Reclamation Part 7

When I was a teenaged Jehovah’s Witness, the church released a book called Reasoning From the Scriptures which was full of scenarios we might run into while preaching from door to door. The idea was that we would be able to practice overcoming objections in advance, and would have a set of scriptures ready to refute any possible objection. I guess the idea was that armed with this book, we’d be able to debate people into joining. Or at least, that’s how I saw it. I was, after all, a teenaged boy who thought he was smart.

And like all people, I was smart in some ways and really really dumb in others. I was pretty good at piecing together logical arguments based on the facts in front of me, and I had a solid command of language. But I was also real easy to convince that I was right, that I had all the answers I needed. I was quick to dismiss anything that didn’t fit into my conception of the world, one that had been pretty carefully curated for me by the church.

One of the ways the church made us feel like we were part of something special or different was in how we referred to our belief system. We called it “the truth.” When you met other Witnesses, you might be asked how long you’d been in “the truth.” People who’d converted as adults would talk about the other witnesses who had brought “the truth” to them. The term, I assume, came from the primary piece of literature the Witnesses used as Bible Study material in the door to door work for many years, this little blue book titled “The Truth that leads to Eternal Life.”

I can look at that cover and the graphic design part of me says the all caps on the top and bottom lines are acting as a frame and that there’s not necessarily any rhetorical importance to that choice and the emotional part of me says this book is promising something big. THE TRUTH. Not a truth or some truth. THE truth. And so we called this “the truth book.”

Because I was raised in the church, I’ll never be able to know what it felt like for someone who came from a different tradition to look at that book or at some other piece of Witness literature and feel like a whole new world has opened to them. It was the only world I knew until I started looking outside of it. And maybe that’s part of the reason why I wasn’t very successful at bringing people “into the truth,” because I’d never had to grapple with anything else. My entire worldview was based on those teachings. I had grown up in “the truth” and I knew it intimately by the time I was a teenager.

That meant I was great at talking to fellow Witnesses about doctrine and faith and the minutiae of scripture. That was all in my wheelhouse. What wasn’t in my wheelhouse? Anything else. The world. You name it. I had all the confidence in the universe that I knew what was really going on because I had “the truth” and as backup? Anytime I came across something that challenged that truth, I had the church teaching that when something disagrees with our translation of the Bible, our faith tells us that we’re right and to doubt that is to doubt God.

And you wouldn’t doubt God, would you? Or the humans put in place to represent Him on earth? You wouldn’t want to do that because the repercussions are major if you do.

How major? The Jehovah’s Witnesses practice (practiced? I don’t know anymore because I left in 1996) shunning members who’ve left the faith. Their term is “disfellowshipping,” and it’s based on the idea that unrepentant sinners pollute the congregation, even family, and that it’s more important to keep the congregation clean than it is to maintain contact with them. Also, there’s the possibility that by expelling them, they’ll see the error of their ways and come back to the faith. (I wish I could tell you that tactic didn’t work, but I saw it happen a lot.)

That’s what happened with me. In my mind, I left the church sometime in the spring of 1995. I was 26, and it was my first semester in college and no surprise, I’d gotten some reading assignments from a couple of professors that challenged my worldview, specifically in my Zoology 101 class. We had to do some research into the fossil Australopithecus Afarensis, aka Lucy, an early hominid. The Witnesses are old earth creationists, which is to say they believe God created animals and humans pretty much the way it’s described in Genesis, so no evolution, but that the meaning of “day” is flexible enough that it could handle the concept of dinosaurs living millions of years ago. Slightly less crazy than young earth creationists who believe fossils were planted in the ground by Satan to test our faith. The more I read the research I found in the university library, the more I realized that this version of evolution was nothing like the description of evolution I had learned from Witness texts, and that it made a lot more sense than old earth creationism.

There’s more to the story of my turn away from Damascus, but a lot of that is personal and involves people who haven’t asked to be part of this story so I’m not going to tell it here. But that was the first step, I think, and the reason it mattered is because “the truth” was a really well constructed facade which depended utterly on not questioning any individual piece of it, because if you start to ask questions, you quickly discover there aren’t any answers beyond “you should pray more to strengthen your faith.” Once I saw that the Witnesses had been fudging things (to be kind) about evolution, I started to wonder what else they’d been fudging about and it turned out to be a lot.

And so I left. I stopped identifying as a Witness. I stopped attending meetings. I started trying to live the life of a “worldly” person, or at least what had been presented to me as what worldly life was like. (Spoiler alert: there was a lot less fornication involved than I had been led to believe. There was some, don’t get me wrong, but I’d been hoping to make up for lost time and that didn’t happen. There was a lot more alcohol consumption, though, to be fair.) I hoped that the relationship between me and the local congregation could be “live and let live.”

But it couldn’t. As it happens, one of my turns toward the worldly had involved taking up smoking (which was dumb, I quit a long time ago) and bartending, and apparently someone connected to the congregation saw me with a smoke and told the local elders who showed up at my apartment sometime around Christmas to ask me if I wanted to come meet with them and explain my situation. I told them that there wasn’t really much point in that. I didn’t tell them that my then-girlfriend was asleep in my bed and that I had a massive Christmas tree up in my living room. I don’t know for certain if the Witnesses have a hierarchy of disfellowshippable offenses, but I suspect that if they do, both of those come in above the occasional Pall Mall.

I’ve told this story so many times over the years that it feels flippant now, but the truth is that I was rocked by that meeting, because I knew what it meant. I was going to be cut off.

The idea of being cut off from Witness friends didn’t really affect me much. Those relationships had pretty much ended once I quit going to the Kingdom Hall. It was the family connections that were tough, because I knew I was going to lose them forever. Because I knew I wasn’t going back.

See, I left because I didn’t believe anymore. I didn’t think it was “the truth.” At that point, I didn’t believe in any singular truth anymore. I still don’t. I mostly just try not to be a shitty human. I had kind of figured out an option if I wanted to maintain those relationships on their terms. Bear with me because this is convoluted. In order to be reinstated to the congregation, you have to show public repentance. I was also about to graduate from college and I knew I’d be leaving Hammond to go to grad school, so I could conceivably go back to the Kingdom Hall and go through the motions long enough to be reinstated then move somewhere where the local Witnesses didn’t know me and just resume the life I wanted to live. That would give my parents the loophole they needed to be part of my life. I won’t speak for them and say they’d have gone along with it, but it would have been there.

I maybe considered doing that for 3 minutes and then said no. The fact was that I liked the life I was leading. But more importantly, I didn’t want to lie to my parents about who I was. I didn’t want to give them false hope. One of my favorite moments in Huck Finn is when Huck says “you can’t pray a lie” and “all right then, I’ll go to hell.” Admittedly, it’s a little easier to say you’ll go to hell when you’ve never believed in one (a doctrinal difference between the Witnesses and most other Christian churches), but it’s not like I wasn’t going to pay for this decision in very real, emotional ways. I’m still paying for it today, but I’ve never regretted that choice.

That’s what this section of Reclamation digs into, the power of doubt and what you can gain from it and what it can cost you. The line from Frost’s poem that this section centers around is “possessed by what you now no more possess” and in “The Gift Outright” Frost is talking about how the British colonists in what would become the US still felt like they were British citizens even as they pulled away, even as they were forming families and cities and, to be fair, committing genocide and enslaving people as well. In my retelling, this line is all about questions, about what possibilities they can open to you and also what precious things they can cost you.

Reclamation Part 7

Imagine childhood filled with secret knowledge
and the command to share it. Imagine
knowing this world will end in your lifetime,
likely before you finish high school. though
no one knows the day or the hour. Then
imagine your first doubt, how you’re no longer
possessed by what you now no more possess,
that certainty which carried you past several
styles of sin. Imagine something more
than loss: a Batman kite, finally in flight,
torn from your ten-year old hands by wind;
a babysitter who makes you pray for
God’s pardon after each time she rapes you;
your father dying with dementia just
days after your first phone call in fifteen
years, no way to make it home.

Thanks for reading. I promise that the next section doesn’t get as dark as this one.