Jehovah's Witnesses

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 was a Jehovah's Witness. They consider themselves to have the the proper beliefs -- the truth -- that will give them survival in the Day of Judgment and Resurrection, or Armageddon, which in these times of evil 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. They take scripture to be fact, and, like many others many other Christians, they do not recognize the limits of metaphor or analogy. Thus they have applied the reference In Daniel 11:40 to the "king of the South" and the "king of the North" in considering the approach of Armageddon. The king of the North has been referred to as the Soviet Union. The passing of the Soviet Union has not led them to question the validity of metaphor. Instead they change metaphors. The failure of Armageddon's arrival on certain dates, using metaphor in their calculations, has been an embarrassment, and today their leadership claims that the exact date is too difficult to determine.

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 the late 1980s.

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. And they believe in integrity in the work place. But rival religious organizations they look upon in something other than 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, which they believe to have pagan origins. 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 perceived lack of patriotism, as in refusing to salute the flag or serve in the military. Some accused Jehovah's Witnesses of brainwashing, which was not my mother's method. Brain washing is a concept that arose during the Cold War and is used by people who do not define it well or do not know what they are talking about.

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. Jehovah's Witnesses bring people into their organization through that purification ritual that is older than Christianity: an immersion in water ritual. They do not see baptism as pagan as they do some other present-day Christian practices. Baptism for the Jehovah's Witnesses is done for those who are of a "responsible age" and who are joining by their conscious decision. My mother tried to persuade me, but she did not pressure me.

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, the Jehovah's Witnesses during World War II, 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].

Peters, Shawn Francis, Judging Jehovah's Witnesses: Religious Persecution and the Dawn of the Rights Revolution, p. 10, University Press of Kansas, 2000.

Peters, ibid p. 8.

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.