| Witness protection By Joel Beck Friday, May 14, 2004
Nothing puts people on edge quite like a stranger at their doorstep. So why do the Jehovah's Witnesses insist on the door-to-door ministry? Because the law says they can - and yes, God told them to. It takes just a few minutes of polite conversation with a Jehovah's Witness to arrive at a rather baffling question: Why are people always calling the cops on these nice folks? When it comes to shady characters lurking in the neighborhood, the neatly pressed suits and sunny dispositions of the Jehovah's Witnesses don't exactly evoke widespread terror. Moreover, the religious literature they're famous for peddling - with Utopian-like illustrations of a nothing-but-smiles populace - may be vaguely creepy in a "Stepford Wives" kind of way, but there's nothing about the Jehovah's Witnesses' practices that screams "better call 911." But people do. All the time. "With the way the crime rate is today, you can understand how people are a little afraid when they see strangers," admits Carl Mackay, an elder with the Jehovah's Witness Kingdom Hall in Lynn. "I can understand how people feel because I might feel the same way if a stranger came to my house." Such was the case in Topsfield just last month when police received a call about a suspicious vehicle turning in and out of neighborhood driveways and strangers knocking on doors. After determining that they were in fact Jehovah's Witnesses, the responding officer suggested that it would be in the ministers' best interests to register with the Topsfield police department before engaging in their door-to-door activity. But as Topsfield Police Chief Dan O'Shea soon learned after receiving a letter from the legal department at the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society - the New York-based parent organization of the Jehovah's Witnesses - a 2001 Supreme Court ruling upheld the Witnesses' constitutional right to continue with their public ministry without having to obtain a permit (see adjacent story). People can call the police all they want, but the bottom line is that the Jehovah's Witnesses have the right to deliver the word of God directly to your doorstep. Like it or not. "It creates a little bit of a Catch-22 for us," says Chief O'Shea. "In this day and age, a lot of people are leery of anybody coming door to door. And not just in Topsfield. It creates the same quandary everywhere." Proselytizing as Jehovah's Witnesses' cause may be, O'Shea speaks for hefty portion of the population when he says the Jehovah's Witnesses' aren't always welcome at every household. Put aside, for a moment, the people who call the police when they see them coming. What should be even more alarming for the Jehovah's Witnesses are the number of folks who simply cringe, roll their eyes or lock their doors at the mere sight of them. No one ever said spreading God's word would be easy. But doing so at the private homes of total strangers borders on the impossible. "Most people are not resentful toward them, but they do kind of joke when they say 'oh yeah, here come the Jehovah's Witnesses,'" says former Topsfield Board of Selectman chairman Joe Iarocci, who sent a letter of apology to the Watchtower Society after the police incident. [There's more, see link above] E-mail reporter Joel Beck at [email protected]. | 
