God’s Kingdom

There are not many spirits by which we have access to the Father through Jesus Christ. There is only one, the Holy Spirit, which is of God. Neither are there many kingdoms, as the world would believe. There is only one kingdom that has the foundation of the faith and doctrine of the prophets and the apostles with Jesus Christ the chief cornerstone.

—The Voice of Zion, September 1979

But what people find difficult to accept is the Church of Christ that emerged in the Philippines.

—Pasugo (God’s Message), August 2014

The Kingdom of God–about 0.002% of the world’s population (click to enlarge)

One fascinating aspect of my old church is its claim to be “God’s Kingdom,” the one little flock of true believers that exists anywhere on earth. Almighty God, who wants everybody saved, has for some reason stashed his keys of reconciliation in a place where almost nobody would know to look.¹ But, the story goes, he is going to damn almost everybody for not finding them.

The (Finnish) True Church

You see, after getting Christianity spread across the planet over the course of two thousand years, God has chosen those 100,000 or so Finns and descendants of Finns who were lucky enough to have been “born into a Christian home,” plus maybe another thousand converts, as his “grace children.” They comprise about 0.002% of the world’s population. Everybody else–other kinds of Laestadians (there are several), other kinds of Lutherans, all those generic Christians in their innumerable “dead faiths”–God is unwilling or unable to help.²

It’s quite a story, breathtaking in its audacity. Yet it’s so deeply ingrained into Conservative Laestadian doctrine that it’s hardly ever spelled out in sermons.³ When a preacher laments the loved ones who have given up this precious gift of living faith or forsaken the fellowship of God’s Children or left the Kingdom, everybody knows what he’s talking about. Those poor misguided saps are no longer members of the Laestadian Lutheran Church, and they’d better not die in that condition. It doesn’t matter if they still profess the basics of Christianity, perhaps more sincerely then ever, or became (spoken in hushed tones) one of those people who don’t even believe in God. They’re spiritually dead just the same, and headed for hellfire if physical death completes the equation to yield eternal death.

Just that one orange dot.

“God’s Kingdom has an address” is one old saying I heard in sermons and discussions from time to time. But the church doesn’t go out of its way to inform the outside world about just how detailed the directions are. “The kingdom of God is to be found on earth according to the teachings of Jesus,” says its How We Believe web page. “It is a kingdom of grace on earth and a kingdom of glory in heaven. The kingdom of God is one-minded in faith, doctrine, and love.” Another page, The Kingdom of Heaven, gives a few hints of something a bit more specific: “In this world God’s kingdom is hidden beneath the flaws and faults of believing people ... What we can offer you is God’s forgiveness in Jesus Christ.”

That’s a nice enough offer, but it omits the unpleasant yet absolutely essential detail that no other offer will do, from anyone else and that you will fry in hell forever if you don’t take them up on it. It’s like a doctor knowing that a certain 70-person clinic down a side road somewhere near the Maltby Cafe off Highway 522 has the only batch of experimental chemo in the entire Seattle Metro area that can cure your rare and imminently fatal form of cancer. Imagine her just telling you to head north from Olympia looking for a good oncology center, mentioning some obscure one nobody’s ever heard of that’s a two-hour drive away, and then hanging up.⁴

Why not just come out with the bracing truth and “call a spade a spade,” as one LLC preacher is fond of saying? If you believe that your clinic has this indispensable medication, that your church is the only way people can avoid the horrors of hellfire, it seems that you would want to convey the absolute urgency of the situation. “Don’t go anywhere else, you hear? This is the place!” I asked an LLC elder about it some years ago: Why wasn’t the church website clearer about who will be saved and who will not? He replied, “Well, we don’t want to scare people off.” ⁵

Perhaps vagueness is considered desirable for PR purposes, but the exclusivity doctrine is certainly something that members are expected to believe. The LLC’s paper “Unity of Faith and Understanding” makes that very clear, at least to those who know the intended meanings of “house of God” and “saving faith”:

It is no small matter when an individual or group, either secretly or openly, begins to believe that the house of God is not necessarily “the pillar and ground of truth” in all matters of soul and conscience or that there is more than one saving faith.⁶

So I will provide the public with some clarity about one of my old church’s key doctrines where it declines to do so: All of the billions of mentally competent individuals over the age of accountability who now occupy this planet other than Conservative Laestadians are headed for an eternity of unthinkable torture. “Preciously believing” ones, that is, not those fence-sitting “New Age” believers or party animals with grievous hidden sin on their consciences. And, unless the world finally ends after two thousand years of failed expectations, that same horrible fate will be shared by almost all of the billion or so of the world’s children as they reach the age of accountability without any clue about how to be saved.⁷

Are you on board with this? Head back to church or visit llchurch.org if you have felt the call of God’s Kingdom. But first you might want to consider the other groups that each claim they are the only true church. Why should just one of them automatically be given the benefit of the doubt, after all?

The (Filipino) True Church

I was in Hawaii on a Sunday morning last month, and visited an Iglesia ni Cristo church I’d spotted while sightseeing the day before. The name means “The Church of Christ” in Tagalog. It was a group I’d written about in An Examination of the Pearl, and I just had to see for myself what its services were like. My wife slept in.

Iglesia ni Cristo church on Kauai, Hawaii

A surprised but polite usher escorted me to a seat near the back of their small sanctuary. The congregation was strictly divided between men and women on opposite sides of a central aisle. I sat down and flipped through the songbook as the congregation halfheartedly accompanied an organ and a choir of white-robed Filipino women.

It was interesting to see how similar the messages in the songs were to what I grew up singing. One of them told of “The kingdom, so glorious and blest,” into which, the singer was to recall aloud, “Motivated by faith, I gladly entered” and where “now I do receive / The care for my once-troubled soul.” It is “Within His kingdom”, the song said, where the “great mercy and grace” of the Father is found, along with “His teachings, great beyond compare.” Another song began, “This lonely land is not my true home,” expressing the same yearning for eternity as a beloved old Song of Zion I heard in warm little sanctuaries for nearly 40 years: My home is not here where I journey, ah, no, it is far, far away.⁸

Those sanctuaries were and still are filled with Finns whose ancestors (in my case, two Finnish grandparents) had left an earthly homeland on the other side of the Atlantic. And in the rough wooden interior of this little church in Hawaii, I sat amidst people whose ancestral origins lay across a different ocean, the Pacific. I was the only white person in the building, looking at the backs of about 150 dark-haired heads, plus the blond-dyed hair of a guy right in front of me who must have been the local rebel.

Actually, I suspect there were a few more rebels with me in those back rows, young guys who reluctantly dragged themselves to their mandatory Sunday morning church attendance. The one to my left was furiously bouncing his knee and shifting position the whole time. And I’m pretty sure I heard some audible snickering behind me at a few points during the preacher’s fervent oratory.

As an outsider, I certainly found it amusing, though I was far too polite to give any indication of that. Imagine stuff like “We cannot neglect our offering to almighty God!” shouted sing-song fashion over a jabbing pointed finger, by a guy with black helmet hair, a thick Asian accent, and a voice that bordered dangerously close to a squeak. Despite all his efforts, to which some people in the rows ahead of me responded with evident or at least well-acted emotion, I walked out of the place without the slightest pang of fear or interest in hearing more of his preaching.

You would have, too, whether you are religious or not. You simply do not take this group’s claims seriously. You may never even have heard of it before now. But it teaches that you are going to hell, and it has about five million members.

Sound Familiar?

The Iglesia ni Cristo began in the Philippines by the inspiration of one Felix Manalo in 1914, after reaching “a pivotal point in his personal religious odyssey.” He “embarked on a programme of evening evangelism,” which yielded about 100 converts within the first year.⁹

They think you are wrong, and there are a lot of them.

Fairly early in the group’s history, some members emigrated to America and, with guidance from the leadership back home, established congregations at their new locations.¹⁰ As with Laestadianism, though, the American adherents still represent only a fraction of the total worldwide membership. And neither movement has attracted substantial interest outside its original ethnic group; most everybody is a descendant of immigrants from the old country. If what I saw in Hawaii was any indication, God’s chosen people in the U.S. are almost all Filipino.¹¹

Today, Manalo figures prominently in the church’s history, and his grandson Eduardo is now its leader, the “Executive Minister.” But the church considers itself “of God and of Christ,” and says Manalo is only “God’s instrument in preaching the gospel of salvation in these last days.” He was, after all, “the first one to proclaim about the Church of Christ” in the Philippines where most of the church’s members are still found today.¹²

The story is not too different in structure from Laestadian lore about Lars Levi receiving the Gospel from one member of an obscure group of “Readers” and then unleashing it from his pulpit in Karesuando. And the spiritual successors of Laestadius also disclaim him as any kind of an object of worship, though the ones in the OALC sure devote a lot of their service to reverent mentions of his name and readings of his written sermons.

Complete unity! Except they aren’t Laestadians.

Naturally, one true church means just one true doctrine: “Unity in the Church is quite significant, because our unity includes God and Christ. It is wrong to destroy this unity.” ¹³ Again there is a striking familiarity between these words from the Philippines and the ones coming from the LLC. They really want everybody on board with the party line, and there is only one party line.

Choose Wisely

The Iglesia ni Cristo makes the same exclusivity claim as each schismatic branch of Laestadianism does for itself. (Obviously, only one of them can be correct about it, at most.) If you are not a member of the Church, “you will not be saved on the Day of Judgment.” ¹⁴ And what they mean by “the Church” is very specific: “The prevailing belief that all churches belong to God is false. Christ founded only one Church–the church of Christ.” ¹⁵ Man receives “redemption and the forgiveness of sins” only through this Church. “In God’s scheme of salvation, Christ and the Church of Christ are inseparable” ¹⁶

The Church of Christ

That quoted material is from Iglesia ni Cristo’s materials, but it could just as well have come from the SRK/​LLC, OALC, IALC, or FALC. If they could be persuaded to come out and actually say it publicly, that is.

I have been in contact with people who have left all of those branches of Laestadianism as well as the Church of Christ (Boston Movement), the “Churches of Christ,” “the Truth” aka the 2x2s or “church without a name,” and More Than Conquerors Faith Church of Birmingham, Alabama. Indeed, for most of the seven groups listed besides my own former SRK/​LLC Laestadianism, my conversations and correspondence have been with more than ex-member from each group. They all spoke and wrote to me about their experiences in a church where everybody in all the others is considered damned to hell, including the sincere believers I grew up with.¹⁷

The nerve of them, I thought about the churches these people had left. Then we smiled together about how firmly that same outrageous and indefensible idea had remained implanted in each of our brains, before that other ex-exclusivist ever had the slightest clue about my old church or I ever did about theirs. And our respective former churches still go on with their self-absorbed preaching, condemning each other and everybody else without knowing or caring to know.

———

The two graphic art images depict the number of Conservative Laestadians proportional to everyone else on the planet. Created with The Gimp, a free and powerful piece of graphics software. The Iglesia ni Cristo church pictured is the one I visited in Kauai, Hawaii. I took the photo of it from the passenger window as my wife and I drove by sightseeing later. These three images are Copyright © 2014 Edwin A. Suominen; you may freely copy and use them for non-commercial purposes, with attribution, under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

Indeed, I hope you will, particularly that first one showing all those dots representing the world population as 50,000 groups of the same size as the SRK/​LLC. “God’s children” are just one orange dot in the upper left corner. Click on the image above or here to download the full-resolution 1311px by 929px version (only 129 KB), or just forward the link.

Photos of textual material are from a copy of Pasugo (August 2014) that I saw and requested after the service, and then photographed in highly cropped, low-resolution form for “fair use” illustration of this essay. The issue was subtitled God’s Message, so what used to be two magazines may have now merged into one. The official website of Iglesia ni Cristo, if you’re curious or perhaps want to see if 5,000,000 or so Filipinos might be right about the perilous state of your eternal soul, is incmedia.org.

Notes

---

1. “God our Saviour ... will have all men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim. 2:3-4); “The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance” (2 Pet. 3:9). ↩

2. If God really wants everybody to be saved, he must be quite unhappy about a world where so few actually are. He seems unable to do anything about the situation, yet he’s supposedly omnipotent, which means nothing can stand in his way (Mark 10:25-27). This show-stopper of a theological problem I discuss in one of my most popular postings, The New Testament Disproving Itself. ↩

3. The results can be embarrassing for the church when one of its preachers does stray into discussing the awful specifics. In a sermon given at the LLC’s 2010 Winter Services, for example, one of them started talking about the “kind of reaction we sometimes hear today when we speak about God’s Kingdom.” Things got a little too candid when he went on, “‘You really think this is the only place where forgiveness is found? Do you really think that you are the only group that is traveling to heaven, the only group of believers? Do you really believe that?’ And of course, to the rational mind it does seem like an awfully simple way to believe, doesn’t it? When we look around us in this world and we see the people and the churches and the deeds that people do and all of these outward things, certainly we can understand that to the carnal mind our faith is so foolish. That’s what Paul found too, when he preached. He said we preach Jesus Christ and him crucified, and to the Jews it’s a stumbling block, and to the Greeks it’s foolishness.” Paul was talking about Christianity itself, not some group’s sectarian claims of exclusivity; I wonder what he would have thought about his church becoming so absurdly limited in scope as to be practically invisible. ↩

4. The size of my hypothetical clinic is proportional to the 0.002% figure, given the Seattle metro area’s population of 3.6 million people. And the Seattle Laestadian Lutheran Church is down that road off Highway 522, in case you were wondering. However, instead of 70 people there are about 200-300 “who have been called by the grace of God to be partakers of the hope of eternal life” and “individually have been given grace to believe the forgiveness of our own sins in Jesus’ name and blood.” ↩

5. This soft-pedaling to outsiders contradicts the idea that God’s holy law, “our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ” as Gal. 3:24 puts it, is being preached in all its harshness to unbelievers to prod us into repentance. See An Examination of the Pearl, §4.5.1. ↩

6. Speaker’s and Elder’s Meeting presentation, 2007 LLC Summer Services, llchurch.org/​topics/unityfaith1.pdf. ↩

7. Adapted from An Examination of the Pearl, §4.2.1. ↩

8. From “A Song of my Home I am Singing,” Songs and Hymns of Zion No. 576, v. 2. ↩

9. Robert R. Reed, “The Iglesia ni Cristo, 1914-2000. From obscure Philippine faith to global belief system.” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, The Philippines Historical and Social studies. Vol. 157, No. 3, pp. 561-608. ↩

10. Reed at pp. 583-85. ↩

11. “Iglesia is not better known, despite its numbers, because the majority of Iglesia’s members are Filipino. Virtually the only exceptions are a few non-Filipinos who have married into Iglesia families” (Catholic Answers, catholic.com/​tracts/iglesia-ni-cristo). ↩

12. Manual for New Members, Part 4: “How you should obey the teachings you received,” under “About God’s Last Messenger,” From unofficial copy reproduced online at incworld.faithweb.com/​info.htm. ↩

13. Manual for New Members, Part 4, under “About unity.” ↩

14. Manual for New Members, Part 4, under “About being registered.” The Iglesia ni Cristo goes so far as to have a “registry on earth” that corresponds to “the registry in heaven (the Book of Life),” which really just makes official what Conservative Laestadianism believes about membership status in its organization. The closest thing it has to an earthly “Book of Life” is the little paperback church phone book that comes out every year. I have to admit I was a bit sad to see an edition of it without my wife and me listed for the first time. ↩

15. Manual for New Members, Part 4, under “About the true religion.” ↩

16. Pasugo (the church’s monthly newsletter): January 1997; September 1988. ↩

17. I have varying degrees of certainty about how much these different groups hold to the belief that they are the only place where salvation may be found. I’ve read quite a bit about the Churches of Christ, for example, and exclusivity has been a commonly made claim among them, even in writing at times. On the other hand, all that I know about the More than Conquerors group making that claim comes from a person who left it. But all of my correspondents from the groups listed seemed sure that the exclusivity idea was commonly understood among their brethren when they were among them. And of course there are other groups not discussed in this essay with the same view, or at least a general belief that nobody else is quite as saved as they are. ↩

 

Getting Out

“Relax,” said the night man, “We are programmed to receive. You can check-out any time you like, but you can never leave!”

—The Eagles, Hotel California

The world beyond the gate. Can you make that first step and keep going? [Flickr page]

I spent the first forty-odd years of my life in a fundamentalist Christian sect that considers itself “God’s Kingdom,” the exclusive repository of grace on this earth after 2,000 years of Christianity. Leaving it was one of the best and hardest things I’ve ever done.

Conservative Laestadianism attracts few converts and retains fewer still of those, with the notable exception of some vibrant missionary activity in Africa. In Finland–where most of its 100,000 or so adherents reside–and in North America, almost all new members arrive at the maternity ward. There are plenty of them, since birth control is frowned upon.

The church safeguards the souls of its new arrivals by instilling into their small brains its doctrines and all the nuances of a uniquely closed and controlling subculture. Its own survival is at stake. These are the innocent little lumps of fresh clay that this religion, like so many others, molds and shapes into the soft living stones of its shaky spiritual house.¹

A substantial portion of them last through early adulthood, until young marriages can start producing their own fresh batches of new members. The cycle continues anew, as it must. These blocks of flesh and blood wear out, sometimes even slip away, and must be replaced if the structure is to stand.

———

Until recently, it was very rare for anyone beyond their twenties to walk away from this “living faith.” The few cases I’d heard about were older singles who despaired of having their nets come up empty in a stagnant little pond of church-approved prospects, and a few spouses who had been faced with or created problems in their marriages. Then a friend of mine left the church, staying happily married and with kids, for reasons that focused on the church itself. That sort of thing just did not happen once you reached a certain age.

Then it happened to me, too, and my wife. And now it has been happening to quite a number of people, both in Finland and North America. Even more than the open defections, there seems to be a lot of private grumbling, questions no longer so easily tamped down. Pressure slowly and silently builds inside the minds of troubled believers–sermon after sermon, baby after baby–and the familiar preaching of forgiveness for “sins and doubts” no longer seems to provide much relief.

But the believing brain can withstand a lot of pressure. Those who make it through all those years of indoctrination and cozy familiarity–of family, friends, and social setting–have strong containers in their heads to keep it all bottled up. Sundays pass, more children are born and taught sound doctrine, and for every person who manages to leave, there are probably a dozen who want to but do not.

Pine Droplets and Webbing [Flickr page]

A Finnish correspondent who did manage to leave describes a web of stuff that he had to cut through before he could finally set himself free. The first strand of it is social dependence.

“My whole life I have been ‘rooted into God’s Kingdom,’” he says. That made him “almost completely dependent on this religious community.” He was taught that most of his “friends should be ‘other believers,’ meaning other Laestadians,” and spent his childhood being brought to services, church camps, Sunday schools, Bible classes, and church youth activities. Molding and shaping the clay.

There was plenty of time for it. He was kept from the “‘worldly’ leisure activities that non-Laestadian kids attend.” No team sports at school, no dances, no TV or movies.

Next is moral dependence. There was little emphasis on any individual conscience. Rather, he was taught about a “community conscience: An individual may be erring but ‘God’s congregation’ cannot.” From childhood, he had been told

that ministers and Laestadian publications are God’s Word. When they say that God is Almighty, and that he doesn’t want us to use birth control, that he tortures the disobedient people infinitely, then I have no other option but to believe. I have also been warned that I can’t make decisions based on my own opinions and thoughts, because I should ask the congregation for advice.

He was also made spiritually dependent on Laestadianism. His “own will and conscience” was “crushed and replaced with a gospel”–a formulaic preaching of absolution central to Laestadian doctrine and practice–“that only this community can provide.” Laestadians preach “the gospel” often, regular believers in private conversation and ministers from the pulpit: Your sins are all forgiven in Jesus’ name and blood.² My correspondent was

taught by these minister-gods that I get my sins forgiven by the absolution gospel. If I don’t go to Laestadian services, I won’t hear this sermon and the gospel, and therefore I remain a prisoner in sin. And if I remain a prisoner in sin and die in such condition, I will be condemned to eternal perdition and torture.

Light at the End of the Tunnel [Flickr page]

“Wouldn’t a smart individual, living in modern Finland, be able to question these doctrines?” he asks. “Of course, but everything is not always as simple or easy as it may seem.” Indeed not. My own process of questioning and eventually rejecting that same inherited faith compelled me to do a year of full-time research and writing, spending “thousands of hours researching seemingly every aspect of Conservative Laestadian history, doctrine, and practice, plus Christianity in general, plus the Bible and the very nature of God,” as I put it in the resulting 700-page book, An Examination of the Pearl. It was “a labor driven by love, but also by the mental anguish of being unable to avoid questioning a doctrinal system that demands firm confession of belief, on pain of eternal damnation.”

Leaving the faith I had inherited and cherished for 40 years was not an easy thing for me to do. Nor was it for my Finnish correspondent. He “had been made dependent on the community in every possible way.” And when he “started to question a small portion of this doctrine,” he “was immediately faced with the alarm mechanisms in the community.” Structural damage, one of the building blocks is slipping out of place!

He got rebuked and heard about people’s worries that he was on the wrong path. “The community that now pressured me threatened to take away all the good that the community was giving me, if I continued to question these matters” (my emphasis). Because of this threat, he says, “most Laestadians don’t let these questions arise even in their own minds: They stifle these thought processes immediately, and ask for their sins and doubts forgiven like they have been taught to do at services.”

Now he happily reports that he’s been able to build a social life outside the church. The old “Laestadian-based network was getting thinner,” anyhow, because of his questioning things. And he’s noticed that he just doesn’t “need the spiritual nourishment in this community” anymore: “I was able to break free from this dependence and obey my own conscience.”

The church social network doesn’t readily extend far outside its narrow confines, and that’s certainly true among Conservative Laestadians in North America, too. One man who left the LLC (Laestadian Lutheran Church) has managed to stay somewhat attached, though only after dealing with a huge outcry from church friends and family. It was, he says, “one of the most painful experiences I ever went through.” But the “constant badgering only reinforced the thought that I made the right decision.”

After a few months of heated arguments and accusations about not loving family, of hearing about people’s prayers “for me to have restless days and sleepless nights so I would see the condition of my heart,” it finally started to get better. “People must have finally realized that I no longer wanted to remain inside the LLC box.”

The same thing happened to a correspondent from another branch of Laestadianism, the Old Apostolic Lutheran Church. She got “calls, texts, voicemails, old-fashioned letters, and even emails.” (The Internet is mostly a no-no in the OALC.) “A majority of what I received was genuine concern–for my soul, my life, my eternity.” There was some coercion and manipulation there, too, she says, but believes that was done out of concern. “Though it hurt me then, I understood where they were coming from, and still feel the same today. They know only what they know. I think Maya Angelou said, ‘We did then what we knew then, we do now what we know now,’ or something along those lines. That is all that they know, and I pity them for it.” ³

There are a lot of religious groups filled with people who “do only what they know” and make life difficult for their friends and family who have learned a bit more. I’d like to give some perspective and encouragement to people facing a difficult path out of their inherited religions–Laestadian and otherwise–by discussing two extreme examples.

The Exclusive Brethren

The first of these is a Protestant Christian sect that holds what Wikipedia calls “an uncompromising ‘separatist’ doctrine.” David Tchappat’s fascinating book Breakout (official excerpt available here) describes the difficult departure he made from their midst. This fascinating half-hour audio interview with the author is highly recommended, especially for troubled Laestadians; you will hear a lot of things that sound weirdly familiar.

Social dependence was certainly a factor for Tchappat. Being “born into the Exclusive Brethren,” he says, “ensured that your small following of fellow churchgoers was your society whether you liked it or not. Having a social circle outside of this was not an option.” ⁴

Journalist Michael Bachelard estimates the number of worldwide members at 43,000, Australia being home to about a third of them.⁵ Tchappat provides the same estimate, adding, “Almost all growth comes from births, as conversions into the faith are practically unheard of.” ⁶ It is indeed a “small following,” as Tchappat puts it, at least when compared to most Christian denominations. But that’s a matter of perspective; the closed church society in which I grew up has about half as many members in my country as Tchappat had in his.

The Australian TV program A Current Affair recently aired a scathing documentary, twelve minutes of which you can watch online, about what it bluntly calls a “secret cult.” Bachelard describes the Brethren as having erected “a wall between themselves and the outside world.” Since 1960, he says, there has been a rule against “eating, drinking, or socializing with any outsider.” What that means, he says, is “there are no friendships, no social intercourse whatsoever with outsiders, and sect members are encouraged to behave with an air of being impervious to the outside world and aloof from it.” ⁷

A fascinating book

Tchappat refers to his life in the group as a “fishbowl existence.” He fantasized numerous times about leaving it before finally doing so. But that was a daunting prospect: “I knew no one in the outside world and had no idea how to look after myself. Since birth, every decision had been made for me. My life was regulated by rules and laws set in place by the Man of God, which were in turn implemented and policed by the local priests.” ⁸

Some of the prohibitions he lists are the same as those from my own upbringing: marrying outsiders, physical contact before marriage, contraception, TV, hair coloring, make-up, gambling, and attending “anything that could be deemed as fun or entertainment.” As I did in my childhood Laestadianism, it seems Tchappat felt an urge to confess any infractions of all those rules: “After church when the rest of my family had gone to bed, and my dad was tidying the kitchen, I approached him and told him I had to speak with him. He shut the kitchen door and I immediately broke down, pulling out my list of sins and confessing them to him.” ⁹ And this part sounds uncomfortably familiar, too: “We were told that we were the chosen people and should feel privileged to be born into this group.” ¹⁰

“It was only the courageous and inquisitive minority that ever dared to leave the Assembly of God,” says Tchappat. That is also true in the Kingdom of God, my old group’s informal self-designation, though the number of defectors is growing surprisingly fast. In my own case, the fear was more of eternal rather than earthly consequences. After many dark and bloody centuries under the Church, secular governments are finally forcing Christianity to leave its exit doors unlocked. But most of them still have the awful eternal threat written in fiery letters overhead. Abandon all hope, they read, in a twist from the words inscribed on Dante’s gates of Hell, you who leave from here.¹¹

According to Tchappat’s account, the Brethren are no exception. More than a year after leaving, he “would wake up in the dead of night dripping with sweat and would dream of the burning pits of hell.” Going back, he thought, “was the only way to avoid eternal punishment.” ¹² Though “the Brethren do not officially believe that they are the only Godly people,” in modern times, anyhow, Bachelard says they do “believe that those who leave the sect will not be saved.” ¹³

While still in the group, Tchappat had worried about being excommunicated for having sex with his girlfriend. Those in that position fared no better in the eternity department. They were, he says, “described as being worse than people of the world because they had known the light and turned their back on it. It was considered an eternal damnation to die out of fellowship and only the grace of God and forgiveness of the Brethren would redeem such people from the pits of hell.” ¹⁴ Here is his harrowing description of “massive guilt attacks” he suffered several years after walking away from the group:

I would lie in bed on my days off staring at the ceiling and crying to myself. I was falling apart. I had my [friends] but I could not confide in them about my inner personal turmoil. All my teachings from childhood were coming back to me. I was petrified that I was going to the gates of hell if I did not fall down and repent. I began to read my Bible constantly and could not sleep for fear of dying and entering eternal damnation. I was seriously entertaining the thought of returning to the Brethren. I did not know how I was going to cope with such a life change but I did not care. It was a way of escaping my problems.¹⁵

That is some heavy shit. Eternity has a way of messing with people’s heads. But he also describes dire consequences right here on earth, in this brief life, for those who “enter the world” from the Brethren:

If caught planning an escape, the local priests would place them under house arrest along with their families and have them put under assembly discipline, revoking any rights to attend church or socialise with those in the inner circle of the Brethren. Those over sixteen years of age who made it to the outside world without detection, would be ex-communicated and starved of all monetary assistance and family support, forcing them to return or find alternative methods of survival.¹⁶

Bachelard’s book is full of tragic stories about family breakups occurring because one spouse was excommunicated from or voluntarily left the group, about parents devoid of contact with their children. Tchappat’s own story is much the same–a final letter he sent was “the last form of contact I would ever have again with my family.” His gripping and sad narrative has an upbeat ending of sorts, though: “There has never been a time in my life where I have experienced such inner peace, happiness and satisfaction as the present day.” ¹⁷

Islam

One way. You’d better believe it. [Flickr page]

Leaving the fold is also serious business for the nearly one fourth of the world’s population who are professing Muslims. In addition to social coercion and the prospect of their own version of Hell, there is often a serious threat of physical harm.

Just look at this comment thread on a web forum calling itself “the online Muslim community” to see how real that danger is. Some guy with over 2,000 comments posted at that site states that death is preferable over continued life to people who claim to be of Islam, leave it, and then call others away from it. Presumably, the actual preferences of the apostates themselves are of little consequence. “It’s a mercy,” he says, “for if they continued, their place in hell would be lower, and lower, and lower. We judge law by the belief of an afterlife 100% without a shadow of a doubt. Thus, death is not a ‘bad’ thing if it is done to prevent chaos.”

Another commentator (4,000 posts) clarifies, “The death penalty for apostates is for those apostates that leave Islam then work against Islam in some way.” It’s the same as treason, after all, and the “penalty for traitors throughout history has been death.” Still another commentator (not quite 500 posts) adds, “The apostate should not be put to death until he has been asked to repent three times,” generously allowing him three days to think things over first.

What a disgusting little attempt to defend medieval intolerance and barbarity. And there it is, polished with a veneer of twisted logic, showing up on an Internet discussion forum built by the technology of a more enlightened age. Seeing that sort of thing helps us outsiders appreciate why an American ex-Muslim highly regarded on reddit was moved to post a “Public Service Announcement” on Reddit warning about coming out. If you are considering telling “your friends and family that you are not a Muslim anymore,” he says, you should only do it if:

• You are 18+ years of age
• You are old enough to live on your own
• You are financially independent from your family
• You know where to go if you get kicked out
• You do not live in a religiously conservative country like Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, etc.

If even one of these conditions is not met, he adds with sober emphasis,

do not tell anyone you are not a muslim anymore. Seriously. I understand how hard it is to live a lie and to put up with bullshit, but in the end, you are going to have a bad time. This can’t be stressed enough. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read self-posts by young, financially dependent ex-Muslims in Muslim countries that want to do this or have done this and felt deeply worried for them. It’s not a rational decision to make, and it’s not gonna do anyone any good if you end up hurt or even killed over it. Don’t put yourself in danger like that. Believe me, it’s not worth it at all. Please be considerate of your safety and well-being, and don’t be a hero unless you’re fully capable of facing the consequences.¹⁸

Those consequences are very real for one high school student in Saudi Arabia. I hope he’s been careful about keeping his identity and IP address well concealed when posting to public discussion forums online. Out of an abundance of caution, I will just paraphrase his comment without a link. He hates living in the closet, he says, but coming out to his parents means that he’ll be shipped off to Mecca to study Islam for the rest of his life or get beheaded. And his parents will grieve about his apostasy. Only if he can become financially independent and move to a country that respects religious freedom will he even consider it.

Reading this stuff does have a way of putting things into perspective. Your family has sent you emails and texts expressing sadness for your soul and offering some self-righteous prayers? You’ve lost most of your oldest and dearest friends? You miss having a place to go see familiar faces every week? Yes, that sucks. But at least you don’t need to worry about being sent to a religious re-education camp or having your head chopped off. Count your blessings.

Heina Dadabhoy

Islamic states are not good places to be when you don’t enthusiastically share the state religion. (Or when you are in the female half of the population, or when you have been accused of a crime, or when you would just like to have a little enjoyment in life, but that’s another blog posting.) These anonymous comments from fearful closeted nonbelievers often express a longing, sometimes even hope, to live in secular countries.

As an American citizen, Heina Dadabhoy had that good fortune, at least, when she told her family she was leaving Islam. They thought she was “turning [her] back on them,” she said in an interview with the New York Times, her parents accusing “her of thinking that she was better than her grandparents and other ancestors.” They “reacted the way they knew how, which was to freak out.” Public defections from the faith are still very rare, and her parents “had never heard of anybody leaving Islam. We were raised with the idea you can’t leave, that nobody can leave. Leaving Islam was something somebody incredibly deranged would do.” ¹⁹

At a conference a few years ago, I asked Dadabhoy if the fear of Hell is also a factor for those considering leaving Islam. It definitely is, she said. Indeed, you can see the eternal fate of the ex-Muslim spelled out in the Quran itself:

Whoso desireth any other religion than Islam, that religion shall never be accepted from him, and in the next world he shall be among the lost. How shall God guide a people who, after they had believed and bore witness that the Apostle was true, and after that clear proofs of his mission had reached them, disbelieved? ... Their recompense, that the curse of God, and of angels, and of all men, is on them! Under it shall they abide forever; their torment shall not be assuaged! ²⁰

Moving On

There are countless other examples of the difficulties people experience trying to get out of the religions that were foisted on them at birth. The stories I’ve read in books and on Internet discussion forums are so numerous and compelling that this essay would turn into a book of my own if I were to venture too deeply into any of them.

Indeed, even thinking about that makes me recall a whole genre of books about Leaving the Fold. That, for example, is the exact title of both Edward Babinski’s fine collection of stories about people deconverting and Dr. Marlene Winell’s thoughtful guide to doing so.

People are leaving these high-control religious organizations–slowly and at great cost, and often thinking they are the only ones going through such a difficult process. Many more stay behind, wishing they too were in the right circumstance to leave, biding their time until they can. Here is a brief listing of a few groups I’ve read about, with quotes from former members who have walked away and told their stories. I recommend every one of their gripping, illuminating books.

• Scientology: “All of a sudden, I felt as if a weight had been lifted from my shoulders. These were things I didn’t have to worry about ... a radical thought formed in my head. Because I am not a Scientologist. It felt good to think it, to say it, to scream it. I am not a Scientologist.... If something is wrong, I can say so, honestly and openly, without fear.” –Jefferson Hawkins, Counterfeit Dreams (2012).

• Non-Denominational Christianity: “When you’re five and contemplating Hell, concepts like ‘proportionality’ exist far out of reach, well beyond climbing range, unknowable. No young child can digest or discern whether such overt sadism is an appropriate punishment for the heinous act of simply being born as a descendent of Adam.” –Seth Andrews, Deconverted (2012).

• Fundamentalist Baptist Christianity: “I had developed some kind of gag reflex for my brain. I just couldn’t think clearly or objectively about my childhood or my surroundings. I felt like if I acknowledged things done to me in my childhood that were negative, I would be guilty of breaking a great commandment. I would be dishonoring my parents or somehow loving them less. Love entailed a lot of denial.” –Timothy Michael Short, Preacher Boy (2011).

• The People’s Temple (Jim Jones, thankfully defunct): “When our own thoughts are forbidden, when our questions are not allowed and our doubts are punished, when contacts and friendships outside of the organization are censored, we are being abused for an end that never justifies its means. When our heart aches knowing we have made friendships and secret attachments that will be forever forbidden if we leave, we are in danger. When we consider staying in a group because we cannot bear the loss, disappointment, and sorrow our leaving will cause for ourselves and those we have come to love, we are in a cult.” –Deborah Layton, Seductive Poison (2010).

• Evangelical Christianity: “Imagine what it would cost you to give up your faith tomorrow morning; if it is unbearable even to think of it, then you ought to consider how much the cost of leaving your faith is influencing your ability to judge your faith critically and objectively.” –Kenneth W. Daniels, Why I Believed (2010).

• The Churches of Christ: “I was deprived of showing spiritual compassion to others because I was taught that if they were not in the CoC they were not ‘real’ Christians, and the CoC didn’t seem to have a lot of concern about people who weren’t real Christians in their eyes. I was deprived of the fellowship of my classmates on their religious turf.” –Charles Simpson, Inside the Churches of Christ (2009).

• Mormonism: “I had been taught early on that the only reliable evidence about the Church–in fact the only evidence at all worth looking at–comes from the Church itself. This evidence can be undeniably confirmed, not through logical, deductive reasoning, but by the emotional feelings we were taught from early childhood to recognize as being from the Holy Ghost.” –Jack B. Worthy, The Mormon Cult (2008).

• The Jehovah’s witnesses: “[T]he only way out of this dilemma was to acknowledge my feelings and doubts about the organization that I had suppressed for so long, and what it meant that I was having them. But doing so was extremely frightening to me, because trying to face up to my doubts nine years ago only resulted in panic attacks and anguish, which ultimately drove me back into the organization. This time, though, I knew I would have to see it through, as my body would not cooperate with the charade any longer.” –Diane Wilson. Awakening of a Jehovah’s Witness (2002).

There is a lot to learn and think about for people who are considering the exhilarating but terrifying possibility of leaving their childhood faith. Are you one of those people? If so, let me offer you my respect and encouragement, whatever you ultimately decide. Even without taking another step, you have allowed yourself the delicious freedom of thinking for yourself, in the privacy of your own brain.

Take your time. The church is right to say that this is the most important matter of your life, even if its own web of dependencies–social, moral, spiritual–is what made things that way. Don’t beat up on yourself for acknowledging how strong that web is. Cut through each strand at your own pace, however slow that is, or not at all.

———

And in the process, if there is still a God in your heart that is the object of your private devotion, give him a little more credit than your hellfire preachers ever will. Would you ever torture anyone, for five minutes, even for some terrible crime? You’re better than that, aren’t you?

How about a child who wandered into your office where she didn’t belong and messed up your papers, and, after being scolded, angrily told you she didn’t love you anymore? Would you throw her little body into a pit of flames and watch the smoke of her torment swirl and rise as you listen to her scream? ²¹ For five minutes?

“What kind of a monster do you think I am?” you say. The thought upsets you, and it should. Think about how slanderous it is against anything remotely resembling a loving God. Or an omnipotent one: A God that could stop such horrors but stands aside, unmoved and doing nothing, is no better than whatever diabolical force you might imagine feeding the fire.

How about five hours? Five days? Let her scream and burn for five long days. Disgusting, isn’t it? How about forever? Unrelenting agony, pain without end, utterly pointless suffering with no hope of relief. And for what? For not knowing better, just like everybody outside the particular group you are thinking about leaving? There is simply no way that anyone–person or God–with the slightest shred of decency could do such a thing.

Whatever else you do, take that awful and impossible idea off of your shoulders and quietly put it down. It is not worthy of another moment’s belief.

Incandescent Forest [Flickr page]

Step up from your computer, put down your smartphone. Look at your innocent child, look outside. See the blue sky and the green trees and all the good things that you have joyously attributed to your God. Leaving a controlling religious group does not make all of that disappear. There is still wonder, there is beauty, there is joy. And there is a whole lot less guilt and fear.

———

Thanks to Heina Dadabhoy for her photo and the suggestion to “go with the more modern transliteration of ‘Quran’ rather than ‘Koran.’” Also thanks to my anonymous correspondents. Several opined that there have indeed been more departures of late from the SRK, which added to my own impressions about the recent state of affairs in the LLC. I am grateful to the one in Finland who provided an insightful analysis of the various dependencies established by religious groups, and to his able translator. The two in the U.S. have never heard of each other, and come from different groups that call each other heresies, yet they expressed so well the same difficult experience of leaving.

A note of continued appreciation, too, to my dear friend and mentor Robert M. Price, who helped me stay, and then, when I was ready, helped me leave.

I neither have nor claim any inside knowledge about any of the religious groups discussed here except my own former faith, Conservative Laestadianism, and, to some extent, its rival branches. Everything written in this essay about other groups is quoted directly from various published works or publicly available materials. Those who are seriously interested in particular groups should consult the footnotes, read the sources cited as well as the many others available, and form their own opinions accordingly. Those intrigued by Laestadianism may wish to consult the hefty volume I spent a year researching and writing, An Examination of the Pearl, and its 180 or so references.

Click on (most) individual images to enlarge, or check out their photo pages in my Flickr photostream. All except for the cover of David Tchappat’s book and Ms. Dadabhoy’s portrait are Copyright © 2014 Edwin A. Suominen. You may freely use them for non-commercial purposes, with attribution, under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

Notes

---

1. “Ye also, as lively stones, are built up a spiritual house, an holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God by Jesus Christ” (1 Peter 2:5). ↩

2. Suominen, Edwin A. An Examination of the Pearl (2012), §4.6.2 (“Forgiveness of Sins” / “The Sole Means of Grace”). Available at Amazon.com and for free online reading at ExaminationofthePearl.org. ↩

3. OALC members are “spiritually dependent” on the proclamation of absolution, too. But the SRK/​LLC considers the preaching of forgiveness in the OALC to be just the empty words of “heretics,” without the Holy Spirit behind it. The person proclaiming the absolution needs to be the correct kind of Laestadian for things to work. That raises an interesting dilemma. One correspondent from the LLC says he’d had church friends come to him countless times with serious sins for absolution, and he preached it to them without actually believing himself. According to Conservative Laestadian doctrine, they are, to use a theological term, shit out of luck. ↩

4. Tchappat, David. Breakout: How I Escaped From The Exclusive Brethren, New Holland Australia (2011), Amazon Kindle ed., loc. 3213. After being known as the Exclusive Brethren for many years, the group has recently started calling itself the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church. ↩

5. Bachelard, Michael. Behind the Exclusive Brethren, Scribe Publications Pty Ltd (2008), p. 2. ↩

6. Tchappat at loc. 3467. Same with my old group, except for 600 or so conversions in Africa over the past decade or so and a handful elsewhere that have stuck around. It’s plenty “exclusive,” too, at least in a spiritual sense. Outside of that one little flock–the correct one of a dozen schismatic branches of a 19th-century revival movement of Scandinavian Lutheranism–you cannot be saved. It’s not a doctrinal tenet that is discussed much in public. ↩

7. Bachelard at p. 49. ↩

8. Tchappat at loc. 105. ↩

9. Tchappat at loc. 300-350, 842. The Brethren seem to go quite a ways beyond even the moral conservatism of Conservative Laestadianism, whose confession expectations have also diminished substantially since I was a kid. Brethren marriages must be pre-approved by their top leader, the “Elect Vessel”? No computers, except, says the documentary from A Current Affair, approved ones purchased from an official Brethren supplier? No domestic pets, including goldfish? The rules make my strict upbringing sound positively libertine. And some of what Tchappat says sounds just bizarre to me: “Cordless telephones and remote control-operated garage doors are also outlawed. Prestige vehicles such as BMWs and Mercedes Benz are not permitted and any vehicle red in colour is banned. Personalised number plates are not allowed and the ownership of a motorcycle is also not acceptable with farmers being the only exception.” Wow. ↩

10. Tchappat at loc. 109. In my own former church, I heard a preacher say that giving up “this most precious gift of living faith” is the worst thing a person could possibly do–even worse than murder. It’s an outrageous statement, and not one that most Laestadian preachers would make–at this point, probably not even the one who originally made it. But it does accurately convey the importance Laestadians place on being “God’s Children.” And the punishment for murder is not an eternity of unspeakable torture. ↩

11. Those still troubled by the Hell idea might take a look at my December 2013 blog posting on the subject, “Healing from Hell Horror.” ↩

12. Tchappat at loc. 2681. ↩

13. Bachelard at p. 56. ↩

14. Tchappat at loc. 2129. ↩

15. Tchappat at loc. 2929. ↩

16. Tchappat at loc. 110. ↩

17. Tchappat at loc. 2602, 3258. ↩

18. reddit.com/r/exmuslim/​comments/2gzm42/​psa_for_exmuslims_considering_coming_out_to_their ↩

19. Oppenheimer, Mark. Leaving Islam for Atheism, and Finding a Much-Needed Place Among Peers. New York Times, May 23, 2014. ↩

20. Quran, Sura 3:80 (J.M. Rodwell trans., Ballantine Books, 1993). Liberal apologists for the supposed tolerance of Islam like to toss around another passage that states, “Let there be no compulsion in religion” (Sura 2:256). Regarding that, one ex-Muslim on reddit cites the passage I quote here and asks, “If there really was no compulsion in religion, then why does Allah not accept those who desire religions other than Islam? The Quran is one big contorted contradictory mess from which nothing consistent is ever going to emerge.” The same can of course be said about the Bible, Old and New Testaments alike. ↩

21. “And the smoke of their torment ascendeth up for ever and ever: and they have no rest day nor night, who worship the beast and his image, and whosoever receiveth the mark of his name” (Rev. 14:11). ↩

 

Witnessing

Book review: Awakening of a Jehovah’s Witness: Escape from the Watchtower Society. Diane Wilson. Prometheus Books (Amherst, NY 2002). Cites are to locations in the Kindle edition.

Last week, two friendly women knocked on my door wanting to share the good news about the Gospel with me, as understood by the Watchtower Society of Jehovah’s Witnesses. They may have been a bit surprised by what they encountered. I declined the little pamphlet they offered, politely explaining that I already knew everything I needed to know about their organization.

My door did not close on them, though, and they invited further dialogue by asking me to elaborate on what I knew. No doubt they were mentally flipping pages through the training materials for Witnesses’ door-to-door proselytizing strategies, turning to a section labeled something like “Dealing with Apostates,” or “Drawing in the Self-Righteous Know-it-All.”

I mentioned their failed apocalyptic prophecies, and said I’ve read quite a bit about their organization along with others like the LDS Church. But then I sought to make the encounter a bit more productive, not for me, but for these two women. This doorstep was definitely stony ground for what they were sowing, but I figured it might be helpful to plant a few seeds of doubt in their minds, about the cultish group whose demands they are compelled to spend hours every week serving.

So I said something like this: “The real issue that I find troubling about your group is how it shuns those who come to disbelieve in its teachings. Disfellowshipping causes a great deal of pain.” Gesturing to each of the women in turn, I continued, “If you decide that there really is a problem with this organization and voice your doubts, then you are forced to have nothing to do with her. Would you like to be treated that way?”

One former Jehovah’s Witness who confronted this cruel form of church discipline, along with a great deal of cognitive dissonance, fear, and emotional trauma is Diane Wilson, author of the spellbinding and carefully researched book, Awakening of a Jehovah’s Witness: Escape from the Watchtower Society. When she was told to disfellowship her teenage daughter, to “treat her as if she were literally dead,” her reaction as a mother was understandable: “I started crying and my body started shaking uncontrollably” (loc. 1300-13, 1442-49). She got little compassion from the JW elder she sought out for help, though: “He did not comfort me, however; instead, he made my grief unbearable by blaming me for our daughter’s departure from the organization, and for having left us as well. I felt stunned, crushed, and devastated as the elder whipped me with his words” (loc. 1370).

The Truth, right near my home.

This was all piled on top of her long struggle with cognitive dissonance about the Watchtower Society’s teachings. Her doubts about the organization, she said,

were causing my entire belief system to break down, and I felt terrified. It seemed like this religion was the glue that held me together as a person and that gave stability to my life; having doubts made me feel like I was falling completely apart and going crazy. I felt like I was being swallowed up by a big black hole, that frightening world of darkness and confusion that the Society foretold would consume any who leave the organization. I feared I was falling prey to Satan. I was so frightened that my mind became obsessed with thoughts of: Perhaps the Watchtower Society is God’s Channel! Perhaps I have no legitimate complaints against the Society. Perhaps I am being rebellious against Jehovah’s arrangement. I had no confidence in myself or in my doubts about the organization; I was scared, and I desperately wanted to feel safe again. [loc. 1117]

Eventually, she said, “I experienced difficulty breathing while just sitting and listening to the meetings, feeling as if I were being literally suffocated. I frequently had to leave and walk around outside the Kingdom Hall in order to get relief” (loc. 1376). I can relate to this, from when a preacher in my former Laestadian Lutheran congregation would start going on about what sinful wretches we all are, his voice rising with pious angst about his sins as well as everyone else’s. Like Wilson, I had seen that my own version of “the Society is adamant in resisting almost all input from others, no matter how well researched or valuable it is” (loc. 3557).

Once questions are voiced, the questioner is all too often told that he or she is to accept whatever the Society teaches and is not to “reason” about it, but must blindly and dogmatically fully accept whatever is taught. The individual’s reason, they stress, is “human reasoning,” but the Watchtower’s reasoning is “God’s reasoning.” If one does not blindly accept all that is taught—however foolish—often their spirituality is impugned, even for sincere and honest questions. One then learns that questions are not to be voiced. [loc. 3564]

All the self-loathing, the quavering gratitude that this angry invisible God would exempt a fortunate few from the eternal torture chamber to which he would be consigning everyone else–for not believing in doctrines he declined to inform them of–just became too much to sit and take.¹ Listening to people in the pews around me get caught up in the emotion of the preachers thundering away, about things I knew they doubted, felt like being the only sober guy at a party.

And so I’d find some excuse to take one of the kids out of the sanctuary. Standing in the fellowship hall looking out the window while my kid played with folding chairs, looking at the innocent trees out in the sunshine, I’d wonder what the hell I was doing there.

Wilson’s book provides many other parallels to my own observations about the Laestadian Lutheran Church. I describe some of them in An Examination of the Pearl. Here are locations in the online HTML version where my book cites Wilson’s and discusses some of the similarities. Like many Laestadians, Witnesses

[1] have a resigned “where else would we go” attitude,
[2] are discouraged from outside socializing,
[3] must be obedient even without understanding,
[4] refer to the organization as the “Mother,”
[5] can be terrified at the idea of breaking away from it, and
[6] are discouraged from independently researching their beliefs.

They also avoid Halloween (loc. 235), offering toasts (loc. 252), reading literature from other churches (loc. 378), and extracurricular school sports (loc. 3616). Their rationale for using taped music rather than a live orchestra during JW conventions could have been pulled straight from a Laestadian publication, at least one from a few decades ago: “to protect the members of the orchestra from ‘getting puffed-up with pride’ because of their musical talents” (loc. 704). And they share the view of most Laestadian groups (yes, there are several) that their “organization alone, in all the Earth, is directed by God’s holy spirit or active force,” and to “it alone God’s Sacred Word, the Bible, is not a sealed book” (loc. 587).

Just people, friendly and chatty. If you haven’t been disfellowshipped, that is.

Though relationships can wind up being strained if not entirely broken off, Laestadians don’t shun their former brethren as severely or rigorously as do the Witnesses.² When I pointed out the cruelty of this treatment, the women at my door protested that it’s for their own good. That’s pretty much what one JW correspondent told me (while asking me to include this link): “Disfellowshipping, while very difficult for the person, may lead to a change in behavior, repentance, and a better understanding of a person’s relationship with Jehovah, and a return to living by Bible standards.”

Then my visitors prepared to list off some Bible verses for me. I saved them the trouble, knowing those passages all too well myself: Do not “keep company, if any man that is called a brother be a fornicator, or covetous, or an idolater, or a railer, or a drunkard, or an extortioner; with such an one, no not to eat” (1 Cor. 5:11). “[W]ithdraw yourselves from every brother that walketh disorderly, and not after the tradition which he received of us” (2 Thess. 3:7).³ And to their argument about letting their light shine before men, upholding the glory of God (Jehovah), etc., I asked what kind of light and glory there is in cutting people off from their families and people they’ve known all their lives. (See this and this.)

“We must obey God as ruler rather than men.”

For Wilson, the prospect of this happening to her made leaving the Watchtower Society

additionally difficult because my entire social system was tied up with the organization. Since it requires Jehovah’s Witnesses to limit their friends to only other Witnesses, disassociating from it would leave me completely isolated socially. This prospect was very frightening to me, and it contributed greatly to my delay in leaving the organization. I knew that disassociating myself would result in being shunned by all of Jehovah’s Witnesses forever. [loc. 3035]

But leave she did, eventually, and her book’s conclusion is one of hope and healing. “As stinging wounds from thornpricks heal, and those from penetrating lacerations produce scars that remain, so heals the emotional pain caused by my involvement with Jehovah’s Witnesses—though the scars may long be with me” (loc. 3396). She reports developing “deeper, more meaningful and satisfying friendships,” and retaining a firm belief in Jesus, occasionally visiting churches and enjoying “the spiritually uplifting, contemporary music offered there” (loc. 3401).

I wish her much peace and happiness. She’s earned it. If you have engaged in a similar struggle to find independence from an authoritarian religious group, you’ve earned it, too, and you’d benefit from reading her book.

———

Update, August 23, 2014: I’m still on their list of places to visit. Here is what I posted on Reddit about this morning’s encounter with a young JW woman at my front door:

It was a soft, tentative knock, just a couple of quiet taps on the front door. When I opened it, the blonde young woman holding her zipper-jacketed Bible and pamphlet smiled at me and asked if I would be interested in some literature. Her hand cradled the pamphlet in the space between us, across the threshold of my doorway, across a vast gulf of differences. I could see with a glance what it was: The Watchtower Society of Jehovah’s Witnesses was offering me an invitation to cross that threshold, printed in pastel colors, a soft-focus background image, and a smooth sans-serif font.

I looked back up at her smile and listened to her wonder aloud whether I might want some literature from this organization she did not yet name. One of my daughters is about the same age this girl looked to be. She is happily continuing her life in the fundamentalist Lutheran church that my wife and I grew up in but left a few years ago. She will probably bear a lot of children and limit her life’s choices based on things we taught her, things we no longer believe. They are both innocent believers, these two girls.

“Were you raised in the Jehovah’s witnesses?” I asked, not responding to the pamphlet.

She slowly brought it back to her chest next to the zippered Bible. “Yes, I was.” The smile brightened.

“Do you think that the possibility of being shunned by your parents might cloud your objectivity about this?”

The smile continued, but with a little movement now around her eyebrows. “Well, of course, I’ve thought a great deal about my beliefs. It’s very important.”

“But have you really considered the thought of your parents shunning you for doubting what you believe? Don’t you think that might make it hard to be objective about this?”

“Are you referring to disfellowshipping?” I nodded. “OK, see, that only happens for serious sins...”

“Well, apostasy is a serious sin. If you were to decide, I don’t know,” I waved at an unseen collection of vaguely remembered doctrinal issues, “that the whole 1973 or was it 1978 thing was a real problem and the Faithful and Discreet Slave wasn’t really so faithful or discreet after all, that would be apostasy. And your parents would have to treat you like you were dead.”

She nodded faintly, looking down for a second, the serious eyebrows taking over now from the smile. I love my daughter tremendously, and fortunately, she is still able to love me just as much, religion or no religion. This girl and her parents would not have the same luxury. She looked back up, and the Watchtower machinery ground back into gear. “Disfellowshipping is done out of love, and...”

“Yes, well, I’m not wanting to debate the reasons for it.” I was leaning against the wall just inside the doorway, my hands hooked in my pockets. The door hung wide open, off to the side. It was cool and bright outside, with a little breeze rustling the leaves. There was no hurry, no conflict, just a chance to let this young woman consider something as she stood in a quiet moment of morning sunshine outside my door. “I just wanted you to consider how much of a motivator that is for you. If you ever decide you don’t believe this stuff, then your parents would have to treat you like you were dead.”

The smile had now fully transitioned into a frown. “It sounds like you have experienced this first-hand. I’m sorry to hear that you’ve had...”

“No, no, I’ve never been a J-dub. I’ve just studied it a lot, along with the Mormons and a bunch of others. And I wanted to give you something to think about.”

“Well, thank you,” she said, and then the smile returned with her missionary voice that spoke a few more words to gracefully wrap things up. The pamphlet was back in its stack, and she wished me a good day and I wished her one, too.

———

Photo credits: Kingdom Hall exterior, own work (CC-NC); Kingdom Hall at night, Mark Faviell (CC-NC); people inside Kingdom Hall, adapted from J-McG (was CC-NC as of posting); signs and chairs, adapted from Michael Sprague (CC-SA).

Note that my legal usage of these materials, under the CC license terms extended as of this posting, does not imply any endorsement or agreement with this essay by the photographers. In compliance with the “share alike” license of Mr. Sprague’s image, reproductions of my adapted version of it are licensed (unlike the rest of my blog or pictures) under the Creative Commons Attribution–ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Notes

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1. To their credit, the Jehovah’s Witnesses do not consign anybody to eternal torment, believing that the fate of those outside the organization is just annihilation. In that, at least, we agree. ↩

2. I’m happy to report that my old church has recently spoken out against shunning. See my August 2014 blog post, “Open Dialogue over the Faith Boundary.” ↩

3. The Bible is no moral guide in this or many other matters, it turns out, and this is just the New Testament. In the Hebrew Bible, believing the wrong thing would earn you a violent death at the hands of the Chosen People. As I point out in EOP, if a family member or your wife or a dear friend secretly asks you to go worship other gods, it’s not enough to say no and rebuke him or her for the apostasy. Deuteronomy 13:9-10 says you have to kill him or her: “thine hand shall be first upon him to put him to death, and afterwards the hand of all the people. And thou shalt stone him with stones, that he die.” ↩