Pat Matthews decided she was not cut out to be a Jehovah’s Witness when the organization’s leaders instructed her to turn her back on a friend whose husband had died.
Matthews’s friend had been disfellowshiped (excommunicated) by the local Jehovah’s Witnesses group because of a “bad attitude.” Therefore, she was to be shunned by other members. When the woman’s husband died, Matthews telephoned leaders at the cult’s headquarters for advice. They told her to have nothing to do with the woman.
The funeral was held in the Jehovah’s Witnesses meeting hall because the deceased was a member in good standing. But no place was provided for his widow and son. They had to find a place by themselves near the casket.
“Ushers were stationed nearby, watchful and with arms folded,” Matthews said. “They were checking to see if anyone talked to her. Few of us did for fear of being excommunicated ourselves.”
At the graveside ceremony, the widow and her son stood alone, Matthews said. No one moved to comfort them. “I knew what was happening was not Christian,” she said, “and I was part of it. I had to ask myself, ‘what am I becoming?’ ”
Now an ex-Witness, Matthews recently joined some 20 other demonstrators outside the building that houses members of the Jehovah’s Witnesses governing board in Brooklyn, New York. The four-day “Freedom of Conscience” demonstration marked the first time a public protest was carried to the doorstep of the organization’s headquarters, known officially as the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society.
Former Witness John May of County Dublin, Ireland, said he initiated the demonstration to focus attention on the “outrageous cruelty” and “totalitarian oppression” of the Watch Tower hierarchy. The demonstrators represented eight countries and perhaps several hundred thousand former Witnesses.
The Watch Tower society claims about 2.5 million members worldwide, including 600,000 in the United States. But sources say a “revolving-door syndrome” has pulled about one million members from the ranks in the last decade. Richard Hickman, who heads one of some 20 organizations that assist banished Witnesses, said he has helped 2,600 individuals over the past three years.
Watch Tower theology recognizes only two kingdoms, Jehovah’s and Satan’s. Members are pressured to make friends only among themselves and to sever all contact with the outside world—political parties, social clubs, and “worldly” friends and relatives.
The effect over a period of years is “total isolation from the real world,” said Richard Rawe, one of the protest organizers. Rawe’s mother, 85, was told to cut all ties with her son. She was disfellowshiped when she refused to comply. Rawe said he has collected evidence showing that the Witnesses’ practice of disfellowshiping and shunning former members has caused broken homes, divorces, mental and emotional disorders, and suicides.
The demonstrators didn’t challenge the Watch Tower’s right to discipline members. “That’s their business,” said Ron Reed of Sacramento, California. Reed is a former Witness who is studying law in order to combat their methods. “Freedom is a two-way street,” he said. “I am free to worship or not to worship. I have the right to change my religion, but Jehovah’s Witnesses will not honor that right. They will not let anyone leave with dignity.”
Members who are banished and those who resign are treated alike. Their departure is publicly explained with inferences of immorality or with statements like “dogs returning to their vomit.” A strict policy of ostracism then takes over.
In their book The Orwellian World of Jehovah’s Witnesses (University of Toronto Press), Heather and Gary Botting suggest that paranoia in the Watch Tower board room prompted a more stringent practice of shunning in recent years (CT, Sept. 21, 1984, p. 66). The overzealous and often capricious manner in which local Jehovah’s Witnesses judicial committees evict and ostracize members has raised the larger issue of religious freedom.
“They act as if they can do anything they want under the guise of religious liberty,” said M. James Penton, one of Canada’s foremost Watch Tower apologists until he was excommunicated in 1981. Penton argues that members of religious organizations have civil rights that cannot be ignored by those organizations. “If the governing board is not willing to hear us,” Penton said, “then we are prepared to fight them in the courts and petition governments to protect us from the oppressive policies of the Watch Tower leadership.”
Court cases pending in the United States and Canada could provide the legal precedents Penton is seeking. He said he doesn’t expect the quarrel with the Watch Tower hierarchy to invite more government intervention in religious affairs. “If a church will faithfully and openly follow scriptural principles of discipline,” he said, “both the church’s right to discipline and the individual’s civil rights will be safeguarded.”
An elder on the Watch Tower governing board told CHRISTIANITY TODAY: “We do not think that [the possibility of judicial intervention] is a problem.” He said the demonstrators were free to voice their opinions, but that the governing board saw no need to respond.
ROBERT L. NIKLAUSin Brooklyn
A Fringe Cult Calls Michael Jackson the Returned Christ
Grammy Award-winning superstar Michael Jackson poses special problems for the leadership of the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society (Jehovah’s Witnesses).
As a rock singer, Jackson represents a segment of contemporary culture that the Watch Tower leadership considers evil. At the same time, he is a devout Jehovah’s Witness who reportedly leads a life free of drugs, sexual immorality, and alcohol. Disguising himself, Jackson reportedly stands on street corners distributing copies of Watch Tower publications.
The problem he poses for the Watch Tower leadership looms much larger than his success as a rock singer. He is the unwilling star of a fringe cult that hails him as the second-coming Christ.
In view of Jehovah’s Witnesses theology, the claim is not as bizarre as it seems. The Watch Tower society considers Jesus to be Michael the Archangel, who is to return to earth. The Michael Jackson cult says Jackson is the archangel.
“This is the same as saying that he is Jesus Christ in the second coming,” says Gary Botting, an expert on Jehovah’s Witnesses. “They use prophecies of the religion to support their arguments.” Jackson was conceived in 1957, prophesied by Witnesses to be a pivotal year of the Second Coming. He was born in 1958 in the same month Jehovah’s Witnesses held their largest international assembly ever.
A Michael Jackson cult pamphlet concludes, “After all, if Michael is the Archangel, He’s been here before. And His appearance on earth would have grave implications for Witness theology: it would mean that Armageddon has already come and gone, and that we are already living in a ‘new world,’ over which Michael, the returned Messiah, rules as the Prince of Peace.”
