My Brother/My Enemy, and the Cult Dividing Us

I have a brother I rarely talk about anymore. He was one of my closest friends growing up, but now I’m not welcome in his home. I don’t even know my nieces birthdays.

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My brother, Joey, is five and a half years older than me. That’s not his real name, but that’s what everyone called him growing up. He goes by something more formal now, I think.

Joey is brilliant, sensitive, and generous to a fault. Or, at least he was when we were younger. What he is now is frightening to me.

We grew up in a broken home that shifted beneath our feet in the wake of my mother’s impulsiveness. Our oldest brother was trying to escape from as far back as I can remember. I was six years old the first time our oldest brother ‘ran away’ from home and refused to come back for over twenty-four hours. Mom practically drug him home after barging into the couple’s house he was staying at. Eventually he was emancipated when I was eight or nine years old. We weren’t very close growing up, but I don’t blame him. Even strangers could see how unhealthy it was.

But Joey was seemingly unaffected by it all. He overcame his speech impediment (I don’t remember it, but he had to take special classes I’m told) and ADHD by taking on extra tasks at his school library and earned his high school equivalency at home by his early teens. He started a lawn mowing service for the neighborhood. He saved up and got a good reputation for his hard work and excellent manners. He bought a car. He started working for a local computer repair shop before he would have graduated high school. He owned his own small computer repair company by the age of eighteen. He now works for a fortune 500 company, as a supervisor in their IT department, without any formal education.

Before he left home he was one of my best friends. He took me to my first concert, with a group of his ‘cool’ older friends. He took me to play basketball in the park and defended me when I got picked on (in all fairness, I have zero coordination). When he started working at the local computer repair place, he used his own money and he took me shopping, at a mall (big deal if you grew up in the ‘boondocks’) and told me I could pick out any outfit I wanted. It was the first time I had ever gotten new clothes that I wouldn’t be wearing to church.

When he started dating a girl from the same faith, but a few towns over, things started to change. She didn’t like him giving me any attention, so she would often interrupt our conversations by climbing on top of him to make out. She would mock me for my ‘flat’ chest while cupping her large breasts she referred to as “puppies”. I told her they would end up as lap dogs one day and she stopped making fun of my body, but even after she became my sister-in-law, we never found any common ground. They have been married for twenty years.

Now she doesn’t need to use excuses to keep me away from my brother. After enduring childhood sexual abuse at the hands of a much older, married member of the church of Jehovah’s Witness (in good standing), and being punished for my “involvement” by public shaming and shunning, I have finally spoken out. According to the Jehovah’s Witness policy, speaking out about their mishandeling of my sexual trauma labels me as an “Apostate”. I am dead forever, unredeemable, basically the property of Satan the Devil.

Joey, on the other hand, is an ‘elder’ in his local congregation. That is a very high honor, and comes with a lot of responsibilities. The three men who ‘formed a judicial committee’ and interrogated me about every graphic detail of my abuse were elders. They had the onus of deciding (after prayer and reflection on the scriptures, of course) what my punishment should be for “engaging in sexual acts” with a man 36 years older than me, starting when I was only fourteen years old. They decided I should be formally shunned and publicly renounced in front of the congregation. I was seventeen when they announced that I was not allowed to be in contact any of my friends or family (until I could prove myself repentant).

Child sex abuse is rampant with the Jehovah’s Witnesses. A simple google search will reveal dozens of lawsuits from around the world, and absolute proof that they are actively protecting the identities of known pedophiles. But members of the church of Jehovah’s Witnesses are told to refer to their own church’s website, JW.org for answers to these questions. Even more disturbing, a church member can get permanently shunned and labeled as an “Apostate” for even looking at websites that are critical of Jehovah’s Witnesses. This is deemed, “Apostate material”.

Jehovah’s Witnesses DO NOT report to the authorities. They handle matters internally, starting with the elders and passed all the way up to the “governing body”: a group of eight, self-appointed old men, leaders of this worldwide cult.

This is why I am terrified of what my brother has become. As an ‘elder’ in the congregation, Joey has access more information than the average Jehovah’s Witness. He sees internal documents and memos instructing all elders to behave in immoral and illegal ways. He feels honored to have been chosen by “God’s Holy spirit” to serve as an elder.

He is the father of two innocent girls. A devout, evangelical, doomsday, fundamentalist cult minion, who turned on his own little sister after she was molested. The fate of those little girls keeps me up at night, but there’s nothing I can do.

I wish the safety of children came before the greed of religious leaders in America. I wish that people would stop assuming that “Christian” is a universally good thing to be, and that we called ‘faith’ by it’s true name: a dangerous mass delusion.