Tonight, I watched the season opener of the new show on the Nat Geo Channel about the religious colony in Montana (USA) called the Hutterites. There is also another fantastic show called Amish: Out of Order. Both shows focus on ex-members or people inside wishing to escape and follows them as they adjust to their new lives on the outside. Having recently met and befriended an ex-Seventh Day Adventist and in speaking with a few ex-Mormon friends, I noticed several common terms that all of these groups share with JWs. Two terms came up in the Hutterite program tonight AND the Amish show a few weeks ago:
"Frowned upon"
and
"...if the elders find out..."
a few others that are shared with LDS and SDA are:
"disfellowship"
"heavy petting"
"worldy"
"the group (organization/colony)"
"brothers and sisters"
"like-minded"
"independant thinking (in a pejorative sense)"
and "what will others think?"
"family study (or family Bible reading/family home evening)"
Each of these groups originated independantly, separated geographically or by a few decades. But all seemed to originate in the late 1700-1800s. I'm interested to know how these groups developed similar vocabulary having never crossed paths with one another. Granted, the SDA and JWs share common ancestry with the Millerite movement, but the other highly controlled groups are almost hermetically sealed from outside influences. Are there any sociology people who wanna chime in with their theories on how this phenomenon may have arose? This was actually one of the big wake-up moments for me. When I discovered that JWs were actually not that different from many other "false" religious groups, it blew my mind. I finally realized, "Hey wait a sec... we are not really all that unique from all the other oddball religions out there!" That was a huge boost to my mental exit from dubland. And after hearing our new Kingdom Melodies, nothing ever sounded more "churchy" to me before.
My theory is this: Religions evolve too. Analogy: There are north American wolves and Australian wolves. The difference is, the Australian wolves are marcupial as are most Australian mammals. That trait is unique to Australia and a few other tiny coastal areas facing Australia in the southern hemisphere (eastern S. America); evidence that the 2 land masses were connected at one time and that all the marcupials share a common marcupial ancestor. The American wolf and Australian wolf are not even closely related. They arose within 2 entirely different branches of evolution. However, both the American and Australian environments positively selected for specific phenotypes. In other words, both locations had environments that provided a suitable niche for species that were wolf-like. I think these separate offshoots of religions developed the same way. Within their cultural environments, each group deemed it necessary to develop similar vocabulary to ensure the survival of their religion from generation to generation. Agree? Disagree? Gimmie your thoughts, I'd like to hear what you guys have to say.