I posted what follows elsewhere but thought it might be of interest here as well. My forst posting here so I apologize in advance if this is not in the correct place.
A Tribute to Ray Franz (on what would have been his 98th Birthday) and to Ed Dunlap, his collaborator
Last week would have marked the 98th birthday of a man for whom most of us here have high regard. So, I begin this post with a tribute in his honor. Some here literally owe their lives to this humble, unassuming truth-seeker.
For those who may not know, Ray Franz, the nephew of the WT Society’s fourth president, Fred Franz, served the Society almost his whole life, which included a 9-year stint on the Governing Body. You can check out any number of accounts of his life, disfellowshipping and the impact he has had and continues to have on Jehovah’s Witnesses. His autobiographical account is the most riveting: “Crisis of Conscience”.
You will encounter there a modest man who sincerely gave himself over to what he believed was God’s one channel of communication to the human race. That channel would eventually betray him and is outlined in his autobiography and elsewhere. What I would like to reflect on here is to invite some thinking and conversation about what would have happened had the Society, instead of rejecting the reformation Ray Franz represented, instead embraced it? What would the Society look like today, if it listened more to Ray than to Fred, his uncle, who the long-time intellectual guru of WT?
Here are a few speculations of my own. Some of you will be familiar with not only the autobiography previously referenced, but with Ray’s subsequent theological text, “In Search of Christian Freedom”. As I noted in a previous post, this is worth the read as well. I don’t agree with all his theology but the important thing about it is that it demonstrates an honest mind at work. Imagine what the cult would look like today had the Society worked itself out of its self-insularity by following Ray Franz vs Fred Franz in 1980/81. Imagine if Ray Franz emerged as the Society’s president from what I will call that Great Unpleasantness.
I think we gain a glimpse of what a reformation might have looked like, not only on the doctrinal and organizational levels, but perhaps even more importantly, on the level of temperament.
Numerous people who knew Ray, and anyone who has read his work, can attest to the humility of the man, his personal integrity and the deep respect he had for others and their consciences.
A kindred soul who shared many of these characteristics was Ed Dunlap, Ray’s close collaborator in a number of writing projects including the “Commentary on James” and the preeminent, “Aid to Bible Understanding”.
Permit me to make a personal disclaimer here, which I noted in my very first post when coming to this subreddit a short while back. I was born in Brooklyn, NY into a culturally Catholic family, received all the Sacraments etc. but in the early 1960’s I made friends with a JW my age and that began my association and entry into the Society in 1964 (the 55th anniversary of my baptism would have been the first of this month). Ed Dunlap was my Congregation Servant and I got to know him, his wife, Betty, and many Bethelites during that period. I even met Fred Franz after a Gilead graduation. I have no clear recollection of ever having met Ray Franz, but I could have as he came to Bethel in 1965. I was a teenager in those days.
Ray and Ed, along with a number of others at Bethel and elsewhere, might have been the core of a reformation. These men and their colleagues, had many years of service to the Society in their background and enjoyed great credibility with many of the “Friends”. Together, Ray and Ed had the potential to form a powerful counter-balance to Fred Franz, who was the WT’s Thomas Aquinas and by then the Society’s president. It was not to be.
I left the Organization many years ago, after only spending three- or four-years in, so my apostacy was long before these events. While being disfellowshipped was a difficult personal experience, the fact that I was not born-in, nor were my family Witnesses, means that my experience of trauma pales in comparison to the heroic stories of people on this site. Yet, I understand the grip the WT culture can have on people and the trajectory of their lives.
Here is a thought I would like to submit for your consideration: Having been out for more than a half century, I see some striking things that may offer a valuable a perspective on what is happening today. When I was in the Society, we were reading books like “Equipped for Every Good Work”, “Let God be True”, “Babylon the Great Has Fallen” and “All Scripture is Inspired by God”. Take a look at them. From the perspective of someone who today holds an advanced degree in theology and who strongly disagrees with the theology and Biblical exegesis they contain, it is nonetheless clear that there has been a planned, precipitous intellectual decline in the past several decades.
It is blatantly obvious that the Society lost whatever intellectual backbone it had when it disfellowshipped the likes of Ray Franz and Ed Dunlap.
In the same way that a different Ray, Ray Kroch, took over a successful hamburger stand in California from the McDonald brothers and transformed it into the McDonald’s Corporation behemoth, so Nathan Knorr transformed Russell’s and Rutherford’s rickety network of colporteurs into a real, thriving business enterprise, dividing the practical recruiting know-how and ongoing training of an international sales force, with the theological quirkiness of that monkish autodidact Fred Franz.
The painfully less competent but audaciously more vain current Governing Body has dumbed down the intellectual output of its publications while pivoting to a virtual presence online. Where publishers were once seen presenting Watchtowers and Awakes on street corners seeking conversations with potential converts, today’s pioneers avoid discussions and instead put iPads in people’s faces. They distribute barcodes over books. This shift may have at first seemed technologically progressive and perhaps even seen as a providential preparation from the hand of Jehovah God in anticipation of the last moments of this wicked system of things (pestilence and all), but it misses one key and necessary ingredient of their past success in recruiting and retaining members. Pressure.
The apex came at this year’s bizarre and decentralized Zoom Memorial, which tells us a great deal about what is going on inside the WT culture. You can’t have one, centralized channel of effective control if there is not a depth of shared reinforced theological and cultural commitment. The depth is gone; the rest will dissipate. The Slave simply does not yet know what they are going to do with electronic media, even though they shifted to it radically. Their mis-perception is in how dependent they have been historically on personal manipulation, observation, constant indoctrination and pressure. But when even their elders are answering emails or using search engines during WT studies, the grip slowly loosens. It is harder to control people’s thinking and the development of their ideas when you have trained them to look up Bible verses on the same device that they can now read an article like this, and when you can’t see if they are wearing a skirt outside the camera’s frame. Talk about becoming Awake!
I find myself wondering what Ray Franz and Ed Dunlap would say about all this. I can hear Ed’s soothing Oklahoman accent, gently responding to questions while actually listening to the precocious curiosity of that 13-year-old kid who pelted him with questions 55 years ago in the Canarsie Kingdom Hall back in Brooklyn. With the same intellectual curiosity with which he or Ray might have pulled down a heavy (non-WT ) commentary from a shelf in the Bethel library in Brooklyn Heights, I could imagine him saying, “Well, let’s Google that question and see what we get.”
The wrong Franz got disfellowshipped 20 years ago.
Fr. Robert Sirico is Pastor of Sacred Heart of Jesus parish and President of the Acton Institute, both in Grand Rapids, MI..