I’ve found the UN affiliation threads very interesting, but I’ve also expressed the view that this issue will have virtually no effect on JW membership. I have at least two reasons for believing this.
First, after reading W. J. Schnell’s 1957 book, Thirty Years a Watchtower Slave, in which the author describes how the Watchtower used negative publicity to increase membership, I’m now of the opinion that continued commentary on this matter may only serve to foster an even greater conviction on the part of rank and file JWs that they are being persecuted, and they will increase their efforts to recruit members; this will offset what I think will be a miniscule number of defections by those who will feel betrayed because of the UN affiliation. The reason why I think there will be few defections is described below.
Second, I believe that the Watchtower can easily defend itself. I envision a defense something like this:
We’ve always been opposed to governments, and have prided ourselves on being a organization not of government—a non-governmental organization (NGO). As all of our brothers and sisters well know, we’ve always opposed the United Nations, and believed that they are one of Satan’s organizations, and many articles about the UN’s failures have appeared in Awake!.Watchtower writers long have been using information compiled by the UN and stored in their many libraries, and often have gone into those libraries to obtain this information. Since at least 1991, access to the main library—the Dag Hammerskold Library—has been possible only after presenting a “ground pass” to the guard at the door. When we learned that such a ground pass would be made available to any NGO which requested and was granted affiliation with the UN’s Department of Public Information (DPI), we made such a request and was granted affiliation and the ground pass was obtained. Much has been made by some of the fact that there were other ways to obtain the grounds pass, such as by convincing the library that the Watchtower had legitimate research purposes for accessing the main library, but at the time we thought an application for affiliation with the DPI would be more expeditious.
As a condition of being affiliated with the DPI, we were required to submit evidence which showed that we were publishing information about the UN’s activities. This we gladly agreed to do, since writing stories about the UN’s activities was something we were already doing. When we learned recently that some officials at the UN insisted that an organization’s affiliation with the DPI meant that it accepted the goals of the UN, we immediately terminated our affiliation and gave back the ground pass. In all of our correspondence with the DPI, we were never asked to affirm that we accepted the goals, aims, or principles of the UN; indeed, if we ever had been asked to so, we naturally would have refused. Furthermore, nobody in the governing body was aware that the DPI expected its affiliated NGOs accepted the UN’s goals. If the governing body had been aware of that, it immediately would have disassociated itself from the DPI.
It appears that DPI officials just naturally assumed that we accepted the UN’s principles because they know Jehovah’s Witnesses are against war, and for peace, and also because we were actively describing the UN’s activities, and gave evidence of this once a year when we renewed our application; it didn’t seem to bother them that we always pointed out in our articles that there was a better way to achieve the UN’s goals: the way of Jehovah. The Watch tower, as all brothers and sisters know, could never accept the goals of the UN, but we could--and did--demonstrate with our articles that the UN was not reaching its goals, and never will, because true peace on earth will come only when Jehovah establishes his Kingdom goverment on earth.
I wonder how many JW's are going to bolt the organization after hearing this defense.
Joseph F. Alward
"Skeptical Views of Christianity and the Bible"