Jehovah's Witnesses

Continuity and Change

George D. Chryssides

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351925426
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy of Religion

From its origins in nineteenth century Adventism until the present day, the Watch Tower Society has become one of the best known but least understood new religious movements. Resisting the tendency to define the movement in terms of the negative, this volume offers an empathetic account of the Jehovah's Witnesses, without defending or seeking to refute their beliefs. George Chryssides critically examines the historical and theological bases of the organization's teachings and practices, and discusses the changes and continuities which have defined it. The book provides a valuable resource for scholars of new religious movements and contemporary religion.

Chapter 1

Researching Jehovah’s Witnesses

There are few people in the West who have not encountered the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Their persistent house-to-house evangelism has brought them to the doors of most households, and even in remote areas they are determined that their message should not go unheard. Yet, despite being one of the best-known religious organisations, they are probably one of the least understood.

Misunderstandings abound and are frequently held with firm conviction. Most people, if asked, will say that the Jehovah’s Witnesses believe that the world will end soon with the battle of Armageddon. Many believe that that they keep setting arbitrary dates for this end, and constantly have to revise them when Armageddon does not arrive as expected. Another popular misconception is that Witnesses expect only 144,000 to be saved, and cannot reconcile this with their membership numbers, which run into millions. One acquaintance insisted that the number was once 400, and that this firm information came from a leaflet which he received some years ago. (Unsurprisingly, he could not produce the leaflet.) Numerous people have told me that they are only familiar with a very few passages of the Bible, and can be easily flummoxed if one engages them in a discussion that goes beyond these. Another of my friends was convinced that in order to become a Jehovah’s Witnesses the baptismal candidate must first win two further converts for the organisation. Others are convinced that Jehovah’s Witnesses do not believe in vaccination, or any kind of orthodox medical treatment. At a recent academic conference one participant refused to reappraise his conviction that their organisation canvassed aggressively in the streets, and that not all the canvassers were Witnesses, but belonged to independent agencies who paid them according to their results. Not so long ago I heard a preacher attributing to the Jehovah’s Witnesses the view that the ‘mark of the beast’ in the Book of Revelation refers to our current use of barcodes, since John the Revelator associates it with buying and selling.¹ And, of course, numerous acquaintances have assured me that they have a failsafe method of ensuring that they never call at their home again. If one does not know these things, the perpetrators of such myths hint that, of course, the Watch Tower organisation is secretive, and does not want the public – or even its own members – to know its true nature.

One can see why some of these misunderstandings arise. Members of the public do not necessarily know which organisations canvass in their town centres, and can readily confuse evangelists with ‘charity muggers’, who are not necessarily supporters of the organisation for which they work. Some people may remember the Watch Tower Society’s² past rather than present practices, and recollect the days when the public were asked for a financial contribution towards its literature. There are many Christian and Christian-derived groups who offer interpretations of the Book of Revelation, and some do believe that the mark of the beast is associated with silicon chips, barcodes and electronic tagging devices. (The Family International is one such organisation.) The belief that recruiting two new members is a precondition for joining conflates the Watch Tower Society with the Unification Church, which requires having two ‘spiritual children’ as a precondition for undergoing Sun Myung Moon’s Blessing (the so-called ‘mass marriage’). Although Jehovah’s Witnesses were initially opposed to vaccination, they have since reappraised their stance, and the view that one should seek spiritual healing in preference to medicine is a tenet of Christian Science rather than the Watch Tower Society. If the Jehovah’s Witnesses do not appear to have returned to one’s door, it is more likely that the householder was out, rather than that he or she had an assured method of seeing them off, although Jehovah’s Witnesses normally respect door signs indicating that religious canvassers are unwelcome. I hope, among other things, to dispel these and other misconceptions, although those who hold them are often intransigent in their insistence that they know better.

The aim of this book is to provide an accurate account of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, showing how the Watch Tower organisation originated, how it has progressed through time, and highlighting the issues it faces in the twenty-first century. The account that follows seeks to treat the Watch Tower organisation in the same way as any scholar would treat any other religion or denomination. Normally a scholarly account of a religious movement examines its historical sources, its basic tenets, and the lifestyle these entail. An author writing a book on Hinduism or Buddhism would not normally highlight the respects in which these religions differ from Christianity, or endeavour to show that there were doctrinally false. Such critiques, however, should scarcely be necessary, since Jehovah’s Witnesses themselves have always sought to contrast their beliefs with those of ‘nominal Christianity’, as they call it, to demonstrate that they are ‘in the truth’ and the churches in error, being part of ‘Babylon’ – the false religion that was propagated by Nimrod when he arrived in that city.³ Those countercult writers who produce two-column tables with headings like ‘truth’ and ‘error’,comparing Watch Tower doctrine with that of mainstream Christianity only play into the hands of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who would acknowledge such differences, but merely wish to reverse the ‘truth’ and ‘error’ headings. This book is therefore not a critique, let alone an exposé of the organisation. Readers who wish to compare Watch Tower teachings with those of the Bible, as understood by mainstream Christians, can find an abundance of literature. Unlike a theological critique of Jehovah’s Witnesses’ teachings, academic writing seeks to maintain neutrality in such matters, and the purpose of the present study is to explain, rather than to criticise. This is not to say that offering a theological critique of the Watch Tower Society is an inappropriate activity in some other context, but it cannot be the aim of an academic study, where the religion under study must be central, rather than some other religious worldview acting as the pivotal point around which the object of study is made to revolve.

Rationale for the Research

It is often asked why it is necessary to conduct research on minority religious groups, who may seem to have little impact on religion worldwide or on society at large. There are several reasons which make academic study of Jehovah’s Witnesses desirable. First, the size of the organisation makes it significant. There are some 13 million attendees annually at the Memorial service, which is the organisation’s one and only calendrical religious celebration. In Britain, the attendance reached nearly 137,000 in 2014, which is roughly equal to the membership of mainstream denominations like the United Reformed Church. Second, Jehovah’s Witnesses have a relatively high profile, and those who encounter them are largely dependent either on the Watch Tower Society’s own literature, or on countercult critiques. Third, the Jehovah’s Witnesses are a particularly interesting example of an organisation whose fundamental touchstone for faith and practice is the Bible. As I shall argue, it is misleading to describe them as fundamentalist, but their interpretation of scripture highlights methods of coping with some of the problems that are encountered by those who rely exclusively on the Bible as their fundamental source of authority.

Throughout the organisation’s history there has been a dearth of serious literature on the Jehovah’s Witnesses. It is only in recent times that new religious movements (NRMs) have gained serious academic attention.⁴ Half a century ago the study of religions other than mainstream Christianity was confined to the world’s major traditions, such as Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam. The study of other religions in many British theological seminaries tends to start with Ancient Egyptian culture, no doubt because it impinged on the study of the Jewish-Christian Old Testament. The fact that Jehovah’s Witnesses came round people’s doors when followers of other world faiths did not was not considered a compelling factor for defining the syllabus. NRM studies only began to flourish when the new wave of minority religions began amidst the 1960s counterculture. The early studies were principally sociological, focusing on movements such as the Children of God (now The Family International), the Unification Church (popularly known as ‘the Moonies’) and the Hare Krishna movement, among others. The public interest in these organisations was fostered by the media. Television, still relatively in its infancy, found arresting visual material in the hippies, the Hare Krishna devotees and the Unification Church’s ‘mass weddings’. No such visual material can be derived from the Jehovah’s Witnesses: any visitor to a Kingdom Hall will confirm that it is designed to be as plain as possible, with little or nothing that would make ‘good television’.

The academic interest in NRMs has largely followed the media, focusing on new movements that have gained public attention, and leaving behind the ‘old new religions’, such as British Israel, Moral Re-Armament, Theosophy, Spiritualism, the Christadelphians and the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Of the ‘old new religions’ only Mormonism has received substantial academic treatment, since the Latter-day Saints already had their own scholars in Utah. One or two pieces of early writing addressed the phenomenon of minority religions collectively, usually under the umbrella heading ‘Christian heresies’, of which the Watch Tower Society featured as one of several examples. The earliest piece of academic writing that focused exclusively on the Watch Tower organisation was Milton Stacey Czatt’s brief thesis entitled The International Bible Students: Jehovah’s Witnesses (1933). A later, more substantial study was H.H. Stroup’s The Jehovah’s Witnesses (1945), and another shorter volume by Royston Pike entitled Jehovah’s Witnesses: Who They Are, What They Teach, What They Do appeared in 1954. William J. Whalen’s more substantial although somewhat journalistic Armageddon Around the Corner presents an overview of the organisation up to 1962. Additionally, Counting the Days to Armageddon by Robert Crompton (1996), a former Jehovah’s Witness, provides an excellent account of the Society’s end-time calculations and their background in Adventism. More recently, Andrew Holden authored Jehovah’s Witnesses: Portrait of a Contemporary Religious Movement (2002), which is a sociological study based on a congregation in Blackburn, England.

Czatt’s study was written only two years after Rutherford gave the Bible Students the name ‘Jehovah’s Witnesses’, and his brief study is therefore limited to Russell’s teachings and Rutherford’s earlier modifications. He describes life in a Bethel, and offers some restrained criticisms in his final chapter. Stroup’s more substantial volume draws on Czatt, and offers quite a remarkable and empathetic account of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, particularly considering the lack of scholarly material on the Watch Tower Society. After briefly outlining the lives of Russell and Rutherford, Stroup discusses their distinctive teachings, lifestyle and ways of worshipping, and how their publishers spread the Society’s message. (The term ‘publisher’ is the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ term for those who engage in house-to-house ministry – ‘publishing salvation’, as the prophet Isaiah puts it.⁵) Although Stroup successfully undertook a substantial amount of fieldwork, he was unsuccessful in securing the cooperation of the Watch Tower Society, and its president Nathan H. Knorr personally wrote to the author, stating that the Society did not have the time to offer assistance and that, apart from the annual Yearbooks, ‘there is no other information that we have available to the public’.⁶ In the mid-twentieth century the Society tended to perceive academic writing as an irrelevant distraction from its own work of proclaiming Jehovah’s kingdom, viewing itself as the sole custodian of religious truth. The idea that anyone should want to study the Society for anything other than spiritual reasons was foreign to it. Inevitably, Stroup’s study is now dated, but it nonetheless provides some useful insights into the past practices of Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Both Royston Pike’s and William J. Whalen’s studies are popular rather than academic pieces of writing, and their authors do not discuss their methodology. Pike is aware of Czatt and Stroup, and draws on Watch Tower sources as well as press reports and – usually critical – pamphlets from external bodies. Most of the book is set out in the style of a lexicon but, while it may be have been useful for quick consultation by the non-specialist reader, it does not add any new insights into the organisation. Whalen brings the reader’s knowledge of the organisation into the 1960s, again giving an overview of the main aspects of the Watch Tower organisation: theology, structures, publishing work, and attitudes to political and religious bodies. Interestingly, Whalen provides information on some of the schismatical Russellite groups that split away during Rutherford’s leadership.

Two further accounts of the Watch Tower Society come from Jehovah’s Witnesses. Marley Cole’s Jehovah’s Witnesses: The New World Society (1955) and A. H. Macmillan’s Faith on the March (1957) were brought out independently of the Watch Tower organisation. Having met Russell in 1900, Macmillan served in Bible House, Allegheny from 1905, and became a director of the Peoples Pulpit Association (subsequently renamed the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York, Inc.). His account is therefore particularly useful in tracing the Society’s early history. Cole’s writing is another overview, aimed at the general reader, and it proved highly popular, especially among the Jehovah’s Witnesses themselves, selling over 100,000 copies in its first year of publication.

In more recent years the Society’s relationships with academics has changed somewhat. James A. Beckford’s The Trumpet of Prophecy (1975), originally presented as a PhD thesis for the University of Reading in 1972, was written with the cooperation of a number of Jehovah’s Witnesses congregations, and my own Historical Dictionary of Jehovah’s Witnesses (2008) was undertaken in dialogue with local congregations, the UK national headquarters at Mill Hill, London, and researchers at the international headquarters in Brooklyn, New York. Beckford’s landmark study provides a fairly comprehensive profile of the Society’s history and organisation, but its distinctive and innovatory feature is his analysis of the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ social stratification. The Trumpet of Prophecy was written 40 years ago, and of course the Society’s teachings and organisation have moved on considerably since then; this study seeks to identify and explain the changes that have occurred.

A number of factors have helped to change the relationships between academic authors and the Watch Tower Society. Stroup appears to have contacted the Watch Tower organisation from cold, whereas the academic community has now built up a relationship of greater trust with NRMs over the years. Understandably, when Jehovah’s Witnesses have been unsure of an author’s intentions, they have been wary, but where trust has been built they seem glad to have gained independent counterbalancing voices to the prevalent countercult polemic. At a few academic conferences I have recently attended, the Society has sent representatives, sometimes as speakers and at other times as observers. The recent interest in Holocaust studies has caused the Jehovah’s Witnesses to be identified as one group of people who suffered enormously during the Third Reich, and indeed they were the only specifically religious group apart from the Jews to be specially identified and targeted by Adolf Hitler.

Origins and Progress of the Research

The research that led to this book began in 1992, and when I was appointed as senior lecturer in religious studies at the University of Wolverhampton. Part of my brief was to introduce a new module on NRMs, which had not previously been on the curriculum. It became evident that the campus library was less than adequate for student use, and I therefore wrote around to several religious organisations, inviting them to donate their own literature, explaining the advantage of students accessing primary source material. Several organisations immediately responded with books and pamphlets, but the Watch Tower Society was slightly more wary, stating that they would prefer the local City Overseer to call on me first.⁷ His visit marked the beginning of personal relationships with members of the Darlaston congregation in England’s West Midlands, and his visits as an outside speaker became a regular feature of the module. Engaging in dialogue away from the doorstep opened up a different type of conversation, which proved productive in gaining understanding of the Society. When Circuit and District Overseers visited the Darlaston congregation, I was often introduced to them, and enabled to familiarise myself further with the Society’s affairs. In 1998 the University of Wolverhampton made the decision to host a small Holocaust exhibition, with special reference to the Jehovah’s Witnesses. The exhibition was sponsored by the Watch Tower Society, and several specialist academics, together with a researcher from the Society’s Brooklyn headquarters in New York, came as speakers. The Society decided later in the year to take the exhibition to the University of Toronto, where I was invited to speak.

All these contacts facilitated my acquaintance with what is effectively a semiclosed community. Although the Witnesses pursue fairly conventional lifestyles, their congregational life takes up much of their time, and friends are largely drawn...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Researching Jehovah’s Witnesses
• 2 Origins
• 3 Charles Taze Russell
• 4 The Rutherford Era
• 5 Opposition
• 6 Organisation
• 7 The Bible
• 8 Ethics and Lifestyle
• 9 Worship and Rites of Passage
• 10 Prophecy
• 11 Problems and Prospects
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index