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http://home.versatel.nl/rsingelenberg/holden_review.htm
Andrew Holden. Jehovah’s Witnesses: Portrait of a Contemporary Religious Movement. London, New York: Routledge, 2002
There is a certain truth in Andrew Holden’s remark on the dearth of academic literature about the Jehovah’s Witnesses, in spite of their high visibility in daily life. Although a quick count yields approximately 90 scholarly publications, empirical social scientific research of this religious movement is surprisingly rare. Until now the most recent comprehensive study, The Trumpet of Prophecy (Oxford: Blackwell) by English sociologist James Beckford, dated back to 1975. Jehovah’s Witnesses in the United Kingdom are once again the subject in the book under review.
Andrew Holden’s basic framework is an examination of the response to modernization from a variety of theoretical angles. The most promising of these angles is the idea of Anthony Giddens, who argues that individuals in modern societies can deal with their anxiety about secular changes by trusting it to higher authorities. In addition, concepts of purity borrowed from anthropologist Mary Douglas make clear that the Watch Tower Society, the umbrella organization of the Witnesses, is part of the larger religious fundamentalist countercurrent, on the understanding that its teachings relate to a strictly rational theological system. The qualitative methodological approach is Geertzian, so in essence Holden has studied the Witnesses from the perspective of the detached anthropologist, suspending any judgments about the validity of their beliefs and practices. This conceptual foundation is the starting point for the main research questions: how does the Watch Tower Society deal with the challenges of the modern world and how do the Witnesses manage their religious identity in an age of cultural fluidity (p. 2)? Preceded by a sketch of the movement’s history and teachings, the phenomena of recruitment, conversion, and integration into the belief system and community of the Witnesses figure prominently in no less than three chapters. Next, Holden examines how adherents negotiate their contact with nonbelievers, followed by the socialization of second and subsequent generation members. In the final chapter he describes and analyzes causes of disaffiliation from the movement.
For the most part, the ethnographic approach works well, since some data Holden elicited from his interviewees could not have been obtained through other methods. They reveal, for example, that many youngsters transgress the movement’s puritanical rules, indulging in premarital sexual relationships and excessive alcohol consumption. Though officials of the Watch Tower Society are reluctant to admit that socializing children into the movement causes any major problems, the author concludes that ‘second-generation rebellion within the organization is more widespread than parents realize’ (p. 143). In 1996, for example, the Swedish branch of the organization, in a letter to the national congregations, made clear that youngsters exhibited gross misconduct during the annual summer conventions. As Holden rightly notes, such protest may jeopardize the survival of the movement in the longer term. Consequently, the effect of house-to-house proselytizing carries less weight than justified by the amount of attention the author pays to this characteristic form of recruitment.
This brings us to a shortcoming of the study, for Holden has refrained from critically analyzing the quantitative data that the Watch Tower Society publishes annually. (I will dwell on this topic, since it touches upon the nucleus of the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ identity.) Although the author relies on a study by Rodney Stark and Laurence Iannaccone (‘Why the Jehovah’s Witnesses Grow so Rapidly: A Theoretical Application’, Journal of Contemporary Religion 12 [1997], 133–157), which predicts a continuing and steady growth of the movement, reanalysis largely contradicts these findings. Primarily, these figures indicate that during the last decade membership in the movement’s traditional American and European strongholds (with the exception of the former Soviet controlled regions) is decreasing or at least stagnating. Moreover, expansion in the rest of the world, like Latin America, is considerably less spectacular than in the late 1980s. Secondly, commitment indicators, such as the amount of time the individual Witness spends on proselytizing, show a gradual decline. Further, it can be derived that the amount of ‘inactive’ Witnesses (members who do not engage in proselytizing) must be substantial. For example, in the UK, in the five-year period from 1997 until 2001, more than 15,000 prospective Witnesses were baptized, while the number of proselytizers decreased by 3%. Since, basically, the Watch Tower Society does not sanction inactivity, except for upward mobility within the organization, this can only lead to the conclusion that among Jehovah’s Witnesses, nominal membership has set in. From research among the Witnesses in the Netherlands, this reviewer learned that in some congregations 50% of the membership consists of ‘free-riders’.
While the data indicate that the missionary zeal of the Witnesses is waning, the potential pool of recruitment is also diminishing. The Western phenomenon of mutual wage earners not only affects the Witnesses themselves, causing them to reduce their time spent on proselytizing; it also contributes to many unanswered calls when they canvass their neighborhoods—a major factor in the dwindling evangelistic enthusiasm, according to this reviewer’s informants. From observing baptismal ceremonies, it is clear that the initiates are overwhelmingly, if not all, sons and daughters of the existing membership. Therefore, in those regions where the Watch Tower Society is firmly embedded in the religious landscape, the proportion of external recruits in a cohort of new adherents appears to be marginal in comparison with the quantity of members’ offspring. It seems safe to conclude that the function of house-to-house proselytizing for the individual believer has evolved from an effective recruitment strategy to a mere ritualized expression of commitment through which the believer demonstrates his or her religious identity. In the terminology of social anthropology, one may, in the near future, designate the practice as a ‘survival’. It would be premature, though, to conclude that the movement is in a process of decline. In newly opened missionary fields—usually in states who barely tolerate religious freedom—recruitment and commitment tend to peak initially; in that respect, China is a huge reservoir of potential adherents.
These comments notwithstanding, and some minor errors like calling the Witnesses ‘pacifists’, a label they emphatically rejected half a century ago, Holden’s strictly qualitative approach provides the reader with fascinating details about the Witnesses’ daily struggle, ranging from major issues of dealing with the tribulations of modernity such as ‘9/11’ to apparently futile occasions like unbelieving spouses who want to put up a Christmas tree (an abomination among Jehovah’s Witnesses, since they look upon this celebration and similar events such as birthdays as traditions rooted in paganism). The theoretical framework is convincing and fits perfectly well with the data. ‘The world’, though still anathema to a large extent, is a millenarian prerequisite: it must exist to show how evil it is. That does not imply silent withdrawal from or loud protest against the social system. Holden’s conclusion that the Witnesses’ response to the world ‘centres on the interplay between their resistance to and alliance with modern secular culture’ (p. 173, italics in original) may point to opposing and undecided positions: the movement’s continuous worldwide expansion of its infrastructure appears at odds with its urgent apocalypticism, while, at the level of the individual, a believing spouse may wonder if and how to partake in the birthday celebration of her unbelieving husband. At the same time, this dialectic relationship effectively blocks the road to either sectarian obscurity or mainstream denominationalism. By indicating how religion is shaped by secular forces, Holden’s monograph is also a valuable contribution to the study of Christian Fundamentalism in which this mechanism of calculating ambivalence functions as a viable means to negotiate with the outside world.
Once again, though, it is clear that sociologists and anthropologists of religion should aim at a variety of research instruments, since Holden’s ethnographic approach apparently obstructed a quantitatively oriented analysis. The outcome of the latter does not only query the author’s remark that ‘At the moment, the movement is flourishing …’ (p. 149) but also brings the Witnesses’ most salient feature of their religious identity up for discussion.