As a spinoff to my previous answer, here’s a bit about how marital relationships are dissolved in the organization of Jehovah’s Witnesses.
There are two acceptable reasons for leaving. One is for infidelity. The other is for personal safety or willful nonsupport. Let’s look at them.
Infidelity - Let’s say the husband cheats on his wife. She is free to leave him, so long as she has not had sex with him since (I assume it is since finding out), as having sex with him would renew the marriage bond as they see it.
Safety (from abuse) or willful nonsupport (not providing for the family) - The latter gets so blurry as to what is acceptable. I honestly don’t know all of the rules, but you don’t have to starve or live on the streets because your husband, for whom the responsibility falls to provide for the family, refuses to do so on some grounds.
The former, about abuse, does provide an out. So let’s say that the husband is beating his wife. She can leave him. However, she is not free to remarry unless he has had sex with someone else and he either admits to it or she can provide some evidence that he’s having a sexual relationship with someone else.
There are plenty of people in that organization that are separated or divorced but not free to remarry. It is a messy, complicated. utterly ridiculous set of rules made by an organization that claims to be guided by God.
That’ll make your head spin, eh? There are plenty of people that move on to another relationship and just take the disfellowshipping that will come, bide their time while being shunned, and come back with their new partner.
I’ve had a few co-workers who were JW. One proselytized at work so much that I had one of her co-JWs tell her if she didn’t leave me alone I’d complain to HR. In the case of at least two of the JWs I’ve worked with, the parents were converted after a tragic death in the family (in both cases, I think they lost a child). It seemed like the JW conversion team moved in with heavy-duty “support” and by the end of the natural grieving period, both families converted. It seemed like they were taken advantage of, during a vulnerable time in their lives. One co-worker said she went to school as normal and came home to be told she could no longer socialize with her peers, no longer wear pants, etc. When my father died, the one co-worker sent me all kinds of literature and was really pretty pushy. Odd thing was, she was much pushier with me (devout Catholic) than she was with the less religious co-workers. I don’t know if she thought she had a better chance with someone who already believed in something, or what the deal was. The other JW co-worker did all the conventions and meetings and door-to-door stuff, but I know that she still had a loving relationship with her two children who left the JW.
I’m just listening to some very worldly music (though sometimes also very spiritual), Hank Williams, and I asked myself how media consume is controlled (everything seems to be controlled in that cult :eek:). Do regular JW’s watch TV, go to the movies, listen to any kinds of music and read books? In other words, what’s the church’s position on the arts?
Too late to edit, but to expand on my last post: what about the internet, smartphones, social media and all the other modern means of communication? These are all gates to information and views that maybe could be kept hidden by those perfidious mechanisms in traditional social settings, but not anymore. Are there restrictions from the church for those media? Does better information drive people away from the cult?
First, I don’t know why the one lady was told she couldn’t wear pants. That’s not true, unless of course we’re talking about at meetings, but that would be it. That sounds more Pentecostal than JW.
I can confirm that JWs do sometimes individually look for things like obituaries and write families with what they feel is an “encouraging” scripture. In doing so they are absolutely exploiting people’s grief. They don’t see it though. They think they’re helping.
As far as a “conversion team” moving in, you have to realize that ALL JWs are that conversion team. So support from them will always be that. Everything they do is that. Had my family not shunned me it would have been difficult to have had much of a relationship anymore anyway because they really only have one thing to talk about. It consumes their entire life.
JWs are allowed to listen to music, play video games, read books, watch tv, go to the movies, etc. However, the caveat is that they aren’t supposed to involve themselves in being entertained by anything that Jehovah wouldn’t approve of, such as violence, sexual immorality, theft, greed, etc. (Of course, you and I know that the Bible is full of such things itself, and that some of it was even at God’s command.)
If they are entertained by things that would fly in the face of JW standards and it is found out about, they could be talked to by the elders and counseled to change their ways. If they don’t they might be sanctioned in some way or labeled as bad association and people will give them the cold shoulder. Remember, people in the religion are good at turning one another in for their transgressions. It is a very self-policing state, and if you know about something and don’t turn the person in you could get in trouble yourself.
Oh, and as to that word you used, “spiritual”. That is a term hijacked to mean things that are upright in the eyes of the JW organization. So Hank wouldn’t be seen as spiritual.
There is no strict JW ban on things like social media or the internet, smartphones, etc. However, they have made it clear that they don’t really approve of any website other than their own (which I don’t like to plug), and they have built it out in the past few years with lots of video entertainment. For instance, you can watch boring old men with either no personality or cartoonish personalities drone on and on about the Bible in infantilizing ways. They also have horribly manipulative videos for kids. They even have their own JW tv station of sorts, and they have a Roku channel to be all hip and cool.
Basically they warn their members against reading anything about Jehovah’s Witnesses from ANY source other than their own. It was a HUGE deal when one day, after discussing our doubts together, I told my wife that I just had to go on an “apostate” ex-JW site and see what people were saying. It was like I thought my face would melt if I clicked on that link. What did I find? I found that instead of Bible twisting lunatics there were lots of people that saw exactly what I saw, had the same doubts, and some of which were searching for truth. It blew my mind because I was always told that apostates left because of personal issues with people in the congregation or because they just didn’t want to obey God. Nope, they just realized that the organization wasn’t what it claimed, much as I did, and that it ran the gamut of exact reasons why.
The organization of Jehovah’s Witnesses is thriving in third world countries without access to the internet. The internet is killing them in the developed world. In the United States any realized growth comes through preaching in foreign languages to immigrants. The regular English speaking, home grown crowd is shrinking as the internet takes a huge toll. Freedom of information is the enemy of such control.
Here’s a fun fact. Jehovah’s Witnesses have literature that has been available since the late 1800’s. From somewhere in the 1990’s on they made a cd-rom available with much of the history available on it through the archived publications. However, as times have changed, so have their doctrines, plus they’ve realized that they’ve had some particularly embarrassing things that they’ve said in the past like end of the world predictions. So, what they’ve now done is instead of making a new cd-rom available that goes so far back anymore, they’ve now put everything online, only you can only go back as far as the year 2000, and because it is online they can change things as they wish. It is very much like Orwell’s 1984. They control the past by erasing it, and they can now go back and edit what little they make available at will without any proof that they ever said anything different.
Thank you for posting this. My ex-father in law is a JW and so much of this sounds so familiar. A story and a question for you…
When my ex and I got married his father at first said that he wasn’t going to be able to come to the wedding because we were getting married in a church and he wasn’t allowed to go into a church. He would come to the reception instead since it wasn’t at the church. Ex and I both said “fine, whatever” because we knew we would lose any argument with him about his JW beliefs.
Ex-FIL eventually got special permission from the elders (I assume) to come to the wedding too, but he couldn’t go into the sanctuary. He had to stand outside in the hallway and listen to the ceremony from outside the sanctuary.
Have you ever heard of anything like that happening in your congregation? By the way, if you do decide to celebrate Christmas this year please tell us about it!
Many thanks, justanothermike, for your insightful and detailed responses. I congratulate for your courage to take those eminent and surely sometimes painful steps, but I’m sure that it’ll better your life, so all the best for your future. I watched a program on German TV some months ago with an ex-JW married couple, and many of the aspects of the cult you told us about was absolutely congruent to their experiences.
I’m a bit surprised that the JW’s seem to have a rather normal reputation as mainstream Christian denomination in the U.S., here in Germany they are mostly always considered a cult in public opinion. We have religious ed in public school, and in my time over thirty years ago in Catholic class, a part of the curriculum was the overall subject “cults”. I remember being taught about the Moonies, Hare Krishna and the JW’s in that class as examples for dangerous cults. Interestingly the approach had nothing to do with pointing out differences in religious dogma to Catholicism, but primarily about the manipulating and psychological dependencies these cults operate with. So generally, the view from the mainstream here at the JW’s is rather critical. It doesn’t go as far as outright hostility, but that has to do with our special dark history; the JW’s were one of the many groups persecuted and murdered by the nazis, so excessively criticizing the church is a shaky subject in this country.
Did you or your parents ever convert anyone? I find it hard to believe anybody would be convinced by these tactics.
I don’t know if you ever talk to other JW’s. If you do, tell them I think they’re bullies. If I had ever considered accepting Jehovah I’d definitely change my mind after you got through browbeating me.
In my experience, proselytizing isn’t about converting people so much as it is about reinforcing JW identity. Sure, they are genuinely trying to win converts, but I think that’s a distant second to proselytizing as a tool to keep JWs cowed.
It becomes an example of the Sunk Cost Fallacy: anything people have spent that much time on must be worthwhile. And JWs spend a LOT of time on their religion. Plus, witnessing gives you a daily reminder that JWs are different from other people. Theirs is a harder path, yes, but (they force themselves to believe) they will be rewarded beyond measure. And again, when you’ve spent many years looking down on non-JWs, it becomes that much harder to leave.
This is over and above the very powerful tool of shunning. My mother was shunned by her parents for ten years, but they too left the religion when the world failed to end in the 70s, and my uncle died in an accident / possibly by suicide shortly thereafter.
Right now, we’re in a protracted legal scuffle over my ex-JW’s will. As has been made explicit in an email, I am literally a minion of Satan. Ah, family.
My guess is that your ex-FIL just reasoned, either by himself or after talking to someone else like an elder, that if he was in the hallway he wasn’t technically in the “church” part of the church. I really don’t know on that one. I do know that many won’t go to anything in a church, a funeral of a loved one included. It is discouraged, of course, but I don’t know that there are hard consequences for stepping over that line.
We will definitely do Christmas this year. It won’t be religious in the slightest, but my wife already bought me some bubble lights that I remember having on our tree when I was a kid, pre-JW. I always talked about them, and she got me some for my first birthday this year as one of my gifts. She found a tree she liked on Amazon that was silver and shiny. We’ve got to make it through Halloween and what we’re doing for that, and then we’ll start planning the Christmas more solidly. I’ll post something here if I remember. Thanks for the interest!
Oh yeah, for good or bad, one thing all of us ex-JWs have in common is our experiences, for the most part. In fact, I was invited to a party last night by an ex-JW friend and there were some other ex-JWs there. Two young ladies were adopted by a JW couple when their mom died and they were in their early teens. They are now shunned by their adoptive family. How lovely. And there was another guy there that left the religion, but his mom still has a relationship with him, which is nice, and more rare than the usual shunning. It was a good time meeting them.
The first thing that came to mind when discussing Germany and the JWs was Hitler’s exclamation that he wanted to “wipe them off the face of the earth”, referring to JWs, or so I always understood. He hated them. Catholics and JWs have a bad relationship too. So I’m not too surprised that over there JWs are thought of primarily as a cult. Then again, it may have to do with something else entirely. I certainly have no experience in that country or any other than my own. It is interesting though to realize and think about the various perceptions worldwide of the group.
I’m not sure where you live now, but many cities have Holiday parades and municipal celebrations; please avail yourself of these and see how happy people are simply to be part of their community coming together.
Charleston, SC has a boat parade where the boats are done up in lights and such, for example.
Nope, never converted anyone, and I’m so glad that I personally didn’t. It would haunt me even though I did it with good intentions.
There are individuals that are converted by such means. I’ve known of some over the years. Most come into the organization through birth, and then you have people that meet JWs because they work with them or are related in some way. We moved next door to some and that started our mess. The door to door formal ministry is largely ineffective.
I don’t have any access to current JWs. Oh believe me, I think they’re bullies too. It’s a huge part of what they are and what narcissists do to other people. The organization breeds those attitudes. I was a huge narcissist myself, very judgemental of others. I’m so glad that I was able to drop that part of my development and leave it behind. I never wanted to be that.
Nailed it. Not much I can add. I am sorry that you’re caught up in this stuff. It only makes tough situations tougher.
Oh, in a similar vein, Jehovah’s Witnesses released a brochure entitled “Return To Jehovah” (read as, return to us and we are Jehovah God) the very year that we formally left. It was supposed to be aimed at helping people like us at the time to come back. My wife and I had a bet as to how many we’d receive. She bet double digits (10+) and I bet two (one from a sister who was obsessed with us and a wild card, maybe family). We received exactly zero. Nobody tried to “save” us.
Those brochures weren’t for us anyway. They were there to reinforce their description of why people leave, to obscure any criticism and snow their own members. It was pure manipulation of their members who were in, not aimed at addressing the reality of those that leave. Their psychological tricks know no bounds.
A great suggestion. We’ve missed several opportunities to do such lately because we’ve had so many other plans with this family or that, but I know what you’re talking about. The sense of community and joy is amazing in the few times we’ve been to something like that. We’re in the Louisville, KY area, so we have lots of opportunities around the month leading to the Kentucky Derby, and there are many other events as well.
I don’t think that the rather critical opinion of the Jehova’s Witnesses in Germany is a product of old resentments from third reich times, opposite to the remaining disease of antisemitic and general xenophobic tendencies that still linger in our society. You must consider the very different religious sociology as compared to the U.S.: here, you are traditionally either Catholic or Lutheran, or “other”. Ok, the “other” part grew extensively in the last decades, consisting mostly of atheists and Muslims, but the American Christian variety of having a church of a different denomination in almost every street isn’t a thing here. There’s even a special word for protestant churches outside of Catholic or Lutheran, “Freikirchen” (free churches). So everything out of the mainstream is looked at a bit askance, and churches (or cults of other religious cultures as well) don’t get an easy time here when they apply manipulative means. Scientology is also viewed (and that includes being “viewed” by domestic intelligence) much more critical here than in America.
That makes perfect sense. Here there are so many religions and churches that there isn’t much domination overall. Where my wife came from, an hour north of here, there were more Lutherans. There are lots of Catholics here. However, there are also lots of Baptists, JWs, Buddhists, Muslims, Methodists, Presbyterians, and so on.
It also probably doesn’t help JWs cause in front of Catholics that they (JWs) spent so many years taking shots at them in their magazines. They seemed to really go after them.