Part VI – The Great Apostasy Sets In
“If you ever leave the truth or get disfellowshipped that’ll be that – we’ll be finished.” I clearly recall my Mum laying it on the line. I was 14. As well as making her position clear it also had a powerful impact on me – impressionable children are particularly vulnerable to this sort of emotional manipulation, especially when parental authority is a factor. So I knew where I stood with regard to my family relationships 23 years later when I decided I would be exiting the Jehovah’s Witness religion. No matter – the die was cast and I was leaving. The Watchtower Society had lied to me about blood, about their history, about the date for the destruction of Jerusalem, about their relationship with the United Nations and about the fact that I would be living forever in paradise with a pet lion and as many oversized vegetables as I could eat. Oh ye – and did I mention I never really wanted to be a JW in the first place? I think I did alright putting up with the nonsense for the first half of my life. It was the halftime interval and I was changing sides for the second half.
By this time I had read the cautionary tales on the Internet about how some brothers had revealed their desire to leave the JW’s to their true believer wife who promptly collects up the children and moves back home to the safe embrace of her JW parents. I never really believed Sam would react like this but I had to be sure of giving us the best odds of making it out together. What to do, what to do? I had been making Sam aware of my increasing lack of appetite for all things JW - if she hadn’t figured that out by this stage then God help her. She knew I was struggling to show any enthusiasm for the meetings (zero field service for a long time) and that was a drag on our relationship as I was miserable anytime a meeting was in prospect.
22 month old Archie was getting to be a real handful at meetings and our second boy, Bertie, had just arrived so we were in the middle of a stressful time. Nothing like a Circuit Assembly to recharge your batteries stress you out even more. We worked hard to get all set to go but still ended up getting to the Assembly Hall an hour late. I was physically fighting with Archie to keep him restrained in his seat for just_one_talk in the main auditorium whilst Sam was out in one of the dining rooms feeding Bertie. I knew then that this punishment would have to stop – I mean what exactly is a grown man doing dressed in a suit, shirt and tie on a Saturday morning anyway? Sam was tearful that day – the stress of a newborn baby that was facing a hernia op, the stress of an excitable 22 month toddler, the stress of being the perfect JW mum was adding up. So when we got home I executed Part 1 of what I expected to be a long term strategy.
I had raised the issue of Jesus not being the Mediator for 99% of Jehovah’s Witnesses with Sam’s Mum. I had found the WTS literature with the offending quotes and asked for her opinion. She hadn’t got back to me yet and so I casually mentioned this to Sam after we got home from the Assembly. Sam was curious to know more about the Mediator issue – this is a basic Christian belief that Jesus is your Mediator. I wager that a large percentage of JW’s have not grasped that according to their own doctrine Jesus is not their Mediator. Sam didn’t believe me that the WTS taught this and asked where the quote was. I replied that as we didn’t have that particular piece of literature in our library I would have to show it to her online. She agreed to read the relevant page at jwfacts.com and I nervously hovered as she did so. Amazingly and to my immense relief she instantly grasped the logic of what the website was telling her. The Watchtower says Jesus is not your Mediator. The Bible says he is. It ended for Sam right there. A lifetime of indoctrination evaporated in less time than its taken me to describe what happened. And so she read a few more pages and understood the whole construct was built on sand. Sam joined JWN the following Tuesday and put our WTS library in the recycling. That Circuit Assembly had transpired to be our last ever meeting with Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Just under a year previously my Dad had passed away after a short battle with terminal cancer. He bravely elected not to have treatment after being given the options and died with much dignity – I respected him immensely for the way he handled himself in the lead up to his death, aged 72. I have often asked myself if I would have left the JW’s if my Dad was still around – I don’t know the answer to that yet. I wish I could have had a closer relationship with both my parents, particularly my Dad, but the way the chips fell it hasn’t been possible. The challenge I accept with relish is to break the cycle with my boys – be the man I want them to become. Oh dear – poor sods, God bless them. (that last part is a quaint figure of speech – God probably doesn’t exist)
I was starting to travel to the US on business more frequently at this point. Our company had been acquired by a much larger outfit and it seemed a good plan to expand from being European to being global. Another trip to Las Vegas for a 96 hour drinking bender trade show was looming for me and given that the news that we were stopping going to meetings was also bound to travel I felt obliged to call Scotland to tell my Mum that we weren’t going back. This was received very poorly indeed. I can’t recall all the details of that first call but Mum ended up in tears and Andrew, who happened to be there, came on the phone. Amongst other niceties he enquired if I knew that my marriage was going to break up, as that’s what happens when you leave Jehovah. Thanks Andrew - that was a lovely thing to say to someone who had a 6 week old baby. All that ‘training’ you have had as shepherd certainly paid off. Last time I checked I was still happily married – no doubt in your mind the collapse of our marriage is like Armageddon – widely predicted as coming ‘soon’. On this and a few subsequent calls my mother and brother both let me know exactly what they thought of me – weak, spineless, proud, arrogant, stubborn, lazy, had dragged Sam down to my level – the compliments were effusive. One particularly astounding comment was from my Mum - apparently me telling her I wasn't going back to the meetings was worse news than hearing her beloved husband of 50 years had terminal cancer. Anyone would think I was leaving a cult.
That particular trip to Vegas was ill-timed for several reasons. One – we were leaving a high control group and Sam needed all my support. I had a long time to think things through whereas Sam was in an emotional mess. She had the toddler, the new baby and now she was coming to terms with losing some of her lifetime best friends. Secondly wee Bertie needed a minor operation, so whilst Sam was relieved at the blood issue being taken out of that equation, she still needed me there. Lastly, with a cooler head she probably wouldn’t have gone round to see a couple, who were amongst our closest friends, on the day they moved into their new house to tell them we were never going back to the meetings. Inevitably word got back to our elders from several sources that we were not going back. Let the games commence.
Shortly after I returned to the UK Mum, Andrew and his wife came down to London for my cousin Jill's wedding. It was like nothing had happened – nobody mentioned anything and it was all sweetness and light. Sam and I had agreed we would not discuss anything controversial with them knowing it would lead to trouble. But, because our guard was down as they hadn’t raised the subject, we fell into our own trap and I launched into a lengthy description of all that was wrong in the wacky Watchtower wonderland. In hindsight I did myself an enormous favor as this conversation would ultimately prove sufficient to get me disfellowshipped.
The Watchtower Society is a legalistic organization – that means they never saw a rule they didn’t like. A bit like the Pharisees, except with more of an eye for detail. So when our elders heard we weren’t coming back they instigated a well worn procedure - after all you can’t just up and leave a high control group. In the first instance they attempted to conduct what is known as an initial inquiry. This is carried out when they suspect you may be guilty of something but don’t have all the evidence to prove it. In our case we were suspected of apostasy – defined as disagreeing with the Watchtower Society leadership. And so they sent two goons round to our house – we had agreed to see one of them and he brought a buddy – to ask some loyalty questions. Such as ‘are you attending another church’, ‘do you believe god is using the Watchtower Society?’, ‘when you read the bible do you use our translation?’ etc. Most tedious. But the wrong answer will see you disfellowshipped, and we didn’t want to be disfellowshipped. Despite the mean spirit shown to me by my family, for the sake of the two grandchildren I wanted to retain a civil relationship, even though the elephant in the room would be a permanent addition to the group photos. And so we bobbed and weaved and obfuscated our way successfully past the loyalty test – the goons left and we cracked a bottle of red. I say successfully as it all went quiet for a few months. I did receive a lengthy rebuttal of the points I’d raised to Andrew. He naively reiterated the all too familiar Watchtower beliefs as if somehow that would help me see the error of my ways. I’m not sure why he thought that was a clever strategy – if in doubt repeat Watchtower dogma, maybe. I replied back thanking him for taking the time and that as far as I was concerned the matter was closed. (I could have logically destroyed the content of his rebuttal email line by line but that was not a viable tactic towards the goal of keeping the communication open)
Just before we went to bed one night Sam’s mobile rang. It was the former PO (Presiding Overseer) who had been removed as an elder but now reappointed and leading the charge for information on us. He called at 10.30pm that first time, wondering if we would be willing to meet with them as they wanted our side of the story. What story? We had been gone for several months and the informal shunning had commenced – former friends who regularly would stop by the house or call just disappeared off the face of the earth. Complete radio silence. I called him back and fobbed him off. He called again and again and again, usually late at night and always with someone on the line with him. It felt like harassment.
I should have known something was up when I asked my Mum if she was shunning us too. Andrew had already made it clear he was having nothing to do with us. She replied “I will know what to do when your congregation makes an announcement”. This surprised me – the announcement she referred to could only be the disfellowship announcement, but as far as I was aware no judicial action was in progress. Wrong – it was in progress. And she knew it. But still – my mother would keep a nominal relationship active with me until a stranger 400 miles away would announce that I was no longer a Jehovah’s Witness, meaning she could not speak to me for the rest of my natural life, without feeling guilty about doing so. Medieval – but I felt her pain – she was losing her son, her daughter-in-law and her two only grandchildren. Her decision though, or was it? Difficult to say with cultic groups who is making what decisions – if the boys in Brooklyn ever decide that shunning is a cruel and unusual barbarism in breach of several parts of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and that splits up families and makes them look like a cult, would my Mum start speaking to me again? And if so where is her conscience today? Hmmmm.
In any case the urgency and frequency of the calls from this elder were increasing and eventually he invited us to any or all of 3 dates for a Judicial Committee hearing. We declined to attend as it held no meaning for us. But curiosity got the better of me - I wanted to know what evidence they had ‘on’ me and who the witnesses to my sin were. Imagine my surprise when I was told one of the witnesses was my brother Andrew, and that he had made a special trip to London to accuse me face to face at one of the previous JC evenings which I was not present at. He had made a 1000 mile round trip to accuse me face to face of disagreeing with the boys in Brooklyn and yet didn’t have the decency to travel an extra half mile to knock our door and say hello to me and his two only nephews – just babies really. At this point if you believe in Jesus ask yourself what would he have done. Would Jesus be shunning babies, Andrew?
And so were disfellowshipped within a few weeks. No big deal as anyone that mattered to us had already decided we were dangerous and were shunning us. We knew the rules and how it would play out. That was over two years ago now and a lot has happened since then. I’ll save that for the final part of my story.
Part VII – Not The End Or The Beginning (will post it when I write it)