I've never been a Witness so I never left. But here is someone who did. Graeme Hammond writes:
For some years I’d had a growing irritation and disillusionment with the religion: I was getting tired of the pompousness, the arrogance and the control, I felt increasingly choked by their restrictions and I was drained by their demands on my time. I was frustrated by their blinkered vision and sick of everyone being treated as a child. The meetings and conventions were tedious and repetitive and the level of judgmentalism and gossip was sickening. We were all being watched.
I was already missing meetings and making a pretence of field service. Even when I met people at their doors, I had no desire to try to persuade them to join because I felt it was unfair to entice them into such a constricted life that I hated.
In the end it was “Crisis of Conscience”, the tell-all book by former Governing Body member Ray Franz about his life in — and exit from — the Witnesses, that made me realise I could just walk away. After just two or three chapters I became starkly aware that the religion was in so many ways fraudulent, with no more claim to being “God’s organisation” than any other religion.
As each chapter unfolded, it became painfully obvious that I had been defrauded and manipulated for the entire time I had spent in the religion. Franz’s book showed plainly that it was a totally man-made, man-run organisation seized with an oversized sense of self-importance and a mean streak of vindictiveness.
Once I read that book — and followed it up with books by Jim Penton, Robert Crompton, Tony Wills and others — the more I learned about the religion I’d given so much of my life to. There was no Armageddon, no “faithful slave”, no mathematical formulation of the “last days”, no hotline to God. And no reason for me to ever set foot again inside a Kingdom Hall.
I never regretted leaving: walking away from it made me realise that I was reclaiming my life. Yet in a sense I did “look back”. The sense of anger and humiliation about the deception and control is not something you can easily dismiss. It burned me up for a long time, but today those emotions are a distant past.
I was a cult member, but I escaped. And I survived.