The Novels

When I started college in 1969, I wanted to teach either history or English.  I ended up majoring in English, with a minor in history.  I already enjoyed writing, and wrote a few short stories and kept an extensive journal.  I had plans to write seriously after graduation.  Those plans died when I became a Jehovah’s Witness.  The Watchtower culture severely discourages such individual creative endeavors.

As noted in a previous post, I first considered writing a JW related novel in the early eighties.  “Waiting for Armageddon” never advanced beyond a few ideas and notes.  Most Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t do much that would interest a non-Witness.    We went to meeting and conventions, and studied books and magazines, all of which contained the same information.  We knocked on doors to no effect.  (Sidebar: it takes about four thousand hours of preaching to make one convert to the Jehovah’s Witnesses)  I could not turn this into a story.

I tinkered with the idea because life as a Witness bored me, and wanted to find a way to challenge my brain again.  In retrospect, I could not write the book because I could not examine the subject dispassionately.  Removing the influence of the religion freed me to write about conflicts between religious fantasy and the real world.

A few years after we left the Witnesses I began writing another book.  I didn’t even know it was going to be a book when I started.  One night I wrote a scene about a religious leader’s stirring speech about the approaching end of the world.  I added to it in small pieces, working with only a vague idea of where I intended take the story.  I did in fact finish the book after several years of desultory writing.  Since then, I’ve expanded my knowledge of the writing art.  An outline helps, a lot. I traveled with no road map for the journey.  At one point, I realized that a semi-major character had wondered offstage about fifty pages back, never to return. 

I rewrote “Armageddon’s Disciples” to fix some of the problems.  Events forced another rewrite when, on March 26, 2000, King County blew up the site of my opening scene.  I eventually produced a workable manuscript about an apocalyptic religion grappling with prophetic failure.  Although unsold, the book provided a valuable stepping-stone, in that I created a fictional milieu that provides fodder for many stories. 

My writing then took a diversion as I stumbled on an online writing circle for alternate history.  I wrote some stories of varying lengths over the next few years.  Two shorter pieces, “The Pig War – an Alternate History” and “The Wait,” now have a permanent home at militaryhistoryonline.com.  Along the way I improved my craft (I hope) based on the feedback from the online writing community. 

In November 2010, I joined another online writing community, NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month.  The object of NaNoWriMo is to write 50,000 words during the month of November.  “Winners” receive a handsome certificate stating that they achieved the goal.  I managed to crank out 52,000 words of “Armageddon’s Angel” in twenty-eight days.  The basic plot concerns a serial killer related to the Disciples. 

Following that burst of speed, I went on over the next six months or so, to complete the novel.  Then work and family obligations forced me to slow down.  I used the time to research the publishing industry and submission process. A major rewrite is now underway, based on what I learned.  

I plan to have the manuscript ready for submission in a few months.  This time I’m getting some help and suggestions from a professional editor.  Having made many mistakes with the earlier writing efforts, I hope I’ve learned from a few of them.  If I sold the book tomorrow, it would be about a year, at least, before you’ll see it in your local bookstore.

My created religion has its own history, jargon, mythology, and rules.  The Disciples live in a world that provides ready answers to all of life’s problems.  They no longer need to think. Their most personal decisions arrive with instructions from the Apostles that govern them.  As my protagonist says “Disciples are so used to accepting direction from above that they will do anything they are told to do.”  I like some of these people, despise others, and pity many of them.  My desire in writing their story is to provide a window into the workings of high control religions without pointing fingers.

Besides, I’m having fun.  

Escape from the Watchtower Part II

In September 1982, we moved from Pullman to Spokane, where I planned to spend a year studying business.  This move forced the first break in our Witness lifestyle.  Unlike Pullman, the Spokane congregation we attended did not display a warm atmosphere.  I found them to be distant and snobbish, possibly because of my status as a college student.  Even the witnesses in Pullman (where my wife’s family still lived) made their disapproval of my educational pursuit obvious. 

To be fair, the Watchtower is right about one thing.  Education and the Watchtower don’t mix.  I rediscovered the joy of learning and made friends among my cohort of fellow students.  In comparison, meetings offered little intellectual stimulation.  My meeting attendance and field service dropped significantly.  I threw myself into studying accounting and my grades showed it.      

After a year of school, we moved across the state when I found work in Bellevue, my parent’s (non-witnesses) hometown.  I tried to reenergize myself as a Witness, and failed.  Field Service seemed a pointless exercise.  I became convinced that Jehovah’s Witnesses go door to door, not to make converts or carry a message, but to put in the time demanded by the organization.  The endless meetings produced no joy, encouragement, or better understanding of scripture.  Everything discussed felt recycled.  I began finding more and more excuses to avoid going to meetings, or engaging in the preaching work.  I simply did not want to do something that left me wanting my two hours back.

When I began studying with the Witnesses everything felt new and exciting.  Now, I realized that I had learned everything they were going to teach me.  Nothing we did offered intellectual stimulation.  The Watchtower’s methods actively discourage thinking of any sort.  Around this time, I formulated my first thoughts about writing a book, I planned on calling it “Waiting for Armageddon.”  It struck me that JW’s filled their lives with waiting for the new system.  The Watchtower suppresses personal achievement.  The Witness’ expectations for the future are passive.  When the time comes, Jehovah will fix everything wrong with their lives. 

My frustration reached a breaking point at a circuit assembly in February 1988.  Two thousand Witnesses packed into the Assembly hall in Puyallup, Washington for two days of exhortation to do more and to obey everything the Governing Body told us to do.  One speaker gave a lengthy talk highlighting the folly of a higher education.  In the Watchtower Society’s view, education past high school distracted believers from the vital work of preaching.  Given the short time left to the world, no one needed to go to college, it only prepared the student for life in a world scheduled for destruction at the hand of God.

Having seen the hype surrounding 1975, I simply did not believe this.  I remember thinking “they keep saying the world is about to end, doesn’t it actually have to end sometime?”  Our oldest children were approaching their teenage years and doing very well in school.  I did not want them chasing the Witnesses dream world.  The following week I started taking lunch breaks at the Seattle Public Library and researching the history and beliefs of the Witnesses.  It quickly became clear why the Watchtower discourages such research.  In short order I did not believe anything I learned at the Kingdom Hall.

I read Walter Martin’s “The Kingdom of the Cults” and “Jehovah of the Watchtower.”  I also read “The Four Major Cults” by Anthony Hoekema. The real find was “Crisis of Conscience” by Raymond Franz, which I checked out.  Franz, a former member of the Governing Body is a hero to former Witnesses and perhaps second only to Satan himself to the Watchtower.  His two books (the other is “In Search of Christian Freedom) reveal a rotten core at the center of the Witness organization.  I pored over every detail in the book, however I lived in fear of discovery that I had it.  Simple possession of this and other “apostate” material threatened my marriage and relationship with my children if caught.  So I hid it under the bed and continued my study when I could.

The Watchtower Society prohibits reading Crisis of Conscience for good reason.  Franz offers an inside chronicle of the religion’s many prophetic failures, starting with Charles Taze Russell’s 1914 prediction.  I believed that Russell calculated that Jesus return would begin the Last Days in 1914, 2520 years after the destruction of Jerusalem in 607 BC.  Armageddon would come within one generation.  Franz points out that Russell’s calculation starts in 606 BC because he forgot there was no “Year Zero.”  He predicted 1914 represented, not the start of the last days, but the end.  And almost all reputable scholars place Jerusalem’s destruction in 587 BC.  I quickly reached an obvious conclusion: the cornerstone of Witness prophetic chronology was wrong.

Continued study of this book led to knowledge of early prophetic failures in 1925 and the 1940’s.  Franz also details the events that led up to the 1975 fiasco.  The Watchtower has blamed its followers for misreading its words; Franz clearly proves otherwise, the Watchtower clearly emphasized that 1975 marked a milestone.  He also details other administrative problems and double standards by the Governing Body.  I now faced a crisis of my own.  I could not return to the Witness beliefs, expressing any doubt or admitting my research would lead to a multitude of problems.  I was stuck.

  

So one sunny Sunday morning in May 1988, having contrived to stay home from the meeting, I’m sitting at the dining room table drinking coffee and reading the paper when my wife walks out of our bedroom with “Crises of Conscience” in her hand. I thought, “well now I’m in for it.”  In that instant I knew I faced an inquisition by a judicial committee investigating me for heresy.  Friendships would end and very probably my marriage.  My research and the resulting fallout jeopardized my relationship with my children.

Then my wife grinned and said, “this is MY copy.”  While picking up our bedroom she found my copy of the book where I had hidden it.  Assuming I had found the copy she had hidden, she also feared the fallout from thinking for herself.  However, a quick check revealed that her copy was where she had left it, and she realized what was happening.  While I focused on issues of false prophecy; my wife, who grew up going to Sunday school in a mainstream church, focused on matters of doctrine.  In particularly she disagreed with the Watchtower’s understanding that Jesus did not act as mediator for most Jehovah’s Witnesses.  She could not square this teaching with a plain reading of the Bible.

The rest of that year saw dramatic changes in our lives.  We started celebrating birthdays and holidays, and registered to vote.  Members of the local congregation talked to my wife twice during this time.  Once a pair of Elders wanted to speak to me (I wasn’t home) and once two women offered to study the Bible with my wife behind my back, and “encourage” her (she declined).  We prepared extensive notes detailing our research in the event the Elders formed a judicial committee.  We decided that, having voluntarily joined the Witnesses we should make it clear that we left voluntarily. 

On March 18, 1989, we mailed a letter to the Watchtower in Brooklyn and the local congregation formally ending our association with the Jehovah’s Witnesses.  We were free. There has been a lot of water under the bridge since then.  We attended an independent church for a number of years.  We broke with that body several years ago over a personal issue.  Since then we continue spiritual pursuits as free thinkers.  Our fifteen years as Jehovah’s Witnesses now mark only one stop along the journey.    

Escape from the Watchtower, part I

This part of the story is for my readers with little prior contact with the Jehovah’s Witnesses.  One of the questions I hear most often is “why didn’t you just go to a different church?”  Exiting the Watchtower organization is much more complicated than finding a church you like better.  Before you can understand why I’m calling this article “Escape from the Watchtower” you have to understand what I was escaping from.  

The core doctrine of the Jehovah’s Witnesses is “obey the Watchtower.”  This commandment dominates every aspect of Witness life.  Steven Hassan describes high control religions using the “BITE” model.  These groups control Behavior, Information, Thought, and Emotion.  The Watchtower Society controls behavior with an extreme form of shunning.  The organization forbids reading outside religious material, restricting the free flow of information.  The clever use of language, and peer pressure manipulate thought and emotion. 

Jehovah’s Witness leaders use Jesus command to “go forth and make disciples” as part of their control methods.  Witnesses learn that if God finds their preaching efforts lacking, He may destroy them with the other wicked at the Battle of Armageddon.  The constant pressure to spend more time preaching, plus the many meeting requirements severely limit the time available for research or thinking about personal beliefs.     

Following baptism in November, 1973 I continued to live in Pullman, although I had graduated from Washington State University with a BA in English.  Unable to find work as a teacher, and wishing to display my zeal, I took a string of low-level labor jobs and threw myself into the life of a Jehovah’s Witness.    

We had five one hour meetings a week, one hour on Tuesday evening of “Bible study” which was really a study of one of the Watchtower’s books.  On Thursday night, we had a school to make us better preachers, and an hour devoted to congregation business and current preaching plans.  Sunday morning meeting consisted of a lecture followed by a question and answer study of an article in the Watchtower magazine.  Additionally, there were two day circuit assemblies twice a year. A circuit typically contained about twenty-five congregations of one to two hundred members each.  In the summer, we traveled to ‘district conventions’ that ran as long as five days with fifty thousand present. 

All Witnesses must spend ten hours a month in public preaching, failure to do so results in counseling from an Elder.  We turned in reports every month documenting the hours engaged in this activity, as well as literature “placed” with those we contacted, and Bible studies conducted.  Working extra hours is a sign of godliness and advances one’s status in the organization.  Then, “pioneers” committed to one hundred hours a month, “auxiliary pioneers” to seventy-five.  In early 1974, I auxiliary pioneered for a couple of months.  

I learned the terminology that, for Witnesses, defines a different reality.  Witnesses have “the Truth,” non-witnesses are “worldly.”  The Witness organization and its qualities were “Theocratic.”  Preaching door-to-door is “field service,” the average witness is a “publisher.”  The loaded language serves to channel thinking in desired directions.  Who wants to leave “the truth” to associate with “worldly” people?  Jehovah imparts wisdom through a “channel of communication,” the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society.  “Independent thinking” shows disrespect for this arrangement, placing ourselves ahead of “Jehovah’s Organization.” 

Part of my indoctrination consisted of learning the Bible requirements for “keeping the congregation clean.”  This meant that anyone found an unrepentant sinner by a “judicial committee” of three Elders would be “disfellowshipped.”   The current version of the elder’s manual contains twelve pages of detailed offenses that may require expulsion from the congregation.  These include attempted suicide, various sexual sins, celebrating holidays or birthdays, and disagreeing with the Watchtower.  “Wilful, continued, unnecessary association with disfellowshipped non-relatives” constitutes an offense.  The Watchtower actively discourages contact with disfellowshipped relatives as well.  This enforced shunning prods Witnesses into behaving according to the rules laid down by the Governing Body.

I did not know it at the time, but this is clearly Hassan’s BITE model in action.  Witnesses live in a world that closely resembles George Orwell’s “1984.”  A unique language shapes and controls the individual.  The elders act as thought police, to whom congregation members must report any wrongdoing.  Life as a Witness sounds intolerable to most people.  But the promise of everlasting life appeals to those attracted to the Witness’s message.  The Watchtower presents a beautiful picture of the future as foretold by the Bible.  Those who prove faithful will live in peace and harmony, dead loved ones will awaken in the resurrection.

This message hooks the new convert.  The restrictions, enforcement, and control slip in later, in small doses.  

By the time I started learning this part of the message I had turned off my critical thinking.  I eagerly pursued the routine of study, meetings, and field service for the first year or two. We all expected Armageddon in 1975, we would receive our reward then. In October 1974, I married a young woman I met through the witnesses.  A year later as we expected our first child, and 1975 began to look like a dud, I took a full-time job as an animal technician at WSU.  Slowly over the next few years, I grew more and more dissatisfied with life.  But we had good friends at the Kingdom Hall and making a break with the religion seemed unthinkable.

In 1982, a merger between University facilities threatened my job and I decided to go back to school.  I didn’t know it, but that decision set the stage for my escape.

Creating my own religion

I did not intend to create a religion, or for that matter, a novel.  My writing has a life of its own, and I decided fiction might be a better way to discuss cult-like religions.  In a fictional setting, I won’t offend members of a real church by calling their religion a cult.  So I created The Word of God Foundation.  Its followers call themselves Disciples of the Word, everybody else calls them “Wordies.”  It shares many beliefs and practices with other religions, and obviously, my experience shaped the creation.  This starts with prophetic interpretation.  The Foundation’s Disciples believe God will shortly destroy all human creation and establish a Paradise on Earth, for the benefit of the Disciples.  They have many other interesting habits that I will discuss in future articles.

Like the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, a main feature of my Foundation’s Biblical interpretation is “year for a day” substitution.  The Bible, in the books of Daniel and Revelation mention many prophetic cycles measured in days.  For example Daniel 12:11-12 reads “From the time that the daily sacrifice is abolished and the abomination that causes desolation is set up, there will be 1,290 days. Blessed is the one who waits for and reaches the end of the 1,335 days.”  This interpretative method substitutes years for days to unlock a prophetic puzzle.  Proponents of the method cite passages in Numbers and Ezekiel as justification for the switch.

Charles Taze Russell, the founder of the Watchtower Society, used the year for day principle to predict the date of Jesus’ return.  Russell’s calculated that seven prophetic times, discussed in Daniel Chapter, meant a 2520 year period from 607 BC to 1914.  He expected the end of the world that year.  The year for a day principle predates Russell by two millennia, Rabbi Akibah ben Joseph wrote of the idea around the first century AD.  Since then, many others picked up the idea, notably the American Adventist William Miller, who predicted the return of Jesus in the 1840’s.  Carl Olof Jonsson’s “The Gentile Times Reconsidered” includes a chart showing thirty-eight year for a day calculations with end dates ranging from 1260 to 2016.      

I wanted to create a unique prophetic framework for my fiction, so I set out to see what I could do on my own.  Armed with a bunch of numbers from the Bible, a timeline of world history, and an Excel spreadsheet I cooked up my own prophecies.  A simple fact jumped out at me.  There are no rules for playing this game, which means you can justify any date you want if you hunt around a bit.  For example, adding 1290 years to 691 AD, the year construction completed on the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem brings us to 1981.  The Byzantines captured Jerusalem in 629, adding 1335 years takes us to 1964.  The Jewish revolt against Artaxerxes II started in 350 BC, adding 2300 years (2300 days in Daniel 8:14) equals 1951.  Pick the year you want to end the world, and back into the prophecy.  No one can prove you wrong until the foretold year comes and goes.  Unfortunately, many people believe these flawed interpretaions, and build their lives on false hope and counterfeit reality. 

My novels take place a few years after a prophetic failure, with the Disciples struggling to maintain their faith, and hope for an eternal future on Earth.  The Disciples lived without thought for the future. God would meet their needs and reward their faith.  Then the promised future disappeared.  What do you do when you bet the farm on a losing horse?  Turning away from the investment of their lives is unthinkable, so they struggle to stay faithful that God will reward them soon.  In a novel, this is interesting conflict.  In real life, it’s a tragic waste.     

Over the years a great many Witnesses, and members of other apocryphal religions, have sacrificed normal life for broken promises.  They believed the numerical manipulation and planned their lives accordingly.  They passed up education, careers, children, even vacations to pursue “spiritual interests,” meaning the interests of the Watchtower.  Some sacrificed their lives in adherence to the Watchtower’s medical directives.  Many, about my age, made these decisions forty years ago, or more.  Now they face old age with no savings and benefits based on lower income histories. 

Following the Jesus failure to return in 1914, the Watchtower revised its prophecy.  1914 marked the start of the last days, within one generation the end would come.  In the late 1960’s attention focused on the year 1975.  We had a good friend many years ago who, expecting the end of the world, sold the family farm so he could preach full-time.  He had a breakdown a few years later when the money ran out. We know of at least two married couples that decided not to have children so they could spend more time preaching.  After all, they could make families in after Armageddon.  I’ve lost count of the Witnesses that I’m sure would have done well in college, but didn’t even try, because the Watchtower called higher education a waste of time.

I hope that by incorporating such stories into my fiction I can unlock a hidden world for my audience.  Academic articles dissecting the problems of a religion can never convey the depth of injury to real people.          

Coming soon:  Why it’s so hard to leave, and how we got out.

The Story Behind My Stories

“There are no constraints on the human mind, no walls around the human spirit, no barriers to our progress except those we ourselves erect.”

Ronald  Reagan

In 1973, the year I graduated from college, I erected a barrier to my own progress. 

For many years I had explored various religious traditions.  Among these were Buddhism, and several mystic practices that later called “new age.”  I explored Tarot, numerology and the I Ching.  For several years I expended considerable time, money and energy on Astrology, even teaching an evening class on the subject. During this time, “Jesus Freaks” became a common sight on the Washington State University campus.

I had little interest in Christianity.  I regarded it as a haven for the spiritually lazy, and money-grabbing preachers.  However, through 1972, during a time of mental stress, I grew more interested in the message they were preaching. My Bible reading convinced me that Jesus’ message had meaning, but that most of those that claimed to follow Him missed the point.  I believed that His message required something greater than standing on the campus mall harassing students trying to get to class.

In the spring of 1972, I regained contact with a friend from my freshman year.  In the intervening two years he had joined his mother and sister in the Jehovah’s Witness religion.  He and I engaged in an informal study of his beliefs.  I liked much of what I heard; the Witnesses rejected the doctrines of hellfire and the Trinity, two orthodox Christian beliefs I found absurd.  They believed governments evil and refused to go to war, two values that fit my world view.  They also taught the imminent destruction of evil, and establishment of a “new system” of peace on the earth.

In November 1973, I became a Witness and stopped thinking for myself.  The Witnesses presented themselves as an independent group that studied the Bible without regard to prior dogmatic interpretation.  They claimed their leadership, the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, had well trained and unbiased scholars producing their study material.  Certainly their study aids looked detailed and well developed, and the Witnesses I met seemed open and friendly.

Unfortunately, it was all deception, smoke and mirrors.  The Watchtower’s many predictions of coming apocalypse have all failed.  The religion stifles individual expression and punishes any deviation from its innumerable laws with strictly enforced shunning.  A false face of friendliness and goodwill shown to newcomers hides a dark side of the organization. Many seemingly ordinary activities provoke expulsion and shunning by the Witnesses, including voting and celebrating birthdays or holidays.  More seriously, the Watchtower prohibits blood transfusions, even in the most life threatening situations. The religion also strongly discourages advanced education and personal advancement.

In 1988, I woke up fully to the false nature of the Watchtower religion.  I also found that my wife had already awakened (a funny story about this discovery will come later).  My inquisitive mind began again to explore the history and teachings of the Witnesses.  After a long period of research, and gradually breaking with the constraints on individual freedom (we voted and celebrated birthdays and Christmas) we mailed a long letter terminating our relationship with the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

That event is now over twenty years behind me.  I have found that I could not let go of a fascination with the subject of mind control groups, and the damage they cause.  As noted above hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Jehovah’s Witnesses sacrifice their lives to the ban on blood transfusions.  The Watchtower Society’s “Awake” magazine even applauded the deaths of many young children (Awake May 22, 1994).  Millions have passed up the opportunity to gain a university education.  The May 22, 1969 Awake Magazine told young Witnesses not to waste their time going to college, because the New System might arrive before they graduated. (Awake May 22, 1969)  Those words appeared the month before I graduated from high school.  I will begin collecting social security in a few months. 

Cult experts agree that the deceptive techniques used by organizations like the Witnesses extend beyond religion; to the worlds of politics and business.  How do these societies operate? How do they recruit and control members?  How did I, the supposed intellectual, fail to do even the most basic research?  I had access to a university library with over two million volumes, and never looked up “Jehovah’s Witnesses” or “Watchtower Bible and Tract Society.”

These questions continue to spark my curiosity.  Alcoholics Anonymous presents itself as a place where like-minded people share their “experience, strength and hope.”  I would like to share my experience strength and hope regarding deceptive religions and other groups.  I thought about writing a work of non-fiction, but decided I had nothing to add to the body of work already available.  However, in the late 1990’s, I hit on a new way to look at the issue.

I created my own cult.