Trouble at the
Watchtower
For decades the Jehovah's Witnesses have condemned the United Nations as the Scarlet Beast
of Revelation, but privately they were still affiliated to it.
When he stumbled on their secret, the religious affairs
correspondent of the Guardian uncovered a hornets nest of
recrimination amongst the faithful.
Stephen Bates
THE smiling middle-aged
women who called at my door on a Saturday morning were most
polite. They were from the Jehovah's Witnesses, they said, and
could they interest me in coming along to their Kingdom Hall? No,
I said, in grave dereliction of my duty as a religious affairs
correspondent, I attended another church. And they smiled again
and we wished each other a cheery good morning.
Had I known what I know
now I might have been a shade less polite, for not many days after
that an email flickered on to my computer screen from a senior
academic asking whether I knew of a strange little secret in his
religious sect, the Witnesses. There was, he said, a glaring
inconsistency between its extreme opposition to the United Nations
and its private decision to affiliate to the United Nations as a
non-governmental organisation.
Like most outsiders, I
knew that the Witnesses there are 6 million worldwide, including
130,000 in Britain had peculiar ideas about blood transfusions
(they don't' allow them even at risk of death); that they didn’t
like governments, and did not vote at elections; that they were
governed by a group of elders based in Brooklyn, New York; and
that they were Bible-based fundamentalists. But what on earth
could they have against the UN?
Surely, such a position
for a religious group must be like being in favour of sin? But
there it was, stark in black and white: for 80 years the
Watchtower Bible and Tract Society (WTBTS) of New York, as the
Witnesses are formally known, has not just criticised but
condemned first the League of Nations and then the UN. The UN
appears there as the Scarlet-Coloured Beast of the Book of
Revelation, Babylon the Great, a disgusting thing in the eyes of
God and man.
Yet there also the
Watchtower Society sat on the UN’s website as one of 1,500
accredited non-governmental organisations.
"It’s certainly a bit
strange", said a UN spokeswoman. "I guess we didn’t know
what they really thought of us."
No, said the Witnesses’
British spokesman, they would never be associated with the UN –
though they might make representations to it.
But there they they were.
The WTBTS had been affiliated to the organisation since it first
applied in 1991. To be recognised, it would have had to agree that
it supported the UN charter and was prepared to disseminate and
publicise its objectives and policies. Not once, but every year.
There was no mistake. I wrote the story, which limped into the
Guardian, deep in the paper on the day the bombing of Afghanistan
started. That, I thought, was that, until the emails started
arriving, from Hawaii, California, Nebraska and Ukraine. Somehow,
within a few hours, it had been posted on a Witnesses’ website in
English and translated into French, and 14,000 followers across
the world had read it. Hundreds commented on the article, others demanded to see a copy of the original newspaper (as if they could
not truly believe it if it was just on their computer screens). Only one response was hostile: our subeditors had cut the word "coloured" from "scarlet-coloured", which was
enough to damn the article as being riddled with inaccuracies,
according to a chapel elder in Illinois.
Then the most surprising
thing of all happened: two days after the article appeared, the
WTBTS disaffiliated from the UN. Surely not a guilty conscience?
Under pressure from incredulous Witnesses, the UN issued a
statement on headed notepaper confirming it. The sect’s followers
besieged the office of the head of public information demanding an
original of his letter, or at least a copy. Word filtered back
that, when queried about the story, loyal elders were telling
their congregations that it was a lie disseminated by apostates.
Or that the UN’s website had evidently been infiltrated by
forgers. Or that it was the work of the devil. At the least it was
a mistake – though one, as critical Witnesses pointed out, that
had been continuing for 10 years. Or had the elders just ignored
the correspondence they received?
Witnesses who showed
copies of the article to colleagues and relatives, mothers and
fathers, sisters and brothers, had them torn up or thrown on the
floor, or simply handed straight back unread. They were accused of
apostasy. The Witnesses’ talkboard was abuzz with hundreds of
messages, virtually all of them outraged with the elders of the
Watchtower. One said that when he had shown a friend the UN
website, he was summoned to a two-hour judicial hearing with his
local elders and he and his wife were subjected to a public
reproof in front of the entire congregation at their next meeting.
"My wife’s 16 years
of faithful service are about to be null and void for merely
having a private conversation with a friend about some factual and
private information", he wrote. "We heard the scripture
applied to us about ‘those that arise and speak twisted things’ .
The elders’ decision was presented as good news. They said: ‘We’ve
decided to show mercy and not disfellowship you’ – it was
something that had to be cut out of the congregation like a gangrene."
"Disfellowshipping"
is a serious matter because Witnesses are discouraged from having
close friendships with outsiders. "Disfellowshipping"
means other Witnesses, including your own family, should cease
contact with you and shun you if you meet them. It is done – the
Illinois elder told me – only in a loving way and after attempts
to make you see the error of your ways.
There is a sense in this
row, which must seem footling to outsiders, in which disaffected
Witnesses feel they have been misled once too often. In the deeply
introspective, defensive and suspicious world of the WTBTS,
questioning is discouraged, so an issue of hypocrisy such as this
causes all the more anguish. This is felt particularly strongly on
the blood-transfusion issue. Over the years hundreds of Witnesses
and their children are thought to have died because they refused
life-saving operations on the basis of Acts 15:20. But then, last
summer, the elders met in Brooklyn and, after an apparent divine
revelation – but more precisely following a vote of eight to four
– decided that in certain circumstances the transfusion of blood
components such as plasma might be acceptable, so long as the
recipient genuinely repented afterwards. This was not publicised
to congregations and, under questioning, was said to be no change
at all.
Then there is the issue of
child abuse, in which official guidance is that accusations should
be investigated only if there are two independent witnesses – a
near impossibility. I have seen instructions sent to elders which
tell them that written allegations should be burned. This may, or
may not, constitute an obstruction of justice, but is hardly
helpful. The outside world appears to impinge very little on the
cast-iron biblical certainties of the Jehovah’s Witnesses – which
is what makes their tangle with the UN all the more embarrassing.
The disfellowshipped join the rest of humanity and are known
informally as "bird seed" after – actually, a long way
after – Ezekiel 39:18. For, as the Watchtower magazine says,
Jehovah holds the proud and mighty in contempt, letting the wild
beasts and vultures feed upon them as worthless carrion.
The Witnesses are told to
engage in a "theocratic war strategy": "in times of
spiritual warfare it is proper to misdirect the enemy by hiding
the truth. It is done unselfishly; it does no harm to anyone. On
the contrary it does much good."
The trouble is that the
elders appear not only to have misled the enemy but their own
followers as well. To have such a growing body of disillusioned
members cannot be right. No wonder some of the disaffected believe
Armageddon is coming for the WTBTS, sooner even than the
Watchtower predicts