Cult

People who are in a cult don’t recognize they’re in a cult. Who would acknowledge that their sense of purpose, their undying loyalty to a leader, would qualify as a cult? I never heard that word applied to Jehovah’s Witnesses until recently when I read Leaving the Witness, by Amber Scorah, a young woman who traveled to China with her husband as Jehovah’s Witness missionaries.

When my mother converted in 1958, taking us three children along with her, I was ten. We didn’t call them missionaries. We called it serving where the need is great. The mission—to convert the Chinese--was one of my major obsessions in my early adolescence, as I couldn’t imagine how billions of Chinese could both hear the message of Jehovah’s truth and instantly recognize that they should drop their culture and beliefs for the Bible and a God they’d never heard of.

from www.JW.org

Amber held witness meetings in hotel rooms under the subterfuge of marketing meetings, which was necessary to avoid being apprehended for breaking Chinese law. Eventually she got a job as a podcast commentator on life in China, which opened a new perspective on life and was the first chink in the armor through which a different truth emerged. She learned, through a listener in Los Angeles, that the operation of Jehovah’s Witnesses in China had all the hallmarks of a cult, particularly the part that once you are in, it is exceedingly difficult to get out.

The Witnesses call it disfellowshipping—the punishment if you leave or commit an act against their rules, mostly involving sex. Disfellowshipping sounds abstract, kind of like unfriending someone on Facebook. It’s actually much closer to being cancelled. No one who is a Witness may talk to you or associate with you in any way. If your family and extended family are all Witnesses, being disfellowshipped means you are cut off from a lot of people. Example: your brother graduates from college. You are not invited. Your sister gets married. You will not be a bridesmaid.

If I’d thought about it back then, I would have said the Witnesses were a relatively small, relatively harmless Christian sect with some pretty crazy beliefs. But cults sustain themselves through secrecy and threats—and finding ways to brand their members as unique. Mormons don’t drink coffee. Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t take blood transfusions. The rules don’t make a lot of sense.

Take the Scientologists. They believe people lived past lives as extraterrestrials. They have a secret text that states that memories go back 76 trillion years, older than the universe. Attempts to leave Scientology are met with disconnection, a practice remarkably similar to disfellowshipping.

Perhaps the reason I didn’t consider the Witnesses a cult is that cults are generally ruled by charismatic figures, a leader who governs by force of personality. Jim Jones managed to get hundreds of his followers to drink Flavor-aid laced with cyanide because they believed his argument that they would be whisked to heaven. Jones moved his flock from San Francisco to Jonestown in Guyana in the 1970s. Claims of human rights abuse were raised by members who said they were being held against their will. Jones then ordered the murder-suicide, which resulted in 909 deaths, 304 of them children.

David Koresh, leader of the Branch Davidians, was originally named Vernon Howell. His cult ended in a fire after a shootout with the US Department of Alcohol, Firearms and Tobacco.

When I became a Witness, Brother Fred Franz, the president of the Watchtower Bible and Tract Association, the corporate entity of the Witnesses, looked like a corporate CEO. He wore three-piece suits. His voice was measured and controlled, even when giving Kingdom talks in huge sports stadiums. Although he laid down plenty of Witness rules, his tone was dispassionate. They weren’t his rules he seemed to be saying, they were Jehovah’s. He was just a spokesman.

I see now that the charismatic leader of the Witnesses was actually Jehovah, an unseen presence but whose name was invoked regularly—Jehovah God, as if his first name were Jehovah and his last name were God.

Of course, we never saw Jehovah, but some folks said they heard him. This was made clear by the only holiday celebrated by the Witnesses--the last supper of Christ which they call The Memorial. We all got together in the Kingdom Hall and those members who had been told by Jehovah that they were in the holy class of 144,000, those who at the war of Armageddon would be whisked to heaven to rule the earth with Christ, would stand up to be acknowledged.

Brother Raymond Franz, a nephew of Brother Fred Franz, was asked to substantiate the Witness 144,000 number. He spent years trying to unravel the book of Revelations, only to discover that there was really no authority for the number. Franz was asked to resign for “apostasy” and then disfellowshipped.

He wrote in his memoir:

I now began to realize how large a measure of what I had based my entire adult life course on was just that, a myth—persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.

The holy war Armageddon—when the Witnesses would survive to live on earth in paradise and everyone else would die--was predicted to happen in the year 1975, yet the year came and went without a war. By 1975, I had left the Witnesses so I didn’t see the fallout myself, but accounts say the Witness leadership did an about face, first blaming their membership for taking the date literally when all they meant was 1975 was the beginning of the end of times and then using certain other numerological explanations for why they could not pinpoint the date precisely.

As for odd beliefs, maybe not as odd as extraterrestrials, but pretty odd anyway, many Witness rules defy logic, even though ostensibly each is supported by a Bible verse. In addition to the no sex rules familiar to any evangelical, are rules against saluting the flag, celebrating birthdays or Christmas, and a refusal to take blood transfusions. When I joined, I was told the no transfusion rule was based on the dietary law in the Bible that said thou shalt not drink blood. [Genesis 9:4 “only flesh with its soul—its blood you must not eat.”]

None of the other dietary laws made the cut – not shellfish, pork, no mixing meat with dairy. Just blood. And you had to reconcile the obvious difference between eating blood and getting transfusions, which clearly weren’t heard of when the Bible was written.

Before the Witness days, my little brother Stephen had a blood transfusion as a baby. He was transfused twice completely at birth in 1955 because he was born with Rh anemia. When Stephen was born, my mother had not yet converted to a Jehovah’s Witness. I don’t know if she would have let Stephen die in order to follow Jehovah’s rules. Like so much else about the Witnesses dogma, we just didn’t talk about it. If a religion enforces its rules by making its members make decisions like that one, it strikes me that it definitely qualifies as a cult.

Although I didn’t see the Witnesses as a cult when I was part of it, I came to question their rules, particularly the idea that they and only they were God’s chosen people to survive Armageddon. I had accepted it all, until I couldn’t accept any of it.

Unlike Scorah, I didn’t have a truth-teller who talked me out of the Witnesses. I did that for myself through a combination of logic and shame at being a proselytizer for a religion that seemed alternately cruel or random.

At age twenty, using a little-known technicality, I resigned instead of being disfellowshipped. Actually, my mother engineered it: if I’d profess that I’d been baptized at age 12 just to please my mother, they would annul the baptism. Today that loophole is closed. Witnesses get baptized late in teenage years and sign a statement that they know the consequences if they try to leave.

Forty years after my mother’s death, my two younger brothers are still Jehovah’s Witnesses. One of them shuns my niece, who left the Witnesses over their cult-like beliefs. My own daughters can’t believe I don’t call my brothers to try to talk them out of being Witnesses or at least stand up for my belief that their decision to shun my niece is wrongheaded and cruel.

I know there’s nothing I could say or do that will change them. Lecturing them might lead to a rift I’m not willing to create. We chose different ways to cope with the chaos of being raised by an alcoholic father we couldn’t trust who provided no moral guidance. I chose to practice twelve-step recovery, talk about my past and try to heal it. My brothers chose a cult. I chose to reject authority figures of all types. They chose to embrace the ultimate authority figure of Jehovah.

We all found a way to stay safe. All of us found a way to our own individual truth, and who am I to say they made the wrong choice? All I know is that once having recognized the Witnesses as a draconian religion that uses bizarre rules to brand its members as different and enforces them through the power of shunning, I had to leave.

So did Amber Scorah, who divorced, married a non-Witness, and is now a writer living in New York.