Jehovah’s Witnesses promote shunning of family members amidst child abuse crisis

If you happen to have been anywhere near any big stadia this summer, you may have noticed that instead of the usual sports fans or concert goers, the Jehovah’s Witnesses descending on regional arenas in Sunday best. You may not know much about the cloistered religion, but they hold to a brand of faith that contains ideas that may surprise you – in the same way stubbing your toe on a doorframe first thing in the morning might surprise you – and the agenda for this year’s series of conventions focus on some of the more controversial aspects of the faith that bring sharply into focus some darker period of my life when I faced the harsh reality of wanting to leave the religion.

It was with a grimy horror that I learned about the topic of this year’s Regional Conventions, being held across the UK, which open with the importance of shunning non-believing family members as a means of ‘Staying Loyal to Jehovah’. The act of shunning, which is to completely disconnect and reject all association, is upheld as a virtue.

In a world where the struggle for integration and religious tolerance is a daily battle, this is hardly a helpful line to take. Reading the programme and seeing some of the high production value movies that are to be played (courtesy of a number of online video blogs with content leaked from the US series of conventions) my stomach lurched and I cried for the first time in a long time as I watched how the choice to leave the organisation was portrayed. Day 1 of the convention features a video which shows a young Jehovah’s Witness, ‘Sonja’, questioning her faith 1 (one of her inalienable human rights) and then finding a young man at work – a non-Jehovah’s Witness – with whom she starts a sexual relationship. As all sex outside of marriage is considered a grave sin, this act results in her disfellowshipping from the congregation and shunning by all members, including her own parents. As the video goes on, we see that this complete rejection lasts for 15 years. There is even a scene where Sonja’s mother sees her calling on her mobile phone and promptly rejects the call. Of course, ‘Sonja’, eventually repents of her perceived sins and returns to the faith of her birth, because in religious propaganda everything always turns out ok in the end. During this time we learn she has had two children who presumably have never had a relationship with their grandparents. The moral of the tale is; be loyal to Jehovah and everything will be ok in the end, – or, more accurately, be loyal to the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, the US-based HQ of the religion and keepers of doctrine.

As an ex-Jehovah’s Witness myself, I can vouch for the pernicious and damaging effect shunning has on families. It is emotional blackmail of the highest order with psychologically damaging results. The shunned person will have been indoctrinated with the idea that it is their choice to take the path of sin and reap the consequences of the withdrawal of love and affection from those closest to them. In the case of people born into the Jehovah’s Witness faith, this will be everyone they have ever known. It’s a cripplingly painful path to take, but who wants to be loved by their closest family and friends on a basis which is conditional on you unquestioningly towing the line of an ever changing edict? For the last 25 years I have thanked my lucky stars that I was never baptised as this would have meant that instead of just fading away, I would now be ‘disfellowshipped’. My entire extended family on both sides are in the religion, save for the few who have been ‘led astray’ over the years and I have watched cousins who were baptised shunned by their own parents; an act of cruelty and emotional trauma that has no let-up – not even in times of great celebration, such as family weddings, or great sadness, like terminal illness and death, both of which I have witnessed.

The Express2 newspaper were quick to out a particularly Doomsday edition of the Watchtower magazine in June this year which stated that ISIS was a sign of the times and the nearness of Armageddon – but the Witnesses have been waiting for Armageddon for literally decades. Their belief that God will destroy all the wicked (that’s you and me, by the way) and restore a Garden of Eden style paradise is the carrot to the shunning policy stick. What most Jehovah’s Witnesses wont realise though is that their organisation predicted Armageddon in 1914, 1925, 1975 and then in the 80’s stated that the ‘generation’ that saw 1914 would not pass away without Gods promise of paradise being fulfilled – by my calculations, based on a generous 90 year life span, that puts Armageddon happening before the Millennium. I left the Witnesses in 1997 still with a healthy fear injected from childhood that Armageddon was just around the corner, and still subconsciously fearing Y2K. When the Twin Towers went down in 2001 I distinctly remember getting a call from my dad saying ‘This is it…’, – as if the end was coming. It wasn’t until years later that I conducted my own research and found out the teaching on this ‘generation which would not pass away’ had changed subtly to take on a new meaning3 and from 2010 was presented as overlapping generations thanks to new spiritual light being shed on the subject, presumably to placate a devoted group of followers who are still waiting for the end of the world, and basing their life decisions around that.

It is particularly hard for Jehovah’s’ Witnesses who have grown up in the faith and been indoctrinated into it. I grew up attending meetings at the Kingdom Hall three times a week as well as preaching door to door and it is hard to explain the experience of this life, in the words of Morrissey; Every Day is Like Sunday,- but so strong is the requirement to be entirely obsequious and stay in ‘the Truth’, that the choice to leave the religion often means a need to leave home. I grew up on artists illustrations in the Watchtower publications of families like my own surrounded by angry mobs and destruction – a frightening ‘them and us’ scenario that I needed to stay on the right side of in order to avoid annihilation. No wonder my mental health fragmented when I began to question whether what my parents and the Watchtower were telling me was true. This happens to a lot of questioning young Witnesses. I eventually left home, emotionally fragile and ill-prepared at 18, but that wasn’t until I had spent three years self-harming and crying myself into a trance every night at the thought of how I was about to destroy all my parents hopes and dreams for me. Should you choose to avail yourself of day 2 of the Regional Convention programming, you will see more video productions from Watchtower HQ showing Jehovah’s Witnesses holed up in an underground bunker whilst the ‘Great Tribulation’ (the pre-curser to Armageddon) rumbles away outside. They collectively reminisce on how glad they are that they did not pursue ‘Worldly’ goals. In one video we watch an older man, ‘Sergei’, reflecting on his life with a rue smile as he graciously recalls how his father dissuaded him from entering a conservatory for gifted musicians so that he could concentrate his attention on the pursuit of his faith4. Indeed, the actualisation of personal fulfilment being a quick route to destruction is typical of the emotive messages that are foisted on Jehovah’s Witnesses, carefully juxtaposed with the eternal reward of a paradise earth.

Ultimately, the ability to question is a personal choice, and one that is becoming easier thanks to the free flow of information on the internet, but the Watchtower also discourages any idle surfing and suggests that their official online hub JW.org is the only place to avail oneself of ‘true’ information. This could be perhaps because a quick Google search will render some pretty disturbing news articles. Last year Australia’s Royal Commission, into Institutional Responses to Child Abuse (similar to a UK Public Enquiry) found the Jehovah’s Witnesses management of child abuse cases fell so far short of good practice that since 1950 over 1,000 alleged perpetrators of child abuse, concerning 1,800 victims, were known to the organisation and not one single incident was reported to secular authorities5. The most disturbing data in this equation being that over 500 of the accused involved willingly confessed to their crimes.

One abuse victim, ‘BCG’, who testified, related how she had been made to confront her abuser, her own father, without any pastoral support. Under the Jehovah’s Witness interpretation of the bible in dealing with congregation matters, two witnesses to offences are required, unless there is a confession. This is known as the ‘Two Witness Rule’, a literal interpretation of bible verses Matthew 18:15,16 and has been at the centre of recent dialogue about the churches duty of care to its adherents. In the Australian case, the perpetrator kept his position as an Elder of the congregation, maintaining that his daughter had seduced him. The Watchtower organisation, represented by Governing Body member and evasive apologist Geoffrey Jackson, rejected suggestions that they change this, and other policies, like the strict patriarchal structure, which the Commission identified as contributing to this significant problem. Instead, Jackson suggested that mandatory reporting would help the organisation immeasurably in being able to identify when to report safeguarding issues6. The findings of the enquiry were damning7 with Angus Stewart SC identifying the church as preoccupied with sin and sinning, and demonstrating that Elders considered the spirituality and seductiveness of complainants when assessing allegations. It is in testimony of this fact and a bitter irony that the accused in BCG’s case was disfellowshipped, not for sexual abuse of all four of his daughters, for which he subsequently did prison time, but for lying. He was reinstated back to the congregation after repenting a few years later.

Take the 1,006 cases known by the organisation and not reported in Australia alone, then multiply that across the 240 other countries in which the Jehovah’s Witnesses are active and a significant problem presents itself. Consider then the number of children who are abused who do not find the courage to come forward until adulthood, if at all, and there could be an epidemic of traumatised adults and children being cast adrift by an organisation which refuses to apply researched, independent secular knowledge on how to support, empower and protect those in need.

The Watchtower Society has been dealing with high profile cases of sexual abuse on a regular basis for the past several years, as former members come forward and place civil claims against the organisation for their failure to protect them from known predators. Candace Conti gained a worldwide platform when she successfully sued the organisation for $28m back in 2012. She had been made to report her abuse to a panel of men; Elders of the congregation and, as is standard, her abuser, but was then shunned for making the allegations without a second witness. At the time of the abuse she was 9 years old. “I found the experience of reporting my abuse to a room full of men, including the man who had abused me, very distressing,” she said. “I think that those victims that are brave enough to report to elders should be properly supported and protected.”8

Watchtower’s legal arm has been busy rebutting the Conti case, still appealing points of law four years later, and accused of using delay tactics in dealing with others. In San Diego in June this year, one judge dealing with yet another sexual abuse claim imposed a $4,000 per day sanction on the organisation for failing to produce documents which were key to the prosecution for over a year9. It is little wonder that another key message of the ‘Stay Loyal to Jehovah’ convention is to guard oneself against ‘murmuring’, or in any way questioning the authority of the male-only hierarchy of the church which says it’s Elders and Governing Body are appointed by the Holy Spirit.

As a social scientist and a lover of philosophy, critical thinking and the human experience, I firmly believe in the right of every person to be able to choose any, or no religion, but with the important caveat that the practising of it does not harm anyone else who is not a willing, informed and consenting adult. All organisations are vulnerable to absorbing paedophiles into their ranks, but to indoctrinate children that to leave a religion is to be marked out for ex-communication, followed by destruction at Armageddon is a practice which needs to come to a swift end. When the Jehovah’s Witnesses descend in droves to gather at stadiums around the country, local press are typically supportive of the influx of well-mannered families who bring income to the local economy and clean up meticulously after themselves, but this is unhelpful surface observation of a religion with something altogether more sinister worth talking about.

I do not question the motives of most Jehovah’s Witnesses who have found a comfort in the strict rules and clear lifestyle that is set out for them by the Watchtower organisation. What I do question though is the morality and ethics of the Watchtower to enforce such unquestioning devotion from its members in the face of clear evidence it is doing harm. On the matter of shunning, I always come back to my personal hero Christopher Hitchens, as he puts it so eloquently: “…for not scorning the three delightful children who are everything to me and who are my only chance of even a glimpse of a second life, let alone an immortal one, and I’ll tell you something: if I was told to sacrifice them to prove my devotion to God, if I was told to do what all monotheists are told to do and admire the man who said “yes, I’ll gut my kid to show my love of God”, I’d say: No. Fuck you.”

It’s worth noting that the UK Charity Commission have been trying to investigate Jehovah’s Witnesses, who are registered as a charity in the UK over concerns regarding safeguarding. The Watchtower society has been fighting the Commissions right to investigation in the courts for the last two years, most recently in the Court of Appeal10. The Commission currently have an open call out to anyone who has had experiences of the organisation in this regard to contact them, so it seems we may not be far away from an investigation in the UK into their dealings. Something which I and many other ex-Jehovah’s Witnesses will welcome wholeheartedly.

Notes to Editor:

2016 Stay Loyal to Jehovah Convention; Shunning video with commentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WK7GPoGkWw4 Express news article re Armageddon: http://www.express.co.uk/news/nature/581439/Rise-ISIS-earthquakes-warnings-before-ARMAGEDDON-apocalypse-end-destroys-volcanoes-Earth Explanation of the ‘Generations’ teaching: http://www.jwfacts.com/watchtower/generation.php ‘Sergei’s Story’, with commentary: https://youtu.be/yskH21IVm4o Guardian coverage of the Australian Royal Commission: http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/jul/27/jehovahs-witnesses-did-not-report-1000-child-abusers-inquiry-hears Royal Commission, Day 8, Geoffrey Jackson summary: https://youtu.be/eu6X1YU6YYI?t=15m11s Royal Commission, further coverage: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/dec/01/jehovahs-witnesses-fostered-distrust-of-secular-authority-royal-commission-counsel Candace Conti discussing findings of the Royal Commission: http://www.news.com.au/national/courts-law/royal-commission-hears-how-jehovahs-witnesses-covered-up-child-sex-abuse-dating-back-to-1950s/news-story/270535b784efd4e2de06fa3181d955bb Current San Diego case http://www.sandiegoreader.com/news/2016/jun/24/ticker-judge-sanctions-jehovahs-witnesses/ Charity Commission defends its investigation and calls for interest: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/charity-commission-defends-its-investigation-into-jehovahs-witness-charity-in-the-court-of-appeal