The pattern appears to be the same, over and over and over again. It goes as follows:
Somebody is raised as one of Jehovah’s Witnesses. They are sincere and devout. They are also rational and their belief system is based more on reason than faith. They gravitate towards the Awake! more than the Watchtower, they like “Reasoning From the Scriptures” and “Life – How Did It Get Here? By Evolution or Creation?”. They pioneer, they work hard, but one day they go through an emotionally traumatic time and something shifts in their mind. Suddenly they can see the flaws in the way they’ve believed all their lives. It might take a day, an hour, a week, a second, but suddenly their perception shifts and it’s a whole new world. They can never go back. For all intents and purposes, they have few options. Stay in and fake belief or leave and endure the loss of everybody they know and love. Regaining belief is not an option because it is not possible to believe in a logically false proposition once you understand that it is logically invalid. Once you know that 4+4=8 and not 4+4=44, you simply cannot return to it no matter how much you wish you could. The mind doesn’t work that way.
A significant number probably stay in as nominal Witnesses, attending meetings, getting to the Memorial, but not going out in service. They get constantly nudged and reminded that they should really get a move on, spiritually speaking, but they just play the role. Some can’t do that, generally because they not only find that they don’t believe in the Witnesses, they find something outside of it that they are passionate about. They look at nominal attendance as a kind of hypocrisy and they speak their minds. These folks have three real options. First, disassociate themselves, officially leaving the religion. Second, execute “the fade”, just stop going, become inactive, drift away. Third, stay in, active, and vocal and get yourself disfellowshipped for dissenting. The first and third options will get you labeled “apostate”. The second will merely get you pitied. It is not surprising, then, that many opt for number two. Avoid contact with the congregation for so long that they no longer care what you’re up to. Then, you’re free… mostly. In theory they could still come after you and disfellowship you if they knew you had done something “bad”, but they probably wouldn’t.
No matter what happens, if you leave, friendships and family relationships are endangered. Even if you’re still technically a Witness, you’re “bad association” and to be avoided. If you leave outright, you’re persona non grata and that’s that. Whatever the case, if you leave, however you do it, there is one final piece to the pattern. It’s the part where your experience is recast in the eyes of the Witness friends and family you are now cut off from.
Those who love you, having to make sense of your sudden “worldliness” will look for a means to understand your position that does not undermine their own. If they grant that perhaps you were convinced by the overwhelming preponderance of evidence, then they weaken their position (which states that such evidence is non-existent). The cause will not be factual, it will be emotional. The fallen one strayed away because they were depressed, they were disgruntled, they were anxious, they had been stumbled, they had a bad heart, Satan played on their desires… etc, etc, etc. It’s never because you had a reason, no. It’s always because there is something wrong with you. That allows the Witness to continue to pity the fallen person on some level and to use them as an object lesson for themselves. “See how important it is that we keep close to the Organization? See how important that we don’t let Satan get a chance to draw us away?”
They are right, in a way, and wrong in a way. I did mention emotional distress. It is almost always part of the pattern. It just doesn’t play the role that Witnesses think. The fact is that most Witnesses who have ever actually given any sort of thought to the matter, know that their religion contains self-contradictory elements, logical fallacies and the like. They know it on a hidden, logical level. The trouble is, they just as firmly KNOW, emotionally, that the religion is The Truth. They need it to be true because it defines so much of their personal identity. It defines their relationships, their place in the universe, their time, everything. They are in a very real sense addicted to the religion and cannot consider the possibility that it might be wrong. Therefore, the part of their mind that knows where the logical flaws are is strongly repressed. Doubts are quashed. Objections rationalized away. Maintaining faith is actually an exercise in self-repression. The reason an emotional crisis often precedes a change in beliefs is that the internal conflict, the “cognitive dissonance”, becomes too much to bear under the stress of the emotional crisis and the wall holding back the doubts and skepticism breaks down. The resultant changes are so fast and so dramatic because your mind has known all along that there was something wrong with the old beliefs. You can only spend so much time absorbing information that contradicts the things you believe before you can’t take it any more.
Why doesn’t this happen to everybody? Well, simply put, everyone is different. Some people experience very high levels of cognitive dissonance, some people experience almost none. Some are constantly testing their beliefs, almost obsessively checking and rechecking them in their minds to make sure they are doing what’s right. Others simply accept that it’s The Truth in the same way that they accept that the sun will rise in the morning. By not analyzing deeply, they avoid the dissonance.
When this happened to me, when I suddenly couldn’t hold the facts at bay anymore, it was incredibly traumatic. The fact that the internal trauma was exacerbated by the external treatment I received at the hands of my “brothers and sisters in the Truth” made it even worse. Since I experienced this in 2004, I’ve watched others do the same, friends of mine. It breaks my heart to see it happen over and over. Good people with good hearts and sharp minds who suddenly noticed the emperor had no clothes on and couldn’t deceive themselves anymore. It puts me in an awkward position concerning my own immediate family, Dad, Reed and Robbie, all Witnesses. I love them, I support them, but they hurt people, even though they have the best of intentions. They tell others that people like me are bad people, they cut themselves off from those they disagree with, they allow love of a publishing company, a book, and a bronze-age tribal deity to take precedence over familial love. I know people they’ve hurt, people besides myself, and it’s very sad to hear about it.
Sadder still, they may one day go through this transformation themselves and suddenly see the needless pain they’ve caused and have to deal with the remorse of knowing that you hurt the ones you loved because you were too arrogant, too sure of your beliefs, too sure of The Truth. I’ve had to deal with that one too. It’s a part of the process, the pattern. The best thing to be said of it is that those of us who used to be Witnesses who are now on the outside, reassembling our lives, we know why they treat us as they do, we’ve done it to others ourselves, we can forgive, as long as we don’t forget what we were before the dissonance cleared.
More From Ryan Sutter
- The Long Dark Night of the Soul
- RyanSutter.Net’s 700th Post!
- The Internet vs. The Watchtower
- The Köfels Asteroid
- The Lavone
