What Are the Jehovah's Witnesses Like?

“As faith grows in your heart, you will find it hard to keep what you have learned to yourself.” –A Jehovah’s Witnesses publication

What is Easter with the Jehovah’s Witnesses like? I wouldn’t know, because it’s not open to the public.

I had been looking forward to going to a Jehovah’s Witnesses’ service for a long time, but had been unable to figure out how. They are the only denomination that doesn’t post their worship times outside their churches (they call the buildings Kingdom Halls). They also do not post their worship times on their websites. I got handed a brochure once in the supermarket parking lot, and it also lacked any specific information about when or how to join them for a service. Frustrated and perplexed, I put them on hold, waiting for them to come to my door. Which they did, last week.

I did not have the courage to invite them in and tell them I am an unbeliever who is interested in a theological debate. Perhaps next time. But I did accept their “invitation” to join them for a “memorial of Jesus’s death.” It was held on what other Christians call Palm Sunday, one week before Easter.

Another blog entry will follow about the theology of Jehovah’s Witnesses. Today’s is dedicated to the closed-door nature of their organization. It’s ironic that for a group so famous for their evangelism, they are so difficult to visit. I showed up at the worship service indicated on my “invitation.” Dressed in my only suit, I entered a small building packed with perhaps 100 people. A few people greeted me, but mostly I went in uninterrupted. It looked like most of the seats had been reserved with coats and Bibles and things, so I looked a bit confused trying to find a place to sit. A young man about my age asked me if I was visiting and said I could sit next to him. Thanking him, I asked if there was a program or bulletin. Nope, only a songbook. Every other church I’ve been to has a bulletin which announces weekly events, names of church leaders, etc. Many have specific information just for visitors. The service had none of that information either. There were no announcements about the weekly youth group meeting, the Bible study session or mid-week prayer time. It was just a welcoming, the sermon (more on that later), contemplation of the bread and wine, a word for the visitors, and that’s it.

It all started to come together for me when the man next to me asked me what religion I was when I told him I was visiting. I said not really anything. He said, “Just, sort of Christian?” and I said, “No, not really anything. I just decided to come out of curiosity when the people came to my door.” He said, “That’s fine, this service is open to the public.”

Open to the public? What an odd thing to say. It implies that some meetings are not open to the public. My suspicions were reinforced when they had a “special announcement” towards the end for visitors. The speaker said that any visitors were invited back to another service in two weeks’ time to explore Biblical teachings. Two weeks? That means that on Easter, no visitors were allowed. How odd is it that a religious group would have some services open to the public and others only for those in the fold? Certainly it’s their right, but it’s strange, especially for a group so dedicated to attracting converts.

Their means of getting those converts is often referred to or mocked in the media. There’s a Seinfeld episode (“The Opposite”) in which Elaine gets kicked out of her apartment, and one of the reasons is that she buzzed Jehovah’s Witnesses into the building and it took hours to get them out. The door-to-door method seems intrusive, out-of-date, and ineffective. Yet, they persist with it. They must get 100 people who ignore or reject them for every one idiot like me who shows up. But their method relies on face time, which can be powerful. Their bread and butter is the individual Bible study session. I had 3 separate people offer to join me for a Bible study session between my chair and the door as I was leaving. Once you’ve expressed some interest, it seems they press you with a personal but very regimented system of teaching to draw you in. It must work, because they claim somewhere between 7 million and 18 million believers. Their official website, www.watchtower.org, has a prominent link on the homepage for an individual study session. More on the watchtower later as well.

Here’s another strange thing: the 3 people who offered to study the Bible with me were all young white men in their 20s or 30s. This was in a congregation comprised of all ages and colors. It was as though I were targeted by certain members because of my demographics. Coincidence? Perhaps. But I got the strong sense that there is heavy training involved in how to evangelize, because all 3 people said nearly the same thing, and matching demographics struck me as one of the tactics.

Upon leaving the service, I was, as always, full of mixed feelings. The people all seemed nice and normal, like any other churchgoing people I’ve encountered. I had no reason to criticize them any more than I’d criticize any set of believers. I didn’t want to come into this week with a prejudice, that I had to find something to mock in the Jehovah’s Witnesses. But I cannot get around the uncomfortable feeling of secrecy and cultishness that I left with. I’m sure their kindness and openness is genuine in their eyes. But it is in part false. It must be false if it is shaped by a centralized system, which indoctrinates and controls the thought of its members even more strongly than most other religious organizations. A more detailed blog entry about the content of the service and their beliefs will follow soon…

Week 5: Is the Catholic Church…

…capitalized? To write this blog entry, I begin to type this question into Google. Wanted to make sure I capitalized the right words. But Google tried to predict my question, based, I presume, on the most common phrases typed into Google that begin like that. So before I got to “capitalized,” Google’s options were:

1) Is that Catholic Church a cult?

2) Is the Catholic Church the True Church?

3) Is the Catholic Church evil?

4) Is the Catholic Church the antichrist?

Allow me to answer these questions for the benefit of the world, since apparently a lot of people are wondering these things.

1) Defining “cult” is very slippery. Where is the line between a “mainstream religion” and a “cult”? The word cult has a negative connotation that members of mainstream religions like to give to people they find weird. As an atheist, I don’t see much difference between believing that David Koresh is the reincarnation of Jesus or believing that a divine power sent his only son to be murdered so that we could somehow be forgiven for things that god doesn’t like. Really—is it stranger to believe aliens are hiding behind the Hale-Bopp comet or that Jesus will return to earth to yield a judgment sword? Improbable though it is, I’m inclined to think the Hale-Bopp comet “cult” had a better chance of being right. So the bottom line is, yes, the Catholic Church is a cult, but no more or less so than any other religious system that requires belief in the supernatural.

2) The True Church? What does that even mean? There are apparently a lot of people wondering if the Catholic Church was the first church, i.e. the church that began in the first century right after Jesus’s death. Well, there’s no doubt that it grew out of that initial community of believers, but so did every other church. More to the point, though, the answer is No because the Catholic Church that exists today probably looks absolutely nothing like the churches did in the first years after Jesus. Read the book of Acts for a sense of that first church. That and Paul’s letters in the New Testament are as close as we can get to knowing what it was like, and the Catholic Church’s emphasis on ritual, music, priesthood, and liturgy are drastically different from the charismatic, impassioned, spontaneous, spirit-driven worship of the first Jesus-believers. I heard once that the evangelical churches today are probably much more similar in nature to the first churches than Catholic or protestant churches are.

3) Yes, because it knowingly lies and shamelessly acquires wealth by deceiving people into giving them money. In my humble opinion.

4) No, because there is no such thing as the antichrist.

Now that we’ve got those big questions answered, allow me to pose my own questions about the Catholic Church. Is the Catholic Church…

…alive and well? Most certainly. This week the Churchgoing Atheist project took me to a Catholic Church, a place unfamiliar to me, a lifelong-protestant-turned-atheist. Of course I’d seen Catholic services in movies (like The Godfather, when all the murders happen) and I’d been to Catholic churches for weddings and funerals, but never had I been to the average run-of-the-mill service. I was amazed to find so many people there. 200? 300? There were more people at this service than had been at all the services of the previous four churches combined. My impression of the Catholic Church is that of a church lots of people belong to in name only, begrudgingly remaining Catholic because of lingering childhood guilt, and that prejudgment had led me to expect an empty church. I thought of Catholic Churches as dreary and dark, full of stodgy old people. I couldn’t believe the number of young couples, children, even teenagers. Everyone looked happy, or at least content. People were kneeling, praying with their eyes closed before the service began, something one rarely sees in protestant churches. I just didn’t expect the enthusiasm for a church that most Catholics I know don’t attend or attend only out of a feeling of obligation. This church was legitimately vibrant, and I was witnessing only one of the three services they hold each Sunday morning.

…subject to such strange questions on Google for good reason? I can understand people asking if the Catholic Church is the true church, because many people (like myself) question what they are told. It is perfectly reasonable to observe that there are hundreds if not thousands of variations of Christianity and wonder how that could be. Is it not strange that such disparate rituals and belief systems claim the same origin? Should we not ask what our belief in one of those systems implies about the truth of the other 99%? I can also understand the question about evil. History shows that the members of Catholic Church—in the name of the Catholic Church—have perpetrated war, murder, rape, theft, and so on. I do not wish to dwell on the evils that churches have historically done, because that subject gets a lot of attention from atheists already. Suffice to say, though, it’s a fair question. Is that Catholic Church a cult or the antichrist are nonsensical questions that I suspect get typed into Google by people who are taught to be prejudiced against Catholics. Who that might be, I can only speculate. (Mike Huckabee, I'm looking in your direction...)

…mindless? I would like to explore my protestant/atheist bias here—I don’t claim total neutrality in this project. My impression of Catholics is that they value mindless ritual over serious engagement in critical thinking. This impression comes from history class, in which we learned about the Reformation, from Catholics that I know, and from things people in protestant churches would tell me about Catholics. I believe protestant denominations, in general, encourage individual thought more than Catholics. Today’s service certainly reinforced this belief. To begin, there were no Bibles to be seen. There were books of liturgy—that is, choral responses, prayers, songs, etc.—on each pew, but no Bibles. If someone wanted to read for himself the day’s scripture, he could not. Second, the service consisted primarily of stock sayings that would be sung or spoken aloud by the congregation with no text or prompting. This suggests that the service follows the same pattern each week, and rote memorization or mindless parroting of responses allows one to participate. The sermon consisted of 10 minutes of meaningless platitudes about how God is present in our lives and brings joy to us even when we are unhappy. It did not refer to any book (other than the Bible), current event, or personal story. It did not challenge the listeners to contemplate. It merely reassured them that God was everywhere and his presence should make us happy. It was completely devoid of intellectualism. I admit that ritual has psychological value, but it seems that the Catholic Church places emphasis on ritual at the expense of critical thought. But I am open to having this belief disproved over the course of the project.

…charitable? Tough one. I believe the answer to be yes, because the hundreds of people who came to this service today brought Christmas presents for the poor. There was a huge stack of them. During the offertory, nearly everyone donated, and a second offertory was immediately held to raise money for a specific individual. This church must have raked in the cash. On the other hand, this church had the most beautiful interior I’d ever seen in an American church (I have seen cathedrals in Europe). I was struck by how a fairly bland-looking church in an urban neighborhood could have such ornate beauty inside. The wood paneling, the stained glass, the golden ornamentation, all suggest enormous cost. I can understand why people during the reformation got angry when they saw their hard-earned money contributing not to charity, but to the beautification of a building, the sole purpose of which was to make people so struck with awe that they would be more likely to give money. Still, I am sure the Catholic Church in general and this one in particular give away huge amounts of money to people who need it. This is a topic I’m interested in pursuing further, but not today.

…purposefully using guilt to control people? I just have to comment on this, since the notion of “Catholic guilt” is so prevalent. To what extent does the Church knowingly employ guilt to control people? Probably a lot, but no more so than many other denominations. I still get the guilt call from my mother, in which she expresses “disappointment” that I’m not in church on Sundays. (Why? Why disappointed? Would you prefer falsehoods and piety to truth and thoughtfulness?) I went to the Catholic Church today hoping to get some good juicy guilt preaching, but I didn’t. There were only two moments when the priest played the guilt card: the people weren’t “joyous” enough during the first hymn, and since the topic of today’s service was joy, he wanted to see them really get joyous on the second hymn. (They did not.) The second instance of the guilt card was during the children’s sermon, when he asked the children if they had all gotten their Christmas trees from this church’s Christmas tree sale. When one said no, everyone laughed, and he said, “It’s OK, there are a lot of good trees out there, but the best ones are here.” It was a subtle and harmless plug for the church’s Christmas tree fundraiser, not to the children but to the parents. Still, guilt card.

My call to Catholics: do not feel guilty for not going to church. I have spent many Sunday mornings feeling guilty for not being in church. Even if you believe in God, the notion of a God who actual cares whether you are “worshipping” him enough should be offensive to you. I tend to waste a lot of time checking fantasy football stats and drinking beer, so I sometimes feel guilty that I’m wasting my time, but I don’t feel guilty for missing a morning of being indoctrinated.