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.