Keith, Lili & Sisi Andreve
It has been nearly sixteen years since I became a Christian and left the JWs. My brief five years as a Witness had a profound effect on me that lasted years beyond my departure to become an "apostate", "opposer", and "member of Babylon the Great." The past several years of growth in Christ have been a cleansing of the old JW beliefs and conditioning. For most people who leave the Witnesses the adjustment process takes years. Certain doctrines or attitudes that shaped us as JWs can still linger and hamper us. Three subjects that bothered me for some years were hell, politics, and military service. In this article I will focus on politics.
My earliest dealings with the US government were when I was a Witness in 1979. I remember how the Elders "encouraged" (i.e. pushed), me to apply for public assistance first before they would help me. I was thrown out of the house by my father two weeks after graduation from high school because I took a stand to prepare to go to Bethel rather than to college. I rejected college despite having been in the National Honor Society. That was when the Watchtower was in a tough anti-college period. Many didn't expect the world to go beyond 1984 (1914 + 70), so college was viewed as a waste of time, besides being very dangerous. In recent years the Watchtower Organization has considerably softened its stance on college, and made yet another "adjustment in thinking." I thank God I changed my mind and went to college where I met Christians who witnessed to me, rather than wasting the rest of my youth pioneering or working at Bethel.
Dealings with "Satan's system" seemed to be OK when we could get something from it. In my own case it had been OK for me to take money from the system first before God's servants would offer me help. The typical JW excuse about having paid taxes into the system didn't hold water because I had never worked before. The Elders were relieved when I qualified for food stamps and found a part-time minimum wage job. They didn't have to give me anything. I ended up living with one of the poorest families in the congregation in a dilapidated house for a year where I got very sick in the cold upstate New York winter. Each of the Elders and ministerial servants had their excuses as to why they couldn't help me, despite their having been the ones to encourage me to take a strong stand for Jehovah against my father. My mentor, who was the Presiding Overseer and the richest person in the congregation, said I couldn't temporarily move into his large custom-built house because he had two daughters. It would have looked bad to outsiders. Years later I discovered that he let his daughter's fiance live together with them in their house for one year prior to the wedding. He didn't seem to care about appearances in that situation.
During the first few years after I left the JWs I slowly moved away from an anti-political attitude. I didn't think much about politics and I chose not to get involved. I now think that involvement in politics or patriotic activities is a conscience matter, although I strongly encourage Christians to be informed and involved.
I began to change to a politically active and patriotic viewpoint when I went to live in China for a year as a student in 1985. I clearly saw how the communist government had a profound negative effect on the economy and people's daily lives. Freedoms that I took for granted under a Western democratic system either were not there or couldn't be guaranteed. The sharp contrast made me thankful for what I had back home. I wanted to learn why we had the blessings of economic abundance and political freedom.
My first visit to China further encouraged me to study the histories of 2Oth century China, communism, WWII, and the influence of Christianity on the evolution of government in the West. I went back to China for a year in the fall of 1988. There I met my wife and got married. We stayed in Beijing all during the student demonstrations and subsequent massacre in June of 1989. I didn't flee China with the thousands of other foreigners. It was terrifying to see the crushing power of the government but heartening to see how many people risked their lives by demonstrating for the basic freedoms we have in the West. Christians actively ministered and witnessed to the students who occupied Tiananmen Square. I saw how the government propaganda machine in a system without a free press lied about the whole affair. After the massacre the communist government sent another chill through the city when all the students, teachers, and factory workers had to write confession reports about their involvement and attend committee meetings with officials.
At the public Chinese church I attended the minister couldn't even mention praying for the massacre victims from the pulpit because of government spies in the pews. Years later the same minister was ousted from the church by policemen who interrupted the service and hauled him off. They replaced him with someone whom they wanted. The minister told me that he knew what the communists feared most wasn't capitalism or Buddhism. It was Christianity. The former Premier of China Zhou Enlai even admitted that. At least since the Reformation true Christianity has been the biggest threat to totalitarian regimes and so the Chinese authorities are hardest on Christians.
The seeds planted by the Christian missionaries during the decades prior to the Communist Revolution have born fruit in recent years, as seen in the current great revival going on in China, which the government can't stop. The missionaries built thousands of medical clinics, schools, and orphanages. They actively fought against the opium trade and exploitation of women. In fact, one of the most revered leaders in Chinese history, Sun Yatsen, who ended the dynastic system in 1911, was a devout Christian. In contrast the JWs today have very little to show for their past meager efforts in China.
The JW's stand on abortion troubled me. While claiming to be vehemently opposed to abortion, their lack of action against it was particularly disturbing. Their neutrality doctrine forbade political action. But they didn't even want to do something charitable directed by the Organization's headquarters or even on the local congregational level like run crisis pregnancy centers or adoption agencies. Their neutrality on this issue is contrary to the early Christians who rescued babies consigned to die by pagans who put unwanted new born children in caves to starve to death. An excellent book on the nearly 2000-year history of Christian pro-life activity is Third Time Around by George Grant.
There is more to saving lives and charity than simply witnessing to someone or handing them some literature. The old JW analogy of likening non-preaching activity to rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic (a waste of time) because the world is ending soon is false. We can't be sure whether Armageddon will occur in our life time. The JWs have been revising their predictions for over eighty years. The recent "new light" on the 1914 generation has pushed the end even further into the future. Think of the wasted decades that have passed since they first declared the end was so near. I can think of better things to do than "counting time" by taking little children door to door in the frigid winter or standing silently for hours holding up magazines.
I don't think the neutrality doctrine is the main reason for the JWs' general lack of charity, especially to non-JWs. The main reason is their wrong view of God and his love. People are a reflection of the God they worship. The excuse that it doesn't really matter whether millions die of starvation, war, and abortion now because they will be resurrected in the New Order rings hollow. They rarely pray about the horrible things in the world except in reference to getting strength for themselves to carry on their preaching work.
It is true that the JWs fought for freedom in the US courts years ago to practice their religion. But they often cursed the very same system that they used to their advantage. (Anyone reading Rutherford's books can see the venom in them.) The US system gave them the freedom to march up and down sidewalks in front of churches with placards saying, "Religion is a snare and a racket."
The JWs told me that the world is so opposed to the "Truth" that we have no reliable source of information available to tell us about the government's activities, even if we wanted to try to do the right thing politically. The fact is that we do have reliable Christian sources of information in North America. It is incumbent upon us to search them out. The JWs in their closed Orwellian system limit or don't permit outside sources of information. The Christian Coalition and many other groups monitor the government and the media. The Christian Coalition regularly distributes hundreds of thousands of voter guides with the voting records of every member of Congress. Awake! magazine is woefully inadequate in informing anyone about what's going on in the world, let alone in giving serious analysis. A Christian version of Time and Newsweek is World magazine. (One can receive a sample copy by calling 800-951-6397.)
As a JW I was told not to waste time reading any "worldly publications", including Newsweek. That view is isolationist and helps to reinforce JW mind-control. It is also reflected in their glaring lack of contributions to biblical scholarship, biblical archeology, and the vital ministry of translating the scriptures into the world's languages. The JWs benefit (vampires) highly from the work of Wycliffe Bible Translators. They imagine themselves to have a table spread with an abundant spiritual feast; while the rest of us for the past 1900 years have been spiritually starving or dead. What the JWs really have are stacks of magazines and books that basically rehash the same articles over and over again based on a fatally corrupt "translation" of the Bible. I make these criticisms in contrast to the grandiose claims the JWs make for their Organization.
All systems of human government are hugely flawed and will be abolished at Christ's Second Coming. America itself has much to repent of and may suffer tremendously for its sins prior to Christ's return. However, while we wait for Him we are called to be the salt of the earth and to shine as illuminators in a dark world. There is a firm biblical basis for political involvement, especially in the resistance to tyranny, the promotion of biblically based laws, and in the protection of the unborn and weak. We can promote "Kingdom interests" in many ways. Christianity should extend it's influence into all spheres of human activity (i.e. art, music, economics, government, literature, etc.). It certainly has in the past, making invaluable contributions to world civilization. There is much more to the history of Christendom than the Crusades and the Inquisition. I believe we should reject the "neutral" stance of the JWs and pietist Christian sects as being unbiblical arid dangerous. I've learned that patriotism doesn't mean, "my country right or wrong." It means we should salute and strive for the ideals of what the country should be and fight against those things which are unbiblical and ungodly. As with the holidays, we don't need to "throw the baby out with the bath water." There is much truth in the saying, "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."