Whether we like it or not, moral challenge affects each of us.
It is one of life’s bittersweet ingredients from which there is no successful escape. It has the power to enrich us or impoverish us, to determine the true quality of our relationships with those who know us. It all depends on our response to that challenge. The choice is ours—it is seldom an easy one.
We have the option, of course, of surrounding our conscience with a sort of cocoon of complacency, passively “going along,” shielding our inner feelings from whatever might disturb them. When issues arise, rather than take a stand we can in effect say, “I’ll just sit this one out; others may be affected—even hurt—but I am not.” Some spend their whole life in a morally ‘sitting’ posture. But, when all is said and done, and when life finally draws near its close, it would seem that the one who can say, “At least I stood for something,” must feel greater satisfaction than the one who rarely stood for anything.
Sometimes we may wonder if people of deep conviction have become a vanishing race, something we read about in the past but see little of in the present. Most of us find it fairly easy to act in good conscience so long as the things at stake are minor. The more that is involved, the higher the cost, the harder it becomes to resolve questions of conscience, to make a moral judgment and accept its consequences. When the cost is very great we find ourselves at a moral crossroads situation, facing a genuine crisis in our lives.
This book [Crisis of Conscience] is about that kind of crisis, the way people are facing up to it and the effect on their lives.
Admittedly, the story of the persons involved may have little of the high drama found in the heresy trial of a John Wycliffe, the intrigue of the international hunt for an elusive William Tyndale, or the horror of the burning at the stake of a Michael Servetus. But their struggle and suffering are, in their own way, no less intense. Few of them could say it as eloquently as Luther, yet they take very much the same stand he took when he said to the seventy men judging him:
Unless I am convinced by the testimonies of the Scriptures or by evident reason (for I believe neither pope nor councils alone, since it is manifest they have often erred and contradicted themselves), I am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted, and my conscience is held captive by the word of God; and as it is neither safe nor right to act against conscience, I cannot and will not retract anything. Here I stand; I cannot otherwise; God help me. Amen.[These were Luther’s concluding words in making his defense at the Diet of Worms, Germany, in April of 1521.]
Long before any of these men, the apostles Peter and John of nineteen centuries ago confronted essentially the same issue when they stood before a judicial council of the most respected members of their lifelong religion and frankly told them:
Whether it is right in the sight of God to listen to you rather than to God, you must judge; for we cannot but speak of what we have seen and heard.--Acts 4:19, 20, RSV.
The people I write of are from among those I know most intimately, persons who have been members of the religious group known as Jehovah’s Witnesses. I am sure, and there is evidence to show, that their experience is by no means unique, that there is a similar stirring of conscience among people of various faiths. They face the same issue that Peter and John and men and women of later centuries confronted: the struggle to hold true to personal conscience in the face of pressure from religious authority.
For many it is an emotional tug-of-war. On the one hand, they feel impelled to reject the interposing of human authority between themselves and their Creator; to reject religious dogmatism, legalism and authoritarianism, to hold true to the teaching that Christ Jesus, not any human religious body, is “the head of every man.”--1 Corinthians 11:3. On the other hand, they face the risk of losing lifelong friends, seeing family relationships traumatically affected, sacrificing a religious heritage that may reach back for generations. At that kind of crossroads, decisions do not come easy.
What is here described, then, is not merely a “tempest in a teapot,” a major quarrel in a minor religion. I believe there is much of vital benefit that any person can gain from considering this account. For if the numbers presently involved are small, the issues are not. They are far-reaching questions that have brought men and women into similar crises of conscience again and again throughout history.
At stake is the freedom to pursue spiritual truth untrammeled by arbitrary restrictions and the right to enjoy a personal relationship with God and his Son free from the subtle interposition of a priestly nature on the part of some human agency. While much of what is written may on the surface appear to be distinctive of the organization of Jehovah’s Witnesses, in reality the underlying, fundamental issues affect the life of persons of any faith that takes the name Christian.
The price of firmly believing that it is “neither safe nor right to act against conscience” has not been small for the men and women I know. Some find themselves suddenly severed from family relationships as a result of official religious action—cut off from parents, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, even from grandparents or grandchildren. They can no longer enjoy free association with longtime friends for whom they feel deep affection; such association would place those friends in jeopardy of the same official action. They witness the blackening of their own good name—one that it has taken them a lifetime to earn—and all that such name has stood for in the minds and hearts of those who knew them. They are thereby deprived of whatever good and rightful influence they might exercise on behalf of the very people they have known best in their community, in their country, in all the world. Material losses, even physical mistreatment and abuse, can be easier to face than this.
What could move a person to risk such a loss? How many persons today would? There are, of course (as there have always been), people who would risk any or all of these things because of stubborn pride, to satisfy the desire for material gain, for power, prestige, prominence, or simply for fleshly pleasure. But when the evidence reveals nothing indicating such aims, when in fact it shows that the men and women involved recognized that just the opposite of those goals was what they could expect—what then?
What has happened among Jehovah’s Witnesses provides an unusual and thought-provoking study in human nature. Besides those who were willing to face excommunication for the sake of conscience, what of the larger number, those who felt obliged to share in or support such excommunications, to allow the family circle to be broken, to terminate long-standing friendships? There is no question about the sincerity of many of these persons, or that they felt and still feel distress from carrying out what they deemed a necessary religious duty. What convictions and reasonings motivated them?
Notably, as regards the cases here dealt with, many if not most of those involved are persons who have been associated with Jehovah’s Witnesses for twenty, thirty, forty or more years. Rather than a “fringe element” they have more frequently been among the more active, productive members of the organization.
They include persons who were prominent members of the Witnesses’ international headquarters staff at Brooklyn, New York; men who were traveling superintendents and elders; women who spent long years in missionary and evangelistic work. When they first became Witnesses, they had often cut off all previous friendships with persons of other faiths, since such associations are discouraged among Jehovah’s Witnesses. For the rest of their life their only friends have been among those of their faith. Some had built their whole life plans around the goals set before them by the organization, letting these control the amount of education they sought, the type of work they did, their decisions as to marriage, and whether they had children or remained childless. Their “investment” was a large one, involving some of life’s most precious assets. And now they have seen all this disappear, wiped out in a matter of a few hours.
This is, I believe, one of the strange features of our time, that some of the most stringent measures to restrain expressions of personal conscience have come from religious groups once noted for the defense of freedom of conscience.
The examples of three men—each a religious instructor of note in his particular religion, with each situation coming to a culmination in the same year—illustrate this:
One, for more than a decade, wrote books and regularly gave lectures presenting views that struck at the very heart of the authority structure of his religion.
Another gave a talk before an audience of more than a thousand persons in which he took issue with his religious organization’s teachings about a key date and its significance in fulfillment of Bible prophecy.
The third made no such public pronouncements. His only expressions of difference of viewpoint were confined to personal conversations with close friends.
Yet the strictness of the official action taken toward each of these men by their respective religious organizations was in inverse proportion to the seriousness of their actions. And the source of the greatest severity was the opposite of what one might expect.
The first person described is Roman Catholic priest Hans Küng, professor at Tübingen University in West Germany. After ten years, his outspoken criticism, including his rejection of the doctrinal infallibility of the Pope and councils of bishops, was finally dealt with by the Vatican itself and, as of 1980, the Vatican removed his official status as a Catholic theologian. Yet he remains a priest and a leading figure in the university’s ecumenical research institute. Even students for the priesthood attending his lectures are not subject to church discipline.(They simply receive no academic credit for such attendance.)
The second is Australian-born Seventh Day Adventist professor Desmond Ford. His speech to a layman’s group of a thousand persons at a California college, in which he took issue with the Adventist teaching about the date 1844, led to a church hearing. Ford was granted six months leave of absence to prepare his defense and, in 1980, was then met with by a hundred church representatives who spent some fifty hours hearing his testimony. Church officials then decided to remove him from his teaching post and strip him of his ministerial status. But he was not disfellowshiped (excommunicated) though he has published his views and continues to speak about them in Adventist circles.
The third man is Edward Dunlap, who was for many years the Registrar of the sole missionary school of Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Watchtower Bible School of Gilead, also a major contributor to the organization’s Bible dictionary (Aid to Bible Understanding [now titled Insight on the Scriptures]) and the writer of its only Bible commentary (Commentary on the Letter of James). He expressed his difference of viewpoint on certain teachings only in private conversation with friends of long standing. In the spring of 1980, a committee of five men, none of them members of the organization’s Governing Body, met with him in secret session for a few hours, interrogating him on his views. After over forty years of association, Dunlap was dismissed from his work and home at the international headquarters and disfellowshiped from the organization.
Thus, the religious organization that, for many, has long been a symbol of extreme authoritarianism showed the greatest degree of tolerance toward its dissident instructor; the organization that has taken particular pride in its fight for freedom of conscience showed the least.
Herein lies a paradox. Despite their intense activity in door-to-door witnessing, most people actually know little about Jehovah’s Witnesses aside from their position on certain issues of conscience. They have heard of their uncompromising stand in refusing to accept blood transfusions, their refusal to salute any flag or similar emblem, their firm objection to performance of military service, their opposition to participation in any political activity or function. Those familiar with legal cases know that they have taken some fifty cases to the Supreme Court of the United States in defense of their freedom of conscience, including their right to carry their message to people of other beliefs even in the face of considerable opposition and objections. In lands where constitutional liberties protect them, they are free to exercise such rights without hindrance. In other countries they have experienced severe persecution, arrests, jailing, mobbings, beatings, and official bans prohibiting their literature and preaching.
How, then, is it the case that today any person among their members who voices a personal difference of viewpoint as to the teachings of the organization is almost certain to face judicial proceedings and, unless willing to retract, is liable for disfellow-shipment? How do those carrying out those proceedings rationalize the apparent contradiction in position? Paralleling this is the question of whether endurance of severe persecution and physical mistreatment at the hand of opposers is, of itself, necessarily evidence of belief in the vital importance of staying true to conscience, or whether it can simply be the result of concern to adhere to an organization’s teachings and standards, violation of which is known to bring severe disciplinary action.
Some may say that the issue is really not as simple as it is here presented, that there are other crucial matters involved. What of the need for religious unity and order? What of the need for protection against those who spread false, divisive and pernicious teachings? What of the need for proper respect for authority?
To ignore those factors would admittedly show an extreme, blindly unbalanced, attitude. Who can challenge the fact that freedom, misused, can lead to irresponsibility, disorder, and can end in confusion, even anarchy? Patience and tolerance likewise can become nothing more than an excuse for indecision, nonaction, a lowering of all standards. Even love can become mere sentimentality, misguided emotion that neglects to do what is really needed, with cruel consequences. All this is true and is what those focus on who would impose restraints on personal conscience through religious authority.
What, however, is the effect when spiritual “guidance” becomes mental domination, even spiritual tyranny? What happens when the desirable qualities of unity and order are substituted for by demands for institutionalized conformity and by legalistic regimentation? What results when proper respect for authority is converted into servility, unquestioning submission, an abandonment of personal responsibility before God to make decisions based on individual conscience?
Those questions must be considered if the issue is not to be distorted and misrepresented. What follows in this book illustrates in a very graphic way the effect these things have on human relationships, the unusual positions and actions persons will take who see only one side of the issue, the extremes to which they will go to uphold that side. The organizational character and spirit manifest in the 1980s, continued essentially unchanged in the1990s, and remains the same in this year 2000.
Perhaps the greatest value in seeing this is, I feel, that it can help us understand more clearly what the real issues were in the days of Jesus Christ and his apostles, and why and how a tragic deviation from their teachings and example came, so subtly, with such relative ease, in so brief a span of time. Those who are of other religious affiliations and who may be quick to judge Jehovah’s Witnesses would do well to ask first about themselves and about their own religious affiliation in the light of the issues involved, the basic attitudes that underlie the positions described and the actions taken.
To search out the answers to the questions raised requires going beyond the individuals affected into the inner structure of a distinctive religious organization, into its system of teaching and control, discovering how the men who direct it arrive at their decisions and policies, and to some extent investigating its past history and origins. Hopefully the lessons learned can aid in uncovering the root causes of religious turmoil and point to what is needed if persons trying to be genuine followers of God’s Son are to enjoy peace and brotherly unity.
[Chapter 1 of Crisis of Conscience, reprinted by persmission of the author]
