The Stigma of a Rebel

When I was very young, the St. Ann, Missouri congregation was at its peak. We had about ninety publishers, with average attendance of about one hundred and twenty at any given meeting. Enthusiasm was high, fellowship was good, and there were a lot of young people to go around.

I remember some of the families from that golden age. There were big families and small. Single mothers brought their impressionable children who found kids their own age. Honestly, some of my clearest and fondest memories revolve around those people.

As a slightly older preteen, I recall some of those young people disappearing. For one reason or another, they simply went away. Among the parents of the congregation, there was often a little murmur about so-and-so's son or daughter. They fell in with 'bad association', manifest in one way or another. It became unfashionable to talk about them at all. They had rebelled against Jehovah and the Society.

For years, nothing was said about them. They faded from all memory, no pun intended. But sometimes you might find a face in a crowd that you only recognize after the moment has passed. Perhaps they don't see you either. And for the few times this has happened to me, I've been left wondering if the people they became were less than the people I knew.

I could at this moment give you a dozen names from my childhood, all of them people who were a bit older than me, who left the congregation. Since I've embraced my own apostasy, I have reconnected with a number of them and found that they are mostly happier now than they ever were. The implication that their rebellion had somehow left them broken and sad has been disproved time and again.

The irony is that to be taught that their rebellion had brought them pain required that their personal opinions not be taken into account. In fact, the only way to label them as rebels is to give them no opportunity to speak for themselves. As Witnesses, we were trained to know that divergent thoughts, regardless of cause or reasoning, left one dissatisfied. That just hasn't turned out to be true! Though you'd have to be willing to talk to a rebel to know that, and we were also trained not to associate with them.

Everything I ever knew about the rebel was anecdotal. There were at least two degrees of separation between what I was told they had done and what they had actually done; to which I apply the old bit of advice, "believe none of what you hear, and only half of what you see."

I will admit that I took the bait. I was thoroughly convinced that those young people would damage my faith, and that it was better that they were gone. I would learn to repeat from the podium how bad associations spoiled useful habits. I fully adopted the stigma towards rebels as my own. Somehow, I even learned the piteous tone that accompanied inquiries into their welfare when talking to their parents. Everything about them was quietly lamented as a warning or a disingenuous sympathy.

Now I'm that rebel. I would like to think that I'm uninteresting enough that I don't come up in conversation. The fact that I haven't been actively disfellowshipped is probably proof enough. In any case, no one seems to be looking for me. No one seems to be prying into my affairs. These blogs are more than enough to establish my apostasy, though it is my hope to disassociate myself first.

I only know this about myself, I am not a bad person. I am kind and patient. I think critically about the world. I am courteous, generous, and polite. I am also happier. I was so afraid of being a rebel that I refused to pursue my happiness, rather enduring the pain of cognitive dissonance, social isolation, and emotional and spiritual abuse.

Knowing that, I had to reexamine what I thought I knew about the other rebels. Those 'bad examples' of Christian youth were probably fine examples of human beings. To my unexpected delight, they are. But that emphasizes a key discrepancy in the Society's knowledge base. The fundamental teaching about the people who leave the congregation is either flawed or intentionally false. I won't comment on the likelihood of either, but it does demand correction.

It all points back to the overreaching theme of being a Witness. What we knew was only what we were told. Those that held control over what we knew also controlled what we believed. So long as the only information that a person can obtain from Watchtower is a carefully crafted lie built on deliberate ignorance, then there's nothing to be gained from engaging them. In that respect, I no longer see the stigma of rebellion. The self awareness to take ownership of one's own knowledge (or lack thereof) isn't rebellion. It's maturity. It's wisdom.