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RELIGIONS AND FREEDOM after 1945 (6 of 7)

Jehovah's Witnesses have been described as one of the more persecuted religious groups. Jehovah's Witnesses belong to a Christian Protestant tradition, headquartered in Brooklyn, New York, where their governing body of elders resides and their literature, The Watchtower, and Awake is published. The Witnesses have full-time activists worldwide, and part-time members who go door-to-door or stand on street corners. In July 2009 their membership worldwide was approximately 12 million and said to have been doubling every 15 years. Roughly 1 in every 550 persons in the world is a Jehovah's Witness. They consider themselves to have the the proper beliefs -- the truth -- that will give them survival on the Day of Judgment and Resurrection. In these times of evil, the Witnesses believe, the Day of Judgment may come at anytime.

Jehovah's Witnesses are honest and decent people with traditional Christian moral values who adhere to what they consider to be the teachings of the Old and New Testaments.

This writer's mother was a devoted Jehovah's Witness from around 1930. In the late 1940s she insisted that Armageddon would come in her lifetime. She died in 1989.

Jehovah's Witnesses take scripture to be fact, and, like many other Christians, they do not recognize the limits of metaphor or analogy regarding the validity of ideas. They they have applied, and I have heard, the reference in Daniel 11:40 to the "king of the South" and the "king of the North" in considering the approach of Armageddon. When my mother was alive, the king of the North was described as the Soviet Union. The passing of the Soviet Union has not led them to question validity in their use of metaphor. Instead they have change metaphors. I would be shocked to learn of a Jehovah's Witness with a university degree in linguistics.

The failure of Armageddon's arrival on certain dates, using metaphor and dubious chronology, has been an embarrassment, and today their leadership claims that the exact date is too difficult to determine.

Looming large in the belief of Jehovah's Witnesses is "God's purpose." They obey the laws of the land that do not violate their morality. And their morality includes separating themselves from worship or devotion to the state, with the same strength that Christians before the days of Emperor Constantine refused to participate in the worship of Rome's gods.

Jehovah's Witnesses draw no lines racially, ethically or nationally. Their organization has been integrated at least since the 1930s when I observed them as a child. This gave them a leg up among African-Americans. Michael Jackson's family were members. So too, by the way, was President Eisenhower's mother.

The Jehovah's Witnesses get along well with legal experts, especially members of the ACLU, who have frequently defended them.

Jehovah's Witnesses look upon rival religious organizations other than in an ecumenical spirit. They reject the Trinity, immortality of the soul and hellfire, which they consider to be outside holy scripture. Unlike other Christians they do not celebrate Christmas, Easter or birthdays, and they have helped spread knowledge of the pagan origins of these. They consider other religions to be a part of a contaminated world that includes the secular world. In my mother's day they were especially hostile toward Roman Catholicism.

Other religious groups in her time returned the compliment. Some were hostile because of their perceptions of a lack of patriotism, as in refusing to salute the flag or serve in the military. Some accused Jehovah's Witnesses of brainwashing their children. Brain washing is a concept that arose during the Cold War.

My mother was opposed to automatic baptisms into a religious organization. She held that one had to become a Witness as a result of one's own rational conclusions -- a typically Protestant point of view, if I'm not mistaken. My mother told me often that it for me to think for myself regarding her faith -- accompanied by her occasional hectoring and sadness.

Jehovah's Witnesses bring people into their organization through that purification ritual that is older than Christianity: an immersion in water ritual -- done for those who are of a "responsible age" and who are joining by their conscious decision

My mother believed in public education, and she did not try to force me to refrain from saluting the flag. She spoke against it but without demands that I not participate. One thing she did believe in was the role of the father in the family. When I was seventeen, my father, not a Jehovah's Witness, approved of my joining the Marine Corps. My mother did not, but she did not stand in the way of the required parental approval. I suspect that Eisenhower as a kid was also not subjected to "brainwashing."

Perceived as unpatriotic, during World War II Jehovah's Witnesses while displaying their literature on street corners were attacked physically, spat upon, and jailed -- in the United States, Canada and Britain. In Canada entire families were imprisoned. They have faired better in the United States, with its history of religious tolerance and belief in the law. According to the ACLU, by the end of 1940, "more than 1,500 Witnesses in the United States had been victimized in 335 separate attacks" [note]. Such attacks included beatings, being tarred and feathered, hanged, shot, maimed and even castrated [note].

Jehovah's Witness were sent to concentration camps in Germany and more than 200 were executed for refusing to serve in Hitler's armed forces. In the Soviet Union they were either deported or sent to labor camps. In Cuba in the 1960s they were categorized as "social deviants" and put into forced labor. In 1967 in Malawi, thousands were savagely beaten by police and by citizens for refusing to purchase political party cards to become members of the Malawi Congress Party. They have been imprisoned in Singapore and Vietnam.

Intellectually my mother was a humble woman. The Bible, Watchtower and Awake was her literature. She was the wife of an automobile mechanic. She was, nevertheless, intelligent. And her honesty, decency and courage in the face of hostilities directed against her when I was a small child left me suspicious of hate directed against any group.