "integrity" in spite of my uncle's hearty slap.) The Witnesses are able to identify outsiders, or defectors, or hangers-on, by the slightest misuse of code language. (Years later, when, after leaving the Witnesses, I had a love affair with a black jazz musician, I saw again how language could be used to distinguish those really "in the life" from those on the periphery. If, in 1956, for example, somebody had had the misfortune to say hep instead of hip in front of a jazz musician, he would instantly have been shunned as an alien.)

The Witnesses, who disdain metaphysical inquiry and allow for no doctrinal embroidery or fancywork among their members, play with words to keep the illusion that there is something new under their sun. Over the years, they have made small but, to them, important changes in terminology: What used to be called the New World was later described as the New System and is now uniformly referred to as the New Order. Such changes keep the Witnesses alert to potential apostates in their ranks and help preserve them as a cohesive, homogeneous whole. A Witness in Pago-Pago can immediately claim as brother a Witness from Kalamazoo. Any departure from the universal language they use to enforce their feeling of solidarity and brotherhood and their containment within a holy sphere, any verbal eccentricity, starts alarm bells ringing in the heads of Witnesses. (In their Publications, Jehovah's Witnesses use a lower-case w for witnesses: Jehovah's witnesses. To say I am one of Jehovah's witnesses, therefore, is to say not, I am a member of a strange cult with an esoteric name, but I am someone whom Jehovah has chosen to bear witness to His name.)

In their work of dividing the "sheep" from the "goats," Jehovah's Witnesses are often met with resistance they deem goat-like.

When I was 9, I rang doorbells all over Brooklyn. I was almost always alone. Occasionally I rang doorbells with companions of my own age; and we did draft little bits of business to punctuate our high seriousness. Sometimes, sitting on the stairs of apartment buildings with booklets like "Religion Reaps the Whirlwind!" heaped around us, the girls would "practice" kissing. What a gorgeous dodge! We couldn't kiss the boys-that would have been too frankly sexual, and scary. We kissed each other, clinically; it was science (we thought), not sex. One hot summer day, my friend Lena and I preached in an apartment house where each door was graced with a mezzuzah; afterward, not one door having been opened to us, we peed on the floor of the bright-red gilded elevator, giggling, not exchanging a word. We kept our hot secrets to ourselves. We had no confessors. If, after one of our escapades, we felt guilty, we dealt with our guilt alone-usually by the expedient of ignoring one another, or deliberately fracturing our friendships. We told the adults as little as possible.

Meanwhile, the adults were busy at their own games. Sometimes I was assigned to preach with Crazy Sally as my companion - Crazy Sally, who wore her craziness a la mode: peroxided hair glopped on top of her head, shedding hairpins as Ophelia strewed flowers; high heels and white anklets; twin shopping bags; rolling, hyperthyroidic eyes. The grown-ups thought The Truth would save Crazy Sally (35, a virgin whose father, a cop, had shot himself in her bed); they, like Sally, thought the psychiatrists in whose care she'd been were the "instruments of Satan." But they were (I felt) ashamed to be seen with her. So they "gave" her to a child. Me. Once my assigned door-to-door companion was a middle-aged Italian woman with vacant eyes and a wet smile from whom all the adults drew back in repugnance, or contempt. In a flat, weary monotone, she told me that she'd been in Kings County Hospital for electric-shock

treatment. "It was for my sins," she said. "I wanted to go to the convention at Niagara Falls and my husband said he'd give me forty dollars if I did to him what prostitutes did, and I did it, and the Lord's spirit left me, and I went crazy. Jehovah," she added, "doesn't let people go crazy unless they break his laws." And she trudged from door to door after me, to expiate her sins.

I rang doorbells in tenements that smelled of chicken fat; in walk-ups (In one dark hallway a black baby vomited on my shoulder as its mother, who could not have been more than five years older than I, vomited in the sink of her beer-bottle-littered kitchen-I remember marveling that her breasts were smaller than mine); in the vestibules of neat two-story brick and stucco houses with garish plaster madonnas in the bay windows (in one vestibule a man who smelled stale with age whispered an invitation for me suck his cock). I rang the bells of large, quiet houses in Flatbush with wraparound porches and Henry James lawns. Once, a handsome Jesuit- "a wicked representative of the Vatican" whom I was obliged to despise, and whose ascetic face and gentle manner I immediately loved-served me iced tea and as we swung together on a porch swing told me, "Saint Augustine says, 'Only love God, and do as you will.' "

Most of the doors were slammed in my face. So many rejections! I told myself they were rejecting Jehovah, not me. (But even now, I feel naked in front of a closed door.)

Well, no wonder doors were slammed in our faces. Who, opening the door at 9 o'clock on Sunday morning to the importunings of a stranger bearing ragged pronouncements of redemption/doom, is likely to be charming, or charitable, or kind?

The Witnesses, gaining access to an ear, or to a door cracked slightly open, assault the householder in a manner both gentle and persistent, with remarkable opening statements like these: "Good morning. I have come to bring you good news about a perfect new world without crime. Wouldn't you like to live in a world where you didn't have to lock your doors, and where all citizens lived under the law and order of a perfect ruler,"

"I am bringing all your neighbors a message of comfort and hope from the Bible. I see that you have a little child. Wouldn't you like him to grow up in a world where there was no sickness and no death?" (I said that once to a woman with a child in her arms. She said, "My baby is dying of leukemia.")

"Hello. Isn't the weather beautiful today? Wouldn't you like to live in a world where the weather was always perfect? I see that you've been reading a newspaper. Doesn't racial unrest disturb you? Wouldn't you like to live in a world where all races live in peace and harmony together?"

"I've come with a message from the Lord." (I said that once, and a disembodied voice from behind a peephole said, "Tell the Lord to send it Western Union.")

Given any kind of opening, the Witnesses then recite a tidy little sermon, flipping their New World Translation of the Bible to well-worn passages; offer their literature; and depart-to record the reactions of the householder on a House-to-House record slip. They mark I for Interested; NI for Not interested; GW for Goodwill; 0 for Opposed; NH for Not Home. These scrupulously kept records form the basis for return visits. (In 1956, the year I left the Witnesses-or, according to them, the year the Holy Spirit left me-it was estimated that each New York city block was "worked" by the Witnesses in this fashion three times a year.)

On December 24, 1943, my father bought, for 5 cents, a copy of The Watchtower magazine from a mild-eyed man standing on a street corner selling The Watchtower and Consolation magazines and calling out slogans to the oblivious Christmas Eve shoppers. Jehovah's Witnesses had inaugurated the "magazine street-corner work" in 1940. They had become familiar street corner fixtures, canvas "magazine bags" slung from their shoulders holding the few copies of their journals they might reasonably expect to sell. In the early '40s, when Witnesses were likely to call out inflammatory slogans like "Religion Is a Snare and a Racket," they were sometimes arrested and often verbally abused. Looking back at those days when a Witness stood a fair chance of being noticed, a recent Watchtower publication comments, almost nostalgically (persecution and derision are sweet to those whom the world scorns), "The witnesses called aloud their arresting announcements ... of the theocratic government.... This street work was to provide a striking target for those bent on framing mischief by law and violently opposing these peaceful messengers of good will." (JWDP, p. 186] By 1944, however, most passersby did nothing more violent than avert their eyes from street-corner Witnesses. Stationary Witnesses calling out slogans that touched few nerves were-although they conceived of themselves as actively and aggressively proselytizing--islands of eccentricity. The seller meekly endured the indifference of passersby. His certitude that he dwelt in the absolute allowed him to enjoy his singularity from the undifferentiated masses who casually disregarded him. It was really more aggressive an act to buy a Watchtower magazine than to sell one.

Here is Mario, standing on the street corner, exuding earnestness and the sadness of the isolated whose singularity is a blessing and a burden:

"Read The Watchtower and learn about God's Kingdom!"

"The Watchtower-announcing God's Theocratic Government."

"Read all about God's purposes for man."

"Read Consolation-a journal of fact, hope, and courage."

My father, impulsive and kind, was never oblivious to sadness, and he savored any evidence of eccentricity as he would a good red table wine. He loved the odd fact; he regarded with affection the quirks of human behavior. ("Did you know," he told me, when I was too little to understand why this should be interesting, "that the man who wrote the lyrics to 'I Did Not Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier' in 1913 wrote the lyrics to 'America, I Give My Son to Thee' in 1914?") Connoisseur of Union Square soapbox orators, mischievous, he loved good-natured contention. He was stubborn in argument and, uneducated and ill informed, frequently irritating; but it was never his intention to draw blood. He relished good talk, lively verbal jousting. Also, he had a heart of custard. So the sight of the lone magazine seller standing like an obdurate island among the masses of Christmas revelers moved him to pity and inspired his curiosity. He bought, from mild-eyed Mario, a copy of The Watchtower. And, because he would have considered it an abuse of hospitality not to, he gave Mario our address so that Mario might, as he put it, "Call back to further explain God's purposes."

Several weeks later, we received a visit from Mario, accompanied by his daughter Annie, whose inertia was dazzling. A 17-year-old Frank Sinatra freak, a bubble-gum-snapping bobby-soxer, she followed her intense father with obvious reluctance and remorseless listlessness. She had a crush on a young male Witness and did everything she could to cultivate his interest in her. I, of course, thought 17 was a magical age, a formed, sophisticated age. How slyly she regarded me as I drank in every exotic word of her father's salvation pitch! Annie's condescension to me lent to the evening a frisson of special tension.

My mother and father agreed to participate in a "home Bible study." Every Monday night we sat down-Mario; Annie; my 4-year-old brother, Rickie; my father; my mother; and I-to a study of the Witnesses' latest Textbook, The Truth Shall Make You Free. We took turns reading paragraphs 'from "the Truth book." After each paragraph was read, Mario propounded a question from a glossy question booklet, and, one of us volunteered to answer-that is, to summarize the paragraph. Then Mario would read the Scriptures cited in the text to corroborate the Witnesses' exposition, and one of us would undertake to comment on them.

My father found this approach to knowledge antithetical to all his instincts. His casual curiosity had been quickly sated. He had a restless, irritable intelligence that could not be satisfied by rote learning. He had left Catholicism--he had never been a visceral Catholic-because he found the Catholicism of his immigrant parents gloomy, pedantic, dogma-ridden, and womanish. He had briefly embraced Presbyterianism because the Presbyterian minister was a "regular guy," the Presbyterian church was right around the corner, and Presbyterian hot dog picnics satisfied his gregarious mature. When we moved away from the Presbyterian church on the corner, he left Presbyterianism; the local betting parlor did just as well as a social club, which was all he had really had in mind; and he retreated into his own real nature--cynical, doubting, agnostic, playful, and kind.

He liked to tease God. He soon understood that he could not tease the Witnesses. He argued mischievously; and then, as he understood that his wife and daughter were devouring whole what Mario taught, and were growing swollen with fanaticism that was bound to separate us from him, he argued fiercely; and then as we became lost to him, he argued wearily. From the beginning, my father understood that the Witnesses were not people with whom he could exchange the quick, slighting, bantering, argumentative blows that had formed the whole of his intellectual exchange. They were not, like his Calabrian paesani, people who could argue ritualistically, with the appearance of ferocity, and then disengage and, exhilarated and worn from the excitement of debate, exchange pleasantries and share a pitcher of wine. He understood that these were people with whom he was locked in mortal combat.

When, not two months after Mario's first visit, my mother accepted an invitation to attend a meeting of the Witnesses at the local "Kingdom Hall," my father behaved in a way that allowed us to report excitedly to Mario that he had become "an opposer of The Truth."

Every Sunday morning my mother, who was beautiful, baked muffins. Three months after Mario's first visit, she declared her intention to go preaching, Sunday morning, from door to door. Attaching all the fervor of her passionate nature to her newfound, consuming religion, she-who had always been outwardly submissive to my father--declined to bake the muffins. No one else has fought so passionately over muffins in the history of the world. My father-who pronounced himself fed up with all this female nonsense-packed his suitcases to leave home. He didn't leave. He never could bring himself to leave. But we became a bitterly divided household. (We never had muffins again.)

My brother tagged along with my mother and me, going to meetings, trailing behind her skirt as she went from door to door. His boredom at meetings occasionally found boorish expression, and he was reprimanded by the elders. He seemed not to care what the elders, or anybody else, said to him. Soon he allied himself with my father, who had been driven to noisy, militant atheism by the presence of two female religious fanatics in his previously patriarchal household. (When your wife and daughter are in love with God, it's hard to compete-particularly since God is good enough to be physically remote and thrillingly elusive.) By the time my brother was 8-and sleeping in my father's double bed, while I shared "the children's bedroom" with my mother-he had become so totally immersed in street life that he was a stranger to us all.

What made my mother such an easy mark for conversion? I can only guess, from what I subsequently came to understand about the appeal the Witnesses have for women. For women whose experience has taught them that all human relationships are treacherous and capricious and frighteningly volatile, an escape from the confusions of the world into the certainties of a fundamentalist religion provides the illusion of safety, and of rest. Female Witnesses outnumber male Witnesses 3 to 2. As a child, I observed that it was not extraordinary for women who became Jehovah's Witnesses to remove themselves from their husbands' bedrooms as a first step to getting closer to God. Many unhappily married and sexually embittered women fall in love with Jehovah.

My mother's mother had been a renowned village beauty in her native Abruzzi. Vain, stupid, courted for her beauty, she made a miserable marriage with a man who was her equal in looks and much her superior in intelligence. My maternal grandfather was the last of three male children to arrive at Ellis Island. A patron in the Abruzzi had paid the steerage passage for the older boys-and kept my grandfather as a kind of indentured servant in return. Grandpa-whose fierce temper was legend-worked for five years as a shepherd; he lived a life of involuntary solitude in a hut. By the time he reached America, his ability to express himself in speech had practically atrophied, so seldom had he had occasion to talk to another human being during the five years of his servitude. Having married my grandmother for her beauty, he noisily lamented his error to the day of her death. Unlike his brothers, he was never more than a laborer, and he railed against his fate with all the strength of a large but thwarted intelligence. My grandmother, a compulsive eater and a diabetic, grew fat; she stunned herself into insensibility with food, and surrounded herself with saints and incense and an army of black-robed churchy friends. Grandpa's rage found expression in violent fits of anger directed against his five children-not one of whom survived childhood without a nose broken by him. My mother's nose was broken when he slammed an iron into her face in a senseless, voiceless seizure of unprovoked rage. Her mother never protected her.

My mother left this house, over which the threat of violence always hung (a house that smelled richly-and claustrophobically--of fermenting wine and incense and all the stale, dark-brown smells of poverty) when she was 19, to marry my father. Whether she loved my father I do not know. After he became a Witness, my mother destroyed every letter they had ever exchanged, every photograph she had ever had taken with him. She no longer wore her wedding band. My aunts say she used to write my father poetry; if she did, it was burned with the rest of her preconversion past. In my father's sisters' house, there are pictures of my mother as a bride. She looks vulnerable, soft, eager; perhaps it was a trick of lighting, photographer's magic: she looks like a girl in love.

My mother was 20 when I was born. I never knew the tender girl of the studio portraits. I knew a woman hotly involved in family intrigues, a woman who entered my bedroom at night to weep.

I have two vivid images preserved from the days before our conversion (clues, not evidence): I remember awakening one night and seeing, from my bedroom, my mother's ripe, full-breasted naked body (which I had never seen before), masses of unrestrained chestnut hair soft on her shoulders, and hearing my father's voice saying, "Connie, don't walk around like that. It isn't nice." And I remember walking in on her when she was nursing my baby brother behind a closed door and her begging me not to tell my father I had seen her naked breasts. I remember those moments of her nakedness; but I know her in the armor of her zeal.

Like most second-generation Southern Italians, my mother grew up insular and clannish; in the teeth of the sorry evidence, she was instructed to believe that only the family could ever shelter, embrace, nourish. The rest of the world was hostile, menacing, exploitive, threatening, incomprehensible, and not deserving of comprehension. They were always out to get you. In fact, the family was the smell of incense, beatings, and swollen, angry voices. The Church was no refuge; the Church was her mother's and, she thought, an old ladies' home. It could never be hers. She looked for Family in my father's family-and found jealousies and rivalries, and there too she was an alien. She could not (this is conjecture) love either her family or the world. She chose a religion; she chose "spiritual brothers and sisters"-who told her, as her family had, that the world was other and evil, alien, and cruel. She found shelter. She waited for God to smash the wicked world. All her longing was for the future; all her love was for a jealous, devouring God who promised her rest.

What predisposed me toward my conversion? In recent years, when elders of Jehovah's Witnesses have come to call on me, they have usually asked-out of their zeal to assign spiritual cause and effect to all mysterious acts of the spirit, to tame experience by defining it, and to render apostasy less threatening by subjecting apostates to the rigors of private logic-whether, when I was 9, I'd made a conscious decision to serve Jehovah; whether from true knowledge and absolute belief I chose to "dedicate myself to God." (If they can believe that my water baptism was the act of a dutiful daughter, an aberration of youth rather than an independent act of choice and mature will, they can dispose of me in their minds, categorize and forget me.) Of course I can't answer their question. I choose to believe in free will; but the motives of that little girl who pledged her life to God are necessarily obscure to me. My childhood has been fed into the devouring maw of psychoanalysis, but the leap into belief (or into fancy) is still unsusceptible of analysis, still mysterious.

Sometimes, in an effort to understand my own past, I try to "read" my own daughter. Could she, I wonder, an ardent preadolescent girl whose temperament tends toward the ecstatic, lend herself to religious conversion?

Anna, my 12-year-old daughter, is as familiar to me as my own skin and, in her breezy unselfconsciousness and tidy self-possession, as mysterious to me as a being from another planet. Her luminous and determined curiosity about the world, while it is often outrageous, is never cold or casual or predatory; her passionate prodding and seeking is a form of reverence and of love. Anna reads the classified columns of New York Review for the breathtaking pleasure of learning about the varieties of human folly. She once called up a famous personage getting his phone number through a combination of incredible industry, imagination, and luck-to tell him that he was a "bad person." (She didn't like the views he held on having children; in her opinion-Anna has an opinion about practically everything--he was a "child hater.") She is currently reading Death Notebooks and The Happy Hooker. She regularly fires off letters to magazines, heads of state, and boards of education to tell them where they have gone wrong. She just as frequently fires off letters to her girlfriends to tell them where she has gone wrong. (She insists upon clarity.) One Easter Sunday, when Anna was 9, she took herself off to the black Baptist church on our corner to attend services, and when that was over, she visited the local Irish Catholic Church to see what they were up to. She also occasionally visits the Hare Krishnas; also, synagogues. She hasn't decided whether to believe in God or not. She is fierce, dramatic, vulnerable, sophisticated, innocent, and moral. She is, as I once explained drunkenly to someone who thought she might be the better for a little vigorous repression, a teleological child. That is, she is concerned with final causes, with ends and purposes and means; she would like to see evidence of design and purpose in the world. All her adventures are means to that end.

But Anna cannot conceive of a life in which one is not free to move around, explore, argue, flirt with ideas and dismiss them, form passionate alliances and friendships according to no imperative but one's own nature and volition. She regards love as unconditional; she expects nurturance as her birthright. She feels sorry for me because I did not have a "normal childhood." "Poor Mom," she says. To have spent one's childhood in love with/tyrannized by a vengeful Jehovah is not Anna's idea of a good time- nor is it her idea of goodness. It fills her with terror and pity that anyone- especially her mother--could have grown up in a religion in which love was conditional upon rigid adherence to dogma and established practice; in which approval had to be bought from authoritarian external sources; in which people did not fight openly and love fiercely and forgive generously and make decisions of their own and mistakes of their own and have adventures of their own.

The person Anna is cannot help me to understand the person I was.

Nor can the person my brother became help me to understand the person I became. I ask myself how my brother escaped the religion that threw its meshes so tightly over me. Why was he not hounded for years by the obsessive guilt and the desperate desire for approval that informed all my post-conversion actions? Partly, I suppose, luck, and an accident of temperament; but also, I think, because of the peculiarly guilt-inspiring double messages girls received as Jehovah's Witnesses. Girls were taught that it was their nature to be spiritual but, paradoxically, that they were more prone to depravity than were boys. In my religion, everything beautiful and noble and spiritual and good was represented by a woman; and everything evil and depraved and monstrous was represented by a woman. I learned that "God's organization"-the "bride of Christ," or His 144,000 heavenly co-rulers-was represented by a chaste virgin. I also learned that "Babylon the Great," or "false religion," was "The mother of the abominations or the 'disgusting things of the earth.' . . . She likes to get drunk on human blood. . . . Babylon the Great is . . . pictured as a woman, an international harlot." (Babylon, pp. 576-831

Young girls were thought not to have the "urges" boys had. They were not only caretakers of their own sleepy sexuality,, but protectors of boys' vital male animal impulses as well. They were thus doubly responsible and, if they fell, doubly damned.

To be female, I learned, was to be Temptation; nothing short of death-the transformation of our atoms into a lilac bush-could change that. (I used to dream deliciously of dying, of being as inert, and as unaccountable, as the dust I came from.) If, then, a woman were to fall from grace, her fall would be mighty indeed-and her willful nature would lead her into that awful abyss where she would be deprived of the redemptive love of God and the validating love of man. But if a man were to fall, he would merely be stumbling over his own feet of clay.

I spent my childhood walking a religious tightrope, maintaining a difficult and dizzying balance. I was expected to perform well at schoolwork so that glory would accrue to Jehovah and "his organization"; but I was also continually made aware of the perils of falling prey to "the wisdom of this world which is foolishness to God." I had constantly to defend myself against the danger of trusting my own judgment. To question or to criticize God's "earthly representatives" was a sure sign of "demonic influence"; to express doubt openly was to risk being treated as a spiritual leper. I was always an honor student at school; but this was hardly an occasion for unqualified joy. I felt, rather, as if I were courting spiritual disaster: while I was congratulated for having "given a witness" by virtue of my academic excellence, I was, in the next breath, warned against the danger of supposing that my intelligence could function independently of God's. The effect of all this was to convince me that my intelligence was like some kind of tricky, predatory animal which, if it was not kept firmly reined, would surely spring on and destroy me.

But sexual guilt and the carefully nurtured fear of intellectual pride, while they may have acted as glues to adhere me to my religion for many dry years, do not (I think) explain my conversion to that religion.

I look for clues; I find very few. I had read precociously and voraciously from the time I was seven. War and Peace, Gone with the Wind, and Little Women were my favorite books. When my mother learned that I knew what Kotex was, she destroyed all my books, including Heidi, because it made me "cry too much." (Books were messengers from the bad world.) I envied the small brides of the Catholic Church, solemn young girls receiving First Communion (sprigs of lily of the valley, white leather catechisms, lace veils) I loved the way Catholic churches smelled. When, during my father's brief flirtation with the Presbyterian Church, I attended Sunday hool, I was sure that I had incurred God's disfavor: "Be quiet and you'll hear a pin drop," the Sunday-school teacher said before each lesson. I never heard the pin-which I assumed God Himself was dropping from the clouds--drop. I thought everybody else did. I thought the Presbyterian God did not love me. I do know that when Mario came with his books and his message, I drank in his words as if I were parched. I remember the way the book we studied-The Truth Shall Make You Free-looked and felt in my hand. It smelled wonderfully of new glue. Embossed in gold on its azure-blue cover was a circle which embraced a line of smiling people in varied headgear-all with straight, nondescript Anglo-Saxon features; all clasping textbooks in their hands. These, Mario explained, were "people of goodwill in all lands worshiping Jehovah." The Truth book (published in 1943, printed in the Watchtower Society's own factory, with a first printing of 2 1/2 million copies), like all publications of Jehovah's Witnesses written and published after 1942, was "written" by the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society. Since, as Mario explained, God's organization was not democratic but "theocratic," no single person could claim authorship. That would have been too idiosyncratic, allowing honor to accrue to one person, rather than 'Jehovah's visible instrument on

earth, the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society." No author, then; but, on the dedication page, "Dedicated to Jehovah and to Jesus Christ." I did like that. As a child, I perceived this not as arrogance, but as evidence of a familiar, familial relationship with the Deity that was both cozy and exhilarating.

The romance of that book, its garish color plates! Illustrations of Jesus being stoned by the 'Jewish religionists" out of the temple; spectacularly un-Darwinian pictures of dinosaurs and lambs roaming the Edenic earth-which resembled the pictures in my school geography book of the Panama Canal Zone; scenes of "free men" (Witnesses) in Nazi concentration camps, their hollow-cheeked faces radiant with the nobility of suffering; illustrations of Jephthah's daughter, girdled in gold, dancing with tambourines in pseudo-Arabian splendor, her father dressed exactly like the Roman warriors in the Metropolitan Museum of Art; representations of a beastlike Nebuchadnezzar (who looked like the Wolf Man), crouched on all fours eating weeds in front of a crumbling Corinthian temple; illustrations of a pompadoured Eve with an Elizabethan forehead and high, sharp breasts, offering a miniature pineapple to an Adam modeled after Tyrone Power, glistening green foliage and arum lilies with thrusting tendrils covering the important parts of her naked perfection.

"Worldly and religious scientists," I read, "worshiping their own brains and other men, pass by the very source of truthful information, God's word." How, indeed, could "worldly scientists" vie with the wonderful imagery of the Truth book-images of creation and destruction; images of water and blood:

As the earth rotated on its axis ... thrown-off matter gradually formed into great rings about the earth at its equator, where the centrifugal force of the spinning earth was most powerful.... According to the density and specific gravity of the materials thrown off from the molten earth, they formed into rings of water mixed with mineral substance, the densest and heaviest being nearest the earth-core, the next heavy being immediately next out beyond it, and so on, the lightest being thrown out farthest and being almost wholly a water ring. Thus an annular or ring system existed, and the appearance to the eye of God was like that of a great wheel, with wheels within wheels, and with the molten earth itself as the spherical hub of them. [Truth, chapter on earth's creation, pp. 50-70)

(Actually, the Witnesses do rely upon the evidence of worldly scientists when it suits them: the water-ring theory derives from Isaac Vail's book The Earth's Annular System, published in 1886.)

Adam's descendants, now multiplied over the earth, were out of the water, being on dry land. At the same time they were in the water, being within the water canopy which had been there since before Adam's creation.... The movement of the waters of the great canopy far overhead was toward the poles; ... as a result the thickness of the canopy out above the earth's equator was becoming very thin, almost admitting direct sunlight through, . . . the edges of the canopy nearing the poles were growing dangerously weak, rotating with growing slowness to the point of having little centrifugal force to resist the downward pull of earth's gravity. The fall of the canopy was imminent, awaiting God's removal of his restraining power. [Truth, P. 1351

God "removed his restraining power" 1,656 years after the day of Adam's creation, say the Witnesses (who dismiss the evidence of the radiocarbon clock, as they dismiss the theory of evolution); and so, 1,656 years after Adam's creation, the Great Flood-survived by Noah (who was, according to their reckoning, 500 years old)--covered the entire earth.

According to the Truth book, Noah "typified" Christ; Noah's wife "pictured" the bride of Christ (the 144,000 Jehovah's Witnesses who will share Christ's heavenly reign); and Noah's three sons and three daughters-in-law "pictured" the "great crowd of other sheep," Jehovah's Witnesses who will live forever on an Edenic, cleansed earth; the ark "pictured" the new world. (Theologians have accused the Witnesses of "absurd typology." I thought it was marvelous magic-like those Chinese ivory balls one opens to find an- other ivory ball within, and within that another ball, and within that,

another-secrets within secrets.)

Most important, the Flood "foreshadowed" the destruction of the ungodly in our day. "Reckoning each of the six creative days of Genesis to have been of 7,000 years' duration," the Witnesses concluded, in 1944, that from Adam's creation to the end of 1943 A.D. is 5,971 years. We are therefore near the end of 6,000 years of human history with tremendous events [Armageddon, and the 1,000-year reign of Christ] upon us." [p. 152] The Witnesses do not distinguish among the lyrical, poetic, mystical, historical, prophetic, and epistological books of the Bible; so from the Truth book I learned this hop-skip-and-jump chronology (which German theologian Kurt Hutten has called the result of "knight-jump exegesis") (see Hokema); I zigzagged my way through the Pentateuch to Revelation to Daniel, marveling at the wondrous way in which this divine jigsaw fitted together:

In 1914 Christ's Kingdom was established in the heavens. (Satan, who had had access to the heavens, presumably to play in the fields of the Lord and have his way with renegade angels, was shortly thereafter restricted to the realms of the earth"-which accounts for World War 1.) This was how the Witnesses (in 1944) arrived at the year 1914: From Luke 21:24 we learned that Jerusalem would be trampled upon by the nations until the "times of the Gentiles" were fulfilled. Now skip to Daniel 7:14, which, according to the Witnesses' reading, proves that Christ was to receive a kingdom that would never be destroyed. When was Christ to receive his kingdom? At the end of the Gentile times-the period in which there was no representative government of Jehovah (such as Israel had been) upon the earth. When had the Gentile times begun? In 607 B.C., when Israel, a theocracy, lost her sovereignty and became enslaved to Babylon.

To prove this, we switch to Daniel 3, which contains the account of Nebuchadnezzar's dream of a hewn-down tree, its stump in the earth banded with iron and brass, and of Nebuchadnezzar's seven subsequent years of madness, during which he lived like a beast of the field. (I always ought of the escarole my mother forced me to eat when I thought of Nebuchadnezzar gobbling weeds; it was an "untheocratic" parallel, which I immediately censored.) Nebuchadnezzar was told that "seven times" would pass over him, after which his sanity, and his kingdom-waiting for him like the banded tree-would be restored:

In the miniature fulfillment of the dream ... Nebuchadnezzar ... became like a beast, without human understanding, for seven years, after which he regained sanity and exercised his lordship over the empire. This makes it clear that the "seven times" began with Nebuchadnezzar's overturning of Jehovah's typical theocracy in Jerusalem in 606 B.C.... The Gentile powers or governments were not exclusive in the field. [pp. 236-38)

In Nebuchadnezzar's case, seven times meant seven literal years. In the major fulfillment of the prophecy, however, these "seven times" symbolize the Gentile times.

When would the Gentile times end and Christ take power in heaven? Skip to Revelation 12:6 and 12:14. 'There we learn that "a time, and times, and half a time" are equivalent to 1,260 days. A time, and times, and half a time are three and a half times. Three and a half times constitute half of seven times; hence seven times equals twice 1,260 days, or 2,520 days. But2,520 days is equivalent only to 7 years. So skip to Ezekiel 4:6: "I have appointed thee every day for a year." Apply this rule, and 2,520 days means 2520 years: Since Jerusalem was destroyed in the summer of 606 B.C. that year had its beginning in the fall of 607 B.C. and its ending in the fall of 606 B.C. Inasmuch as the count of the Gentile "seven times" began its first year at the fall of 607 B.C., it is simple to calculate when they end. From the fall of 607 B.C. to the fall of B.C. 1 is exactly 606 years. From the fall of B.C. I to the fall Of A.D. I is one year, do not forget. Hence, from the fall of B.C. I to the fall of A.D. 1914 is 1,914 years. Add now 606 years and 1,914 years, and the sum total is 2,520 years, ending in the fall of 1914. (p. 239]

It was rather tortuous, one might suppose, for a 9-year-old to work her way through that labyrinthine logic; but though I was never able to understand algebra and never able to grasp the first thing about geometry, I learned my way through that maze. (God was in the heart of the maze.) I did not know that since 1873 the Witnesses had arranged and rearranged pieces of the jigsaw puzzle-which had wielded several different, earlier dates for the apocalypse; nor did I know that there was never any basis in secular history for assuming 607 to be the year of Jerusalem's destruction. I knew only what I was told, and I believed it. I can only imagine how insufferable that sure belief made me appear to others-to those who saw only my certainty and knew nothing about my guilt.

It was even jolly to think how, soon, we were all going to be persecuted. Jolly, perhaps, isn't the word: It was thrilling. It made us glad. It was our burden to "beat back those religious-political enemies of freedom of worship and victoriously carry on declaring the day of God's vengeance against Babylon and comforting [sic] all that mourn." We knew that we would be "viciously persecuted" by "Satan's offspring... 'organized religion,'" which preached all manner of pagan doctrines-hellfire, the Trinity, the immortality of the soul. We alone knew that "babylonish religion under the Vatican's leadership" would act as a supranational power for the postwar confederation of nations" (the United Nations, pictured in the Bible as "the abomination of desolation"). We alone knew also that the "hitherto docile political and commercial powers" would awake to realize how organized religion-and in particular, the "Roman Catholic Hierarchy," which would act as the "spiritual police force" of the entire postwar earth-had "befooled" them. And the nations of the world would turn against religion, that "great whore," that "blood-drunk woman" who rides the back of the abominable scarlet-colored beast. [pp. 348-52) And Jehovah would step in to protect His people; and that would be the beginning of Armageddon.

In the meantime, we could expect to be persecuted. (It was a "privilege" to be persecuted.) My mother, I remember, would wonder how she could remove her moustache in the concentration camp she was prepared to be assigned to by the Vatican. (No depilatories in concentration camps.) I would wonder, I remember, whether we would have bowel movements in Jehovah's clean New World, or whether the Lord would find a less odoriferous way of dealing with waste; and I would wonder whether, in the New World, we would be allowed to choose our own mates. It was very real to us.

It was all real. The words I savored that felt new and good on my tongue: nephesh, the Hebrew word for soul (what 9-year-old knew that, and knew that it implied mortality?); Nephilim, the hybrid offspring of angels breeding with women (bigger, better, richer than a fairy tale and true). I knew that Christ had died not on a cross-I threw my gold crucifix with its beautifully tendoned Jesus away, wrapping it in toilet tissue first, so as not to handle the Devilish thing-but on a stake. I knew that Christmas and Easter were pagan holidays and that I must never allow myself to be seduced by their glitter.

And I knew that if I didn't believe, I would "fall into deeper darkness" and the old world falls a "terrible end."

Had Armageddon come exactly on schedule, it would have arrived in 1972. ("From Adam's creation to the end of 1943 A.D. is 5,971 years.") In 1944, we were 29 years away from the seven-thousandth year of human history, according to the Witnesses' reckoning. In later years, the Witnesses juggled figures a little and came up with 1975 as the date of the apocalypse: six thousand years from man's creation will end in 1975, and the seventh period of a thousand years of human history will begin in the fall of 1975 [Common Era].... It would not be by mere chance or accident . . . .for the reign of Jesus Christ to run parallel with the seventh millennium of man's existence." [Life] The Witnesses are now in the process of slithering away from 1975 as they have in the past slithered from other dates. In spite their modest claim that they do not know "the day and the hour," they have nevertheless led their followers to believe in at least five apocalyptic dates.

In 1966, Life Everlasting in Freedom of the Sons of God identified 1975 as "the end of the sixth 1,000 year day of man's existence (in early autumn)." When 1975 came along, the Watchtower Society's vice-president, F. W. Franz, was asked if in that year Armageddon would be finished and Satan bound. He agreed that it could happen, but hedged, warning the Witnesses not to make specific predictions, but to be awake and alert, for "no question, time is running out."

According to The Watchtower magazine of May 1, 1975, Franz (who would appear to be the Witnesses' spiritual timekeeper) said, speaking before a group of missionaries, that according to dependable Bible chronology, 6,000 years of human history will end this coming September [1975) according to the lunar calendar. This coincides with a time when "the human species is about to starve itself to death," as well as its being faced with poisoning by pollution and destruction by nuclear weapons. Franz added: "There's no basis for believing that mankind, faced with what it now faces, can exist for the seventh thousand-year period" under the present system of things. Does this mean that we know exactIy when God will destroy this old system and establish a new one.? Franz showed that we do not, for we do not know how short was the time interval between Adam's creation and the creation of Eve, at which point God's rest day of seven thousand years began. But, he pointed out, "we should not think that this year of 1975 is of no significance to us," for the Bible proves that Jehovah is "the greatest chronologist" and "we have the anchor date, 1914, marking the end of the Gentile Times." So, he continued, we are filled with anticipation for the near future, for our generation,"

Whenever the Witnesses appear to be at the end of their singularly long tether, they add a new wrinkle to the tissue stretched thin over the 100 years of their existence. The time interval between Adam's creation and the creation of Eve is just such a new wrinkle, allowing them, once again, to justify the nonappearance of Armageddon. Faced with the postponement of their hopes, the Witnesses are instructed to believe that the Watchtower Society is "fallible." God's word, however, is not-and the Watchtower Society is the "sole visible channel" through which God reveals the true meaning of prophecy "in his due time," as the "light grows clearer and clearer." [Faith] They are not infallible; they are merely the instrument God uses to make clear His purposes. This would seem to be a distinction without a difference.

The Witnesses continue to grow in number and in strength, even as their chronology continues to falter. Sociologists who have examined the phenomenon of apocalyptic religions have found that almost no religion survives three false dates. [(Festinger, Leon, Henry W. Riecken, and Stanley Schachter, Whcn Prophey Fails (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1955)] The Witnesses are a striking exception. What accounts for their staying power? "Hope deferred," says the Psalmist, "maketh the heart sad. One might reasonably expect the Witnesses to grow weary with waiting. Still they wait.

Why this tenacity of belief? What needs does this religion gratify? Why do people choose abandonment of personality, a harsh, disciplinary, self-negating religion? Why do women, in particular, choose an all-consuming religion; why, in particular, do they choose suffering-renunciation of sexual and family ties in exchange for a love affair with a vengeful God?

Jehovah's Witnesses are enjoined to "hate" the "world"; that hatred can express itself in a visceral loathing for "worldlings," in contemptuous disdain for the strivings of others. Hatred for the world is combined with an insistence that the flesh is intrinsically evil, to be feared, doomed. Sexuality is blunted and repressed; "persecution" is courted as evidence of God's favor. Does the fear and loathing of the physical world spring from deformed psyches? Or is it explainable in terms of a leap into a belief so rigorous and rigid that a world view has been imposed, through external discipline, upon passive personalities?

Is abdication of will attainable; and at what cost? What happens when antithetical instincts (for example, the recognition that one can "love that which God hates") collide with programmed belief?

What are the consequences for one who, after years of total dedication and belief, finds himself no longer able to believe and leaves not only a religion, but a world view, behind? How do precepts of good and evil color one's view of the world and affect one's emotional and political choices? How does one make new connections with the world, learn to see and to feel independently, learn to redefine the world? How do old religious patterns-fanaticism, total immersion, moral strictures-assert and repeat themselves in secular life?

I can answer some of these questions by reflecting on my experience. And some of the answers may be ascertained through the testimony of others who have left what used to be their spiritual home; what these survivors have to say is more eloquent than abstract analysis.

But it is necessary also to look at the history and the doctrinal and organizational evolution of this sect.

To examine one prophetic, apocalyptic cult is to explore the existential experience to which human society is bound at any given moment. (Is it an accident that Jehovah's Witnesses, followers of the Maharishi, and greening-of-America counterculturists have all pointed to 1975 as the time of mystical transformation?) Jehovah's Witnesses may be regarded as people seeking religious renewal and liberation in order to heal deep personal psychic wounds-people who contain and channel their craziness in a "crazy" religion; but the form their religion takes may also be seen as a response to social and cultural realities. To look closely at the psychology of a single all-consuming religion is necessarily to examine human nature, while to understand its ideology and to trace its historical genesis and development is to gain insight into the contradictions, necessities, and turmoil of the society and culture that gave it life. [See Lanternari, Vittorio, The Religions of the Oppressed (New York: Mentor Books), pp. v-viii]

Jehovah's Witnesses willfully place themselves outside the mainstream and relish their role as outcasts; nonetheless, they borrow from the worst of mass culture and, it will be seen, tend to reinforce the status quo. Terrified of dissolution and real-life change, sedate, orderly, law-abiding, they despise flamboyant manifestations of rebellion; they are, in fact, a reactionary force, tending to blunt not only revolution, but social reform. They proclaim the destruction of the Establishment and yet play a role that is socially static and conservative.

Demonstrably racist and sexist, they nevertheless draw most of their members from the ranks of the oppressed: oppressed people respond to the assurance that the day of the Lord is at hand, when all manner of blessings shall be their reward and the evil oppressors shall be blotted out. In search of an ultimate solution, they give themselves over to a dull submission to a tyrannical force.

Jehovah's Witnesses are a microcosm of mankind trying desperately, often pitifully, to find possibility, hope, and grace in a moral wilderness. This is their story (and mine).

Contents

I Personal Beginnings: 1944

11 Organizational Beginnings: (1873-1912) Charles Taze Russell

III Waiting for the World to Die

IV Accumulating Wealth While the World Refuses to Die

V God Can't Kill Arnold

VI In Transition

VII Catholics, Mob Violence, Civil Liberties, and the Draft

VIII The Lure of Certainty

IX The Heroic Opportunity and Adventure: Jehovah's Witnesses Overseas

X Leaving: 1955

Abbreviated Codes for Sources Frequently Cited and Additional Sources

Index

from: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/26/obituaries/26HARR.html