Chapter VIII. The Lure of Certainty

Is it possible that there are people who say "God" and mean that this is something one can have in common? . . . Is it possible to believe that one can have a god without using him?-Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge(New York: W. W. Norton, pp.29-30)

THE W0RLD perceives them as different; and they feel themselves to be different. And that is the magic of 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.

I felt bad for sinning that day and asked the Lord to punish me with a pain. Also desiring to know the pains of labor. He gave me the pain right away, a period-pain, but different - spasms, like contractions! It was beautiful, and I was praising the Lord. Until the Devil said, "But you should take a pill, the pain is bad." I shunned his words, but then the pain became worse, and I took a pill; and the pain got even worse. At 3 A.M. it stopped. I slept and slept.

How wonderful it is to live a pure and simple life! It's really good to sit around a table and share thoughts with simple folk. . .

I'm nervous and frenzied. I think of going to Russia to do missionary work with Andre'. (I don't love him! And he loves Jehovah so much! Why don't I love him?) And I can't help smoking another cigarette. Bad. If I were a man people would leave me alone so much more. And when will I ever be able to relax?

A strange day. Started off by doing a lot of sewing, learned about ~d;1rmn~ and the hex stitch. Then Frau S. walked in and decided to transport me to her house to learn cooking and the Bible. For some reason I suddenly became sad, dissatisfied, self-pitying, couldn't stop crying. She started reading me some Witness article about the necessity of morality and Christian behavior being reflected by clothing. I've heard so much about clothing (mine in particular) from that family, and I got fed up and left, very upset. After a while, I went back to the tranquility of darning with Frau Mehringer. And then was given some very nice baked rice pudding. . .

I know that this is right because I feel cleaner and everything around me is purer than it has ever been.

Today in the late afternoon, after a nap, I went to Klaus's house, the tailor, the Witness of Jehovah. I was feeling tired and a little bit shy and nauseated because this morning I bought a dirndl, a pocket- book, and a bakery bun, and as always when I deal with worldly things, it drained me. . . .

I will write to my brother and tell him I have found The Truth.

What a wonderful thing it is to be able to really trust people be- cause you know they're seeking after the truth. How can I describe the atmosphere around these good, honest people? Brother 0. spoke so wisely while we were sitting there drinking a bit of schnapps and eating a bit of garlic, bacon, cheese, and bread. He also spoke of his six years in prison under Hitler. Oh, how brave! How I admire that happiness of his, and I know it's good.

- from the diary of Vera Retsoff I

Vera was 17 when she wrote this, having been converted by Jehovah's Witnesses in a small village in Germany. Multilingual, from an affluent, achieving family, Vera ran away from college and was a Jesus Freak for two years before she became a Witness. She remained a Witness for three years, until her marriage to her childhood sweetheart; and her growing doubts together with her growing conviction that it was not "selfish" to use her talents effectively divorced her from the Society.

Yeah, it's hard. It's hard to be a Jehovah's Witness. It's hard . . . like the Witnesses can't . . . you don't supposed to like . . . you gotta be good, you can't party, you gotta go to all the meetings, field service and stuff. And like people on the street are saying, like lots of people think we're crazy, so it's hard to cope with the people. But what else is there? You be out on the streets, man, you be missin' a good thing. 'Cause there's nothin' out there. I mean, the majority of teen-agers is bad. I'm gonna keep on tryin'. But it's hard. I mean, it's bad on the street, but we gotta be out on the street. Now, me, I been president of the Black Knights - there was thousands of us. I'm not talkin' about killin' nobody, you understand; but I wanted to feel big, dig it? I'm tryin' now, though, you know. To be good. 'Cause the Witnesses are right: There's nobody out there gonna do nothin' about all the poverty and shit and war and stuff. Nobody.

- Booker Smith, a 17-year-old black from Harlem who is an unbaptized Witness

You get used to the South Bronx; you don't see the suffering any- more. To the people who live there, it's not suffering, it's their life. They are casualties of the Devil's system. And so are you. From Adam all have sinned and all are victimized. You too. Jehovah's Witnesses are not hanging out on street corners or into immorality or dope. We're not violent like the rest of the people. Our people in the South Bronx are physically and spiritually clean. . . . As far as all those programs to feed people and help people with dope problems, and day-care centers and social work. . . some people think that's doing good, but if they're not following the Bible, they're not doing good.

We're treated differently, given respect by fellow workers and employers. Worldly people know we are honest and faithful workers. They know we're not subversive. They know we're discreet, and they know we don't overindulge. Young ladies treat us with honor because they know we wouldn't engage in premarital sex. That would be like jumping off a building. Fornication can kill you. We keep clean.

- Thomas Bart, 21 -year-old black Witness elder

I'm not like the rest of the kids in high school . . . the way how they dress and the way how they act and fool around and not listening to the teacher and talking like what they're not supposed to talk about, like obscene words and things that corrode your mind like sex.

-14-year-old black Witness (male)

All of a sudden there are so many questions and they're so heavy. Jehovah knows I want to serve him. But how can I do so out of a clean heart with no reservations or disagreements? How come there are so many questions when I really know all the answers? What about all the wickedness and suffering God has permitted on the earth? Why, if he has the power . . . why, if he loves? Why? I know the answer from the book: The issue is political-God's rule against Satan 5. For the last 6,000 years, man has had the opportunity to rule, and he has proved incapable of doing so. And the suffering of the innocent is the result of man's choosing worldly governments instead of God's heavenly kingdom. The suffering is a result of man's choice, not God's doing. Also, because he hasn't ended the world yet, Jehovah is really merciful: He's giving more people the opportunity to serve him. . . . But way down deep, I don't really believe it. . . . The waiting seems so long. I wish the end would come now. This instant. Now. I'm tired of waiting. . . . But maybe God's taking his spirit away from me because I have sexual feelings toward S. . . . I never realized how important the words of the brothers are: how treacherous the heart is, how unclean. . . . I want everything, I really do. . . I want the end to come now.

- from the diary of a 23-year-old Witness who left the Society soon after she wrote this

I was so desperately needy when I became a Witness, just barely functioning, just surviving. I didn't like anything about the present, I hated my past, and the Witnesses gave me a future, and I gave myself to it. I loved the idea of a New World . . . someday I'd be tall and beautiful, and everything evil and unfair would go away, and there'd be justice. It's odd; I really didn't like anything about being a Witness, but I gave myself to them fully and completely. I held nothing in reserve. I was looking to them for honesty and decency. I couldn't find it. But I couldn't allow myself to be critical. Then I had a nervous breakdown. Maybe that was my way of getting out? The Witnesses felt betrayed by my breakdown. Their faces were so hard. No help. After the breakdown, I couldn't go from door to door anymore. I wanted God to tell me directly what to do. I couldn't get Him off my back. . . . I was so conscientious. Wouldn't you think that the more conscientious I was, the more rewards I should have gotten? But the more I lent myself to the Witnesses, the more I suffered. Which proves that sacrifice is awful. So now I follow Ayn Rand.

- a former Witness

They shrink from the intolerable fear that God does not care about men. Perhaps the original impulse was one of love: can a God-hungry soul contemplate the thought of souls damned in hell? Charles Taze Russell gazed into the fires of hell, averted his eyes from that vision of eternal suffering and damnation, and substituted for the God of the Passion - the suffering Christ of the gospel - a pragmatic, tribal God.

For some men, the stubborn, painful certainty that God does not exist has (though suffused with nausea and dread) been gorgeously energizing:

Must not lanterns be lit in the morning? . . . God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, the murderers of all murders, comfort ourselves? What was holiest and most powerful of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives. . . . Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must not we ourselves become gods simply to seem worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever will be born after us - for the sake of this deed he will be part of a higher history than all history hitherto.

-Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra

For other men, the absence of the sure knowledge of God has been a thrilling and lucid invitation to act absolutely as if He did not exist, to be fully human, to substitute duty and struggle and human love for the impulse to devotion and praise, to adore a flawed and wonderful world.

For Russell and his followers, who had a sense of premonition and fore boding, it was necessary to invent a personal, concrete, and immediate solution to the injustices of life. "The mean and the vulgar flourish, the righteous suffer," said the Psalmist, praising God in radiant despair. The mean and the vulgar flourish, the righteous suffer, said Russell . . . and he made charts and juggled dates and numbers in a frenzied attempt to reduce the beauty and the terror of the world to manageable proportions. In the process - in his fear of the absurd, the unexplained, the incomprehensible, in his flight from mystery, from the desert of God's uncertain grace - he was obliged to renounce both the world and the divinity of Christ.

The Witnesses have modified their ideology through the years, but what has never changed is that in order to accommodate a wholesome hatred for injustice, the Witnesses have had to embrace an unhealthy hatred of the physical, material world. The world is evil, loathsome and abhorrent; man’s nature is evil, loathsome, and abhorrent. They have never been able to reconcile love of God with love of the world.

Their religion is neither one of austere penance nor one of sublime contemplation. They move in our midst like disdainful strangers, waiting for Jehovah - a hard and irritable judge, not a living flame - to enter into wrath. They neither tremble at the abyss nor swoon at the altar of a magnificent God. They spit out the world as if it tasted of ashes; they reject the large idea of a mystical union with God, a communion of brothers and saints. Their God is querulous and small; their religion nourishes damaged deserters from the world, offering them a brittle certainty.

Because God will accomplish all things without the collaboration of man, they do not strive to accomplish the Kingdom of Heaven on earth.

Because they believe the world exists only to be despised, because they believe it is rotten, they are content to leave it to rot.

It is alien to their thinking that God and man can work together to perfect and transform the world - and just as alien to their thinking that man, unsupported by God, is made beautiful by struggle and human love. They do not rejoice in the salvation of man by God-made-man, or in the redemption of man by man. They are outside the tradition of the other Christian churches: they do not believe in the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Eucharist, the immortality of the soul. Their linear, eschatological religion is literalist. The consequences of not acting are, of course, as weighty as the consequences of acting. Absenting themselves from the conflicts of the world, they surrender the organization of the world to others.

It would be easy to conclude that they love neither God (if by God we mean the God of the gospel who died for men’s sins), nor man; to judge them so lacking in idealism and compassion as to be monstrous in their indifference. Still, their religion allows them to believe that the world is terrible, but that life is not hopeless. Because it rigidly controls all aspects of their behavior, it gives them the illusion of moral superiority, and of safety. It delivers people who have no tolerance for ambiguity from having to make ethical choices. It allows self-loathers to project their hatred onto the world. It translates the allure of the world into Satanic temptation, so that those who fear its enticements are armed against seduction. It provides ego balm for the lowly, an identification with The Chosen. Because Jehovah's Witnesses believe as little in psychology as they do in philosophy, it tames or numbs the wilderness of the heart by closing the valves of inquiry. It exalts mediocrity, at the same time conferring status on and granting acceptance to the exploited and the oppressed. Moralistic rather than moral, it rescues its adherents from vice (drug addiction, criminality, dirty dishes) and from the demands of art. Obsession, which characterizes geniuses, children, madmen, saints, and artists, is seen as idolatrous.

Yet in the heart of every Witness is the felt knowledge that should he leave his spiritual home, he will die a social death at the hands of his brothers now, a spiritual death at the hands of his God later. And the messages received by the Witnesses from their leaders remind them always of the first Fall, the dangerous tightrope they walk between omnipotence and disinheritance. Repressing human needs, individual desires, they may seem smug - but never entirely, never joyously, sure.

To understand them, it is necessary to understand their doctrine, and particularly their views on evil and salvation, from which all their hopes and fears and their social attitudes (and their appeal - which seems to outsiders bloodless and legalistic) stem:

EVIL; THE FALL; IMMORTALITY

By revealing an original fall, Christianity provides our intelligence with a reason for the disconcerting excess of sin and suffering. Next, in order to win our love and secure our faith, it unveils to our eyes and hearts the moving and unfathomable reality of the historical Christ in whom the exemplary life of an individual man conceals this mysterious drama: The master of the world, leading, like an element of the world, not only an elemental life, but (in addition to this and because of it) leading the total life of the universe, which he has shouldered and assimilated by experiencing it himself. And finally by the crucifixion and death of this adored being, Christianity signifies to our thirst for happiness that the term of creation is not to be sought in the temporal zones of our visible world, but that the effort required of our fidelity must be consummated beyond a total transformation of ourselves and everything surrounding us.

-Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Divine Milieu (pp. 102-103)

The existence of evil is the central problem for all religions. Jehovah's Witnesses explain it by legalisms:

God, though able to bring an end to bad things, restrains himself for mankind's own benefit. - TW, June 1, 1974

[God's] vindication is more important than the salvation of men. - LGBT (See pp.29-36.)

The fundamental issue between God and Satan . . . involves man’s integrity to Jehovah as his Sovereign. - AII Scrip (See pp.7-8.)

They base their case on Job's great cry of despair, tidying his heart's pain into logic:

Why does God permit evil? . . . From the book of Job we can see that Jehovah has permitted such because of a boast that his adversary, Satan the Devil, made, namely, that he could turn all men away from God. Yes, Satan claimed that Jehovah God does not deserve to be feared and worshipped and that the only reason why men do obey him is to make selfish gain for themselves. Satan boasted that if God would let him get at Job, a very righteous man, Satan could cause Job to curse God. God accepted the challenge and let Satan bring all manner of hardship and suffering on Job. . . . But Satan failed to turn Job against God. Job thereby upheld Jehovah as the rightful Sovereign and the One deserving to be feared and worshipped. - TW, April 15, 1976

It began, of course, in Eden 6,000 years ago: perfect Adam and Eve were created "free moral agents"; but Satan, in the form of the Serpent, caused the first human pair to eat of the forbidden fruit (a real tree, a real fruit, in the Witnesses' literal version):

The Devil was originally a spirit son of God and, as such, he was perfect; but he allowed pride and greed for power to be like God to develop in his heart, and this led him to rebel and to get Adam and Eve to join him in his rebellion. He wanted to be a god and have creatures worship and serve him. [This Good]

Lucifer was "perfect," the Witnesses say, "till iniquity was found in him, when he conceived a rebellion against God."

Adam and Eve, "although they were perfect in body and mind, . . . were as yet untried, and God gave them the opportunity of proving their obedience to him under the test." [Ibid.]

God's prohibition is seen as an act of love, an opportunity for Adam and Eve. How perfect man might entertain imperfect desires is not, for the Witnesses, an interesting question, nor is why or how "selfish ambition" entered Lucifer's perfect breast. This is as close as the Witnesses come to a metaphysical explanation of the entrance of evil into the world:

God gave to his human son and daughter the freedom of choice, free moral agency . . . because God cared about them and had feeling for them. He had shown love by bringing them to life and by his preparations for their earthly happiness. If God had created them so that they were automatically obedient and incapable of doing otherwise, then they could never show genuine love in return to their Creator. Their obedience would be mechanical. Real love requires a want ing to do things that please another or that are in his interests. . We get our greatest joy out of doing things for others when we sincerely want to do them because we care about them . . . spontaneously, freely. [Awake!, Oct. 8, 1974, p.12]

Had Adam and Eve not been seduced by the Serpent's invitation to "become like Gods," they would have lived forever on a perfect earth. Instead, they were cast out of the Edenic paradise garden to the "unfinished" part of the earth, there to live out their days in toil and pain.

Thus, Adam and Eve sinned through disobedience to God, and their sin involved all men in death, depriving man of infinite bliss in Eden and of free access to the tree of life. But Christ, in obedience to Jehovah, sacrificed himself as the "lamb of God," and thereby caused the "river of life" to rush forth again for the benefit of the obedient among men.

God has permitted Satan (evil) to exist in order to "raise up his witnesses to declare and publish his fame or name throughout all the earth before all his enemies are destroyed." [LGBT]

Satan has, during the course of human history, set up an "organization" to rival God's. This organization-composed of religious, political, and commercial elements - perpetuates the Serpent's original lie to Adam and Eve: "Ye shall not surely die."

The immortality of the soul is a devilish lie:

Satan . . . brought forth the religious idea that when man dies he just appears to die, that it is just the body that dies, but some- thing inside him, a soul or spirit, lives on, either being born again to some other human or into an animal, or going off into some spirit realm.

[But, in fact] when a person dies his soul does not go straight to heaven, nor does his soul go to a place of torment called "hell," nor would that soul be able to come back as a spirit or ''ghost'' to haunt the dead person's relatives. All such teachings are based on Satan's religious lie that the soul of man does not die, and he has caused many to believe such teachings in order to hold them in fear and turn them from the true understanding of God's purposes. . .

The simple truth about the matter is that, when a person dies, he is dead, unconscious, and knows nothing. . . . Jehovah's most wonderful and merciful provision for the human race . . . is the Ransom. . . . Sin and death entered into the world when Adam rebelled against God. Adam lost for himself and for his offspring perfect human life in a paradise on earth. By means of the ransom Jesus Christ bought back for mankind this that was lost, namely, perfect human life with its rights and earthly prospects. . . . God . . . did this by transferring the life of his only-begotten son, who was with him in heaven, to the womb of Mary, a Jewish virgin. . . . Jesus was miraculously born as a perfect human. . . .

The provision of the ransom . . . opened up a hope of everlasting life. Some believers would be granted life in the heavens, others on the earth. [This Good; see pp. 7-2 6]

After [Armageddon] mankind . . . will be told to make preparations for the restoration of their beloved dead. What a happy thing it will be to prepare a room for Mother and Dad! Some day while working -about your lovely garden park home you will hear the familiar voice - of father or mother calling from the room you prepared for them. You will run to their room and tell them about the new world and its joys and all the things that happened on earth while they were asleep in death. How happy they will be to have no more pain, for they will come back without the sickness that caused their death, and they will have before them the glorious hope of living forever on the perfected earth! This process will go on until all in the memorial tombs are brought forth. [Faith, p.225]

The absorbing problem of whether God calls men to Him or if, on the other hand, men choose God, the question of where grace and will join to provide redemption and union is not directly addressed by the Witnesses. The closest approach to the problem of grace and will or whether salvation depends on faith or works, is the distinction between "the heart" and "the mind":

The mind must of necessity take in and digest information. It is the seat of intellect, the knowledge-processing center. It assembles information and by process of reason and logic it reaches certain conclusions. And the Scriptures indicate that it is, in some amazing way, directly related to the heart. The heart has a vital role, for with it are associated the affections and motivation. The heart's direction of one's whole course in life becomes evident to onlookers. They find out eventually what the person really is on the inside. But Jehovah at all times knows the "secret person of the heart." . . . At times the heart may overrule the conclusions of the mind, giving motivation that favors and elevates emotions or desires over logical reasoning. Not only does a person have to know with his mind what is right in Jehovah's eyes, but he has to have the desire in his heart to follow that course. [TMSG, Study 15: "Reaching the Heart of Your Listeners," p.75]

This evades the question of how God's grace operates to save men. It does allow the Witnesses to explain why men who are held in general to be good or wise reject their message: Their "hearts" are "bad" . . . "It is much more to Satan's liking to hold sway in a subtle way over intelligent, capable persons who are highly respected." [All Scrip; see pp.207-08]

THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST; THE TRINITY; THE RANSOM

But truly, Lord, if I wanted to cherish only a man, then I would surely turn to those whom you have given me in the allurement of their present flowering. Are there not, with our mothers, brothers, friends and sisters, enough irresistibly lovable people around us? Why should we turn to Judaea two thousand years ago? No, what I cry out for, like every being, with my whole life and all my earthly passion, is something very different from an equal to cherish: it is a God to adore.-Teilhard, p.127

I want no pallid humanitaranism - If Christ be not God, I want none of him; I will hack my way through existence alone. - Romano Guardini

If God gave his life for a man, would that be a corresponding ransom? Could a lion redeem a mouse? - Watchtower Society

In addition to denying the immortality of the soul, the Witnesses deny the Incarnation.

Dorothy Sayers called the Incarnation and the crucifixion the terrifying drama of which God is the victim and the hero. It is that ecstatic version of God - the version that says that God bore the anguish of being human (by virtue of which, as Teilhard says, "nothing is profane") that permits of the idea that we may be sacramentally joined to Him. We are led back to God through the humanity of Christ:

[God] plunged [himself] into matter in order to redeem it. . . . The immense enchantment of the divine milieu owes all its value in the long run to the human - divine contact which was revealed at the Epiphany of Jesus. . . . As our humanity assimilates the material world, and as the Host assimilates our humanity, the eucharistic transformation goes beyond and completes the transubstantiation of the bread on the altar. Step by step it irresistibly invades the universe. (Teilhard, pp. 107, 117, 125]

Traditional Christianity teaches 'is that God became man to die for our sins; and that the godhead is composed of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit; that the Incarnation may be realized, for each individual, through the Eucharist.

The Witnesses, perhaps out of aversion to mystery and a determination to root everything in the concrete, deny the personality and the deity of the Holy Spirit, which they define, instead, as "the active force of God" which moves His servants to do His will. They argue that the Trinity is a pagan doctrine that originated with the Egyptians, Hindus, and Babylonians.

The Witnesses say that Jesus was a perfect human creature, no more, no less; and that God his father required the sacrifice of a perfect human life to "buy back," or ransom, what the perfect Adam had forfeited - life forever (for the faithful) on a perfect earth. Jesus is described as a "perfect parent" who took the place of sinful Adam. Jesus was, they say, before he became "a tiny bundle of live energy" who was "transferred from heaven to the egg-cell in the womb of the unmarried girl Mary" [FPL, p. 127], a perfect spirit creature, the archangel Michael. He divested himself of his spiritual nature when he came to earth; and, when he died (on a stake - the cross is presumed to be "pagan" too), he was resurrected to spiritual life (a cut above the spiritual life he had enjoyed before, it would seem, since he was raised to rule over "all other parts of God's organization"):

He was a spirit person, just as "God is a Spirit"; he was a mighty one, although not almighty as Jehovah God is; also he was before all others of God's creatures, for he was the first son that Jehovah God brought forth. . . . He was the first of Jehovah God's creations. After God had created him as his firstborn Son, then God used him as his working Partner in the creating of all the rest of creation. . . . The life of the Son of God was transferred from his glorious position with God his father in heaven to the embryo of a human. On the third day of his being dead in the grave his immortal Father Jehovah God raised him from the dead, not as a human Son, but as a mighty immortal spirit Son, with all power in heaven and earth under the Most High God. . . . After he had sacrificed his perfect manhood, God raised him to deathless life as a glorious spirit creature. He exalted him above all angels and other parts of God's universal organization, to be next-highest to himself, the Most High God. [LGBT, see pp.3 1-36, 115-16. See also Aid, pp.917-32.]

So, in the Witness version of Christ, there would. seem to be three Christs (none is God); and each is independent of the other. There is the spiritual archangel Michael (called also "the Word," or "Logos"); then there is the perfect human Jesus - born, according to the Witnesses, innocent of ("ignorant of") his prehuman life, who sacrificed his human nature on the stake; and finally there is the resurrected Christ, who enters a higher spiritual lane than the one he enjoyed in his prehuman existence.

The Witnesses say it was not Jesus' earthly body, but a kind of "suit of flesh" that manifested itself to his disciples upon his resurrection on the third day. (Rutherford, ever inventive, suggested that God might have preserved Jesus' human body somewhere to exhibit it during the Millennium. [The Harp of God (New York: WB&TS, 1928)]

The churches have consistently argued that to deny the divinity of Christ, the agony of God in the garden, is heresy: "For if, being a creature, He had become man, man had remained just what he was, not joined to God, for how had a work been joined to the Creator by a work?" [Athanasius: Discourses Against the Arians]

To deny the divinity of Christ is also to deny oneself the Eucharistic sacrament: When Jehovah's Witnesses "celebrate" the "Memorial" of Christ's death, a small number - those who expect a heavenly, rather than an earthly, reward - share unleavened bread and wine. The bread is merely symbolic of [Christ's] own fleshly body, head and all"; the wine is "symbolic of his own blood"; and to partake of these emblems is a token that one “imitates Jesus," and "appreciate[s] the sanctification of his blood." (Compare this with Teilhard: "There are certain noble and cherished moments of the day - those when we pray or receive the sacraments. Were it not for these moments of more efficient or explicit commerce with God, the tide of divine omnipresence, and our perception of it, would weaken until all that was best in our human endeavor . . . would be for us emptied of God." [Teilhard, pp. 65-66] The Witnesses believe that human endeavor is, by its nature, devoid of God, and that God is not present in the evil world.) Nor is one baptized into the Church as an infant. Adult baptism is a "symbol of one's dedication to do God's will." [LGBT, pp. 29 - 98]

Charles Taze Russell's waspish attitudes toward the Mass, the sacraments, the Eucharist (those doctrines of union of God and man which thrill mystics and exert a magical pull even among unbelievers, for those especially whom Eliot called the "children at the Gate") set the tone for future Watchtower writings: "Papacy denies and sets aside the true Continual Sacrifice, and substitutes the 'abomination,' the Mass, in its stead . . . the very foundation of all the various schemes of the Church of Rome for wringing money from the people, for all her extravagancies and luxuries." [SS, Vol. III, Thy Kingdom Come, p.102]

How splendid it must be, how exalting, to feel, to know:

Ah, you know it yourself, Lord, through having borne the anguish of it as man: On certain days the world seems a terrifying thing: huge, blind, and brutal. . . . The things in our life which terrify us, the things that threw you yourself into agony in the garden, are, ultimately, only the species or appearance, the matter of one and the same sacrament. We have only to believe.

"We have only to believe." [Teilhard, pp. 136-37] Irresistible words; there is a tension amounting to glory even in resisting them.

But for Russell, everything not rooted in numbers and dates and legal analyses was anathema. The low churches did not escape the raspings of his sharp tongue, either:

"[The] year 1846 witnessed the organization of Protestant sects into one great system called the Evangelical Alliance . . . many of those . . . cleansed . . . thus became entangled with the yoke of bondage." [SS, Vol. III, pp. 119-20) The Papacy and the Protestants were both wiped out by Russell's heavy, whipping, sex-stained hand.

And how do the churches feel about what they are obliged to regard as apostasy?

Father Robert Kennedy (of the Brooklyn diocese) says, most charitably:

Catholics are indeed dissatisfied with the institutional aspects of the Church, with its wealth and clericalism. They turn to Jehovah's Witnesses as an alternative. . . . In Latin America, for example, where the Witnesses make great gains, Catholic belief tends to be authoritarian. We have, in the past, represented forces of oppression, and worship revolves around the saints and the Virgin. The Church's Christology - the Christ of the Trinity - is remote. Jehovah's Witnesses offer an immediate, vivid, living Christ - a man, even as other men - who, they think, has relevance to their lives. A carpenter. Not God. He is more real to them than the Christ of the Catechism. And just as the early church succeeded in slave cultures, like Corinth, the immediacy of the Second Coming appeals to the underprivileged. . . . And the simplicity and uniformity of belief among Jehovah's Witnesses, for people who feel that the Church is baroque and disengaged from daily life, is attractive. . . . Intellectual Catholics ask refined questions. Jehovah's Witnesses ask no questions.

The evangelical churches regard Jehovah's Witnesses as "people of the cults . . . unreached by the church." The Witnesses are equated with Reverend Ike, the Mormons, Christian Science, and Sun Myung Moon: "All of them turn away from the central doctrine of the Christian faith." And they are considered as pernicious as the occult - as "witches, Satanism, astrology, and tarot cards." Dr. Walter Martin, of the Christian Research Institute of Melodyland, California, says:

Satan manipulates the church. The Christians have been afraid of the cults. A JW comes to the door . . . a million times a day all over the world this happens. The Christian says, "Well, I belong to such- and-such a church; I'm a Christian." Then the JW zaps him with the Trinity: "Can you prove to me that it's in the Bible?" he asks. The Christian can't prove it; he's frustrated when he can't answer questions. So the scenario is that the Christian's blood pressure goes up to about 5000; he gives his testimony; he talks about how he's been filled with the Holy Spirit; the JW is entirely unmoved by it and says, "But you didn't answer my question from the Bible." The Christian says, "You're going to hell." Bang. And that ends it. . .

What we should recognize is that JWs are lost souls for whom Christ has died. The Watchtower is a cult; it's a group gathered around somebody's interpretation of the Bible, and it ends up denying that Jesus Christ is literally God in human flesh. . . . The church has failed them for a hundred years: "Let the Lord convert them, we've said; "Don't have them in your homes, whatever you do; just be positive, preach Jesus and everything will work out fine."

Well, it hasn't. The ostrich approach has made things worse. What we have to do is evangelize by presenting them with answers. We need to go to them. We've got to go to their Kingdom Halls - their meeting places - to hand out tracts. We have organized a whole movement in Southern California which we call Operation Recovery. We have hundreds of young people volunteering to pass out tracts (designed to look like Watchtower literature) at their conventions. We have teams of people all over Southern California being trained to go to JW meeting places and pass out tracts to lead these people back to Christ. . .

The Witnesses appear to be impenetrable, brainwashed. But it's an illusion. Their minds are blinded by Satan. The only way to communicate with them is by God the Holy Spirit. The Charismatic movement is the spearhead of the Holy Spirit to open their eyes. . . . The Witnesses don't dialogue - they have prerecorded answers, like eight-track tapes. . . . They love to talk about the Trinity, Armageddon.

We send out one tract - 100 Years of Divine Direction - and quote from The Watchtower. We show how they predicted Armageddon seventeen times, and were wrong each time. They missed 1874, 1914, 1918, 1925, 1941 - and most recently, October, 1975 . . . We have to wake up to the fact that this is a mission field. [Christian Broadcasting Network 700 Club broadcast, June 11, 1976]

To grasp the Witnesses' theology, it must be asked, For whom was Christ's ransom sacrifice made? For whose sins did he atone? Not, according to the Witnesses, for all men: Departing again from Christian tradition, the Witnesses say there are two "classes" of people who will benefit from his sacrifice: "a heavenly class," and "an earthly class." For a "great multitude" of "other sheep" the reward for faithful service to God will be everlasting life on an earth soon to be reclaimed from the wicked at Armageddon. A much smaller number, "the anointed," 144,000 spiritual brothers of Christ, will be "co-rulers" and "associate kings" with Christ in heaven. Since 1918, when "Christ came to his temple," these "anointed ones" have been "resurrected" - or raised, "in the twinkling of an eye." (They were joined by the apostles and the early church members.) The heavenly class has been being gathered since the First Coming of Christ; its ranks, according to the Witnesses, are rapidly closing. The invitation the Witnesses now extend by means of their proselytizing is to the "great multitude":

With the rebellion of Satan the Devil wicked heavenly rule gained control of mankind, and God purposed to set up later a new heavenly rulership over the earth. It would be called "the kingdom of the heavens." The heavenly kingdom would be made up of tried and tested creatures who would maintain their integrity on earth down till death in following faithfully the footsteps of Jesus Christ. . . . The number of these is limited to 144,000,... associated with him in this heavenly kingdom. . . . Today, after nineteen centuries of selecting, there is yet on earth a small remnant of the 144,000.

When the last members of the kingdom class finish their earthly course faithful to death, then the heavenly kingdom of the 144,000 under Jesus Christ the king will be completed by their resurrection from the dead to life in heaven. It will rule over all other creatures in the heavens and those who gain life on earth. . . . It will destroy Satan and all his agents. . . . The call for heavenly inheritance is now closing. [FPL]

Charles Taze Russell distinguished between two classes of "spiritual-begotten" people - a higher class, which (with his passion for numbers and dates and concrete emblems which extended even to the alphabet) he called Class n, who would sit with the resurrected Lord in heavenly glory; and Class m, mortals who "shrank from the death of the human will" and as a consequence would not reign with Christ in glory, but would become spirit beings of' a lower order within the divine nature. [SS, Vol. I, The Divine Plan of the Ages] As the Witnesses had to accommodate more and more converts, however, a new scenario was invented. M and n are no longer operative.

THE SCENARIO:

At Har-Magedon, . . . the kings and their armies and those having the marks of the "wild beast" will all be "killed off' in execution of the death sentence that proceeds out of the mouth of the victorious King of kings like a "long sword." Their corpses will not be buried with religious, military, or civil honors. All the scavenger birds will feast upon their dead bodies, and the eyes of God's protected remnant and their "great crowd" of godly companions will also feast. These will be satisfied at seeing this glorious vindication of the universal sovereignty of the Most High God, Jehovah. . . . They will be glad afterward to bury any bones remaining of the wicked ones and so cleanse the earth. . . . This will also serve as a health measure, to rid the earth of the foul smell of putrefying human corpses and to prevent water and air pollution and the spreading of diseases to the survivors of this war at "Har-Magedon." [Babylon; see p.630]

Before Armageddon, this is what the Witnesses say will happen: "A scarlet-colored wild beast with seven heads and ten horns" will turn against "the international religious harlot, Babylon the Great" [TW, Jan. 15, 19761; who has been "riding the beast," and will destroy the "symbolical woman that, figuratively speaking, has had immoral sexual relations with the world."

Less vividly, all worldly rulers, acting through the United Nations, will turn against organized religion and destroy all religions:

They will make her appear shameful like a naked woman in public. [Like the] dogs that ate up . . . Jezebel . . . they will devour her body with which they once had liked to unite. They will destroy all her beauty of form and her religious capacity to give soothing pleasure to ungodly, worldly men. . . . They will feed on her, as long as there is anything to her. What is left of her frame they will burn with fire, as if she were, not a Babylonian temple prostitute, but the unchaste daughter of a priest in ancient Israel." [Ibid.; see pp.599-604.]

The seven-headed scarlet-colored dragon spoken of in the 17th chapter of Revelation is the eighth (and final) world power of Satan's organization set up to rival God's: it is the United Nations, which God bends to His Will to destroy "false religion." In the Old Testament book of Daniel, seven wild beasts are spoken of; for reasons impervious to logic, these beasts represent, to the Witnesses, seven successive world powers. The first six are Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia, Medo-Persia, Greece, and Rome, all of whom have ranged themselves against God. The seventh beast represents "the dual world power of Great Britain and the United States." (Other great civilizations, such as the Mayans and the Indus Valley, to say nothing of the Axis powers and China and the Communist countries, have no place in this collage.) Now, it follows that the eighth world power is necessarily the United Nations - because it springs from the previous seven world powers.

“Since these religious organizations claim to represent the true God, the desolator [the beast, or the UN] will act also in hatred against the One whom they pretend to serve. This vicious, beastly attitude against God [is] blaspheming his name." [TW, Dec. 15, 1975, p 7441 God is obliged to destroy the U.N.

Meanwhile, what about the Witnesses? One can hardly expect them not to assign themselves a leading role in this theater of the absurd:

Should the [Watchtower] Society survive that violent destruction of Babylon . . . the Society will absolutely refuse to unite itself [with the UN]. Such a refusal would certainly move the [UN] to take drastic action against the Society and the Christian witnesses of Jehovah whom the Society represents and serves. . . . International action against these announcers of Jehovah's Kingdom . . . would be the way in which the UN "wild beast" fights against the "lamb," the Lord of Lords and King of kings. . . . Anti-religious political authorities of the earth will be able to dissolve religious corporations . . . but never will they be able to dissolve the worldwide brotherhood of Jehovah's Christian witnesses. [TW, Jan. 15, 1976]

Jehovah's witnesses, sheltered within his Theocratic organization, will be under siege and will seem threatened with destruction by the overwhelming hosts of . . . Satan. . . . Yet be not anxious . . . Jehovah will fight the battle for his remnant and their companions. He will perform his "strange act at Armageddon. [TW, April 1, 1945, pp. 108-09]

There will then follow, so the scenario goes, a period of anarchy. As Charles Taze Russell wrote, "The closing in of this night will evidently put a stop to any further labor to disseminate the truth, which, misunderstood by the public generally, will probably be accused of being the cause of much of the anarchy and confusion then prevailing." (The Watchtower Society is, and always has been, obsessed with anarchy - to the extent of imagining that it will be regarded as the cause of anarchy, as the source of all power failures.)

After all the survivors of Armageddon pile up dead bones and watch birds feast on the eyes of dead enemies, they will begin, under the direction of God, to prepare the earth for Paradise. The 1,000-year reign of Christ will have begun.

The Witnesses anticipate the charge that their zest for gore is unbecoming; as if to excuse their God's bloody excesses, they compare His war to the wars of men:

"There will be a rotting away of one's flesh, while one is standing upon one's feet; and one's very eyes will rot away in their sockets, and one's very tongue will rot away in one's mouth." Frightful? Gruesome? Sadistic? Ghoulish? Fiendish? Bible readers in Christendom may express shock at that inspired battle account! . . . How can they sincerely be shocked, when the so-called "Christian" nations that they so patriotically support now stand prepared to fight the final war with . . . flaming napalm bombs . . . with liquid fire belched forth from guns, with corrosive chemical gases, with explosives that will blast away a person's face so that the surviving victim needs to wear a mask and be fed intravenously, with nuclear bombs of such enormous power as to make tens of thousands of human creatures disappear into thin air? How can the supporters of such wartime viciousness find fault with Jehovah of armies? [Paradise Restored to Mankind by Theocracy! (New York: WB & TS, 1972), pp. 389-90]

Satan, for the duration of the reign of Christ and his "144,000 royal associates," is "abyssed" before his ultimate annihilation. For a thousand years, a series of "resurrections" will take place: Brought forth to "a resurrection of life" will be "the other sheep" who died before Armageddon and "the faithful men of old" - pre-Christian "Witnesses." Brought forth to "a resurrection of judgment" will be people "whose hearts may have been wanting to do right, but who died without ever having had an opportunity to hear of God's purposes or to learn what he expects of men." [FPL, p.229]

Not to be resurrected - but to sleep forever in uneventful death - are "those who deliberately and willfully did wrong," those who "died wicked beyond reform or correction," [Aid, pp. 1399-1400] such star sinners as Judas, Adam and Eve, those who perished in the Flood and at Armageddon, and the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Those who are "raised," or resurrected, will arrive in fallen, imperfect bodies, but not in the identical bodies they took with them to the grave. God will not collect their scattered atoms; He will "reactivate the life pattern of the creature" which He has stored in His memory.

The logistics of all these resurrections - which will be spaced over a period of 1,000 years - might give population experts a very large headache. Other, less literal, religions might simply trust in God and hope for the good. But the Witnesses have worked it all out in advance, down to the closest half-acre:

A very liberal estimate of the number of persons that have ever lived on earth is twenty billion. . . . Not all of these . . . will receive a resurrection, but even assuming that they did, there would be no problem as to living space and food for them. The land surface of the earth at present is about 57,000,000 square miles . . . or more than 36,000,000,000 acres. . . . Even allowing half of that to be set aside for other uses, there would be more than half an acre . . . for each person. . . . One-half acre . . . will actually provide much more than enough food for one person. . .

Let us assume that those who compose the "great crowd" of righteous persons who "come out of the great tribulation" on this system of things alive . . . number one million (about . . . one thirty-five hundredth of earth's present population). Then if, after allowing, say, one hundred years spent in their training and "subduing" a portion of the earth . . . God purposes to bring back three percent of this number, this would mean that each newly arrived person would be looked after by thirty-three trained ones. Since a yearly increase of three percent, compounded, doubles the number about every twenty-four years, the entire twenty billion could be resurrected before five hundred years of Christ's thousand-year reign had elapsed. [Ibid.]

Not all, after these resurrections, is yet perfect: After the Millennium (during which man will have achieved physical and mental perfection), God will schedule another test of man's integrity. Satan is "let loose out of his prison," and he and "his demons come again into the vicinity of the earth, where they can exert an invisible control over those of mankind who succumb to them." For reasons that are unclear, "Satan the Devil will be confident of himself, in spite of the mental, moral, spiritual, physical perfection of mankind." He will again "challenge God's sovereignty"; the issue will at last be settled in God's favor. [God's Kingdom of 1000 Years Has Approached (New York: WB&TS, 1973), p.149] Anyone seduced by the Devil will be consigned to "the second death." (All of this, for anyone who's interested, is an odd reading of Ezekiel and Revelation.) With God's name "sanctified forever," Christ will be able to hand over to his Father a forever-perfect kingdom; and all shall be well, world without end.

He hath made everything beautiful in his time. - Ecclesiastes 3:11, KJV

Everything he has made pretty in its time. - Ecclesiastes 3:11, NWT

The Witnesses' translation of the Old and New Testaments (which they prefer to call the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures) both diminishes emotions and - by clever manipulation of words and punctuation unsupported by unbiased scholars - furthers their own doctrine. (For example, "Cross" is translated "torture stake"; by a replacement of a comma, the meaning of Luke 23:43 is changed to destroy the idea that Jesus was offering the malefactor who died with him immortality: "Verily I say unto thee, Today shalt thou be with me in paradise." - KJV. "Truly I tell you today, You will be with me in Paradise. " - NWT.)

The Watchtower Society published its translation of the New Testament (the "Greek Scriptures") in l950 - to something short of critical acclaim. The Old Testament (the "Hebrew Scriptures") was published in five volumes from 1953 to 1960, and the entire New World Translation of the Bible was published in 1961. Prior to 1961 the Society had relied chiefly on the American Standard Version (1901), primarily because this translation used the name Jehovah over 6,000 times in the Old Testament. In 1944, the Society purchased the use of the plates of the American Standard Version in order to print it on its own presses.

But the Society, while acknowledging its indebtedness to other versions of the Bible, found fault with them all - for their "inconsistencies or unsatisfactory renderings, infected with sectarian traditions or worldly philosophies." [All Scrip, p.323]

Thus, a decision was made by the Society to bring out its own translation from the original languages. This New World Translation was intended to bring the Bible as close to present-day readers as were the original Scriptures to their audience. An announcement was made on September 3, 1949, at the Society's Brooklyn headquarters that a committee had completed such a translation and was presenting it to the Society for publication. The gift also gave the Society complete possession and control of the property, in recognition of its work in spreading knowledge of the Scriptures. The translation was accepted by the directors of the Society, who then proceeded to have it published.

This bland account implies that Knorr had stumbled upon a work by disinterested (anonymous) translators. The New World Translation of the Bible was, of course, an in-house version. The "Committee" labored with Knorr peering over their shoulders. All of us who worked at Watchtower headquarters knew it was in the works; Fred Franz, then the Society's vice- president and Knorr's confidant, was known to be the chief translator; I proofread portions of it when I worked at headquarters. (I sometimes think that the single thing that clinched my decision to leave the Watchtower Society was reading that Job was scared. I may not have known exactly what I was doing, but I knew life was larger than that.)

The New World Translation places ("restores" according to the Watchtower Society) the name Jehovah 6,962 times in the Old Testament and 237 times in the New Testament. The Society acknowledges that "the pronunciation Yahweh may be a more correct one, but the Latinized form Jehovah continues to be used because it is the most commonly accepted form of English translation of the tetragrammaton." [Ibid., p.326]

One of the aims of the translators was to achieve a high "degree of literalness”;

Many Bible translators have abandoned literalness for what they contend to be elegance of language and form. They argue that literal renderings are wooden, stiff and confining. However, their abandonment of literal translation has brought about many departures from the accurate, original statements of truth. They have in fact watered down the very thoughts of God. [Ibid., p. 325]

This presupposes, of course, that the Watchtower Society alone knows what "the very thoughts of God" are. How well its translators succeeded in achieving "a high degree of literalness" may be seen from the following comparative readings:

The Lord reigneth; let the people tremble; he sitteth between the cherubims; let the earth be moved. - Psalm 99:1, KJV

Jehovah himself has become King. Let the peoples be agitated. He is sitting upon the cherubs. - Psalm 99:1, NWT

But who may abide the day of his coming? and who shall stand when he appeareth? for he is like a refiner's fire. - Malachi 3:2, KJV

Who will be the one standing when he appears? For he will be like the lye of laundrymen. - Malachi 3:2, NWT [Try setting that to Handel.]

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. - Psalm 23:1, KJV

Jehovah is my shepherd, I shall lack nothing - Psalm 23:1, NWT

Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity. What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun? - Ecclesiastes 1:2-3, KJV

"The greatest vanity!" the Congregator has said, "The greatest vanity! Everything is vanity." What profit does a man have in all his hard work at which he works hard under the sun? - Ecclesiastes 1:2-3, NWT

The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land; The fig tree putteth forth her green figs, and the vines with the tender grape give a good smell. Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away. - Song of Solomon 2:12-13, KJV

Blossoms themselves have appeared in the land, the very time of vine trimming has arrived, and the voice of the turtle dove itself has been heard in our land. As for the fig tree, it has gained a mature color for its early figs; and the vines are abloom, they have given their fragrance. Rise up, come, 0 girl companion of mine, my beautiful one, and come away. - Song of Solomon 2:12-13, NWT

Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world. Amen.- Matthew 28:20, KJV

Look, I am with you all the days until the conclusion of the system of things. - Matthew 28:20, NWT

Yes, one is obliged to admit that the New World Translation is inelegant, not to say tin-eared, lacking "the perfect order of speech, and the beauty of incantation." What the Committee says is "Ideas, once cloaked in archaic English, now shine out with meaningful brilliance. Its everyday language helps you to grasp information vital “for eternal life." [All Scrip. See pp. 327-28]

In fact, the Watchtower Society despises "ideas." The Committee says:

Since the Bible has been written in these down-to-earth, easily understandable terms, it is possible to translate its symbols and actions clearly and accurately into most modern-day images. The original power and force of truth are preserved. . . . Simple everyday words, such as "horse," "war," "crown," "throne," "husband," "wife," and "children" communicate accurate thought clearly in every language. This is in contrast to human philosophical writings, which do not lend themselves to accurate translation. Their complicated expressions and up-in-the-air terminology often cannot be conveyed precisely in another tongue. [Ibid., p.9]

Well, it is easier to translate horse than it is to translate existential, as it's easier to translate war than goodness. Still, is the Book of Revelation any more accessible than "human philosophical writings"?

The Bible's power of expression is far superior. Even when God communicated judgment messages to nonbelievers, he did not use philosophical language, but, rather, everyday symbols. This is shown at Daniel 4: l0 - 21 1. Here the kingdom of the self-glorifying pagan king was described in some detail under the symbol of a tree, and then, by means of actions involving this tree, future happenings were clearly foretold. [Ibid.]

But who is to determine what the symbols symbolize? One gets the feeling that when the Watchtower Society talks about "human philosophical writings" it means anything other than common nouns; the Society cherishes the facts and it alone determines what the facts "mean." [Ibid.]

The point about the New World Translation is not just that it is inelegant and uncharming; it is hardly worth laboring the point that God ought to be praised (or, for that matter, damned) in language that attempts to approximate His magnificence (or His awfulness). Nor is it profitable to point up a pious Philistinism of the Witnesses. What the New World Translation reveals about the Watchtower Society is its fear of the terror, beauty and wonder of the world, its fierce desire to make all that is awful pallid, its determination to reduce the world to small, manageable proportions. Its lust for literalness is a desperation for certainty.

But one of the odd things about the Society (some people have experienced this as terrible) is that while it has provided its followers with a narrow certainty, there is something niggling about its dogma, something thin-voiced about its imperatives, that denies its followers the rapture of abandon. It is dogmatic rather than Absolute. The lure of certainty attracts different kinds of people. Some (most) of Jehovah's Witnesses choose their belief in order to be enhanced: It confers upon them a status, a feeling of being accepted, that they would otherwise never enjoy. Others choose the Witnesses out of a need to be reduced; some of these - particularly those who suffer from the guilt of affluence, combined with idealistic temperaments - wish to be delivered from the fullness of their personalities; they have a need to throw in their lot with the oppressed. Whatever the reason for the choice, however, many ultimately feel cheated - because the dry certitude they are given is not a substitute for Absolution.

Jesus please let there be much less of me . . And Jesus, p/ease, much more of you. -Vera Retsoff

Vera went looking for a large ecstasy, and found a shriveling pain instead. She found herself, as she was later to say, not "reduced to an atom of praise," but "diminished to a speck of suffering."

Vera was born to a large, rich, aristocratic White Russian family of artistic and cultivated exemplars. Her mother was a socialite. Multilingual, Vera spent part of her childhood in boarding schools in England and Switzerland. She was a stern and an ardent adolescent. Her early journals and diaries are full of sincere, albeit self-conscious, ennui, rage, self-loathing, self-adoration, necessity to fix the blame ("There's so much bad in me" . . "Other people are so little"), and seesawing between narcissism and masochism ("I am separate and 'bumbled' and lonely and bad and silly"; "I feel a light burning within me - I am marked"). She disliked her mother, whom she regarded as narrow-minded and intolerant.

Vera spoke to me as she was on the verge of leaving the Witnesses. During the whole of our conversation she spoke of the Witnesses as "They" (not "We"). I think she was really out already, but didn't know it. It was one of the hungriest conversations I've ever been involved in. Vera's need to explain herself was so immense it was almost as if she wanted to be exposed and eaten and every part of her found good; she wanted my life (which was, while in some disarray, clearly a chosen life) to prove to her that one could leave "The Truth" and not only survive, but live with some grace and hope of joy She searched my children's faces and found (to her mild astonishment, I think) that there was nothing to despise in them. She gazed and gazed at me, wondering, I think, if some visible stain could be found on me, some brand of the wickedness she had been told to expect. She even attempted to extract messages from tangible objects; I remember her running her fingers over the smooth surfaces of waxed tables, tentatively touching plants and objects, and taking surprised delight in each thing that was whole and fresh and thriving and clean and beautiful. She twisted a Venetian wine goblet in her hand, amazed (I thought for a moment) that the clear liquid did not turn into blood and the glass shatter in her hand.

(Six months after this conversation, Vera sent a formal letter of renunciation to the Watchtower Society - an act she said she felt was necessary because "they loom so large in my dream life . . . I don't want them relegated to my unconscious . . . I have to make a real break with them in the real world-and on my own terms.")

When Vera was 16, she had written in her diary, "I'm so rotten that the only person who could love me is God and He's not there - and I'm mad at Him; why doesn't He make me believe in Him?"

Because she didn't want to go to college, she ran away to Mexico.

I couldn't imagine what good art and poetry were. Everybody in my family was successful. But still, life is terrible: people get old and they're thrown out like garbage. I felt there had to be an answer to all the suffering . . . and a community of people who had the answer. And I felt that if I had any talent - like languages, or acting - I should use my talents to help humanity. What good was it to write a book? So many other people had - practically everybody in my family had. I wanted my cause to be the cause.

When I was in Mexico I met some Jesus Freaks. What I really wanted was to relate to people on a deep level - a deep intellectual level and a deep emotional level, and no artsy bullshit. I accepted Jesus. I thought I found what I'd wanted - a community; but there was no real sharing. I couldn't talk about my inner life. Praying and speaking in tongues seemed to me a good substitute for acid and protests, but it was all so simplistic. And I had this terrible feeling that it was too easy. Why would Jesus suddenly allow me to find Him? I wanted an intellectual exploration of religion, and that wasn't happening; so I lulled myself into thinking that I had at least found enthusiasm, love, and security.

I came back home to Long Island, determined to find other Jesus people there. And I went to work in a day-care center . . . my God, the deprivation of other people! My boyfriend, David, who had accepted Jesus with me, couldn't reconcile his desire to be an artist - which he equated with elitism - with the fact that people were starving. And I couldn't accept my family's ambitions for me when people all around me didn't have enough to feed their children. David's commitment to Jesus wavered, and he set off for New Orleans, where he got lost in the drug culture again. I went off to a small mountain village in Germany. I had my Bible. I imagined I'd be ascetic, I would fast, I'd get involved with simple crafts - and leave all my selfish, ugly ambitions behind . . . I’d hitchhike, and preach in my primitive way.

I wanted fellowship. My landlady introduced me to the people down the road. They were Jehovah's Witnesses. The first question they asked me was Do you read the Bible? I wanted to embrace them! They loved God too! I felt as if I were starving and they were offering me food. They tried to turn me on to the name Jehovah, which I saw as a denial of my personal attachment to Christ. I wanted to believe that Jesus was God, and they were taking that away from me. But I allowed myself to be convinced by their arguments. I loved them very much. I was impressed, the first night, with their systematic study of Revelation, which I'd found confusing. I felt I'd discovered what I'd been looking for - the people, the real people. They weren't chattering about art and politics - everything that seemed vain and petty and quarrelsome to me; they didn't care about worldly success or failure; and they weren't just saying Praise the Lord - they were approaching the Bible (I thought) rationally. How beautiful!

When Vera was very young, she had written in her diary: "Is thinking bad? Is feeling bad? Or both? Or neither? How can I just be?" What impressed her about O-Ma, the grandmotherly woman who converted her, was her apparent homely simplicity:

She never had to ask herself whether she had to forfeit her intelligence or her instincts. She just was. All she wanted out of life was to live in the New World on a little farm and raise pigs. That's all she asked of God. I felt as if I'd been bludgeoned all my life before into being special . . . with 0-Ma and the Witnesses, everything seemed simple and good, like bread. She was the salt of the earth. I'd had Freud and dope and Radcliffe up to my ears. When I was hungry she gave me something to eat. When I cried, she gave me schnapps. The Witnesses at the first meeting I went to were so warm and friendly. I remember singing a song: “Come here all you thirsty ones, come and drink - life's water is free" . . . and I said oh, I'm so thirsty. I felt as if I'd found the fountain of living waters.

But the idyll was wormy. It was not so simple and good after all. Vera says:

I loved feeling like a real woman, not an intellectual machine. I gardened and cooked and sewed - all the things I'd never done In my aristocratic family, those were things servants had done. But pretty soon I understood that some of the Witnesses thought I was a prize - they used to point me out to people as an example of an educated, upper-class hippie who'd doped and slept around . . . they made me testify at conventions about my former life; and I felt I was being used. I used to wear long skirts, and they told me not to, it made me look as if I were still a hippie. But they wore nail polish - I thought that was silly and artificial. Still, my need was so great, I overlooked all their harangues. In the eight months I spent in Germany, I became a real Witness. I wrote to David that I could never sleep with him again, although I still loved him, because intercourse was sinful. David, who was living on skid row in New Orleans, wrote that if the Witnesses were thrown in prison and persecuted he'd feel he'd have to go with them, because if there's a choice between the victims and the victimizers, you have to choose the victims (he'd been reading Camus); but he also said that 1 was narrowing my definition of love so much he couldn't recognize me anymore - and he asked me, If God is good, why doesn't He love all victims, not just Jehovah's Witnesses? So I felt I had to choose between God and David, and of course I chose God. It was a terrible wrenching.

When Vera came back to New York, her parents wanted her to return to college; she wanted to become a missionary. They made a deal: "My father said he'd study the Bible with the Witnesses if I went to college. So I studied Russian at school. I had a fantasy that I'd go to Russia and help all the spiritually thirsty people there. And I fantasized about being thrown into prison camps. I loved the idea of going to prison, suffering for - maybe dying for - Jehovah."

While Vera was enjoying her persecution fantasies, she also derived pleasure from preaching in the poor, black part of town - to people whom she would otherwise never have known.

It really turned me on to go into the black part of town - think what my socialite mother would have said to that! I know there was an element of rebellion in what I was doing; but I did truly love feeling that I could be with different kinds of people and be accepted as an equal. I could go into a black house and feel that we could transcend our differences . . . there was a feeling of community; social reform and protest became irrelevant because you got this feeling that it had all happened already - that we were black and white and together and loved one another.

At the Witness assemblies, I felt just like everybody else, like part f a family. For me, the theological content of what the Witnesses had to say was never as important as that feeling I had when I taught at Bible studies that I was giving and receiving love. . . . That wonderful feeling that you can meet people and help them, provide them with easy answers to all their problems. I wanted to help. And I felt omnipotent. This is blasphemous: I felt like God; because I could say, "If only you believe in this, you'll be happy." I loved being special and different and inviting people to be special and different and happy like me; I've always felt unique. Preaching made me feel full.

While Vera was in this heightened state of consciousness, she met Andre', a French Jehovah's Witness whose Russian mother had been in a concentration camp in Germany. He seemed to be the fulfillment of her fantasies: they would marry, go to Russia together, and preach. But she describes him as a "paper person.”

I wanted a mating of souls. He wanted to quote Scriptures. He told me that all my efforts to "understand" him were "Devilish psychology" - and he told me that all the fairy tales I grew up with and loved (I used to read them to him in Russian) were "demonism." He wanted to quote Scriptures - and he had a huge erection all the while he was talking about "demonism." I started dreaming about David; and I started masturbating. I tried to convince myself that God had provided me with Andre, a perfect mate. But I'd masturbate and think of David and love David and know that God would take His spirit away from me because I was masturbating.

The guiltier I felt, the worse I behaved. I renewed a friendship with a nonbeliever, who was an actor: I was so jealous of that acting troupe - they had the freedom to do what they wanted, and I hadn't. But then I'd look at them and think, It's all ego and publicity, there is no pure art, there are no pure people. . . . But if I were pure, all things would be pure. And I was getting a lot of pressure from my local congregation elders to leave college and go into the full-time preaching work. . . . I went to see Andre in France - to marry him - and I felt as if I were falling down a deep well. He went, physically, as far as he could go without breaking the Watchtower rules - and I was sickened. There was no physical basis for our union, no spiritual basis, nothing but sloppy need - his; mine.

Out of all this conflict came Vera's decision to go back to the simplicity of the people who had converted her in Germany. She thought they would put her right, but:

That whole congregation - the congregation I had thought was so pure and simple and sweet and wise - had split apart over the issue of whether women should wear pants or not! The male elders said it would "stumble" worldlings if the Witness women wore pants; the women said it was too cold to preach in the mountains wearing dresses. They finally fixed on a compromise: If it went below a certain temperature, the women could wear pants, but never to meetings. . I remembered thinking that they had seemed like the fountain of life to me, and now .

Vera came back to America. David agreed to study the Bible with the Witnesses . . . and the inevitable upshot was that Vera and David went to bed together. Vera had by this time been celibate for three years.

Once I had sinned against Jehovah by sleeping with David - although in my heart I could never feel that my love for him, and my full expression of it, was a sin - my relationship with Him was broken. I couldn't pray anymore. Had there ever been a real connection between me and God? I felt totally abandoned. By God, by the Society - and of course my terrible fear was that David would abandon me too.

So after David and I got married, which we did almost immediately after we'd made love, I confessed to the elders. I was "put on public reproof." It was announced at the meeting in the Kingdom Hall that I'd committed fornication; and there was fifteen minutes of graphic description of what we'd done and how often we'd done it. I was, of course, humiliated. But relieved, too. I thought God's spirit would return to me.

What happened instead was that Vera's doubts about the Witnesses increased; and the Witnesses' coldness toward her increased. At the time I spoke with her, she still hadn't figured out which was cause and which was effect.

David is a totally honest person, and he stopped coming to meetings because, though he'd tried, he just couldn't believe. They were mean to him. An elder suggested that because he was an artist, and because both his father and then his stepfather had died when he was very young, he was "prone to homosexuality" and that he should overcompensate by being dominant in the home and doing manual labor. He said, Fuck that. And then I started to think about homosexuality. I realized that part of my attraction to the Witnesses was the opportunity it afforded me for intense relationships with other women. There is so much female bonding among the Witnesses, and in my opinion it's unconscious and unacknowledged homosexuality - not that I could ever have expressed that. If I said to them, "I like women's breasts" - and I do - they would probably deny ever having homosexual fantasies.

When David stopped coming to meetings, they asked me if he was "rebellious." They told me my appearance wasn't as "nice" and "clean" as it had been before I married David. They told me I was dirty. I told them that being married wasn't exactly the same as not being married, and that I loved David, and that he was good . . . but they obviously thought I was some kind of predator, a devourer of young boys; because once they talked to me about having evil sexual intentions because I gave a hippie boy a ride to a meeting in my car. They said it might give worldly people the wrong impression. . .

All that emphasis on outward appearances, the ridiculousness of their sexual preoccupations. . . . It became harder and harder for me to go to meetings. I became obsessive: Was innocence, I wondered, the lack of sexual appetite? How could that be? Why did Adam and Eve suffer a revulsion against their genitals the minute they broke God's law? Why did He give them that prohibition in the first place? It's like telling a kid not to put beans in his nose - of course he'll put beans in his nose the minute you tell him not to. . .

I began to lose something. I couldn't talk honestly to the Witnesses anymore. It was all just superficial jargon. . . . I couldn't preach. And I missed that terribly. I couldn't make my mouth say things I didn't fully believe-but I missed instructing people in Bible studies; I missed the exchange of closeness and love. That terrifying feeling that you're living a double life! . . . I realized I was getting so much more from the people I had been “instructing" than they were getting from me. I was getting love. I was instructing a woman from Haiti, a maid; I was practically her only friend. How she loved it when I told her that the bad people were going to get their lumps and someday she wouldn't be poor anymore. And she made me feel that it was all right that I'd been born rich because someday we'd all be equals.

I wanted to hold on to those feelings; but every time I went to a meeting, the Witnesses would give me the hairy eye. . . . They asked me if I practiced fellatio or cunnilingus with David. Why? What business was it of theirs? And at the last meeting I went to, an elder told me that Women's Libbers should be satisfied that God has lovingly provided for some women to be of the heavenly anointed class, and that that should make me rejoice in my submission to David. As if David had ever asked for submission. . . . They slander everybody! And it all began to feel empty.

But you see, how could I be sure that all my doubts weren't the result of God's taking His spirit away from me because I'd committed fornication? Or because I was ambitious? (They told me I was like Lucifer because I wanted to be an actress.) Or maybe it's because I'm a snob? I gave my grandmother a Watchtower publication in Russian, and she despised it because it was ungrammatical. I told her that Jesus and his disciples spoke the language of the uneducated masses; she said, Language is the wav we communicate, and if it is inexact and sloppy, then the thought is bound to be inexact and sloppy.

Well, I am a snob. If that means having standards. Why are their publications illiterate? Why are their meetings so leaden and dull and oppressive, so boring? . . . Is it wicked of me to want surprises?

I think a large part of my attraction to the Witnesses was that I had a terrible fear of success - or of failure, which is the same thing, I suppose. Once I became a Witness, I didn't have to go to Juilliard, I didn't have to become an actress, I didn't have to prove anything. Except that I was good. Or bad? I can't sort it out. I was idealistic. I was narcissistic, too. Did I choose God, or did He choose me? Did I leave Him or did He leave me? And why me? Why not David? I'm no better than David. And probably not very much worse. They can't answer any of my questions. . . .

Like, I've been thinking: What if Voltaire and Diderot came back to the New World? Wouldn't they hate it? A suburban paradise? . Do you know they don't even know who Solzhenitsyn and Doestoevsky are? And if they did, they wouldn't care. . . . And yet they have a sense of foreboding. They feel they're at the verge of the end, and maybe we are; maybe they're instinctually right. . .

I don't know if I can make a clean break. Sometimes I dream that I'll get back to being spiritually strong. And I'll find a congregation that won't be mean to me. (But they'd all be mean to me if I told them I loved Solzhenitsyn.) Sometimes I think God's spirit will come back. And then I think, But it'll be talking that horrible English they talk. . .

I've been told by them so many times that if I left "The Truth" I'd have no friends. But I've been with acting troupes and with people who are good and kind and helpful. How awful that I should be surprised by the fact that people are kind! I was really beginning to believe that the whole world was composed of monsters. It isn't really all that cold on the outside. . .

But suppose the error really is all in me. Suppose all my doubts are from Satan because I offended God and He took His spirit away from me. . .

Several months after I met Vera, I got this letter from her:

Dear Barbara,

I went to an assembly at Ozone Park to test my feelings. There was this black woman there with a little baby on her back and her baby- pack was slipping off and she was having a hard time with it, and I was trying to help her. And she immediately told me she was disfellowshipped, as if she were warning me off her, as if she were a leper, not clean, not good enough to talk to. And I felt, out of all the people there, she was the only one who was really my sister. . . . As you are my sister. . .

I will never go back again. I am trying to be good and happy. (Are they the same thing?) Love,

Vera

Vera is now acting, and working with Soviet dissidents, and researching a biography of one of her ancestors - and living happily with David. She has survived her experiences remarkably unscathed - although, as is the case with many ex-Witnesses, her longing for a "perfect brotherhood," a communion or community, will probably never leave her. Unlike many ex-Witnesses, she is not shopping for a new certainty; her experience has taught her to tolerate ambiguity - and to tolerate herself.

The world already bates us, but Jehovah God and Jesus Christ do not. - The Watchtower, Jan.15 1976

When Vera was a Witness, one of her fantasies was that she would be "persecuted" - die, perhaps, for Jehovah in a Russian prison camp.

I have never known a Witness who did not have a similar notion. (According to a recent Watchtower publication, one of Jehovah's Witnesses in an unspecified country named her baby "Persecution" - and one must believe that that mother thought she was blessing, not cursing, her infant.)

I remember how the hot exploration of evil poisoned my childhood; how Witness women sat around kitchen tables (those kitchens never seemed sunny) and spoke with lust of the evil in men's hearts of doctors who maimed, teachers who corrupted, public figures whose dishonor was disclosed.

When my mother went shopping or to a restaurant, she handled every thing that did not belong to her as if there were some hidden menace in it; she had repulsion and fear for everything she had not appropriated. Her look to all inanimate objects said, Stop; let whatever evil lies in you be obedient to my will. She touched skirts on hangers gingerly, with trepidation and fascination, as if they might leap off and enshroud her. Until she got them home. Then she cared for them so solicitously, as tenderly as if they were frail children who could have no independent existence without her. She fingered rolls in restaurants as if they were malignant objects that might attack or hiss at her or explode in her face. Then she conquered them, ate them up ravenously - and pronounced them good. Everything that was hers was good. Everything that was other - that existed apart from her - was bad. In order to love things, she had to make them her things.

The Witnesses have to make the world theirs. They love only what they appropriate.

One way to control the world is to formalize one's behavior in it. The Witnesses have the illusion of total control; they are instructed on what to do and how to feel on everything from grief to body odor to baseball statistics (an encyclopedic knowledge of the latter is criticized as "unbecoming passion") to music to fashion.

A common reason why some have B.O. is that they are wearing underwear in which they have sweated profusely. . . . Change underwear more often. . . . Some doctors believe that lack of personal cleanliness is the "common denominator" involved in the majority of B.O. problems. . . . If water is very limited, . . . a sponge bath can be taken. . . . One can get clean without using soap. [Aw, March 8, 1974, p.25, "Banishing B.O."]

True followers of Christ . . . evidence grief in their "hearts and not in their garments." . . . While we will deeply miss a deceased loved one, we should avoid feeling unduly sorry for ourselves. . . . The wonderful hope of the resurrection will prevent us from being overcome by sadness. . . . A Christian may indeed be sad. But he should not become hysterical and act as if everything were lost. Others should be able to see that he has a marvelous hope, a hope that truly strengthens him. The grief of true Christians should be balanced. Also, weeping that reflects disagreement with God's judgments or is contrary to his express commands would likewise be wrong. [Aw, Dec. 8,1974; March 22, 1976, pp.2628]

There may be something that appears to be allowed. . . . It may be some aspect of your dress or grooming, what decorations you put up in your home or what you do for recreation. But what if the con-science of many others around you leads them to feel that it is not fitting for a Christian? Does your Christianity move you to conclude happily, "If this makes my brother stumble, I will never do it"? Perhaps you have taken a liking to a certain modern fashion or mode of grooming. Your conscience is not disturbed by it. But as a minor or a married woman you must seek permission from your father or husband. Have you considered his conscience? [TW, April 1, 1975, p.219, "Are You Guided by a Sensitive Christian Conscience?"]

Classical music . . . generally has a dignified, sometimes majestic sound. But while much of it may have a rather noble effect on one’s thoughts, some of it deals with and even glorifies the sordid or selfish side of life Many famous classical composers lived immoral, even dissolute, lives. . . . It is almost unavoidable that some of their warped outlook and warped emotions would filter into their music, with or without words. So, if we want to guard the health of our minds and hearts, even so-called "serious" music cannot be taken too seriously or be accepted without question. [TW, May 15, 1974, p.303, "The Music You Choose"]

How can Christian men and women determine what to wear or not to wear? Naturally, they do not desire to stand out as being old-fashioned or out-of-style, but to go to the other extreme and let the old world lead one along completely in clothing and grooming styles would be to fall right into these alluring fad-traps of the Devil. When a sister bends over or tries to seat herself modestly on the platform, does she have difficulty because of her short dress? Do we mislead others into thinking that we have loose morals or have a proud, militant attitude? . . . Extreme hair styles can easily lead one into a trap of the Devil. [TW, Aug. 15, 1975, p. 500, "Do Not Let Yourself Be Ensnared by Fads and Entertainment"]

But while this kind of mechanistic approach gives Jehovah's Witnesses the illusion of control over their inner and outer environments, it is also conducive to restless and sometimes immobilizing guilt.

How much grief is "too much" grief?

How does one know when classical music reflects its composer’s warped outlook"?

How is one able to know when one's dress misleads others (which others?) into thinking "we have loose morals"?

How can we know when the decorations in our house are "stumbling" someone?

While everything is apparently centrally controlled and rigidly ordered, this effort to avoid the twin evils of flexibility and mystery causes Witnesses to fall victim to what Freud called "the narcissism of small distinctions." Because they have the answers to all the large questions, the Witnesses fret ceaselessly over nuances of behavior. (The Witnesses call this a search for "balance"):

A self-respecting person does not want a reputation for being a thief. . . . But, on the other extreme, he does not care to be known, perhaps even among his own Christian brothers, as a fanatic. Suppose a person is in a public phone booth; when he completes his call his coin . . . returns to him. Then what? . . . Balance is mandatory. [Aw, Dec. 8, 1974, pp.5-6, "The Appeal of Honesty"]

(It should be apparent by now that the Witnesses' "morality" pushes them in the safe direction of traditional American middle-class ideals; it upholds a strong, male-dominated nuclear family, honesty, conventional good manners, and an honest day's work.)

There are an endless number of Watchtower and Awake! articles dealing with the role of conscience in one's employment. Is it right for a Witness to work in a blood bank? No; not in a case

where everything was devoted to an end [the preparation of blood for transfusions] that [is] in violation of God's law. . . . [But] a Jew finding a carcass of an animal that died of itself could clear it away by selling it to a foreigner who was not under the Law's restrictions about animal flesh not drained of its blood. So the technician's conscience [might allow] him to run blood tests, including those of blood for transfusions to patients who did not care about God's law on blood. . . . But where does one "draw the line"? Here is where conscience comes into play. [TW, April 1, 1975, pp.215-16]

Larger ethical or moral questions remain unexplored, or are dismissed.

I remember this awful discussion: A young woman, a Witness, grieved because she'd allowed her sister, a nonbeliever, to be sent to an orphanage rather than care for her herself. The Witness woman had recently been married when the sisters were orphaned, and she felt that she did not want the responsibility for her younger sibling's care. Her sister hanged herself in the orphanage. Now L., the Witness, was seeking absolution from an elder for having deserted her sister. The elder said: "Your conscience need not trouble you. You must only question whether you are doing God's will in matters of worship - and the impression you create on nonbelievers. What happened to your sister had nothing to do with worship." When I said "L., everybody does terrible things, and everybody has to learn to live with them," the elder said, "L. has done nothing terrible; and she has not 'stumbled' anybody because nobody blames her for what happened. She is a good member of the congregation, and her field-service record has not been affected." This is what is called having a "balanced view."

The Witnesses have, or seek to have, a "balanced view" even about suicide. While (predictably) deploring a suicide committed "while in possession of one's mental faculties," because it "shows one to be void of morality, lacking faith, having no fear of God . . cowardly," The Watchtower, rhetorically asking, "What then should be the attitude of members of a Christian congregation as to attending funerals of reported suicides who may have been associated with the congregation?" requires Witnesses to answer these questions (as if the answers to them were as easy as the answer to how to stay clean when there isn't enough soap):

"Was there mental illness involved? Was the person in his right mind? Was he culpable or blameworthy?" If these questions cannot be satisfactorily answered, then "members of the congregation and elders may desire not to become involved in the funeral. . . . Arrangements would be left to the family itself for a private funeral where some member of the household might say a few words for the sake of the relatives. Furthermore, some may not desire to attend a funeral of one who is believed to have committed suicide." [TW, July 15,1975, p. 447~8]

It is hard to imagine a colder, more loveless way of dealing with the outcome (and the relatives) of despair. The despair is in fact not dealt with at all - it is buried with the dead, by the Witnesses' dead rules. (And yet, for anyone who is truly lovingly involved with God, or with man, for anyone who believes that God wishes man to be happy, the suicide, because he has despaired of the love of God and therefore threatened the peace of the believer as well as mortified God, must be not just the object of the most intense fascination, but the source of greatest anguish.)

This motif - the reduction of everything terrible and large in order to make the world manageable and comprehensible (which, because it can never be fully successful, turns back on itself to produce spasms of guilt in all of Jehovah's Witnesses0 - runs through everything the Watchtower Society publishes.

About dreams, for example, the Society, speaking as if Freud or Jung had never existed, says, "Natural dreams may be stimulated by certain thoughts or emotions, sensations or daily activities (anxiety, one's physical condition, his occupation, and so forth). These dreams are of no great significance." [Aid, p.465] "What about gaining insight into one's own personality? No human can provide that through interpretation of dreams, no matter how skillful the analyst." [Aw, Jan.22, 1975] But it isn't enough for the Watchtower Society to say that dreams are insignificant," thus closing off the most direct path to the believer's inner life. The Society attempts to manipulate the unconscious (implicitly recognizing that dreams are significant) in a way that can lead to the most excruciating guilt: "But what if you are troubled by repetition of the same type of unpleasant dreams, perhaps ones that contain allusions to sexual immorality, egotism, aggression or similar things. Remember the close relationship between recent events and dreams. The cause of your bad dreams may be in the things you practice and dwell on mentally from day to day. The solution to bad dreams may call for an adjustment in your routine of life, especially in what you regularly feed your mind." [Ibid.] The Witnesses are cut off from their own feelings, censoring not just data from the outside world, but their own revealing fantasies.

(Psychiatrists have reported that under the Nazis, dissident Germans frequently censored their own dreams - a self-protective device. They automatically awakened whenever anything in their dreams began to signal to them disobedience to, or vengeance toward, Hitler, the SS, or the Gestapo. Sometimes their startled awakening was triggered by the appearance, in their dreams, of a uniformed Nazi hovering over their beds demanding that they cease such "unnatural" dream activity. To what extent this censoring of their own assertiveness and this internalizing of authoritarian imperatives contributed to the national psychosis is an interesting question.)

Of course Jehovah's Witnesses consider psychology and all allied disciplines a threat to their own control over the minds of their followers. As an elder once told me, "Superiority and inferiority complexes are all the same words for self-centeredness." Retrospection and introspection are considered evil; and Witnesses are told to abjure the "unprofitable study of philosophy, sociology and similar professions" and to get instead "the mind of God." [Faith]

No literature that threatens their system of belief may be included in the Witnesses' Kingdom Hall libraries:

"Watchtower" and "Awake!," bound volumes from past years and older publications of the Society. . . . Encyclopedias, atlases, or books on grammar and history may be useful, but we do not recommend purchasing them.

It is not necessary to include books on health, genetics, politics, science. mathematics, etc. . . . It is inadvisable to have books on spiritism, mysticism, higher criticism, evolution or fiction. [Kingdom Ministry, 1972, p.4)

One must be constantly on guard. The Devil lurks in all the material zones of the world. One must, for example, abhor even the suggestion of "demonism" or witchcraft; one must even be vigilant about entertaining "strange talk" from fellow workers at one's secular place of employment. One may not accept gifts from "persons who practice some form of spiritism, astrology, who rely on charms.

In modern times many persons have been seriously harassed by the demons because of taking these things into their homes. . . . A middle-aged woman in New York suddenly suffered occasional seizures of paralysis. She would lie in bed stiff, rigid and cold. She was able to speak but was very despondent, wishing that she would die. She was visited by two of the elders of the congregation. They recognized it as a possible case of demon harassment, and questioned the woman closely as to whether she had any association with any person connected with spiritism. She recalled having worked alongside such a person in a factory, finally quitting her job to get away from this person's constant "predictions" and strange talk. . . . The spiritistic woman had given her a pair of gloves and a string of beads. These were then hunted out and thrown into the incinerator. Immediately the woman recovered fully and has not had such an attack since. [TW, Dec. 1, 1974, pp.715-16, "Is There Danger in Occult Charms?"]

The Watchtower concludes, from this bizarre account, that "one can see from this that [one] need not live in fear of the demons." But of course the result of all this misbegotten advice is to keep the Witnesses in constant fear of "demon harassment." Their demons are never exorcised.

But they believe - and this is surely the mark of the irreligious man (unless it's whistling past the graveyard) - that they deserve to be lucky. Watchtower publications are full of accounts of Witnesses who avoid disaster by adhering to simple Watchtower rules - like the Witness whose boss asked him to cancel plans to go to one of the Society's conventions:

Because he refused to give up his plans to go to the assembly, another person took his place [on a business trip, presumably], taking Eastern Airlines flight No.66 to New York. The plane crashed in its approach to Kennedy airport, killing practically everyone aboard. [Aw, Oct.22, 1975]

To struggle against evil and to reduce to a minimum even the ordinary physical evil which threatens us, is unquestionably the first act of our Father who is in heaven; it would be impossible to conceive him in any other way, and still more impossible to love him. . . . Providence . . . brood[s] across the ages over the world in ceaseless effort to spare that world its bitter wounds and to bind up its hurts. - Teilhard, p.84

The Witnesses do not say, "Teach us to care/and not to care": their prayer is "Teach us not to care, so as not to hurt." Not only does their conviction that the world is evil and unredeemable save them from the pain and trouble of analysis ("the Devil did it" is sufficient explanation for all worldly ills); it saves them from having to act in the world to change it (thus protecting themselves from the inevitable disappointments of men and women of action); and it pushes them to an extreme form of blaming the victim for his own victimization (if victims would only listen to their advice, they would no longer be victims).

While conceding that "Most people are not poor because they are lazy or refuse to work," the thrust of Watchtower rhetoric is that the poor are poor because they like it that way, so reduced are their sensibilities. (The Society is able to say, without irony, "It cannot be denied that some people would be better off if they worked harder.") The poor are poor, they say (confusing cause with effect) because they "gamble, use tobacco and narcotics"; 'They'll eat nothing but bread and onions all day, and will go into debt up to their ears in order to be able to boast ownership of a car.' . . . The poor, accustomed to living in slums, unless educated otherwise, will often make even a new home a slum." ~ Feb. 1, 1975, p.69, "Growing Poverty, a Threat to All")

Self-help, and "getting the mind of the Lord" are suggested to ameliorate all problems, from mental illness to muggings. (The similarity between Witness teachings and such fad therapies as est is interesting: both the new therapies and Jehovah's Witnesses extend the overt message that one is entirely responsible for and in control of one's life, while promulgating the covert message that salvation from life's ills comes from a group-network support and that the group must be sustained by the will and imperatives of a central authority figure - in the case of est, Werner Erhard; in the case of the Witnesses, "the Society." Where one says, Get the mind of Werner, the other says, Get the mind of the Watchtower Society.)

This is called “getting the mind of God":

Since excessive stress is frequently a [primary] factor in mental illness, do all that you can to remove or diminish the source of the stress that may be causing the problem. . . . Resolve the indecision, or else do all you can to put the matter out of your mind. . . . Basically, the mentally ill person needs help in getting control of his thinking. [Aw, April 22, 19~5, p.15]

The suggestion that mental health is a matter of willpower and of reading The Watchtower and Awake! does not strike the Witnesses as exaggerated.

Victims themselves often provoke crimes. . . . The self-control that can protect you from such violence is a product of God's spirit, available to those who apply Bible counsel. [Aw, Nov. 22, 1975, p. 12, "How Can You Protect Yourself?"]

("Blaming the victim," according to psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, is one of the techniques applied by all authoritarian groups who attempt to change hearts and minds through "coercive persuasion.")

Blaming the victim leads the Watchtower Society inevitably - though it claims to be apolitical - to a position of social and political conservatism.

People on welfare are advised, in effect, to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps; drug addicts and alcoholics need only heed the Society's advice in order to kick their habits. (A methadone user "would certainly not be encouraged to go from house to house on his own or to represent himself at the homes as one of Jehovah's witnesses. Neither would a field service report be accepted from such a one. . . . The deciding factor is whether their accompanying us in our field ministry will be cause for stumbling [giving a bad impression to nonbelievers] or not." [KM, April, 1973] Methadone users are denied baptism.)

The Witnesses' position on all social issues is certainly somewhere to the right of Ayn Rand: Awake! magazine, for example [Jan 8, 1976] deplores the "money-giveaways" to big cities which "transfer the strain to the entire nation": "The remedy for big-city troubles is not more money and giveaway programs." (No political or economic analyses accompany this rhetoric, nor does it occur to the Watchtower Society that it places itself firmly in the corner of big-money interests when it remarks blandly, "owners abandon thousands of [urban] dwelling units due to high taxes." [op. cit.] The effect on the displaced poor whose lives may be brutalized by derelict landlords is glossed over. The wretched are dismissed as "selfish, thoughtless people [who] reduce fine housing projects to something resembling ghettoes and slums." [TW, Apr. 15, 1976]

Extolling the virtues of whatever is pastoral over whatever is civilized is not uncommon among the superficially religious; cities are, after all, where art as well as vice happens. Part of the Witnesses' animus toward the urban poor springs from an intense hatred for cities. Everything agrarian is good, godly, and clean, and "natural." Cities are “unnatural"; they are synonymous with sin, dirt, and evil. Cities represent man's achievements, flying in the face of the God who tore down the Tower of Babel.

In the book Children, written by "Judge" Rutherford in 1941, a kind of country romance in which protagonists named John and Eunice vow to serve Jehovah together in a sexless idyll, at work in the fields of the Lord where "the air [is] filled with sweet perfume from the numerous wild roses. . . the sun [shines] brightly, and the songbirds [sing] to the glory of the Creator," John expresses his (and Rutherford's) hatred of big cities:

The cities have no real attraction for me. What is generally called society appears to me to be entirely empty and means nothing. As to politics, that has become so involved that an honest man must shun it. The fact is, 1 love these broad fields and the things they contain. The great Creator put them here. They are the handiwork of the Almighty. . . . Here we breathe the pure air, eat pure food, indulge in purity of speech, and our friends are sincere. . . I should be loath to leave. . . what think you, my childhood companion? [Children, pp.13-16]

Jehovah's paradisaical New World will not accommodate skyscrapers. Watchtower illustrations of the New World run to ranch houses and barbecues - or a kind of theocratized Our Town: "God's viewpoint" demanded that "the nation of Israel had provisions that were not encouraging to big- city living." (Never mind that the Jews were a nomadic tribe.) "A more agricultural way of life will no doubt predominate over the soon-to-be realized 'new earth.' "[Aw, Jan. 8, 1976]

Cooped up in cramped apartments and narrow city streets, children, too, suffer. They lose much of the joy of openness, discovery, and interacting with nature found in more rural environments. Destroying, crushing and breaking things are often the way they satisfy the need for excitement and experience. The consequent vandalism and graffiti bring further deterioration to the cities, and more seeds of crime are planted. [Op. cit.]

In describing the problems (but never the joys) of the cities, the Watchtower Society, which charges the poor in underdeveloped countries with living in shantytowns "of their own making" [italics mine], again places the blame on the victim:

The growth of black and other ethnic communities in American cities has created intractable housing problems. Deep-rooted prejudices and fears sped the exodus of whites to the suburbs, creating another big-city problem: defacto segregation. [Ibid.]

An ingrained conservatism which proceeds from the Witnesses' view of evil extends to hunger and food shortages too. One reality of life the Watchtower Society finds it convenient to ignore is agribusiness. It perpetuates the myth of the small farmer who has "difficulty in hiring honest and dependable labor. . . 'Many farmers feel that their occupation brings them close to God.' . . . But they detest the oppressive worldwide system that will work honest men - farmers, packers, sellers, shippers, distributors - day and night, give them minimum returns for their labors and then some- how never get the food to the people that really need it." [Aw, June 22, 19.5, pp. 10, 13]

The “oppressive worldwide system" is never identified; only one villain needs to be - the Devil. Class analysis has no place in Watchtower rhetoric. Given a choice between what the Watchtower Society terms "international communism" and “capitalistic democracy," the Witnesses choose the latter: "[Communism] is for the regimentation, the complete regulation, of the people in their private and public affairs. . . . The other side ["capitalist democracy"] allows for a measure of liberty in the personal lives and pursuits of the citizens." [TW, Nov. 1, 1975, ~: 652]

The Society, protesting that it is "not of this world," makes oblique political statements. Awake!, February 8, 1975: "Africa! What is the first thing that comes into your mind when you read that word?" The first thing that pops into the mind of the Awake! correspondent in Rhodesia is wild flowers: "A Bouquet for Every Day.”

As they fear chaos and mystery and love patterns, hate what is random or accidental, desire stability, insist upon a safety that "the demons" cannot violate, the Witnesses support law-and-order; they support capital punishment: "The Supreme Law-Giver . . . authorized the exercise of human authority in executing murderers." What if there is a mistake? "Occasionally. human authorities have executed persons unjustly." But the blood is not their hands: "Jehovah is not responsible for travesties of justice that result in death by execution, for he is just. . . . Capital punishment for deliberate murder was part of divine law that applies to all mankind." [Aw, July 22, 1974, pp.27-28, "Capital Punishment-Is It God's Law?"]

(Think of Teilhard: "Religion which is judged to be inferior to our human ideal . . . is already condemned.")

An increase in crime is attributed to "this modern, permissive attitude, where anything goes," and to an "anti-police attitude"; critics speak inappropriately when they "censure police for using their guns too quickly and for unnecessary use of force." [Aw, Nov.22, 1975, p.7] One might guess that as the "hunted and persecuted," the Witnesses would have sympathy for other victims; but it doesn't follow:

People in these areas [Bedford-Stuyvesant and Brownsville] become hardened, too. In [one] case, the husband had killed his wife. They had twelve children, and as the investigation was going on, a number of them were playing tag around the house, as though nothing had happened! [Op. cit., p.7]

And yet, in spite of their determination to blame the victims, the Witnesses' appeal to victims, to the marginal, the exploited, the disenfranchised, is inestimable. Millennarian movements, sociologists say, do not appeal to those who are integrated into cohesive existing frameworks. They burgeon in times of social disorder and cultural conflict when social controls are eroded, when the center does not hold - among those who feel them- selves to be aliens and outsiders. (I often think that if my mother had been a rich Florentine and not a poor Abruzzese, I'd never have been one of Jehovah's Witnesses.) What Nathan Adler says of people who are "in retreat from rationality" - "a generation of university students [who give] credence to astrology, the I Ching, the folklore of extrasensory perceptions, flying saucers, space people" - might be relevant here:

We live in a time that permits the psychotics' fanciful vision of world destruction to coincide with the actuality of atomic brinksmanship, a time in which the apocalyptic vision finds reinforcement in the sudden recognition that we do in fact live within a limited biosphere, a sha1low, fragile, delicately balanced ecological system that supports the only kind of life we can have. ["Ritual, Release and Orientation," Z &L ; seepage 286]

In 1940, after the Great Depression, the Catholic magazine America - calling attention to the fact that many Witnesses came from "the poorer classes of Southern farm tenants; . . . from the Okies who, dejected and rejected, wander about hopelessly; from the ignorant, superstitious, and illiterate of the city slums" - remarked astutely that Pastor Russell and "Judge" Rutherford "answered the anguish" of the chronically unemployed and victims of social injustice.

We are again living in a time of social dislocation and distress; it is no accident that blacks are now turning to the Witnesses in enormous numbers.

The sect churches provide immediate gains in terms of social cohesion and support, a social outlet for repressed emotions, and a belief system that justifies God's ways to men. . . . The ideologies of these sects tend to promote the values of the culture at large, and consequently the sects are actually a socializing medium for converting lower-class values to dominant middle-class values . . . a social mechanism for integrating a subculture into the culture at large. Sometimes explicitly and almost always implicitly these groups support the existing social structure. Rituals are clearly used in many of the churches to uplift daily life and to return the individual to his occupation. . . . They socialize people back into mainstream society. - E. Mansell Pattison [Z&L; p. 442, p. xxvi (Introduction)]

Jehovah's Witnesses are uniquely successful at changing the life-styles of converts.

Think what it must mean to be poor, black, and uneducated and to read and believe that "The wise men of this world are highly intelligent but they cannot understand the good news. . . Let them know that you are . . . an instrument to bring things to their attention." [TW, June 1, 1974]

Fired by the conviction that their status derives not from their "secular work' (a janitor may be a congregational elder) or from their standing in the blind eyes of the world, but from their relationship to God and the Watchtower Society, Witnesses - including former convicts, addicts, and criminals - change their lives in matters big and small. Watchtower publications are full of testimonials, all no doubt true, of formerly "marginal" people who have begun to exercise middle-class virtues. ('The home that had been very dirty and disorderly was now neat and clean. The children were dressed presentably." [Aw, Oct. 8, 1975, p. 19, "Proof in the Lives of People"]

Jehovah's Witnesses are all desirable employees. A Witness has "a desire to perform work that excels in quality. He tries to be a cooperative, helpful and honest employee [and, while he pays union dues, he doesn't join union protests]. Working hours are used to the best advantage without needless waste of time or materials. He strives to earn a reputation for being reliable and true to his word." [TW, May 15, 1975]

Get sufficient sleep so that you are rested, alert and friendly when appearing for an interview. Your clothing, too, is important. It should be neat and clean. A conservative style of dress is usually best, rather than one that may detract in some way. Be confident, yet, at the same time, avoid a superior know-it-all attitude. . . . Do not look down or mumble, and do not chew gum. . . Be courteous and cooperative at all times. [Aw, May 8, 1975, p.15, "Are You Looking for a Job?"]

Work in the world is viewed not as an inward renewal, but as a means to purchase time in which to serve God in prescribed fashion. Man's secular work enhances neither man nor God; the Witnesses lack what Teilhard called "faith in the heavenly value of human endeavor," "the loveable duty of growth." It does not occur to them that one's natural talents can bear fruit that will praise God and serve man. This enforced separation of the secular from the narrowly "religious" - the failure to see that there is an interrelation between matter (or labor, art) and soul and God - is of a piece with their theology; it comes from the same mind-set that separates the Godhead into three separate entities, Father, lesser son, and (impersonal) Holy Spirit. There is, in the Witnesses, a proclivity to fragment which leads, perhaps, to the lack of integration in their own personalities. And it also follows, from their view of work as an essentially meaningless means to a religious end (rather than as a collaboration with God to perfect the world), that business is much to be preferred to art as a means of making money: Art is a personal (and therefore a suspect) statement. One of Jehovah's Witnesses may be a storm-window-manufacturer millionaire and not be despised by his peers; if, on the other hand, he were to have a painting at the Whitney, he would immediately become the object of derision. Witnesses give up promising careers in the arts, and are given group recognition for so doing. Creative work has one's personal signature; it is far better to labor anonymously, without credit, in entrepreneurial fields. Only God may have a name: Jehovah. For an individual to have a "name” is seen as a diminishment of God.

There is a strongly Calvinistic flavor to Watchtower advice, which reinforces middle-class values: Honesty is good because honesty "pays": Jehovah's Witnesses don't steal, and as a consequence they are offered managerial jobs; living in accordance with Bible principles brings material reward. . . But for those who do not manage to achieve material reward, in spite of "living by Bible principles," the Watchtower Society's attitude toward work exerts this appeal: It minimizes the effect of economic hardship and deprivation. It gives people with menial jobs compensatory status - one does not have to rely on one's work for ego gratification. And it gives the Witnesses the feeling that they are all in this together.

Here is some advice to the unemployed, written during a recession:

If you are looking for a job, an adjustment in mental attitude toward employment may be what is needed. . . . You may need only to adjust your thinking.

Work that you might do could range from picking up garbage to grooming poodles. You may need to readjust your thinking somewhat to collect garbage. But, then, someone has to do this work. . . . Janitorial work . . . gives individuals considerable free time, and some full-time preachers of the Kingdom message find it desirable for that reason. . . . Domestic work [leaves time] for spiritual interests. Women . . . might take in washing and ironing, do mending or clothing alterations . . . raise rabbits, chinchillas or chickens. [Aw, Aug. 22, 1975, pp.9-11, "Making a Job for Yourself"]

Advice is designed to help the Witnesses maintain optimism and hope in times of distress - without their ever having to address themselves directly to the sources of distress:

True, times are difficult. But there is sound reason for optimism, even should unemployment grow much worse. For these critical times are evidence that soon now God will wipe out this unjust system and usher in his righteous new one. This hope can sustain us. [Aw, May 8, 1975, p. 15]

And one of the effects of all this advice is to mystify the sources of temporal power.

We don't spearhead anything. We're not reformers. When the door opened for colored and white brothers to meet together, we took advantage of it. We didn't sit- in, we didn't protest, we didn't march. We didn't push. We don't push. We practiced strict segregation when local law dictated it. We give to Caesar what belongs to him.-Fountain Van Shriver

Fountain Van Shriver, a 50-year-old New York City subway worker who is a congregational elder in Harlem, spent most of his life in Georgia, under circumstances calculated, one would think, to leave any black man with a bitter residue of anger. At the Watchtower convention at Aqueduct Race Track at which I met Van Shriver, black Witnesses outnumbered white Witnesses by roughly 3 to 1. (It was estimated in the early 1960s [Lee Cooper, Z&L] that 20 to 30 percent of all Jehovah's Witnesses in the United States were black. If these estimates are correct, there are almost twice as many blacks among Witnesses as among the general population.) At Aqueduct, white and black Witnesses were baptized together and were together generally in a way that seemed genuinely easy and friendly. But it interested me that there were no black administrators managing the Witnesses' affairs at Aqueduct. (It interested the Witnesses not at all.) Every convention official I spoke with was white, male, and middle-aged. Young black men, who might reasonably have been expected to deplore, or at least to question, this state of affairs, smilingly assured me that they were "confident Jehovah [had) picked the right men. Convention overseers are usually chosen because they are of the 'heavenly class' who will reign with Christ, overseeing matters here on the cleansed earth."

"Is everybody in heaven going to be white, then?" I asked.

I was accused of racism: "You're seeing discrimination where none exists. Satan comes in all colors and sizes and shapes - and sexes.

Black liberation?

"We are like Jesus. We remain neutral in the struggles of this world. God will take care of that. All of Jehovah's servants are like flowers in His sight - different colors and shapes, but equal, and beautiful."

Black Witnesses reject strenuously the notion that, their leadership being white, their religion is racist. No voices are heard in protest. So great are the satisfactions they derive from being of the Chosen, it would do little good to remind them of Pastor Russell's implicit racism. In 1904, Russell wrote that

The interests of the New Creation will, we believe, be generally conserved by the preservation of a measure of separation in the flesh, because the ideals, tastes, appetites, dispositions, etc., of one race necessarily are more or less in conflict with the ideals, etc., of another; hence the several races of humanity will probably find their spiritual interests as New Creatures best conserved by a measure of separate- ness. [SS, Vol. VI]

When I was at Bethel headquarters in the 1950s, there were only, as I recall two (male) black Witnesses working there - both at menial tasks. The explanation given for this disproportionately low number of black Wit nesses was that it might "stumble" - that is, distress, or give a bad impression t - the Witnesses' Brooklyn Heights neighbors, who were presumed not to want Negroes in their moneyed midst. In the late 1960s, when not to be overtly racist became chic (the Heights is a liberal neighborhood), the Watchtower Society pragmatically admitted many more blacks to its headquarters staff.

In any case, black Witnesses are likely to give offense only to the most obdurate racist. They, as they are fond of pointing out, stay out of trouble.

That was clear at the convention at Aqueduct.

Beatific is not a word I thought I'd ever use to describe the countenance of a police officer; but the cops - two black, two white - who sat in the command post at the entrance to Aqueduct when Jehovah's Witnesses convened there were as close to being blissed out as makes no matter. ("Man, the next time one of them comes to my door on a Sunday morning, I'm going to listen to what they say, let me tell you.") They weren't wearing their hard-work, dirty-work faces. They looked the way cops look in kindergarten

primers - relaxed, unguarded, smiling protectors of the good, the helpless, the maimed, and the true. They were loving their assignment; there was little for them to do. One white officer ventured two minor criticisms - "The women's skirts are longer than what people usually wear, and some of them ain’t such hot drivers. I guess they got their minds on higher things - but he added, fervently and ebulliently, "These are good people. Ever see such respectful coloreds?" That encomium came immediately after a 14-year-old black Witness popped his head in the door to ask a question: “Please Mr. Policeman, Officer, Sir," he began. They drank it up, an offering sweeter than milk and honey. Those are words that could make a cop forget Serpico.

“Do you expect any trouble here?" I asked.

“'Not unless you start it," the officer answered. "Jehovah's Witnesses don't make trouble."

When, at that convention, I came upon two black Witnesses who did not fit the standard mold (they were dressed vividly and, not having forgotten street language, they talked vividly, too, and their loose-limbed bodies made the other Witnesses look like stick figures), it became apparent immediately that we were under surveillance. Within minutes, eight or ten standard-product black Witnesses converged upon us and tried to put a wedge between me and "these two young men who are like two immature babies speaking on their own authority. [The two young man had confessed it was "hard as shit, man, to be a Witness . . . you gotta be good all the time."] They haven't dedicated their lives. Why are you talking to them? What you should do is tape the speeches at the convention - and then you won't ever have to talk to anyone.

It had, in fact, amazed me (but not the Witnesses, apparently) that at an earlier convention in Yankee Stadium, in the Witnesses' "demonstrations" (skits) white Witnesses role-played middle-class businessmen, while young black Witnesses role-played street kids who smoked what they anachronistically referred to as "reefers."

Sociologist Lee R. Cooper (Z&L) found himself perplexed by similar questions:

Why are urban Negroes attracted to this millennial and authoritarian religious movement dominated by white American leadership? More specifically at the local community level, what do the Jehovah's Witnesses offer as a total life style for today's ghetto dweller that makes this sect movement attractive to growing numbers of Negroes? [See "Publish or Perish: Negro Jehovah's Witness Adaptation in the Ghetto," p.700]

After spending eight months with a congregation of black Witnesses in a North Philadelphia ghetto, he concluded that

An analysis of Negro Jehovah's Witnesses as they interact in a hostile environment, including ghetto society and unsympathethic audiences of non-Witnesses, shows that their own shared definitions of reality and patterns of daily living, revealed in a "contract" of obligations and rewards, constitute a functionally adaptive way of life for certain segments of Negroes living in U.S. urban ghettos. [Ibid., p. 701]

(Cooper had his work cut out for him: "What I did not understand until well into my study, when I thought some basis for friendship and trust had been established," he says, "was that my very presence as a social scientist constituted a spiritual and social threat to the families who opened their doors to me. The Society forbids any fellowship with outsiders that is not in the context of winning that person to become a Witness; if a 'publisher' persists in an 'outside' friendship, he is excommunicated from the Society. This restriction . . . meant that I was not able to be with them informally as much as I would have preferred and that conversations almost invariably returned to what I thought about 'the Truth.'")

These are some of the satisfactions and rewards Cooper lists as accruing to black Witnesses:

The individual Witness believes that within his lifetime he and his family will live in the new earthly kingdom of Jehovah You know" [one black Witness said], "I just can't wait to live with my family in that peace of Jehovah's Kingdom after the battle of Armageddon. Everything'll be so wonderful."

Each Witness . . . proves his membership in Jehovah's elect by his good works for the Society, activities which are tangible and weekly reminders that you belong to the one select group of people worth belonging to.

In their own congregational life Witnesses form a genuine community of trust and acceptance. The small in-group feeling . . . is facilitated by the Society rule that no local congregation can grow beyond 150 members; when that figure is reached the congregation splits into two new groups. Such a practice means that it is always possible to group members by name.

Self-identity and respect . . . they are convinced they are Jehovah’s chosen people. One is no longer identified as Bill Green, warehouse clerk or shoe salesman, lower middle or lower class, Negro. As a “publisher,” he is Brother Green, . . . one of Jehovah's elect. It is an identity impervious to outside opinion. . . . Brother Green gains a sense of purity and superiority, factors of importance to an American Negro seeking . . . a new image of self-esteem to overwhelm feelings of self-hatred.

[Being a Witness] reinforces mainstream aspirations for a strong nuclear family headed by the male. In a conversation about the Witnesses' model for marriage a wife confirmed her description of his role as head of the family: "What's okay with him is okay with me; he makes the decisions in this family." . . . The Witnesses offer an alter- native by giving the man the household leadership. The male Witness' status, then, comes from his membership in the New World Society and from his unquestioned position as family head. [Ibid., pp. 709, 715, 718]

(It is interesting that Cooper does not analyze the appeal for female black Witnesses.)

The alternative way of life offered by the Witnesses . . . minimizes the hardship of living on a low income. . . They are reminded that they do not depend upon new cars, expensive clothes, or lavish living for their status. At the same time a Witness is to give a just day's work to his employer, be scrupulously honest, and not engage in union activities, though he may pay dues. Such traits make even a man without many skills a useful employee, and some Witnesses in North Philadelphia have moved up to positions of considerable job responsibility.

Negro Witnesses can ignore the low status that mainstream America accords many of their jobs because they belong to an exclusive subcultural group that confers its own identity and status. [Ibid., pp. 719 - 20]

The Jehovah's Witness life style is an adaptive strategy to cope with the racial prejudice experienced by American blacks. . . . By selectively withdrawing from both mainstream and ghetto culture into the movement of the Jehovah's Witnesses [they] have found psychic protection. As Negroes they are no longer dominated by the frustrating American socio-political scene. Now they are citizens of the one Society that assures them of an impending future earthly paradise, members of an international and interracial community. Racism does not exist in the New World Society, or if it does it is not recognized. . Racial injustices experienced in the secular world are reinterpreted as signs that point to the approaching end of this present evil system. [1bid., p.720]

Cooper concludes that

[While] outsiders may object that Negro Witnesses pay a heavy price for such a way of life for in adopting it they lose most of any black cultural distinctiveness, . . as long as the societal structures and cultural values of the United States make the black man a marginal man, the Jehovah's Witnesses offer him an alternative life strategy that gives its adherents a way to find identity and self-respect, a community of acceptance, and hope for the future. [Ibid., p.721]

An account by a black Witness [TW, Dec. 1, 1974] illuminates blacks gain, and also what they lose, by becoming Jehovah's Witnesses.

The young man who writes this (anonymous) account was the child of sharecroppers. His story (up to the time he became a Witness) might, with minor variations, be the story of thousands of angry black men: "Why, I asked myself, did whites want to keep us down? What was wrong with being black?”

Threatened with lynching because he'd held a gun to the head of his landowner for his refusal to take a sick black child to a hospital, the young man’s father fled to New York, where eventually his son joined him. The North - with the opportunity it provided him to study "singing, ballet, journalism, . . . nursing and . . . modeling," and to go to college and become a recording artist, working at one time with Paul Simon" - seemed, for a time, like heaven. "In time," however, he realized "that I was a victim . . . of self-deception. I was unrealistic to think that perhaps the color of one’s skin did not matter. It was a lie that racism existed only in the South; it was bad, too, in the North, only neatly camouflaged."

His response to this delayed understanding - and to the deaths of Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman - was to work for CORE and for SNCC. Another illusion crumbled when Martin Luther King was murdered. "I had to ask myself, . . . 'What did the non-violence he advocated accomplish?' Then a personal tragedy: His father was brutally murdered. "I refused to cry. Instead, in my heart I made a vow. I was going to do something about the injustices I saw my people suffering."

So far, clearly, this young black man has feelings, but no ideology. He is completely unarmored.

He joins the Panthers. "By then I agreed with their ideology that it was time for blacks to arm themselves." In 1970, he joins a group of "radicals" (he doesn’t say which group) to go to Cuba "for advanced training in revolutionary tactics. My goal was to initiate armed insurrection against the American system." By the end of his stay in Cuba, where, he says, he worked side by side with hard-core Communist fighters from Vietnam, Africa, Korea, and Russia," he is "willing to fight and die to bring about the liberation of black people."

He is asked by "a revolutionary group" to "subvert the military, to use any means necessary” to find and bring over to the revolutionary side black military men who had technical skills that could be used."

(So far, what is remarkable, it seems to me, about this story is its studied absence of specificity: no names of individuals or groups or comrades are mentioned, nor is the author's own. What is also remarkable is the kind of unfocused quality of his life: he still has no developed ideology; he has only a history of pain around which to center. He is ripe for a religious withdrawal from worldly defeat.)

And disillusion piles upon disillusion (in all of which self-loathing plays its wormy part): "Soon . . . I became totally repelled by the way I was using myself. . . . The revolutionaries I knew did not live up to the moral idealism I had come to expect of the liberation movement. They became grossly promiscuous. One night, after a comrade had relations with his woman companion, he turned to me. I saw this . . . as revolting."

It is at this point in his life - when he has made the mistake of confusing the justice of a cause with the behavior of its adherents - that one of Jehovah's Witnesses knocks at his door. (It is also at this point in his account that it becomes clear that the past no longer has any reality or meaning to him - except to prove a point.)

His immediate capitulation to the simplicities the Witness offers can be explained only in terms of his weariness (how many black militants were not weary in 1970?), his ardent desire to achieve an eschatological finality. He is tired of having to renew the struggle every day; he reminds himself that even in socialist countries, people "still get sick, grow old, and die. Human rulers are unable to prevent this."

And so, when the Witness reads rhetorical questions to him from a Watchtower publication - "Do you want to live in peace and happiness? Do vou desire good health and long life for yourself and your loved ones? Why is the world so filled with trouble? What does it all mean? Is there any sound reason to believe that things will get better in our lifetime?" - he says, with the innocent rapacity of a dying man who has been offered a quick pill cure for cancer, 'I had never seen a book with such thought- provoking questions."

He is ”staggered" to learn that "God does not like these governments either. And he is going to destroy them!" He then begins seriously to "consider the idea of God as having a heavenly government with earthly subjects. Could it be possible that these Witnesses are earthly subjects of God's government? And when God crushes all earthly governments to pieces, are these the people He will preserve to start a new earthly society?"

He learns that the Witnesses, as is he himself, are willing to die for their convictions: and he is convinced that the Watchtower Society, unlike charismatic ghetto churches, is not venal, not "milking people of their money and blinding them to the source of oppression.

He is won over. He will become part of the elect-and withdraw from the struggle. Everything that was difficult has become simple: The Devil is the source of all oppression; Jehovah will soon destroy the Devil and all worldly governments; Jehovah's Witnesses are His people.

He has found a teleological explanation, and a community, a completely unambiguous solution to everything in his life that oppressed him:

"I am not saying that Jehovah's witnesses are perfect," he writes.

At times I detect among certain ones of them leftover attitudes of racial superiority, and I have sometimes seen a certain uncomfortableness of some of them when in close association with persons of another race. But really, what can you expect after centuries of this world’s carefully indoctrinated hatred? . . . However, because they line by the constitution of God's government, Jehovah's witnesses ha'-e, to a degree unmatched by any other people on earth, rid themselves of racial prejudice. They do strive to love one another regardless of race. . . On occasion my heart has been warmed to the point of uncontrollable tears to experience the genuine love of white Witnesses, people whom shortly before I would have killed without hesitation to further the cause of a revolution.

It can't be underestimated, the appeal of this community. The appeal, and the need to belong, are so great it makes it impossible for black Witnesses to question the monolithically white nature of their leadership; it allows them to defend the fact that Jehovah's Witnesses were among the last of all religious groups to be integrated in the South. They waited until integration became law; they did not question the segregation laws that had kept them apart until then, nor did they protest them in the name of God. When nuns and priests and ministers and students marched to protest against what the Watchtower Society believed was Caesar's business, the Society called them "crazed mobs."

The need to belong to a community, and the appeal, to weary souls, of final solutions, lead otherwise rational people to take leave of their (vexing) senses.

I have a young black friend who, raised as a Witness in the South Bronx, left the Society when she was 22, when the world and its opportunities (and its sorrows) opened up for her. What had catapulted her out of the Society was her work in a drug-rehabilitation center (work the Society frowned upon), her deep involvement with hard-core addicts, and her feeling that the Watchtower Society was irrelevant to these lives. She could not make herself stop loving and caring for addicts who did not respond to "Scriptural” treatment and Watchtower self-help advice. For several years she led a busy and purposeful, sensual, exploring life. Then she was offered a scholarship to a small Northeastern college. After six months at school - having confronted not just racism, but the reality of class privilege (she was no happier among rich blacks than among rich whites), and having felt herself to be exploited by sexually demanding men, who asked her to violate her own conventional nature in the name of "liberation" - she was ready to become a Witness again. "How can you?" I asked. "You know you don’t believe it." "I don't believe it," she said, "but what else is there? I can’t stand the way nobody seems to care about anybody else at college, I can’t stand all the screwing around; and I want to be anchored again." wi know the Witnesses are really racist and sexist," I said; "what will you do about that?" "Everybody's racist and sexist," she said tearfully. "What I’ll do about it is overlook it - and throw myself so hard into Witness activities I’ll numb myself to it. . . . I want to be with people who all want the same thing and don't make me feel like a freak." "Do you think you'll be able to blunt your sexuality and numb your intelligence?" "My sexuality and my intelligence haven't gotten me much." "You won't be able to be my friend anymore; you'll have to think of me as evil. That makes me very sad. Doesn't it make you sad?" "Life is terrible," she said; "when I believed in the New World, I could stand it." (Six months later, again involved in a drug-rehabilitation program, and having found compatible people at school, she put her passing desire to rejoin the Witnesses down to a bout of mononucleosis - and guilt over a one-night stand.)

The former revolutionary who chose the simplicities and certainties and the community that my friend (not without a certain amount of sadness) put behind her concludes his account by saying that now "no government official need ever fear trouble at my hand."

He has a point.

Jehovah's Witnesses reject the idea that Christ's was a social gospel (even as they reject the idea that God died for man; they offer neither ecstatic union with God nor social reform on behalf of their brothers). Heaping disdain upon Vatican II, they charge the Catholic hierarchy with being the “darling of the wealthy classes" - and of "promoting Communism" by supporting revolutionaries and political activists. The Witnesses think that the Church is damned in either case, whether it consorts with kings or with beggars. They criticize not apartheid in South Africa, but clergymen who speak out against it, charging them with being derelict in their duty to be "not of this world." All this follows logically from a view of the world as evil. Protest is rendered irrelevant when it is accepted that "vicious spirit creatures are exploiting the sinful inclinations of imperfect humans who ignore God’s law. What other reasons could there be for the horrors of the past and of those of the 20th century?" That there might be political or economic reasons does not occur to them, nor does it occur to them that man can help God do His work by bearing witness against evil:

Sometimes social, racial and religious barriers and prejudices result in hardship and oppression for many. They often make the Christian race for life much more difficult. The tendency is to speak out, to fight back, to take things into one's own hands, to demand justice. . . There is a need to maintain neutrality and avoid getting involved in the affairs of this world. Rest assured that Jehovah will settle accounts for any wrongs committed. “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, says Jehovah." [TW, Aug. 15,1975]

I'll never forget the camaraderie that existed among Witnesses traveling to conventions. It was like a frontier spirit we had. I remember in '41 we drove in a caravan to a convention in St. Louis, and as we drove along, more and more cars with Watchtower posters would join us, and we'd sing . . . it really felt like making a joyful noise unto the Lord. . . . You have to remember that we were a small group then, in lots of trouble with the law; and that all-alone-in-the-cold-world feeling intensified our joy. We knew that every time we'd find another Witness, we'd find a brother . . . Woodstock and the peace marches really knocked me out, because it was like a replay of those convention times - or I wanted it to be. . . . You miss that communal tenderness. I do. -Walter Szykitka, ex-Witness

Even if the Witnesses were inclined to protest, it's hard to see where they’d find the time. In addition to their obligatory preaching, they spend almost as many hours at weekly meetings and at semiannual conventions as a nun does at prayer. (It has been estimated that the average Witness spends a minimum of sixteen hours a week preaching and at congregational meetings.) [Lee Cooper, op. cit., p. 707]

I agree with my friend Walter Szykitka that Watchtower conventions have a spirit of "communal tenderness." They are also extraordinarily well run. It's too bad the Witnesses don't organize protests and boycotts; they're good at logistics.

The spirit of communal tenderness Walter speaks of nostalgically is noticeably missing, however, at weekly congregation meetings, which tend, in my experience, to be repetitive, dull, infanticizing, leaden, and oppressive. But they are an important part of Witnesses' lives; and there are built-in rewards for attending them. The Witnesses are "schooled" at these meetings - and for people who lack formal education, they are an important means of acquiring status and self-respect. The Witnesses are continually assured, at these meetings, that they are indeed chosen and special and will receive the reward of eternal life (but only if they're letter-of-the-law good: the meetings inspire as much guilt as confidence); they are trained in public speaking and proselytizing; their behavior is modified (or, as Lee Cooper more delicately puts it, they receive "moral guidance by an unambiguous code.”). [Op. cit., p.707]

All programs at all meetings are dictated by Watchtower headquarters, which provides a yearly schedule for each congregation.

Every Sunday, the Witnesses attend an hour-long "public speech," given by an elder or someone judged to be equally qualified to address nonbelievers from the podium; these speeches, which are advertised locally, are delivered from outlines prepared at Watchtower headquarters.

Also on Sunday, the Witnesses convene for an hour-long study of The Watchtower magazine. In preparing for this meeting, they will have read (and scrupulously underlined) The Watchtower in advance. The magazine is “studied” paragraph by paragraph; questions (printed at the bottom of each page) are asked, and members of the congregation are called on, or volunteer, to answer. All answers summarize or play back (sometimes word for word) material in the paragraphs. No one is permitted to ask "individual questions,” or to engage in "private speculation." The text is never departed

from. (And since many Watchtower articles deal with the importance of reading Watchtower articles, what frequently happens is that the Witnesses spend a Sunday hour discussing the importance of discussing the importance of what they're discussing.)

Meetings are opened and closed with a song. (The Watchtower Society has its own hymnal, Singing and Accompanying Yourselves with Music in Your Hearts [1966]. This is a sample lyric: "Hail the good news of the Kingdom rule that Jesus Christ foretold! / This good news of the Kingdom let us preach! And in preaching this good news let's be courageous, firm and bold./ This good news of the Kingdom let us preach! Preach the good news of the Kingdom on the streets, from door to door; / Preach this good news with the printed page all nations o'er. / Preach with skill and preach with kindness, with more zeal than e'er before. / This good news of the Kingdom let us preach!" [pp. 28-29]) There are no meetings devoted exclusively to song or prayer or praise, nor anything that resembles a liturgical year; there is, of course, no litany and no Mass.

On a midweek evening, small clusters of Witnesses from within the local congregation meet in private homes (these "cells" also work as proselytizing teams); they study, paragraph by paragraph, by means of a question-and- answer rote formula, the Society's latest handbook.

At the Kingdom Hall midweek, there is 'another two-hour meeting, during the course of which Witnesses are given speech training (in the "Theocratic Ministry School") and instructed on proselytizing techniques (at the “Service Meeting"). Just as a lot of The Watchtower consists of admonitions to read The Watchtower, a lot of the Service Meetings are devoted to the admonition to go to Service Meetings.

Recently, I went to a Ministry School/Service Meeting in an upper-middle class neighborhood in Brooklyn. There were, for this brownstone-revival neighborhood, a number of blacks disproportionate to the general population; ~ everybody was dressed with 1940-ish lower-middle-class propriety and sobriety. (Toni home permanents and nylons with seams were very much in evidence. Not a single woman was wearing pants.) The Kingdom Hall, faultlessly clean, looked more like the rec room of a Levittown tract house than a place of worship. There were many children visible - but almost preternaturally inaudible. Women diapered and bottle-fed babies who never squawked; and toddlers were controlled apparently by invisible means, since they showed no inclination to act their age.

The Society exhorts parents not to permit small children to "occupy their time with material that is foreign to the program." [TMSG, p.27] In typically Skinnerian fashion, it recommends that "As a stimulus to listening, [children] can be given to understand that when they get home they will be asked to repeat something they have learned. And they should be warmly commended if they do remember or make note of something said during the meeting." [Ibid., p. 121 The Witnesses are also told that "concentration comes more easily if we have been careful to avoid eating a heavy meal just prior to meeting time, for this is sleep inducing. . . . With mental perception thus dulled, there is danger of simply listening sluggishly to what is said, without response or deep appreciation, or of dozing off altogether." [Ibid.] Actually, it's the meetings that are sleep-inducing; but the Witnesses are not permitted to acknowledge, even to themselves, that the meetings are boring. If they are bored, they have only themselves, they are told, to blame. No wonder they operate at a high level of anxiety. Inducing a high level of anxiety is a standard device for authoritarian groups that deal in persuasion.

The first audience-participation event at the Service Meeting I attended was a rehash of an article in Kingdom Ministry (a four-page tabloid newsletter received by each congregation but not distributed to outsiders): "How Elders Encourage Brothers to Come [to meetings] on Time." These are some of the questions asked and answered from the printed material:

Q: What questions might one ask about getting to the meeting on time?

A: Am I on time for all meetings? Do I come early enough to greet people warmly?

Q: When we're punctual for meetings, who is it we're really pleasing?

A: Jehovah.

Q: If we come late what do we miss?

A: The song.

Q: If we come even later, who is affected?

A: Brothers who come on time.

This was followed by a ten-minute speech on "Keeping in Touch with the Brothers During Times of Pressure," the theme of which was how, in spite of the fact that the wars and revolutions of worldlings discommoded the brothers and caused them to be "persecuted" - in Ireland, the speaker said, Witnesses had often as a result of the "Catholic-Protestant" war, to wait up to forty-five minutes for a bus to get to a meeting, and in China the Witnesses were required to read Chairman Mao's writings for four hours every day - they should remember that nothing was more important than coming to meetings on time.

Then there was a skit on family problems. Three men discussed how to be “good family heads":

“My wife is a bad cook, she burns things, she isn't thrifty."

“My wife is something else. She doesn't even cook!"

Elder: “Take the lead in loving her. . . Even if she improves in small ways, compliment her. If a decision isn't important, let her make it."

The rest of the Service Meeting was given over to a detailed training course on how to present the Society's latest handbook to householders:

("One might ask: 'Do you think it is possible to establish a completely righteous government that will last for a thousand years?' Pause for reply.")

In the Theocratic Ministry School, which followed the Service Meeting, a fifteen-minute "instruction speech" was given by an elder: "The Bible Views on Sex." A middle-aged man who looked hand-pressed, deodorized, and as if sex and he had been strangers for many years informed us that "nudity" [sic] was not "upbuilding" and that "all the perverts, pornography, homosexuality, and sex murders are because youth does not have a proper understanding of sex. God approves of sex, but there are limits to everything. Eating is good, but you don't eat for hours and hours. The same with drinking and sleeping and the same with sex: too much is no good. Proper use of your sexual organs will protect your happiness."

After this depressing exercise in guilt-producing obfuscation (how much sex is “too much sex"?) there were two skits.

In one, two women demonstrated how to "preach to our neighbors on our jobs during coffee breaks": "You might illustrate to your fellow worker how Jehovah's Witnesses are blessed through being persecuted. For example, one Witness in Africa compromised his integrity under duress, and he dropped dead six months later."

(When I became a Witness, women were not allowed to participate in the Theocratic Ministry School. They may still not address the congregation directly, but since the late 1950s they have been encouraged to accept School assignments that allow them to engage in role playing. Their performance of these assignments is publicly criticized by the "School Servant.")

In the second of the skits, two women demonstrated how "talking to one's fleshly [i.e., natural, not spiritual] sister should be uplifting and encouraging": During meals, we should talk about Watchtower articles and field service, not about movies. Although there is nothing wrong with talking about something humorous or informative, Jehovah really blessed us by providing us with a tongue; we should show our appreciation by talking about spiritual things."

It was hard for me to believe, as I sat through these meetings, that (lacking anything resembling a sense of humor) I hadn't been bored out of my skull all those years I attended them. Then I remembered what had kept me from being bored. In later years, it was the prospect of meeting men, of flirting with unattainable objects - which, in my case, meant trying desperately to prove that I was smart and good (and wondering why nobody loved me, and guessing that it was because I was too smart and not good enough). What had kept me from being bored into somnolence earlier, however, was that at the Theocratic Ministry School my profound ignorance of life (and learning) was papered over with what then seemed to me like exotic knowledge: What other 9-year-old knew about prepositions? Or got instructed on "fluent, conversational, proper pronunciation”?

I was a child; but ill-educated adults must also feel enhanced by the kind of instruction they receive in the Ministry School. The School takes people with low self-esteem and prepares them to be public speakers. At the School, student speakers (any male Witness from the age of 8 is encouraged to enroll) are given public criticism of their five-minute talks. They are criticized for style as well as for ideological substance. In addition to the oral criticism administered by the School Servant, all speakers are given a “speech counsel" sheet; they are marked W ("work on this"), I (“improved"), or G ("good") on "accuracy of statement, articulation, bearing, choice of words, grammar, mannerisms, relevancy, teaching techniques, and voice quality."

Some of the specific areas of criticism mentioned on the counsel sheet (a couple of which defy analysis) are

Pausing

Gestures

Enthusiasm

Coherence Through Connectives

Warmth

Confidence and Poise

Personal Appearance. [TMSG, pp. 104- 05]

At some Ministry School meetings the Witnesses are instructed on how to approach “tenants who live in exclusive apartment buildings . . . by use of letters." ("It helps to have a fairly uniform margin. . . . Smudges do not make a good impression." [TMSG])

Granted, it sounds not unlike a Dale Carnegie Course, or something offered on the back of a match folder; but think how a high school dropout feels when he is invited to give a talk on - say - The New World Translation of the Bible, using the Society's material to discuss "the genitive and accusative cases in the Greek Scriptures," or "The Important [Hebrew] Verbal Form Called Today the Waw Consecutive." He may never have read Hamlet; he may know nothing about the ''Catholic-Protestant war in Ireland; but he feels terrific.

And he’s fortified by passages such as this, from the Theocratic Ministry School Guidebook:

Those who perhaps lack some school education should keep in mind that God foresaw that the message of the Kingdom would be heard without response by many who are wise in a fleshly way, of noble birth, highly educated from a worldly viewpoint. But he also foreknew that many who are despised from the world's point of view would heed it and willingly pass it on to other truth-hungry persons. By enrolling in this school and by faithfully following through with its lessons you will be guided to speak delightful words of truth to honest-hearted ones. [p.8]

Many, as a result of Theocratic Ministry School training, have been able to give a fine defense before courts and rulers, while others have spoken to school or social groups. . . . Whether at a place of secular employment, at a public school or elsewhere, our training as Jehovah's witnesses becomes apparent to observers. [p.12]

The negative part of all of this is that while their training does help some Witnesses to feel good about themselves, it also makes them feel smugly superior to everybody else. True, they may meet many people in their ministry who've read Tolstoy and Blake (which they have not); but how many will have heard of the "waw consecutive"? The Witnesses have the illusion of wisdom, while in fact they have esoteric pieces of knowledge. And they feel good about themselves only in relation to "worldlings"; their relationship to God and to "his organization" is a constant source of guilt and anxiety. It may not be calculated to have this effect, but even the speech counsel the Witnesses receive keeps them off balance: Be confident, but not overconfident. Increase your vocabulary, but don't use multi syllabic words to put on airs. Express warmth, but don't be overemotional. Not only does advice like this encourage extreme and debilitating self-consciousness; it increases the individual's dependence on the Society, which alone can assure him whether he has passed its tests.

The guilt and the anxiety take their toll: One-third of American Witnesses have been members of the Society for less than five years. [KM, April, 194, p. 1] This figure reflects not only the rapid growth of the movement, but the rapid turnover. The dropout rate, as several former headquarters-staff members will testify, is high; for many, this escape from the hardships and humiliations of life proves only temporary.

For those who remain Witnesses for ten, twenty, or thirty years - preoccupation with Armageddon growing with the passing time - each year provides at least one occasion for refreshment, one source of sweetness: the communal tenderness that is so lacking in dreary local congregational meetings is at evidence at large conventions of Jehovah's Witnesses, and particularly at international conventions.

In 1958, for example, almost a quarter of a million Witnesses from 123 countries gathered at the "Divine Will International Assembly" held at Yankee Stadium, with an overflow crowd filling New York's Polo Grounds, to reaffirm their faith, and to rejoice in the samenesses that transcended their national differences.

In 1955, for a series of thirteen conventions held in the United States and Europe, the Society chartered planes and two ocean liners to carry American Witnesses to European cities in what was referred to as "probably the biggest mass movement of Americans through Europe since the Allied invasion during World War II."

I went to a number of those European conventions (in a chartered converted Flying Tiger prop cargo plane), and my waning faith (soon to die a total death) was briefly, vividly, revived: I don't forget, even now, standing with 100,000 Witnesses at the convention grounds at the Zeppelinwiese in Nuremberg and thinking "Here is where Hitler - who sought to crush us - held his barbaric rallies; and now he is dead, and we survive." It seemed to me a glorious victory of good over evil; and because such transcendental moments are so rare in the ordered life of the Witnesses, they are the more thrilling when they come. And I remember the testimonies of Witnesses had survived both Hitler's concentration camps and incarceration at the hands of the Communists in East Germany after the war; and thinking how small I was in comparison with them, what a novice I was in suffering, and how great was the cause to which we were commonly joined. And I remember - it was in Paris, I think - listening to the recorded voices of African Witnesses singing hymns, the unaccompanied vocal music almost like Gregorian plainsong, full of a lyrical sweetness, fervor, and intensity, and thinking that they were my brothers, and that my irritable doubts were nothing compared with the immensity of that shared love.

This is the kind of fervor, and nourishment, the Witnesses bring to and derive from these assemblies:

At the missionary meeting in 1958 in New York, Brother Franz [then the Society's vice-president] commented on the assembly talk based on Isaiah 8:18, and said, "Well, now you can go back to your assignments and tell the brothers you have seen the remnant [of the heavenly class]. The remnant are for signs and wonders, as Isaiah's sons were in their time." At that time I thought: "How I wish all the brothers back in South America could see the remnant and feel how we feel on this historic occasion!

Now this wish has become a reality at this marvelous assembly [in 1967]. When I was encouraging the publishers to attend this assembly, I referred to Brother Franz' words and told them: "You must not miss this assembly, for when the New Order comes you, too, will be able to tell the new generations that you have seen the most representative part of the remnant!" [Yearbook, 1972, p. 118]

All those smiling faces, smiling because they are together, united in a common cause! I remember how good and sweet it felt to suspend disbelief and feel, however fleetingly, that all around me were my brothers and sisters; and that nothing, oceans or persecution or the Devil's wrath, could separate us. And I remember too, how boring the speeches were. It was context, not content, that mattered.

Even when something is anticlimactic, at a large convention, it is made to feel, at least in retrospect, climactic - as, for example, at Yankee Stadium in August, 1950, where the Witnesses were reminded of the old belief that God’s faithful - Abraham, Joseph, David - would rise from the dead before the end of the world. This aroused tremendous expectations, which were heightened by the speaker, F. W. Franz, when he suggested that among those gathered together were the "Princes of the New Earth."

The spectators were roused to tears by the prevailing excitement, expecting to see these biblical figures. Some stood up; others rushed to the entrance near the speakers' stand, where they would have a better view. The speaker quieted the crowd and then compared the new Jehovah's Witnesses to those of old. In effect, he assured them that they were the new princes, those who had turned their backs on a world slated for doom and who must persevere in going forward to build the New Jerusalem.

Forward, indeed. This was, in fact, a denial of a previously cherished and defended belief, couched so as to make conventioneers feel that something had been added unto, not taken away from, them. David didn't pop out of the dugout, and Solomon didn't surface on the speaking stand; but Franz had thrilled his audience nonetheless. (I myself was irritated - though I applauded as fervently as anyone else; I had a distinct sense of having been had, and I felt guilt as a consequence. And I wondered how many coronaries Franz had occasioned by his initial provocative remarks. And from some of the mutterings I heard as I left the Stadium that night, I I deduced that others were irritated as well, though not, perhaps, as guilt-stricken as I was for allowing myself to feel vexed.)

It has been said that the U.S. Navy, the Civil Defense Administration, and the New York City Department of Health have sent observers to study crowd-handling and mass-feeding techniques at Watchtower conventions. (One has also heard unsubstantiated rumors that during World War II, when the Watchtower Society's official position was one of "absolute neutrality" and non-cooperation with the U.S. Government, the Army Quartermaster Corps asked for, and got, the Society's advice on mass-feeding operations.)

During the late 1930s and early '40s, when the Witnesses were undergoing legal trials, the conventions were suffused with special joy. The Witnesses huddled together for warmth; infatuated with their pain, they took violent satisfaction in their suffering. The assemblies were a blessed relief from their tribulations. They were like sanctuaries. Today's assemblies have lost that encampment feeling; they are no longer a refuge, a benevolent enclosure. (But they receive a terrifically good press - the Witnesses behave so well at conventions; and that, perhaps, is almost as gratifying to the Witnesses as feeling threatened and besieged.)

In any case, whatever the circumstances, Watchtower conventions have been and are well-oiled machines, impressively run by an all-volunteer army of administrators, menial workers, and technicians.

The larger conventions are like mini-cities that have the appearance of having sprung up overnight. Actually, preparations begin months in advance. Reasonable accommodations for out-of-town delegates, who make exemplary houseguests, are found in the host city, in spare rooms of private homes, by means of a house-to-house search undertaken by the local "rooming department." At some conventions, tent-and-trailer cities are established near the convention grounds; volunteer Witnesses set up water and sanitation systems, in accordance with government health regulations, and traffic-control patterns. Thousands of conventioneers are fed, cafeterias in fast-moving lines, three times daily, at convention sites; they eat standing up at waist-high tables. (I have never observed a hassle at one of these lines, or a stoppage of traffic.)

Now that the Witnesses have grown in numbers, they are obliged to have fewer national, and more regional, conventions.

The assembly I attended at Aqueduct Race Track in Queens, in 1974, was one of eighty-five held around the world; in all, almost a million people attended. Each convention delegate - whether in Tahiti or Kansas City - heard the same program, designed at Brooklyn headquarters.

The New York Racing Association rented Aqueduct to the Witnesses for $32,000, plus expenses, which, according to Association attorney Heffernan, were "not insubstantial"; utilities, for example, ran over $1,000 a day. Confirmation of these financial statistics could not be pried loose from the assembly overseer, Michael Haraczaz (who is a buyer for a plastics firm when he is not engaged in "kingdom preaching" or assembly organizing); Haraczaz, and all the other administrative officers I spoke with, sought to give the impression that the Racing Association was loath to rent to other groups because “ no one else is as clean and orderly as the Witnesses." No one else is; in fact, only one-third of the Pinkerton guards regularly assigned at Aqueduct were required to be there for the Witnesses' assembly.

Over 4,700 volunteers, some as young as 10 years old, worked in the twenty highly organized convention departments set up at Watchtower headquarters.

Volunteer workers erected a California-contemporary simulated-slate-and-brick patio/stage; speakers were sheltered from the sun by a 20-x-70-foot “ornamental" shingled structure flanked by masses of plastic ferns, peonies, and giant mums. A jet-aircraft balancing agent nailed the shingles, and an optician and a refrigerator engineer stained them. (The Witnesses, miraculously, never seem to have any problems with the trade unions.) The and the 8-x-12-foot Bible that adorned it, were made in movable parts at Watchtower headquarters in Brooklyn and trucked to Aqueduct for assembly on the racetrack. One was forced to admit that the labor was prodigious and the laborers generous, even if one were not convinced that the final result justified the energy and enthusiasm brought to the task: I overheard one reporter compare the thing to an idealized suburban McDonald’s hamburger stand. Another thought it was only slightly more lamentable than some of the quainter architecture at Forest Lawn; I agree that Evelyn Waugh would have found it something to write home about.

Volunteer cooks and butchers working in Aqueduct's kitchens fed 4,000 to 7,000 people noonday and evening meals in an impromptu cafeteria set up by volunteer carpenters. It was an operation the Salvation Army might well have envied. Substantial meals cost convention delegates only $1 each. Everything had been thought of: Witnesses had bought their meal tickets at local congregations in advance of the assembly. The order and discipline of hungry conventioneers - whose appetite for "spiritual food" had been appeased by a six-hour daily diet of sermons, discussions, and skits - were as

impressive as the food was bland.

Volunteer janitors kept Aqueduct so litter-free that a racing fan, had he inadvertently wandered in, would surely have been the victim of culture shock. (There wasn't much to clean up: As an Association sanitation officer remarked to me, glancing balefully at my lit cigarette, "I haven’t seen one smoker. The crowd is very interesting and very pleasant and they throw everything in baskets." There weren't any beer cans to clean up, either, because there wasn't any beer.)

Volunteer ushers kept track of attendance.

Volunteer plumbers installed the aboveground plastic pool in which 1,003 new converts were immersed to "symbolize their dedication to do God's will.” In this pool, ringed with fuchsia plastic flowers, volunteers immersed the converts - among whom there were no bikinis, an 11-year-old boy with chicken pox, an 86-year-old woman, and a 350-pound woman totally immobilized in a wheelchair - with deft assembly-line dispatch.

According to the Pinkerton guards, and according to New York's 106th Precinct cops assigned to the assembly, and according to the drivers who drove the chartered buses that brought the Witnesses to Aqueduct, and according to the waitresses at the nearby Big A Restaurant on Rockaway Boulevard, the Witnesses were "the most courteous, orderly, law-abiding, decent, sincere, best bunchapeople we ever saw.

It was a young crowd.

Outside the gates of Aqueduct were a handful of ex-Witnesses, who, looking forlorn and exhausted of hope, attempted to distribute mimeographed anti-Witness literature, offering their own speculations about the date of Armageddon - and being pointedly ignored. Their presence was a reminder of the high dropout rate among Jehovah's Witnesses, and of their inability to sever ties with the Watchtower Society completely. They were still drawn to certainty, schismatically.

My mother raised me to believe that there were some very nice people who were not Jehovah's Witnesses and some stinkers who were; so I was prepared to discover that there were nice people who weren't really nice people . . . but I stuck at their being destroyed at Armageddon - Walter Szykitka, ex-Witness

Some ex-Witnesses do make a final and complete break, though they frequently substitute one form of certainty for another. For those who remain with the Society, the sustaining conviction is that God will destroy their enemies in their time and restore them to a perfect life in the New World; that hope redeems them from the degradations of daily living. "This is good; this is what I want; what I've been looking for": that is what H. M. Macmillan, who was a member of the Society for over fifty years, says, of his conversion by a Watchtower representative, in his autobiography, Faith on the March. What he was saying was "This ought to be; therefore it is.”

For others, it is not enough that it ought to be. Some begin to doubt the premises upon which their waiting is based; or they quail, ultimately revulsed, at the idea that their entry into the New World will be paved, as it were, with the bones and carcasses of "nice" (but insufficiently nice) unbelievers - or they doubt the good faith and goodwill of the Society which claims to be God's own.

All these factors were at work in the person of Walter Szykitka, who, having been raised a Witness, left the Society after eight years at Bethel headquarters (where his father, before he married, had also worked). Walter began to doubt the accuracy of the chronology upon which his expectations that Armageddon would come in his lifetime were based; he questioned the arbitrary nature of the decisions he saw made at Bethel and the mischief he saw practiced there; and he began to love "worldly people."

Walter says:

When I first came to Bethel, if someone had said to me, "We have a lot of jobs here - why don't you tell us which one you don't want to do?" I would have said, "I don't want to do anything involved with buckets of water and scrubbing - I'll do anything but that." And as luck would have it, they gave me a job washing walls and stairwells. My first day at it, as I was washing on a scaffold (scared), some brother came by and said, "Oh, you must be doing my old job." I asked him how long he'd worked at it; he said, "Twenty-two years.” So I pictured myself washing walls for the next twenty-two years.

There was this whole mystique about the job you did there; everybody was aware of what everybody else did, and what that meant. While you were told that every job - no matter how menial - was “noble," you always felt - they always kept you feeling trapped and guilty - that if you were promoted to an office or administrative job, you had passed some test; but you never knew what the test was. They let you know, obliquely, that when you got a job of "greater responsibility" - that was code for a cushy job - it was because they'd been taking your spiritual temperature and you'd been found healthy. But you never knew what constituted health in the President's eyes.

Like I remember one guy who was smart and zealous; but President ~ heard him say in the dining room one day that the mashed potatoes were lumpy-and they kept that guy waiting tables for nine years. I thought I'd be washing walls till I was seventy.

And another guy, equally bright and zealous, was working a hand press, and they'd say, "There's a reason why Tony, with all his intelligence, is doing manual work, and the Lord knows the reason."

But after a while you began to feel that President Knorr knew and determined the reasons, and that everything was arbitrary and capricious. After a while, you began to get Knorr and Jehovah mixed up. And you wondered if it was a coincidence that all the offices that had prestige, like the President's office, were staffed by tall, good-looking young men, like a palace guard.

And you had to wonder how disingenuous Knorr was being when he said, anticipating complaints about assembly-line work, "I get bored too, shuffling papers around my desk and making decisions; flying around the world is just as boring and repetitious as putting staples in a magazine." Was he kidding?

The thing was, you were always walking this fine line between being aggressive and "wanting to shine" - which was bad - and endearing yourself to Knorr, which worked out to be good. Why was it that certain people struck Knorr's fancy? People were always dropping into and out of his favor. You never knew what to do.

Walter washed walls for a year and a half. He worked on the top floors of the Bethel residence, where the presidential, legal, and administrative staff lived and worked.

On the first floor - where the factory workers were - it was pretty spartan; on the top floor it was private kitchens, eggnogs, and valets . . . and you couldn't reconcile that with their rhetoric (I tried). That kind of high living was what they denounced the Church for. It didn't jibe. . . .

After a year and a half, somehow they found out that I could type, so I was given an office job. A lot of the guys were jealous - as I would have been if the positions had been reversed. I must have behaved pretty well, or I wouldn't have gotten the job. But it increased my irritation with the way things were run to understand that I didn't know what I had done that had put me in the way of Knorr's favor. I didn't know what it meant to be good.

These are problems and disaffections common to all religious communities; and Walter used the rationale standardly employed by religious people who see abuse of temporal power at the hands of "sacred" authority: "I figured the Lord's servants were 'imperfect vessels,' and that however harshly or whimsically they behaved, that was nothing compared with the fact that they had The Truth."

That rationale works, however, only as long as one is absolutely convinced that the words of one's leaders spring from The Word; and Walter was beginning to have his doubts:

After a year or so at the Service Department, I started wondering whether they did have The Truth. I was one of the lucky ones: I had a good job. But I was beginning to question basic doctrine. I was really interested, for example, in proof of whether man had free will. I was developing a very deterministic, mechanistic view of the universe, beginning to believe that everything was just a chain of cause and effect . . . that there was no room for free will; but if there was no free will, if everybody was preordained and predestined to his fate, then God's punishments and rewards were rendered meaningless. I wasn't satisfied with the Watchtower Society's analogies about God's foreknowledge - which were that an engineer could know a building was going to fall, but that didn't mean his knowing it caused the building to fall. I mean, yeah, but the building is going to fall, it has no choice in the matter. (You have to remember that if this sounds like nursery-school metaphysics, I'd never read a book in my life except for Watchtower literature - maybe a Jesuit could have answered me. I wanted everything to be rational; I should have known that was the end of faith.)

So I used to brainstorm these ideas with a few Witnesses I trusted. But I found that every time I opened up and expressed doubts with people I regarded as kindred souls, I was being "reported." . . . And you could go just so far with them. It was like a declension. They'd keep taking you another step backwards: Like, Do you believe that the Bible is infallible? Don't you believe that this is God's organization? Do you believe there is a God? They came to some point where they figured you had to agree with them.

So when I could see that the conversation was about to leave the argument itself and return to their basic frame of reference - which was that God's organization had all the answers and had the mind of God, and it wasn't for us to question - I began to edge off. I wasn't ready to declare myself a heretic. Though I started to have fantasies that I was another Martin Luther. In fact, I no longer believed that the Bible was infallible; but it took me a year after I had that realization before I left Bethel. Because, on the other hand, I'd tell myself, If this is the Lord's organization, and you find a couple of things wrong with it, that's not enough to outweigh all the good." But all the doubts - and their faults - began to accumulate and tip the scales. And I left.

Even after Walter left Bethel, he could not tear himself away from the organization he had served for all his life. With his wife, Peggy, whom he'd met at Bethel, he continued to participate in local congregational activities, go from door to door, almost as if by reflex (and despairingly: if he didn’t believe, how could he convince anybody else?).

And he had an extraordinary correspondence with the Society on the Biblical chronology.

My own instinct tells me that Walter's preoccupation with chronological accuracy had less to do with wanting to be certain that Armageddon would come, as predicted, in this generation than with his metamorphosis from a person who relished the notion of a newly ordered universe to a person who was no longer able to take the required delight and relish in a disaster for which he could find no justification and which could by no effort of his be ameliorated.

I have Walter's obsessional correspondence. I find it heartbreaking. Walter's letters run to nine pages (single-spaced) of rigorous questions designed to elicit proof from the Society that there is both Biblical and secular evidence to support 1914 as the date of Christ's Second (invisible) Coming. The Society's answers are niggardly and refer Walter back to internal sources - to the Watchtower publications which gave rise to the questions in the first place.

Walter, at the time he wrote these searching letters, had checked literally scores of scholarly and religious authorities in an attempt to substantiate one of the Society's key dates: 607 B.C.E. - the date the Society claims "Jerusalem fell under Nebuchadnezzar's hordes"; it is from this date, working with various unconnected Biblical texts, that they arrive at the date 1914 for the establishment of the "heavenly kingdom of Israel in heaven."

Historians ascribe no particular noteworthy event to the year 607 B.C. (It is to be remembered that Pastor Russell's chronology was arrived at in an entirely different way, using different dates; it was no less dogmatic.)

In answer to Walter's questions on chronology, the Society merely referred him to reference books on Babylonian, Egyptian, and Assyrian cultures, as well as several Watchtower publications - The Truth Shall Make You Free, The Kingdom Is at Hand, New Heavens and a New Earth, Your Will Be Done on Earth - and, of course, to The Watchtower. The suggestion was made that he do his own research.

Letter of February 9, 1959, Walter Szykitka to Watchtower Bible and Tract Society:

Dear Brothers:

. . .

You say you do not know why I desire material I requested, "but that it appears to have no relation to the reckoning of Biblical events." I am sorry that I did not explain my request a little more fully, but I did not want to burden you down with a lot of extraneous material. I thought you would naturally conclude that all my questions were related to the reckoning of Biblical events, otherwise I would not have bothered you with them.

As you say, the bulk of my questions "can be answered by reference to secular works on Babylonian, Egyptian and Assyrian cultures." But unfortunately secular works on these cultures do not agree with the Society's position on a number of points, and, in fact, oftentimes do not even agree with themselves. I thought the most logical thing to do would be to ask the Society's position regarding chronological methods, and then endeavor to answer questions of detail on the basis of the Society's general principles.

You refer me to chronological material in four of the Society's books. . . . But unfortunately my questions are not answered by a study of this material. Rather, more questions are raised. For example - a tremendous shift is made in the method used from The Truth Shall Make You Free [1943]... to The Kingdom Is at Hand [1944]....

I have been making an effort lately to make more than a superficial study of the Bible. And the more I study, the more I realize that there is a great deal I do not know. This study has taken me on several different avenues, but my interest in chronology was sparked by a comment to me in field service that chronology is not reliable. I had to confess to myself at the time that I was unaware that there was so much to be learned about [it]. But I was determined to learn it, and to study it down to the finest details. It was then that I became aware of some knotty chronology problems. As far as those of a minor nature are concerned, it was of minor concern, excepting where those persons took up the problems of chronology as being evidences of the Bible's lack of authority. And to study . . . some of these "minor" problems would have been rewarding.

But of more concern are chronological questions of a major nature. There are a number of doctrines of major importance that are based on chronology. I refer particularly to the fact that God's creative days were 7,000 years in length, as is his now-existing day of rest; the times of the gentiles; and the 70 weeks of years. . . .

I asked about the chronological figures in the Masoretic text as compared with those in the Septuagint version because there is a discrepancy between the two.

I inquired about Ptolemy's Canon because of its position and standing in secular works.

References do not agree on the year 607, but instead offer 586 as the year of Jerusalem's destruction, varying perhaps a year at the most. . . .

And the problem is further compounded by the fact that I have been unable to find a single reference work to use the date 607 B.C. as the time for Jerusalem's destruction. .

To underscore the widespread disagreement with the Society's reckoning, . . . I offer below some references on these . . . dates:

The new edition of The Pulpit Commentary, . . . The Jewish Encyclopedia, . . . Lange's Commentary of the Holy Scriptures, . . . The Preacher's Homiletic Commentary by George Barlow, . . . John D. Davis' Dictionary of the Bible, . . . A Standard Bible Dictionary . . . The Outline of History, H. G. Wells . . . The Mysterious Numbers of the Hebrew Kings, by Edwin R.Thiele. . . .

He explained that his interest was only natural, for he felt his responsibility, as a preacher, not only to those who heard him but also to himself, to be fully informed on "major" as well as "minor" chronological matters. He was cognizant of the burden of their work, but was sure of their desire to assist one attempting to "leave the elementary doctrine," and he spoke of his desire that Jehovah's blessings enrich their work.

In reply, the Society pointed out its belief in the weakness and inaccuracies of all chronological authorities other than Scripture, and suggested that as a believer he should learn to accept and understand the chronological information contained therein, provided by God's "faithful and discreet slave."

Suppose the Watchtower Society had taken more pains to convince Walter that its chronological reckonings were based on solid historical fact. Would he have remained a Witness? My guess would be that he would have found another reason to leave. He has a sanguine temperament; and this is a religion that offers solace and certainty to souls in despair - to people who regard their past as refuse, have no appetite for the present, and need, with all their alienated hearts, a sure hope for the future.

Walter still believes in large solutions. During the 1960s, when Buckminster Fuller and Marshall McLuhan were his heroes, he substituted the counterculture for God; and he believes that everything that conduces to individual happiness and fulfillment produces "waves of goodness" that will eventually change society. He sees now "a movement toward an incredible expansion of human consciousness, awareness of our essential social nature. This System is based on competition and evil and greed; but humanity will reach a point in evolution when suddenly it becomes more beneficial for human beings to cooperate with one another because competing for the survival of the fittest has gotten us nowhere. We're moving in that direction now. What's happening now is different from anything that has happened before."

He believes (as he once believed, but for different reasons) that we are living in a marked time. Whatever one might think of Walter's beliefs - regarding them as naive, or as the mirror image of the fantasies of dread apocalypse he lived with for so long - they spring from a mind that can no longer entertain visions of God-death and destruction; from a soul that joins its struggle with life; and from an ego sufficiently strong to dispense with the false comforts of the no-comforters. Walter's Yes may not suit everyone (it is not, for example, mine); but it is at work, and at play, in a larger world of human beings he had once been taught to despise.

Still, it is interesting that Walter, once obsessed with Biblical chronology, sees human evolution toward goodness as "a kind of mathematical progression" (or accumulation); he describes his perspective as "global."

It colored my life, the idea that what was happening for me was happening all over the world. I used to belong to a group that had missionaries all over the world, conventions all over the world. I've experienced the joy of knowing that you're part of a thing that encompasses the whole globe and it's growing. It's a hard high to come down from . . . and I've come full circle; I've come back to a global perspective again in another way, seeing the world change in other terms I've been able once more to put myself in the position of believing that I'm part of a thing that's global and growing . . . it gives me a sense of continuity . . . I don't feel that one part of my life has been cut off and hasn't informed what I am now.

Walter is a lucky survivor, able to integrate his past with his present. Not all ex-Witnesses are so fortunate. And he is also proof that once one has been drawn to certainty, it is almost impossible not to seek it in other places.

Walter says: "We could never have had this easy, good conversation while we were still Witnesses. Now you and I seem beautiful to each other against that shared past and background, against the pain we survived . . but we had to leave it to find the joy we left behind.")

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