(Headline) Toppled Tower
(Dateline) October 2029, Brooklyn, New York; Associated Internet Media News Service
After a century and a half of preaching and publishing, the WTBTS (Watchtower Bible and Tract Society) has closed its doors.
The group was started in the 1870s with most of its doomsday doctrines borrowed from the Second Adventists, another American-born religion of the 19th century. In its fifteen decades its membership count waxed and waned as numerous predictions of dates for the arrival of a planet cleansing Armageddon came and went. With as many as eight million members some fifteen years ago, less than a hundred thousand were counted in the last year's report.
If a religion were to have a death certificate, the coroner's report for the WTBTS would state "death by bankruptcy". And that would be true enough, for the collective demands of creditors forced the liquidation of the group's few remaining assets. A combination of claims by lenders and also by successful lawsuit plaintiffs resulted in yesterday's corporate Armageddon for the WTBTS. But while it took less than two hours for authorities to chain the doors of the last WTBTS buildings, the decline in the fortunes of the group have spanned the last two decades. The irony is that a religion that banned life saving blood transfusions for its members was done in by twenty years of fiscal hemorrhage and in its last few years was unable to gain cash transfusions from its members.
For the first few years of this century, the WTBTS appeared outwardly healthy with its membership growth and with its ambitious real estate investment programs. Although its numbers were decreasing in the more prosperous nations, the group managed to preserve its revenue streams and continued to make inroads in the less developed countries. But by the end the first decade, the WTBTS began its uninterrupted contraction in its membership and its holdings. Let it be said that the religion did not go gently into that good night; it fought hard for gaining new converts, and when this failed, fought even harder to retain remaining members. Unfortunately for the WTBTS, its efforts in battle turned out to be mostly counterproductive as an ever more stringent attitude by the leadership drove away adherents grown weary of the increasing demands of their masters. The losses were a trickle at first, but a meltdown was in full swing ten years later when all but the most fanatic left the ranks.
Up to the last days of its life, the WTBTS demanded shunning of former members. This sad dogma also surely contributed to the group's demise as the count of former members became much larger than the current number of followers; the vocal efforts of the shunned resulted in a reverse shunning of the WTBTS by society at large. And in its failure to observe the scripture "Judge not, lest thee be judged", the WTBTS also kept its elaborate judicial and punishment system; and so it was condemned and punished by others.
The WTBTS claimed that it was the only religion that could save its members, but in the end the question remains: could the WTBTS have saved itself? The group was well known for its extensive collection of statistics and so its leaders should have been able to have foreseen the warning signs. Perhaps some of them have, for the surprisingly high turnover in the group's higher-ups in the past twenty years may be taken as an indicator of a lack of faith in those responsible for defending the faith. Without doubt the WTBTS decline was accelerated by the departure of relatively moderate leaders when those were replaced by ones more inflexible and tenacious.
The main indication of the inflexibility of the WTBTS is probably its retention of the 20th century technology of printed media. The group refused to migrate to electronic publishing and up to the very end published only a paper version of its magazines. Some say that the WTBTS stayed away from the Internet because of the dramatic membership losses caused by revelations of the group's past activities found on thousands of former members' web sites. Others believe that the electronic medium was dismissed as an outlet because of the difficulty of generating cash as compared to sales of its printed material. And some observers maintain that the printing presses were used mostly for the purpose of keeping members too busy to investigate alternatives to their beliefs.
Those presses are slient now. Too antiquated for any sensible use, they now await shipment to the recyclers with the last copies of the _Watchtower_ magazine still in the output bins.
In an obituary, it is the custom to list the survivors of the deceased. There are a few schism groups of the WTBTS, some of them date back to a hundred years ago. But most former members range from moderately agnostic to adamantly atheistic, wanting nothing to do with religious organizations of any kind. The WTBTS preached of a resurrection hope for its followers, but there is no such hope for itself.