Daughter (15) recently told my wife and I that she has a huge crush on this boy (17) from school who’s hanging out with her friend group a lot these days. She said he can’t date because he’s a Jehovah’s Witness. All wife & I knew before is that they’re some Christian group. From what we read online they seem to be pretty radical & abstract stuff like 144000 (?), Armageddon. They even get called a cult.
Fairly recent (in the scheme of things) non standard Christian group
they don’t believe in the trinity: God is god, Jesus was crafted by god - used to be an angel, the holy spirit is more like an impersonal force
they don’t believe in everlasting hell, they believe the soul of unbelievers is annihilated
believe Armageddon is imminent and have repeatedly tried predicting it and failed
they originated from a bible study group in the 1800s and some things they are into are actually a literal reading of the new testament rather than a more pop culture or traditional view of Christianity. for example:
they believe the future of believers is on a restored earth, not heaven (based on Revelation). (This is why all their tracts have pictures of ‘the good family life’ in a park or nature type setting. That’s the earth restored to be like Eden)
they believe 144000 special believers are elevated to rule in heaven (Revelation again)
they believe a letter written by the apostle in Acts telling believers to “abstain from blood” is still in force (to be fair there isn’t anything saying it isn’t) which they take to mean refusing all blood including blood transfusions
they don’t believe in Christmas, Easter or birthday celebrations because they’re not in the bible. Christmas trees are pagan etc
they practice ‘shunning’ family and church members who won’t repent of sin which sees some parents totally rejecting their children, people acting like people don’t exist if they see them on the street. (Again to be fair, this is what the new testament tells Christians to do). For this they (rightly) get flak for being cultish and overly controlling
they believe it’s every believers duty to give people opportunity to repent hence going door to door (I think they’ve stopped doing this now) or standing on the street offering their standard magazine “Awake”
their central organisation is called the Watchtower, again a biblical reference to keeping watch for the end of the world
various reports of child abuse scandals typical in any organisation where you can’t question or scrutinised authority
They still go door to door and the newsletter is called The Watchtower.
And to clarify the very specific 144000 number: that’s made of up 12k people from the original 12 tribes of Israel. When I pointed out that I wasn’t Jewish so does it mean I don’t get to go to heaven, they clarified that it was 11 tribes and one “lost tribe” that allows non-jews eligibility. “So only twelve thousand get into heaven, out of about 9 billion?” They agreed that it’s the gospel and many people weren’t good enough Christians. I asked how many Jehovah’s Witnesses there were. They left after they figured out I was going to ask questions that exposed their awkward answers.
Jehovah’s Witnesses are one of the only cults that tell people that they most likely aren’t going into heaven for believing and giving your life to a religion. And don’t even insinuate that better Christians might appear in the future and take their places in heaven. The end will happen before new Christians have a chance to prove how good they are.
JW are super petty and very mean to even their own. It’s all passive aggressive and it’s constant.
They send me hand written Hallmark cards. They don’t know my name (yet) so mine get addressed to “our neighbor” but my neighbors get them addressed by name and are very creeped out by it. The latest one came during the LA fires and is about how “the bible” will help me “cope” with extreme weather:
I got a letter like this a couple years back. No hallmark card, just the thinnest and flimsiest paper you’ve ever seen. It was pretty eerie to have a random handwritten letter addressed to me by name, but since name and address is public information here in Sweden it’s hardly surprising they have it.
My old workplace happened to be right next to a JW cult church, “Rikets Sal” as it’s called in Swedish, which I’m guessing translates to like “Halls of the Kingdom” or something like that in English. They were terrible neighbours. They tended their property meticulously, and wouldn’t be obstructive, but they’d come over during business hours and they were intensely misogynistic. They’d also attempt to kill the hedge that sat between their church and our offices because they were unhappy with how tall it was. That is up until my boss threatened to charge them for it.
I got this in my letterbox last new years day
from them. (The paper strip, not the cute magnet frog)
It says in Swedish: “On new years eve a lot of fireworks create light phenomenon in the sky. In the near future the greatest light phenomenon the world has ever seen will appear, it will be like when the lightning flames from east to west and shall occur when the Human Son return with his angels. Vigilance is needed for this event!”
It’s been on my fridge ever since. I remain vigilant for the return of the king although it sounds like it will be hard to miss.
Well, I guess they had good intentions, at least?
“Awake!” is also a thing. I’ve seen it many times.
Looks like they have two: “Awake” and “Watchtower”: https://www.jw.org/en/library/magazines/
In London in recent years I’ve only seen Awake. Maybe Watchtower is American or only in Kingdom halls?
As far as I’m aware there are 10 lost tribes. Only Judah and Benjamin were not regarded as lost. They might have a different view on that of course…
They don’t see the “vast multitude” (who are believers besides the 144,000) as having a bad deal in any way. They get to live on the restored earth which is basically Eden paradise. That’s why all their magazines / tracts have pictures of an idyllic life in a park / nature type setting
I did econmerce for a grocery chain during COVID. A JW retirement community was a huge source of customers. They spent ungodly amounts of money on cheese and crackers
They now stand outside places, like a university a few miles away from me, and have incredibly idiotic stands meant to take advantage of people going through hard times.
They do far more than that to be considered cultish. The elders of an area have a large degree of input on things like marriage, for instance, which goes hand in hand with men moving their new wives to areas far away from any family. Combine that with the typical cult emphasis on only socializing with people in the cult, and you’ve got a beautiful combination to keep women oppressed and without options. I’ve had to sit and listen to a poor woman come to terms with leaving everything, adult children included, behind and hope that her family would still help her after 30 years, because she had no other means of support. It was horrifying, because even the resources I was trying to pair her with wouldn’t be enough to help.
#3 seems like a pretty standard evangelical Christian group
Yes, it’s a general feature though I’ve rarely come across evangelical groups that go as far as to make public proclamations of their predictions like Jehovah’s witnesses did (some do, no doubt)
Amusingly it seems the JWs might have only survived because around 1886 it accidentally predicted 1914 would be the end of the world and the beginning of the favouring of the Jews (WWI and II culminated in the re-founding of Israel)
They re-engineered the text of the prophecy to better match the outbreak of world war (unsurprisingly). But that, together with the founding of Israel in 1948 are things they still point back to as “proofs”