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This article was published 27/7/2019 (426 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

For most of us, rebelling against the mindset and beliefs of our parents is part of growing up. But as we learn in Leaving the Witness: Exiting a Religion and Finding a Life, abandoning a sect like the Jehovah’s Witnesses takes far more courage and means a major restructuring of one’s life.

Yes, we all know something of control, rebellion, and dislocation, but apart from a knock at our door or avoiding people distributing pamphlets on the street, most of us know little about the day-to-day life of Jehovah’s Witnesses. That’s one of the reasons Amber Scorah’s book is a compelling read.

The setting is fascinating, too. Scorah grew up in Vancouver, but made her decision to leave in her early 30s while working in Shanghai, where she was strictly undercover (Jehovah’s Witnesses are banned in China). She lived there for three years altogether, two as a Jehovah’s Witness member and one on her own.

Her descriptions of Shanghai with its old European sections, intimate alleys and spiralling expressways are a pleasure to read.

Ironically, operating illegally on the Chinese mainland actually gave Scorah more time and freedom than she had ever had before. Jehovah’s Witnesses are expected to play their "witness" role 70 hours a month, as well as attend numerous meetings and earn a living. But in Shanghai, there was only one meeting a week, and it was impossible to knock on doors or hand out pamphlets.

Finding converts meant striking up casual conversations while sitting on a park bench or shopping for groceries. Scorah had studied Mandarin for three years in Taiwan and emerged the most fluent in her class. She was able to find a part-time job working at ChinesePod, a podcast that helped foreigners learn Mandarin.

It was this combination of making Chinese friends and working at ChinesePod that gradually led Scorah to question her faith. She came to realize that she didn’t have answers to all the evils of the world (including the Cultural Revolution), and neither did her elders. She discovered people can be viciously cruel in the name of ideology, and remembered a gay man named Dale who died by suicide after being shunned several times by her Vancouver congregation.

Her exit was facilitated by having very little in common with her husband (whom she had married young and while on the rebound) and by forming an online friendship with Jonathan, an American, through her work at ChinesePod. No one at her workplace knew she was a Jehovah’s Witness, but she finally confessed her dilemmas to Jonathan, and after a year of debating with him online, she left both her husband and her religion.

Finding a new life turned out to be a much longer process.

"Living in uncertainty is humbling and terrifying," she admits. She had always believed she was guaranteed a place in paradise as long as she followed the prescribed routine. Now, alone and with no profession, she had to make plans for the rest of her life. Scorah’s honesty about coping with loneliness and loss, as well as her insights into the nature of happiness in an unpredictable world, show a wisdom that most of us take much longer to acquire.

"Having lost all all expectations as to what should happen, or how people must be," she writes, "every tiny experience or thing or person was beautiful for what it was. Not immediately, but slowly, this suffering had bred thankfulness, appreciation for the things of the Earth that go unnoticed when one is blithely right."

It is obvious that Amber Scorah — like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-Dutch activist author of the 2006 memoir Infidel: My Life — is a thinker who has finally found her voice.

Faith Johnston was lucky to grow up in family where questions were welcome, and leaving a mainstream denomination was an entirely personal decision with no penalties.