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Going Door To Door
Despite legal roadblocks and persecution - even mob attacks - Jehovah's Witnesses spread their message
By Paul Moses
Paul Moses is a regular contributor to Newsday.
July 20, 2002
Gregory Olds strides into the lobby of the Jehovah's Witnesses world headquarters in Brooklyn Heights, passing a large floodlit globe that turns in the atrium. He arrives in the constant flow of people, diverse and well-dressed, who enter through tinted revolving doors that were already clean when a worker sprayed them cleaner minutes before.
Olds, 47, tall and dark-haired, is part of the busy legal team at Jehovah's Witnesses. "I had to take a call from State," he explains after arriving 10 minutes late. With understatement, his voice drops off quietly at the word "State."
The lobby around him is as deftly styled as any new office building's, with a sleek, green- topped reception desk. But the large painting above the desk, colorful in the old-fashioned style the Jehovah's Witnesses favor for biblical scenes, tells a different story. It depicts the quintessential moment of Christian evangelization, when the disciples, inspired by the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, began preaching to people from many lands - each miraculously understanding the message in his or her own language.
The imperative to evangelize is one reason lawyers like Olds so often find themselves in court, pursuing the right to spread their beliefs from one doorway to the next. Last month, the Witnesses won a significant victory when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, 8-1, that an ordinance requiring all door-to-door "canvassers" to get a permit from the mayor was unconstitutional. It was the latest in a long line of First Amendment cases Jehovah's Witnesses have argued before the nation's top court, dating back to the 1930s.
Now evangelizing in 235 lands, the Witnesses have taken their same legal strategies with them. A 70-person staff in Brooklyn, including 10 to 12 lawyers, helps attorneys around the globe use the law to confront mob violence, to free members jailed for refusing military service and to gain the right to worship freely. "Unfortunately, we're misunderstood by government authorities in many places until they get to know us," Olds said.
But unlike the many conservative Christian groups lobbying the U.S. government to oppose religious persecution around the world, the Witnesses believe it's wrong to seek such intervention. "We are politically neutral," Olds said. "We will provide information."
It is a difficult task for lawyers representing a religion opposed to political involvement or even national allegiance. "Essentially, they believe that the state is evil, and that government in and of itself is evil. Consequently, they don't become engaged in the political process," said Ronald Flowers, a professor of religion at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth. But, he said, they are willing to use the legal system to get civil law to conform to what they view as God's law.
The stakes can be high.
Violence against members was touched off when the Witnesses lost a case before the U.S. Supreme Court that upheld a Pennsylvania law requiring students to salute the flag.
"There was a huge outbreak of persecution of Jehovah's Witnesses in the summer of 1940 right after this decision was handed down," said Shawn Peters, author of "Judging Jehovah's Witnesses: Religious Persecution and the Dawn of the Rights Revolution" (University Press of Kansas). "Part of it was literally due to this decision."
Peters said the Witnesses were victims of mob attacks in almost every state because they were viewed as traitors. Three years later, the court reversed itself in another case, and the Witnesses became an important factor in defining First Amendment law concerning religious freedom, with the Supreme Court issuing 23 opinions involving the group between 1938 and 1946.
"They won more than they lost, and the ones they won were of very great importance to expanding and broadening the free exercise of religion, not only for themselves but for all Americans," Flowers said.
Now, Peters said, "It seems like they're applying the lessons they've learned in the United States worldwide."
The State Department's Annual Report on International Religious Freedom records country after country where Jehovah's Witnesses have been banned from practicing their religion, jailed or attacked.
Among the worst is the former Soviet republic of Georgia, where, the report says, a court ruling that technically revoked the Jehovah's Witnesses' legal registration was used by local law enforcement as an excuse not to protect members. Mobs led by a defrocked Orthodox priest beat up Witnesses, sometimes with nail-studded sticks. When the Witnesses held a news conference to present a petition with 130,000 signatures demanding government action against the violence, followers of the ex-priest broke up the gathering and fled with most of the signatures.
Jim McCabe, a Jehovah's Witness attorney, said members had filed 670 criminal complaints, "and no one has been brought to trial."
"It's not for lack of evidence," Olds added, noting that videotapes of the violence had been shown on the evening news in Georgia.
Unable to get police protection even after President Eduard Shevardnaze condemned the attacks, the Witnesses filed a case before the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.
Refusal to serve in the military often leads Jehovah's Witnesses to prison. In Turkmenistan, a former Soviet republic, members were not released after finishing their time because they refused to swear an oath of loyalty to the president.
Witnesses' many legal battles include problems with tax authorities in various countries, such as France, where authorities retroactively slapped a 60 percent tax on donations. In Armenia, the group was denied registration and its literature confiscated, which meant it could not publish papers or rent meeting space. But in April, Armenia's high court allowed a member to practice his religion.
There have been other success stories. Olds points to Bulgaria, where, according to the State Department, as recently as 1999, a Witness was fined $250 for unauthorized Bible study.
McCabe said he started visiting Bulgaria in 1994, with Witnesses losing a case to be registered as a religion on grounds "we didn't believe in the Trinity." (Jehovah's Witnesses consider Jesus the first-born son of God and the second highest personage in the universe.) The situation was so tense, he recalled, that a member of Bulgaria's Parliament "stood up and said she wished she had a Kalasknikov to shoot all" Witnesses. Since then, he said, the government made a settlement with European courts and changed its law on conscientious objection.
James Richardson, director of judicial studies at the University of Nevada in Reno, said Bulgaria eventually cooperated because of its interest in being accepted by the European community. "It was actually one of the important cases the European Court of Human Rights has decided."
Still, Richardson said, the strategy of testing court systems holds the risk of adverse decisions that would prompt further persecution. "It does require the assumption that the legal system will treat them halfway fairly . . . and that's not always the case."
Although Jehovah's Witness officials said they don't lobby the federal government for help, the State Department, which has an office that works to prevent religious persecution, does occasionally step in.
"The State Department contacted us because they had learned six women were fired in Azerbaijan because they were Jehovah's Witnesses," McCabe said. "State investigated, and it turned [out] that Jehovah's Witness got legal recognition."
In the United States, landmark disputes generally have involved newer organizations such as the Witnesses. "The less conventional religious groups figure in virtually all the court cases because they're really the ones who've got a gripe," said Rodney Stark, a sociologist at the University of Washington who has studied the Witnesses. "The Methodists and Presbyterians are usually safely protected by convention."
Jehovah's Witnesses took another step toward shaping the First Amendment when the Supreme Court ruled on June 17 that an ordinance in Stratton, Ohio, that required a permit for door-to-door canvassing was unconstitutional. The village, population 278, made engaging in door-to-door advocacy without a permit a misdemeanor and said the measure was aimed at preventing crime.
"It is offensive - not only to the values protected by the First Amendment, but to the very notion of a free society - that in the context of everyday public discourse a citizen must first inform the government of her desire to speak to her neighbors and then obtain a permit to do so," the court found, ruling on free speech grounds.
In the lone dissent, Chief Justice William Rehnquist portrayed the case as a legal mismatch. Unlike the Witnesses, the residents of Stratton, he said, "do not have a team of attorneys at their ready disposal." Rehnquist said the top court had allowed permits for door-to-door canvassers for more than 60 years, and two lower courts relied on this precedent to approve Stratton's ordinance.
Even two judges who supported the ruling took a nasty dig at the Witnesses for their insistence that applying for a permit to evangelize door-to-door violated their beliefs. "If our free-speech jurisprudence is to be determined by the behavior of such crackpots, we are in a sorry state indeed," Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in a concurring opinion joined by Justice Clarence Thomas.
For the Witnesses, though, there was little choice but to challenge the law, since they feel compelled to follow through on St. Paul's description of his ministry as "teaching you publicly and from house to house" (Acts 20:20).
"Going door to door is not a major source of new members," Stark said. "It has as much to do with the impact on the person going door to door as it does on getting members."
Paul Moses is a regular contributor to Newsday.
Copyright 2002, Newsday, Inc.