I thought I'd relate my experience here. Can others relate to it? Does it sound familiar?
It’s quite a remarkable thing to feel that you’re in possession of the sole truth, the absolute truth about life and the universe. It’s a heady feeling to look around you at the masses of humankind and pity them as lost and confused, and even worse, about to be obliterated. I remember as a little boy my father pointing to the steeples of churches we would pass and he’d ask me what was to become of them. I had been trained well and quickly responded that ‘Bab-a-don [Babylon] fall DOWN’ (Revelation 18:2)! I knew at the tender age of 4 that I was on the right side and woe to the rest!
The Bible at 2 Timothy 3:15 encourages the training of children from infancy and trained I was or, more accurately, indoctrinated with Watchtower dogma. Even from such an early age I tended to be a deep-thinking person and I took everything very seriously. The twin horrors of disfellowshiping (ex-communication) and/or dying at Armageddon were imprinted onto my soul indelibly. By the time I had entered first grade we were convinced as a family that I’d likely not get past elementary school before the Big A came. We reasoned that 5th grade would be a likely time with 4th grade being slightly optimistic and 6th grade an outer limit for God to bring his wrath on the earth.
Anyone familiar with the Jehovah’s Witness religion will be well aware of ‘keeping close in mind’ the imminent end of this “system”. 1975 had been labeled the “appropriate time” for God to act in Watchtower literature but obviously God’s calendar was on a different page. So it turned out that my family’s timetable was likewise off and I not only graduated elementary school but finished high school as well without lightning bolts raining from the sky.
The Watchtower religion, of course, always had answers for such delays. If there is one verse in the Bible that the religion loves more than any other, it may be Proverbs 4:18 where it talks about the ‘light getting brighter’. This has been construed to mean that no matter how wacky or illogical a teaching might be or what effect it might have had on the believer’s life, it can be altered with no qualms and no apologies and chalked up as “new light”. So, instead of such failures being black marks, the new teachings are actually heralded as blessings from God. It matters not that the replacement teachings are often discarded a few years later to be replaced by even more “new light”.
I didn’t worry too much as a young boy because I was told that I would be safe under the umbrella of my parents’ faithfulness. The Watchtower never came out with a specific age when a young person could no longer count on their parents’ saving powers but mention was made of an age of understanding and a time to take responsibility. As I neared my teens I started to be a bit more concerned. Was this age perhaps 10 or 12? If not protected by my parents’ faithfulness, I knew the only way to avoid a lightning bolt through my head was to get baptized and makes things official between God and me. My parents made a big push as I came up to my thirteen birthday and I almost took the plunge. Puberty had not yet fully set in and I deemed myself to be quite pure at the time. In the end, I decided that I was just a bit too young to be making such a bold move. I would take my chances with God and the nebulous age limit thing.
Alas, my childhood innocence couldn’t continue forever and the hormones released into my body around age 14 caused me to see girls in a whole “new light”. All kinds of devilish thoughts were now coursing through my brain and I found, much to my dismay, that it was quite unlikely I’d make it through Armageddon at this point, baptized or not. I went through the motions of doing the Jehovah’s Witness thing in high school but my mind was elsewhere. I felt guilty but since I wasn’t baptized I felt I’d be pretty much dead anyway so I didn’t worry too much until I reached my senior year of high school.
I had never given much thought to what career or occupation I would need to support myself. I remember as far back as fourth grade being exposed to workshops in class that were designed to help kids start to think along those lines. My parents assured me that it was definitely not something to worry about because the Big A[rmageddon] would have come long before this would be an issue. Suddenly, I was 17, about to graduate, not baptized and with no career in mind! I reasoned that at the very least I should get plunked. Why not? You’re dead anyway if you don’t so might as well give it a shot. So, in the spring of my senior year I started to take steps to try to get somewhat serious about the religion. I told my overjoyed parents the news and they breathed a sigh of relief that as long as Armageddon held off until July 15, 1989, we could safely pass through as a family. Fortunately, God held off his wrath and that date arrived and I was immersed in modest bathing attire. I did slightly flaunt an independent spirit by choosing to not wear a shirt. I wasn’t alone in this but it was considered better decorum if brothers were dunked while wearing a white t-shirt lest impure thoughts be generated in those viewing the procedure.
Phew, made it! I had my ticket, kind of. It was strongly emphasized that baptism was only the beginning of the steps needed to please God and fend off annihilation. I needed desperately to do something about the ongoing interest I didn’t seem to be able to shake in girls. Fortunately there were Watchtower articles that assured me I wasn’t alone. There were other young people with hormones who only gave into bad urges about six times per year (see the book Questions Young People Ask, Answers That Work). Oh, how I wished I could be one of the six-times-a-year people!
There now remained only one problem. I was out of school and had to find something to do with my time. College was a definite no-no. Watchtower speakers referred to such as ‘polishing the brass on the Titantic’ because we all knew Jehovah would soon be obliterating the whole population minus the few million Watchtower followers (and possibly many of those too). No, college was a complete waste of time and even more dangerously, would expose the participant to new ideas! There was iron-clad proof too of the nearness of the end. By piecing together a series of scriptural verses, applying some formulas and insisting ancient Jerusalem fell in 607BCE rather than 587BCE as all historians teach, we knew God’s kingdom had begun ruling in the heavens in October 1914. Jesus promised at Matthew 24:34 that one generation would live to see the end so it was simple math to add a lifespan to 1914 and know when the end had to come by.
The Watchtower encourages all its members and particularly the young and unencumbered to “pioneer”, a term used to designate those who promise to put in a certain number of hours per year in the conversion work. It was at the time 1000 hours per year. I soon agreed to this and to complement it, took up the Watchtower’s secular work of choice: cleaning. It was ideal, clean at night and preach all day. I really should have been joyful. I was ‘exerting myself vigorously’ (Luke 13:24), being supported by my parents, living girlfriend-free and waiting for Paradise to envelop the earth after the nasty destruction and bird-eating-corpses part. For some unexplainable reason, I wasn’t particularly happy though. I knew it had to be something wrong with me. I wasn’t studying enough, wasn’t praying enough, wasn’t preparing for meetings enough, wasn’t preparing effective enough presentations at the doors….it had to be something like those things. Or was it that my hair tended to get longish at times? There were just so many things to keep track of.
This continued on for a few years. I eventually dropped the pioneer label and became part of the less esteemed “publisher” class. I also for some reason decided to stop my career in cleaning and instead switched to making collection calls for part-time work. But then November 1995 came – a fateful date in Watchtower lore. That generation equation I referred to above was starting to make the leadership a little uncomfortable. Do the math: 1995-1914=81 and that would be for people born in the year 1914. At one time they were saying people had to be old enough to remember the year to be counted as part of the 1914 generation that wouldn't die off. So what do you do when such a difficulty arises if you’re part of the Watchtower leadership? You bring out the trusty Proverbs 4:18 scripture and let out some “new light”! They completely disconnected any time element to Matthew 24:34, claiming that Jesus wasn’t talking about the word ‘generation’ in a chronologic way. There was no apology offered for the havoc this would definitely cause but rather a not-so-subtle attempt to blame the rank and file for reading too much into the previous interpretation.
I.was.pissed.