A Ruse by any Other Name

I remember a young brother in my home congregation once giving an Instruction Talk during the old Theocratic Ministry School format. Dan was a relatively new Ministerial Servant and, to the best of my recollection, this was his first talk of this type.

He used an effective illustration of a bag of candy that one may think was empty, but actually contained a lone treat if one was willing to check thoroughly. With his illustration, he was drawing a correlation to theocratic knowledge. When we think we've taken every last bit of understanding from a topic, looking once more could yield a small morsel of enlightenment.

And then I remember that this blog is about Jehovah's Witnesses...

C.T. Russel had embarked on his mission to expose bible truth through exhaustive scriptural examination. His fledgling Society had the admirable mission of making Christianity purely Christian. That meant excising pagan practices, false teachings, misunderstandings, and baseless tradition. Almost brilliant in its simplicity. But nearly one-hundred years later, young Ministerial Servant Dan stood on the dais and expounded on the virtues of exhaustive examination, while disturbingly ignorant of his religious foundations.

As Witnesses, we once proudly claimed to have stripped away all the practices that were not biblical in nature. We, almost haughtily, professed that we were the only true Christians left in the world. But we had actually returned to the evolving roots of all religions. What Pastor Russel had set out to do in the late 1800's had been forgotten. Replaced with new understandings, the current beliefs of Jehovah's Witnesses are ones that Russel would not recognize.

Over the decades, Witnesses have modified their beliefs to include practices once thought to be unscriptural. Blood transfusions are an easy example. Taking literally the admonitions not to consume blood as a biblical prohibition of medical blood transfusions, hundreds or thousands of Witnesses have denied this proven medical treatment for the fear of eternal destruction. The policy was to disfellowship anyone who accepted this proven medical procedure. The new stance is that it wont get you disfellowshipped. It would seem that the Governing Body no longer feels it will cost a person eternal paradise. Whether they erred in issuing the old policy or the new, and one of them is certainly wrong, the bible has rules about accidental blood-guilt.

That's not really the point here. Blood transfusion, along with every other baseless stance, are tangents of a much bigger problem. Watchtower belief systems have expanded over time. They are tweaked to close gaps, explain inconsistencies, and make exceptions... Just like every other religion.

While at one time Witnesses may have moved in the right philosophical direction in removing those Old World, non-Christian practices, new ones are now just as tightly woven into their beliefs as those they sought to remove. So what progress has actually been made?

To be frank, none. It's the same old song-and-dance. Indecision about blood transfusions, the repeated revision of the 1914 Generation doctrine, financial consolidation, child abuse scandals, power struggles, organizational splits, government collusion, scientific suppression... the list goes on for quite a while. And it all points to the same thing - Jehovah's Witnesses, as an organization, are as likely to veer off course as any other mainstream religion.

Religious organizations peddle fairy tales as fact that no one really wants to dispute, and being a system of cognitive stasis at their core, they are dependent on followers who don't ask questions. It's the ultimate long con. One would think we'd have looked behind that particular curtain by now, so why does it persist?

Conformity with social groups, even in the face of empirical falsehood, is usually the safer bet for the individual. It doesn't accomplish much to be an outlier because of an inconsequential point of contention, and psychological experiments have demonstrated that even clearly false information is readily assimilated by people to avoid becoming an outcast. This acceptance of group paradigms is known as conforming behavior.

Harvard's Herbert Kellman has identified a number of these behaviors, of which Internalization is the most common. Internalization is analogous to "making the truth your own". It is the practice of making beliefs integral to one's thought processes. Other conforming behaviors may only be an external display, but Internalized beliefs have the deepest and longest lasting hold. Also called Informational Social Influence, subjects turn to peers for accepted truth by which to guide their own thinking. Our experience among Witnesses is hard to characterize any other way. The Society is very clear that Witnesses must be unified in their thinking, and seeking outside validation is reason enough to be shunned.

We sometimes refer to this dedication to the charade as "drinking the kool-aid". It's most predictable in groups that also restrict your socialization outside the group. The aforementioned conforming behaviors become requisite in the face of banishment. Time and again, we encounter former Witnesses who have struggled to cope with living in a new and strange social environment. Hardly a one of us will claim that it was easy to make that transition. Sadly, far too many of us have fallen to destructive coping mechanisms like drugs or alcohol, or even suicide.

It's humbling to admit that we were duped for as long as we were. But the comforting thing is that its in the past. No one there can impede our progress forward into an enlightened and fulfilling life.

What else could smell as sweetly?