Millions of children have grown up as Jehovah’s Witnesses. I was just one of many. Let’s start from the very beginning.
I owe my life to Jehovah’s Witnesses. In articulating it in this manner, I mean that I would not have been born if my father had not sat in on a Bible Study alongside his sister in 1967. He most certainly would not have met my mother a year later while pioneering together, and 1974 would have come and gone without me taking my first breaths of air. My mother’s grandfather first heard one of Judge Rutherford’s phonograph records in the American Great Plains area in the 1930s. Several of his daughters also joined, though my grandmother wasn’t a particularly zealous Witness. Although she remained faithful (and still does today, edging toward her tenth decade of existence), she didn’t force the issue with her seven children and unbelieving husband. Mom went through her own brief period of rebellion in the 60’s, dating men, smoking cigarettes, and idolizing The Beatles.
Though I had no way of knowing this during most of my life, I probably more specifically owe my life to the publication of the book Life Everlasting in Freedom of the Sons of God, which was released in 1966. Looking back at this particular chapter of Jehovah’s Witness history and the consequences which followed this book’s release and the emphasis put upon the 1975 date, I can simply draw no other conclusion. Perhaps if the end of times weren’t stressed as much as they were, my mother might have followed most of her siblings into substance abuse and marriage to an infidel. Maybe my father would not have seen the grave importance and urgent nature of this distinctive teaching, and continued his studies in college. It seems quite silly now to simplify things to the extent that I am alive today due to a religious movement and a publication released to further its cause. No matter how much I try to hide these facts, as if they were deep and dark family secrets, I cannot escape them. Perhaps I was never meant to. Thus, after 30+ years of living, I finally feel free and open to discuss these matters to anyone should the subject come up.
As I was growing up, most of my relatives were “in the Truth” as this was commonly referred to. My Dad’s sister and her family were quite close. Even a few of my mother’s sisters could be observed attending meetings and going out in field service. In the late 70’s, things started to become different. I noticed that we weren’t seeing many of my cousins, aunts, and uncles anymore. When finally pressed about the issues, I was informed that I wouldn’t be spending much time with these people as they had “stopped serving Jehovah”. This came as an utter shock to me. How could these fine people have done such a careless act? The boilerplate “Satan and his demons had to be involved” was the conclusion I was often brought to. Around the time of the turn of the decade in the early 80’s, the only family which remained was by Dad’s brother’s family. My mother’s sister was weak, but still professed belief, and so thankfully we still had contact with them. But everything else vanished.
In 1980, our family, which consisted of my older sister and younger brother as well, moved out of the house we owned and into a rental in a cookie cutter tract housing suburb 10 miles away. The people at the Hall were different, but more notably, there were virtually no children our age there. In the elementary school I had attended, my sister, me, and later, my brother, were the only Witnesses there. This fact scared me. Soon as I was brought along with my parents in door-to-door ministry, I started recognizing some of the kids who answered the door. Even more shocking to me, they saw who I was. “What were you doing at my door dressed up like that on the weekend?” was the question often put to me. Though I had a canned answer which I knew I should have said (I am serving Jehovah in preaching the good news of the Kingdom), somehow I knew that this would have brought forth even more probing questions. As a result, I started to become known as “that strange religious kid” to my new classmates. I began to withdraw from everything and everyone. My ultimate estrangement from my peers was still to come.
My father worked in construction, so when the weather turned for the worse, he was often at home. My mother was meek and obedient, but not overly zealous in her enforcement of Jehovah’s rules. Dad was the opposite. When he was home during the day, we usually had Watchtowers waiting for us on the table when we got home. As a child who wanted to watch cartoons as soon as I got home from school, this was always a disappointment. We were informed that this study of the Watchtower was only to prepare for the Sunday meeting. Also expected of us was “personal study” of any of the Society’s publications. This was my first real question about these guidelines set about for us by the Society. One half of the meeting on Sunday was ostensibly for the “Watchtower Study”. Weren’t we going to study it then? Why must we study for a study? We also had the Theocratic Ministry School, the Service Meeting, and the Book Study on evenings during then week. Shouldn’t that have been enough? As a result, I hated having bad weather since this meant that my father was home and we would be subjected to strict and disciplined “study” with the conclusions forcefully drawn out for us. My second question was regarding the celebration of the American holiday of Thanksgiving. Though the pagan roots of Christmas and the unlikelihood that December 25 th was really Jesus’ birthday were well documented and spelled out for us, I never understood the prohibition regarding Thanksgiving, and for that matter, birthdays. As I remembered it, the explanation went that Thanksgiving was “pagan” holiday since the Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony were celebrating this dinner with the Native Americans, who gave thanks to their pagan gods. Even at my young age, I thought this was really a stretch, which I would later know as the fallacy of “guilt by association”.
At my second grade classroom, there was to be a Thanksgiving themed lunch during the week. Somehow my dad got wind of this, and he gave me pointed warnings not to partake, let alone touch any of the food offered. Ideally, he wanted me to “give a good Witness” by informing everyone they were serving Satan by eating turkey, mashed potatoes, and stuffing. At the very least, I was to isolate myself in a corner of the classroom and be completely aloof from everything. This I had faithfully planned on doing. Though I didn’t quite agree with the Society’s line of reasoning, I didn’t want to upset Jehovah. But in particular, I didn’t want to upset my father. Jehovah didn’t beat me when I displeased him. Dad did, and when he thought that you had disobeyed one of Jehovah’s laws, you were not spared the rod. Breaking or circumventing any Jehovah’s Witness law, standard, or tradition was the one thing that would set him off. Since I had already become known as some sort of an oddity due to my random appearances at my classmates’ doors during weekends, I had acquired my own personal bully. His name was Gerald. Gerald was a Cub Scout, and had the solemn duty of raising and lowering the American flag before and after class. This led us into a direct course of conflict, since I was under strict orders to not salute the flag or recite the “Pledge of Allegiance”. When Gerald menacingly asked me why I didn’t salute, I chose the more neutral tone of “It’s against my religion”. To be fair, Gerald undoubtedly couldn’t grasp how religion had any conflicts with patriotism. To him they went right along with each other. This issue between us was unresolved by the time the Thanksgiving lunch was served. I shared this information with my father in the hope that he would straighten things out with my teacher, but all I had gotten was an “atta-boy” that I had done the right thing. It’s never easy to be the only one in class who is left out. I just wanted the whole thing to be over, and would have skipped lunch altogether if it had gotten me out of this predicament. As the lunch was served, I pushed my plate aside and began to gravitate towards the empty half of the classroom. Not missing a beat, Gerald followed me and wanted to know what I was doing. After giving him the same answer that I had given him regarding the flag salute, he wasn’t having any more of it. He started pushing me and shoving me back to my seat, but I tried to elude him. This made him even angrier at me, and he punched me several times in the belly. At the point of tears, I finally succumbed and walked back to my desk and started poking at my food. Under his constant stare, I started eating.
My father picked me up from school that day. Due to the holiday week, half the class had the morning session, and the other half had the afternoon one. I have the morning session and it was around 1 PM that he picked me up. I knew what was coming. The first words out of his mouth were to question me about whether or not I had partaken of the forbidden turkey lunch. At first I had attempted to explain the situation leading up to my sin, but wasn’t having any of it. He would have hit me had he not been driving, but I was dragged crying back into the house while he was in a rage. My Book of Bible Stories was immediately opened to the page of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. These three Hebrews were threatened with the furnace of the Babylonian king, while I couldn’t resist one second grade bully. The bound volumes soon followed with particular references to the evil nature of Thanksgiving. In short, I was told that I had just served Satan by eating that turkey lunch, and that if Armageddon came right then and there, I would be killed. Needless to say, I was in hysterics and crying uncontrollably. In my innocence, I couldn’t have told my father a simple lie which would have gotten me off the hook. But I should have. This sour tale did not end in a flourish of uncontrolled sobbing over open bound volumes, unfortunately.
After the impromptu Bible Study session, it was soon established that we were to go back to the school and I was going to tell my teacher how I had sinned against Jehovah. My father even composed the content of what I was going to say. I was going to start it off by saying “I did something I shouldn’t have done”. Then I was going to go into the “Biblical” reasoning behind the Jehovah’s Witness view of Thanksgiving. I begged my dad for forgiveness and asked that he please not make me do this in front of the other half of the class and the teacher. This made him angrier and he stipulated that I was “ashamed of Jehovah” for not wanting to preach to my teacher and class. As we marched towards the classroom, my knees began to wobble. A shove to the back straightened me out. By the time we reached the room, my teacher was just outside it with the rest of my class lined up behind her. I was hoping the class would have already left. I barely made it through the first prepared sentence. I cried hysterically as I buried my tears into my teacher’s skirt. As I was holding onto her legs for dear life, my father continued the sermon I was to give. I hated him for that. From that day on I despised him and dreaded the thought of my own father. I spent the remainder of my school years knowing that something was odd about me, and I felt even more isolated from everyone. I never stood up for myself after that, knowing that my father would never back me up, and I would be punished even more for fighting. Gerald wasn’t the last bully I had to contend with. Consequently, this was the day I had ceased to be a Jehovah’s Witness. It was all settled in my own mind. It was only a matter of when.
In the same year of my very first Thanksgiving feast, our family had important guests from out of town. One of my uncles was the Convention Overseer for the District Assembly. He brought several older men and women along with him to dinner at our house. Alone among the group was this elderly man whom I thought was a bit funny looking. He always had a strange smile or smirk on his face. I knew he must have been important because everyone stopped talking when he started. I don’t remember a whole lot of this event. Most of what I saw now is gathered from stories my mother had repeated to me later. Us children were carefully herded into our own room and table for dinner, but as dessert was brought out, we were invited into the big room and all sat on the floor. We had other things on our mind than these uninteresting guests. Silence descended upon the room as the introduction was made. The man in question was none other than Frederick W. Franz, the fourth president of the Watchtower and Bible Tract Society, otherwise known as Jehovah’s Witnesses. He took a few of us on his lap, and muttered a few things such as how he saw a few future missionaries and Bethel workers in the bunch. My mother volunteered the fact that I had nearly memorized every story on My Book of Bible Stories, and that I could tell you what number it was if you mentioned the title. Brother Franz was impressed by this, but wanted to see for himself. He called for the book to be brought to him, and he gave me a short quiz that I effortlessly passed. He smiled warmly and we were soon all dismissed. We were later told that this man was anointed and would go rule with Jesus Christ in heaven after he died. This seemed strange to me since I wondered why we weren’t all going. After all, this was just another man among many. I wasn’t about to inquire further.
About a couple years later, we went to my uncle’s house, and it was here that I met another important guest. This man had little of the charm and genteel manner of Brother Franz. As I joked to my brother and sister later, this one looked rather like a Muppet. He had semi-curly gray hair, and huge spectacles. Even with these exaggerated features, this wasn’t the defining feature of him by far. I’ve heard Karl Klein a few times at the District Convention. During his talks we were most likely to be punished, because his voice along with his German accent was something children could not help but giggle about. My father would lean over and sternly admonish us, while reminding us about Brother Klein’s standing in the organization. More important than what he was saying was who he was. Thus, by simply being on the Governing Body and one of the Anointed at Bethel, Karl Klein’s words were to be taken with the utmost seriousness. Looking back, as well as hearing what many of Karl’s contemporaries thought about the man, Klein was in his element at the dinner table. Though he was given a place of importance at the table, it was with none of the almost hideous sense of godly presence which had absorbed Fred Franz. It seemed to me that Karl relished in his position and always took the opportunity when it came to remind people how important he was to the organization. I forget just how or what was said that it hurt his fragile ego, but at one point Karl started to call out for someone to bring him the song book. One of my cousins raced to her room and grabbed her own copy. Karl held up the song book for all to see, and went into some kind of ramble about how he was a musician and that the book itself had owed a lot to his oversight in the development stages. Much preferring my Thriller album to that hideous cackle which I was embarrassed to sing, this claim didn’t impress me. But I’ll never forget how obviously vain the man was. And here was a man who was tasked along with a handful of others to be our spiritual taskmasters.
The next Governing Body member to attract my attention was Albert Schroeder at the District Convention in the early nineties. I did not meet him, but something he said stuck in my mind. I’m certain that wasn’t his intention, but what was said was said. The talk he gave was about apostasy and apostates. Through the gossip mill that always had a life of its own around the conventions, we learned that apostates were infiltrating the convention. We could see some with their picket signs outside the convention, and were told that they were being directed by Satan. Even though I was getting towards the end of my teen years, this still put a scare into me. The story went that these people were disguising themselves as Witnesses, and leaving their edited versions of the Society’s literature in the bathrooms. Making a vague reference to these rumors, Brother Schroeder worked his talk up to a bit of a climax. “Do not be reading the book by Franz!”. I had no idea which “Franz” he could be referring to. My parents didn’t either, though we all were in agreement this was not a reference to Fred. Mom speculated that it might have been a reference to a son of Fred Franz who was airing out his family’s dirty laundry. It took me years to figure out which Franz he was talking about. My interest was piqued, though I knew better than to put myself in trouble by reading it.
By the time I had reached 17, the pressure was in full swing about me getting baptized. I dreaded this decision. I knew that I did not want any part of this religion which to me seemed a bit hokey with a strange 50’s style morality coupled with a 19 th Century millenarian philosophy and Old Testament imagery. But the pressure was on from both parents about what they expected of me. My older sister had succumbed to the pressure two years earlier, and my younger brother had just gotten baptized. I was known as the problem child now, and I was often ridiculed. Family studies now focused on me and my apparent lack of faith, and I had often left them in tears. Finally, my father put an ultimatum to me to either get baptized, or get out of the house. I told him I didn’t want to get out of the house, so he submitted my name to the elders as a baptismal candidate. I took it in stride, and tried my best to get through the studies with three different elders which were a pre-requisite for this. At the next District Convention, I shamefully trudged down the steps to a baptism I never wanted or authorized. I had to. It was that or the streets. I convinced myself that after this step, things would have calmed down a bit. It was foolish of me to think this, knowing what I did about how Jehovah’s organization worked. As it turned out, my baptism as one of Jehovah’s Witnesses was one of the worst choices I had ever made in my life.
Though I grudgingly had gotten baptized, I was adamant about not pioneering. Ever. I always had a problem with the silly notion that you needed to report your time in field service. Though the organization always stressed that they needed this information to know how much literature to produce, I saw through the ruse. It was a thinly disguised attempt to pressure people to put more time in. The notion of putting in time to me was counter-productive. Like everyone else, I knew that for every hour claimed, there were actually only minutes in which you actually preached to people. Sometimes not even that as many doors were slammed by the people we did find at home. My father made a special effort to ensure that I was keeping my end of my dedication to Jehovah. Thus, I was often the one he dragged out of bed on Saturdays to go out in service with him. Knowing that I was the weak one, this was probably his attempt to train me. It didn’t work out so well for me. By this time, my sister was disfellowshipped and I was constantly reminded about not following her path. It was on one of these mornings that I decided that I would not go out in service ever again. It was already in the afternoon as we had been hitting the territory since 10 AM. I was getting tired and was waiting for him to call it a day. My turn came at the door and a stern looking man opened it, with his face not inviting anything I was about to say. So I said what came naturally. “We’re Jehovah’s Witnesses.” The response was “Jesus Christ, get out of here!” As we were walking back towards the car, my father lit into me. His position was that I never should have said that. Instead I should have preached to him and not given him the excuse he needed to slam the door on me. I thought this was dishonest. Why shouldn’t I identify myself? It was what we were. At any rate, my father’s nit-picking and constant pressure to do more had reached its breaking point. Though I did go out on a few other days, the writing was on the wall. One day I would quit this silly ritual. I felt really great about it too. I remember my last day in service right up to the detail of where we were going door-to-door and with whom. Upon coming home, I put my book bag into the furthest reaches of my closet, knowing I would not be needing them again.
I have been inactive since 1992. My sister came back twice, but now she is on her third disfellowshipping. I joke to her that she might get a free set of steak knives if goes for a fourth. My brother stayed, though I suspect his faith is based on that he is not the type to do any research on his own, and in no small part due to the fact that he live off of my father as long as he stays. True to his word, my father went right back into pioneering once he retired. My mother followed him into it until she was tragically killed almost 10 years ago. While my mother always kept up contact with me on a weekly basis, my father seldom contacts me. He will speak to me if I call and take somewhat of an interest in my life, but it always goes back to the one subject I can’t bring myself to tell him the truth of what I feel about. I’m not ‘coming back’. I never was really there in the first place. He and my brother still refuse to have anything to do with my disfellowshipped sister. When I look back at my family and the fragmented mess of what we’ve become, I feel only pity and regret. After my mom died, everything fell apart. She kept us together, in spite of organizational rules. I miss her greatly, and not a day passes when I don’t think of the love she showed me. With a bit of anger, I also reminisce about the guilt that this organization put on her for not doing enough. She was habitually depressed for most of her life and never got the happiness she deserved. Knowing what I do now about the organization’s history, she’s yet another one of C.T. Russell’s, J.F. Rutherford’s, N.H Knorr’s, and F.W. Franz’s victims. She was told she would never grow old and die. She believed that, but eventually she had both happen to her. My father has literally wasted what should have been a pleasant and long retirement period on a ritualistic submission in mindlessly putting in as much “time” as he can. Little does he know that he’s doing just that. Putting in time, like a prisoner with a long sentence might do, with death or incapacity the only exit. As I look to people with the same experiences as I have had, I realize that the ex JW community contains one of the few people on this planet that I can truly relate to. I cannot eliminate Jehovah’s Witnesses from my life, as much as I would want to. They are always there, and nearly every personality trait that I carry today has some root in this upbringing. Instead of isolating myself, I’ll embrace it. Ex-JW’s are my people. We don’t all think alike, but we have the same foundations.