Jan 29, 2023
Where does the term ‘Stockholm syndrome’ come from?
Jan 27, 2023
Cults – what they are, how we can stop them and how we can reduce harm
Abnormal Normal: My Life in the Children of God - Kindle edition by Mahoney, Mary.
'Sexual Wellness' Company Founder Loses Libel Bid Against BBC Over Podcast
Variety
KJ Yossman
January 26, 2023
The founder of “sexual wellness” company OneTaste has failed in her bid to sue the BBC for libel over a podcast.
Last March, Nicole Daedone, the co-founder and former CEO of “orgasmic meditation” company OneTaste, applied to be party to an existing libel action against the BBC over a podcast called “The Orgasm Cult” that ran in November and December 2020. She was joined in her application by OneTaste itself and Rachel Cherwitz, an “orgasmic meditation” practitioner.
The original libel action, which continues, was filed by the Institute of OM LLC and OM IP Co – understood to be a rebranded version of OneTaste – in November 2021.
However, the BBC argued that Daedone, Cherwitz and OneTaste’s libel claims were time-barred, falling outside the 12-month limitation period.
In a judgement handed down on Thursday, Mr Justice Pepperall, who heard the application, said that he would not permit Daedone and OneTaste to be added as parties to the libel claim because the time limit had expired and would be “prejudicial” to the BBC. However, he said that Cherwitz’s libel claim could proceed because she was “not aware of the original claim and did not make a deliberate decision in November 2021 not to join in proceedings.”
“While the High Court has decided not to hear my defamation claim, this does not in any way alleviate the BBC’s responsibility to correct its errors and ensure the facts are put on record,” said Daedone in a statement. “I have said I find bringing defamation proceedings distasteful. Yet despite having in its possession the true facts that unravel the false thread that holds together its podcast, the BBC has been unwilling to do its duty to ensure the public is accurately informed.”
Daedone had claimed the BBC’s podcast had defamed her by suggesting that she – along with OneTaste and Cherwitz – had “controlled a destructive sex cult which, under the false pretence of being a wellness organisation promoting empowerment for modern women, deliberately manipulated and exploited vulnerable women causing them lifelong trauma for the purpose of making themselves wealthy,” according to the judgment.
She also said that the podcast accused the trio of being responsible for “serious criminal acts including the repeated rape of a vulnerable woman, sex trafficking, and facilitating and benefiting from prostitution and violations of labour law,” the judgment continued.
OneTaste was formed in the mid-early 2000s in San Francisco after Daedone was reportedly introduced to “orgasmic meditation” by a Buddhist monk. The company operated workshops, retreats and a coaching program, among other offerings. However, following a Bloomberg deep dive titled “The Dark Side of OneTaste, the Orgasmic Meditation Company,” which claimed the company “resembled a kind of prostitution ring,” the FBI reportedly opened a probe.
Daedone sold her stake in the company in 2017.
The BBC’s 10-part podcast, “The Orgasm Cult,” hosted by Nastaran Tavakoli-Far, touts itself as “a story about people desperate for connection and how far they would go to find it.”
The logline reads: “Join Nastaran Tavakoli-Far as she investigates One Taste through exclusive interviews with former employees and asks big questions about the wellness industry.”
In November, Netflix dropped a documentary about the company titled “Orgasm Inc: The Story of OneTaste.”
A spokesperson for the BBC told Variety: “We note the court’s decision not to allow the libel claims of two claimants to proceed, and aren’t able to comment further at this preliminary stage.”
OneTaste’s current CEO Anjuli Ayer said: “I am encouraged that Rachel Cherwitz’s application for an individual libel claim has been approved. The false attack on a woman for entertainment purposes is misogynistic and should not be allowed to continue. Rachel is a courageous individual for taking on a leading global broadcaster that has lost its moral compass. I am thankful to the High Court for having carefully considered our out of time application for a libel claim against the BBC. The same claim continues from our affiliated company the Institute of OM.”
https://variety.com/2023/biz/global/onetaste-podcast-bbc-nicole-daedone-libel-lawsui-1235503124/
Shawn Vestal: Another year, another chance to fix Idaho's fatal faith-healing protections
Shawn Vestal,
The Spokesman-Review, Spokane, Wash.
January 24, 2023
Jan. 24—More than seven years ago, Boise attorney Kirt Naylor signed off on a rallying cry to defend Idaho's children.
In a letter to then-Gov. Butch Otter, Naylor and the rest of the 17 members of the Governor's Task Force on Children at Risk, outlined a child mortality rate in a Canyon County faith-healing community that was 10 times greater than the state average.
The committee, including doctors, judges and citizens from across the state, urged Otter to revise the state's religious exemption to child abuse and neglect laws, which protect parents from civil or criminal repercussions if their children suffer or die as a result of their religious beliefs.
"Our First Amendment right to religious freedom does not include the right to abuse or neglect children," the letter read.
"In 1944, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, 'The right to practice religion freely does not include liberty to expose the community or child to communicable disease, or the latter to ill health or death. ... Parents may be free to become martyrs themselves. But it does not follow that they are free, in identical circumstances, to make martyrs of their children ... "
And yet year after year, more martyred children of the Followers of Christ Church are buried from treatable or preventable causes — from sepsis, pneumonia, diabetes and other conditions that most children survive — and year after year, attempts to stand up for them in the Statehouse come to naught.
"It's disappointing something more hasn't been done," said Naylor, a former prosecutor in Ada County and longtime volunteer in the state's Court-Appointed Guardian Ad Litem program for abused children. He served on the task force from 2000 to 2016.
"I believe there can be some form of agreement where religious freedoms are protected but vulnerable children are also protected from severe illness and death."
That agreement has been elusive. And as the new legislative session gets rolling, the early signs are that it will remain so.
In the task force's letter, written in July 2015, they noted the grossly high proportion of children's graves in the Peaceful Valley Cemetery, near the small town of Marsing. The cemetery serves the Followers of Christ Church, who do not believe in using modern medicine.
Between 2002 and 2011, the letter says, state records show that 3.37% of all deaths in Idaho occurred among children. During the same period, 130 people were buried at the cemetery; 40 of those deaths, or 31%, were children or stillbirths.
Since then, other efforts have been made to try and make an accurate counting of the deaths of children among the church members. The Idaho Statesman found 19 instances of child deaths since 2015, in an investigative story in 2020 and an update this month. Other journalists have covered the story, as well, and a documentary about the Followers of Christ, "No Greater Law," was released in 2018.
The Idaho Legislature has spent the last couple of sessions puffing itself up as the most "pro-life" of them all. This year is off to a nutty start on that front with the culture-war exertions of its newest counter-balance to intelligent lawmaking, Sagle's Scott Herndon.
Herndon proposed a measure that would force children to take advantage of the "opportunity" to bear their rapists' babies, by eliminating the exceptions for rape and incest built into the state's new, draconian anti-abortion laws. The measure was DOA, but it got a committee discussion.
Here is how Herndon responded when asked about decency of forcing a teenage girl to bear a child if she were raped by a father or an uncle: "Some people could describe the situation that you're talking about as the opportunity to have the child under those terrible circumstances, if the rape actually occurred."
The silver lining, if you will. The idea that this got even a brief airing in the Capitol chambers, while no one is rising up to put a stop to the ongoing deaths of children at the Followers of Christ Church, tells you a lot about the current state of "pro-life" politics in Idaho.
Over and over again, Idaho lawmakers have simply supported the rights of parents to religiously neglect their children to death. Legislative proposals to change that usually don't even make it to a full vote.
"I personally believe in prayer and medical intervention but I cannot interfere with a parent's right to worship as their faith and morals direct them," Sen. Patti Anne Lodge, who represented the district where the church is located and was a staunch opponent of removing the faith-healing exemption, said in 2018.
Even those Republican lawmakers who might have qualms seem scared to even bring it up, and in a Senate that has veered even harder to the far right — where the pandemic has driven the commitment to medical quackery to new heights — we probably shouldn't hold our breath for progress.
The new chairman of the Senate State Affairs Committee, where such legislation has tended to die in past years, described the issue to the Statesman recently as "a very complicated, touchy issue."
In what universe is this very complicated?
In what world touchy?
Many states offer some protection for faith healing, but only six grant full immunity to parents for the death and serious injury of a child. (Washington has a peculiarly narrow exemption for Christian Science faith-healing.)
Good, decent Idahoans have been crying out for change for a long time now. Naylor and many others want lawmakers to protect children here, and many of those calling for change are not at all opposed to faith healing, per se.
"I believe in faith as a means of healing," said Naylor, who is LDS. "I believe in medical healing, too. But if a child is likely to die imminently or to be severely injured imminently, something has to be done to protect the rights of the child.
"In these cases, the child doesn't have a voice."
Idaho lawmakers have had a long time to change that.
And they have another chance right now.
https://news.yahoo.com/shawn-vestal-another-another-chance-045900005.html
Psychedelic church asks panel to let it seek religious exemption for drug use
A Florida church known for its use of ayahuasca tea in religious retreat ceremonies wants an appeal court to revive its challenge to a DEA decision prohibiting its use of the hallucinogenic drink.
Courthouse news service
KAYLA GOGGIN / January 25, 2023
ATLANTA (CN) — An attorney for an Orlando church asked an 11th Circuit panel on Wednesday to overturn a Florida federal judge’s dismissal of its challenge to a Drug Enforcement Administration decision prohibiting the church from using psychedelic ayahuasca tea in its religious retreats.
Billing itself as a “spiritual learning and healing center,” Soul Quest Church of Mother Earth offers three-day retreats at its facility where participants can imbibe ayahuasca, a tea that contains the hallucinogen dimethyltryptamine, or DMT, in search of a religious awakening. For a $999 donation, Soul Quest Church extends participants the chance to join in on weekend retreat ceremonies to experience the “healing” attributes of the tea.
There’s just one problem: federal drug enforcers say the church is not entitled to a religious-based exemption to the Controlled Substances Act, the federal law designating DMT as a Schedule I substance with no currently accepted medical use.
Regardless of the DEA’s decision and a wrongful death lawsuit arising from one of its retreats, the ceremonies have continued unabated for the last seven years.
An attorney representing Soul Quest Church and its leader, Christopher Young, told a panel of the Atlanta-based appeals court that a Florida federal judge unfairly dismissed his clients’ lawsuit against the DEA last March.
The church sued the agency under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, claiming in legal filings that its refusal to issue a religious exemption for the sacramental use of ayahuasca violates the First Amendment’s free exercise clause. Soul Quest Church had previously sued to block the DEA from enforcing the Controlled Substances Act against its use of the tea.
U.S. District Judge Wendy Berger ruled that the court did not have jurisdiction over the case and dismissed it.
The plant-based brew made from Amazonian vines and leaves originated with indigenous cultures in Latin America but in recent years has become popular among westerners seeking to treat physical, spiritual and mental ailments, including depression.
According to a 2016 review published in the journal Frontiers in Pharmacology about the therapeutic potentials of ayahuasca, the perception-altering tea often produces visions of beautiful scenery, “power animals, spirit guides, topical motifs, vibrant and varying geometric patterns” and induces self-reflection.
In its decision rejecting the church’s petition for a religious exemption to use the tea, the DEA determined that Soul Quest Church did not show that its use of ayahuasca is “pursuant to a religious exercise and based on a sincerely held religious belief.” The agency determined that the church promotes the use of ayahuasca for self-help and therapeutic reasons, not for religious ritual purposes.
But the church has claimed that the DEA failed to properly conduct an investigation into the sincerity of its religious use of ayahuasca, calling the process “defective in practice” in court filings.
Arguing on behalf of Soul Quest Church, attorney Derek Brett of the Burnside Law Group reiterated that claim on Wednesday.
Asked by U.S. Circuit Judge Britt Grant whether anyone could look at the evidence and question the religious sincerity of the group, Brett said it was not up to the DEA to make that call. Brett told the panel the church was entitled to “the same robust protections” that Congress anticipated under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
Justice Department attorney Lowell Sturgill, Jr. asked the panel to uphold the lower court’s decision, arguing that the church has failed to follow the appropriate procedures to appeal the DEA’s decision.
Instead of filing a petition for review within 30 days, the church elected to challenge the denial in federal court by adding it to the initial lawsuit against the agency. This type of legal maneuvering doomed the church’s appeal, DOJ attorneys argued in an appellate brief.
The government has also argued in legal filings that its denial of Soul Quest Church’s exemption request is in the interest of public health and safety. Although the church lists common side effects of drinking ayahuasca tea on its website – including panic, paranoia, vomiting and diarrhea – it claims that the brew “seems to be safe” for healthy individuals.
According to Berger’s ruling, church members are educated and evaluated for suitability before participating in the ceremony. But an investigation by the DEA revealed that the church does not always follow its own policies.
Soul Quest Church was sued in March 2020 for wrongful death after a 22-year-old participant in one of its ceremonies died. According to the lawsuit filed in Orange County Circuit Court, Brandon Begley began behaving “erratically” and making “abnormal bodily movements” after taking part in a Kambo session.
The session involved the administration of poisonous secretions from South American giant monkey frogs through holes burned into Begley’s skin with a heated stick.
The lawsuit filed by Begley’s father alleged that Soul Quest Church's employees waited three hours before calling 911. The action claims that employees failed to properly monitor Begley or prevent him from drinking an unsafe amount of water, leading to his hospitalization for respiratory failure and an anoxic brain injury.
Begley died several days later.
Another lawsuit filed by Kevin Rupchand the following year alleged that he had a seizure and lost consciousness after drinking too much water during a ceremony in which participants consumed a poison from tree bark.
In light of the allegations, the DEA argued in its appellate brief that refusing to grant the church a religious exemption “is the least restrictive means of protecting the public health and safety.”
Grant and fellow Trump appointee U.S. Circuit Judge Kevin Newsom were joined on the panel by U.S. Circuit Judge Jill Pryor, an Obama appointee.
The panel did not indicate when it would reach a decision in the case.
Jan 26, 2023
New book suggests Florida cult inspired Waco's David Koresh

A National Guard helicopter flies past the burning Branch Davidian cult compound in Waco, Texas, on April 19, 1993. Photo: Tim Roberts/AFP via Getty Images
Journalist Jeff Guinn says he's found new evidence that Texas cult leader David Koresh was a fake who plagiarized the prophecies of a long-forgotten Fort Myers man.
- Guinn's new book, "Waco: David Koresh, the Branch Dividians, and a Legacy of Rage," timed to release near the 30th anniversary of the notorious 1993 siege in Waco, Texas, traces the "prophecies" of the ill-fated Branch Davidian leader back to the banks of the Estero River at the turn of the last century.
Flashback: In the 1890s, a man named Cyrus Reed Teed, who proclaimed himself to be the Messiah, moved with some followers from Chicago to 300 riverside acres in Fort Myers.
- There, the "eclectic" physician and alchemist, who identified himself by the single name Koresh, built a following of hundreds while proclaiming through a newsletter that the End Times were coming and he would be transformed, and his followers would be treated well in the afterlife.
- Teed claimed he'd been visited by an angel who told him he'd "redeem the race" and open the Seven Seals to initiate Armageddon.
Yes, but: Teed died in 1908 and did not rise from the dead. His body was entombed in a mausoleum on the beach in Fort Myers, but it was washed away by the 1921 hurricane.
- The number of so-called Koreshans dwindled until the last of them, a single German woman, gifted the compound to the state of Florida in the 1960s. It is now a state park.

Fast forward: Years later, in the late 1980s, a young man named Vernon Wayne Howell would start calling himself David Koresh, adopt Teed's prophecies as his own and emerge as the leader of a cult in Texas.
The connection: Guinn notes the astonishing similarities in the mens' stories and prophecies, and many David Koresh scholars agree that he must've plagiarized Teed, knowingly or not.
Of note: Guinn found that in 1993, the Waco public library had a rare copy of "Koreshanity: The New Age Religion," published by Teed's followers long after his death to keep his legacy alive.

Leeds man who labelled church a 'cult' not guilty of harassing members whose accusations were an 'exercise in pearl clutching'
A Leeds man has been found not guilty of harassing members of a church who he sent letters and emails to stating that they were a part of a “cult”.
Yorkshire Evening Post
By Charles Gray
January 25, 2023
Lance Christie, 57, was acquitted yesterday (Wednesday) at Leeds Magistrates’ Court of one charge of harassment against eight members of the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church; including two of his sons and his nephew. It was heard that Christie delivered letters to their homes in December 2020 before sending emails to family members in 2021. He then sent another email to members that included links to YouTube videos criticising the “fundamentalist” group in April 2022.
The eight church members were cross examined on Monday and Tuesday, during which they said that the messages were “an attack on what’s precious” to them and had left them “distressed”.
The court heard that Christie had been a member of the church, which has a congregation in Horsforth, since birth but was excommunicated in 2017 due to acts of “heresy”. In the documents shared with members he accused the church of being a “cult” and said that the church had “caused him to lose his family and business”.
Closing remarks were read out by the prosecution and defence on Wednesday before the not guilty verdict was given.
Representing Christie, Simon Myerson KC said that the accusations made by the church members were “a concerted effort made out of vindictiveness and spite” and “an exercise in pearl clutching”. He said that the members “wanted to criminalise” Christie.
He said: “It’s perfectly clear this is a one-man church. What that means is is these people can’t say why they found it oppressive and unacceptable and what it amounts to is ‘I don’t like what I think is heresy’.
Mr Myerson emphasised that members had read the emails and clicked on the links to the videos of their own volition and said that their reasons for feeling harassed were “nonsense”. He said: “These are grown up choices. People are allowed to make them of course they but you can’t then say ‘now I have done that I’m harassed’. You have gone voluntarily to look at material that might upset you.
"People are allowed to follow faiths that can’t deal with challenge and insulate themselves from criticism if they think their faith will be shattered. But in this case the mechanism of delivery allowed for exactly that.”
In his closing remarks the representative for the prosecution, Robert Campbell said there was a “balancing act” when looking at Christie’s remarks of whether he had “overstepped the mark”. He said: “Where he oversteps the line is to email the people directly and draw their attention to matters they don’t want to hear.”
The district judge overseeing the trial, Timothy Capstick said that he had considered whether the contents of the information sent by Christie had been “oppressive and unacceptable”. He said: “While each complainant was upset at what they saw or read, none could actually explain when invited to do so what he found oppressive or unacceptable.”
He said that he believed the defendants were genuinely distressed by the material but rejected their reasons for reading it, saying: “The explanations given are at best disingenuous. The reality is they knew the content was going to be unwelcome if they read it.”
The People With Purple Triangles
Tablet
MAGGIE PHILLIPS
JANUARY 25, 2023
Jehovah’s Witnesses were among the very first groups persecuted by the Nazis, from 1933 until 1945. By the end of WWII, thousands had been imprisoned or sent to concentration camps. Hundreds of ernste Bibelforscher (“earnest Bible students,” as they were called by many Germans at the time) died by guillotine, shooting, hanging, lethal injection, in gas chambers and medical experiments, and as a result of the harsh conditions they endured in detention.
Often Aryan and fluent German speakers, many Jehovah’s Witnesses had an atypical experience in concentration camps, compared to other groups (accounts describe some working in the homes of SS officers). A 2017 article in the journal Genocide Studies theorizes that their race and language, combined with “group cohesion, mutual support, and religious faith,” meant a higher-than-average survival rate for Jehovah’s Witnesses compared to other groups. Like the other descendants of groups persecuted during the Holocaust, followers of the faith today continue to honor both the profound suffering and the steadfastness of their forebears who faced deprivation, torture, and death. But their fellow believers today draw particular inspiration from the way that Jehovah’s Witnesses of the time were committed to communicating their faith to their fellow prisoners, and the horror they were living to the wider world.
This legacy continues, as Jehovah’s Witness publications and media speak out about the persecution of their co-religionists in the oppressive regimes of the 21st century, as Jehovah’s Witnesses around the world continue to experience state persecution for their beliefs.
Faith-sharing is at the core of who Jehovah’s Witnesses are; they are best known for their door-to-door evangelism. Even when the COVID-19 pandemic stymied their trademark in-person approach, they switched to handwritten letters, inviting recipients to learn more about Jehovah’s Witnesses’ perspective on suffering (they resumed door-to-door ministry just last year).
Originally calling themselves simply Bible Students, Jehovah’s Witnesses came out of the Adventist movement of the 1830s, which believed in the imminent return of Christ. When the movement broke up into factions in the 1840s, the Bible Students were led by a man named Charles Taze Russell. Russell departed from much of Christian orthodoxy, preaching that the doctrine of the Trinity was unscriptural, and that Christ’s second coming would be an invisible manifestation of his presence. Today, Witnesses continue to oppose Trinitarian beliefs, rejecting the idea that Jesus is one with God, while remaining distinct, manifesting through their relationship a third person, known as the Holy Spirit. Rather, they see Jesus as subordinate to God, his father. Jehovah’s Witnesses remain convinced of Christ’s invisible, spiritual second coming, which they hold began in 1914, based on a prophecy in the Book of Daniel, and which they believe is leading up to the final triumph of God over evil.
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Evangelizing by Mail
When the pandemic made unannounced home visits untenable, Jehovah’s Witnesses stopped knocking on doors and started writing letters instead
BY MAGGIE PHILLIPS
Publishing is in their DNA: Russell also established the Watch Tower Society, which was dedicated to the publication of tracts and other religious literature, still a feature of Jehovah’s Witnesses’ proselytizing today. In fact, the Bible Students’ leadership was imprisoned in Atlanta in 1918 for violating the Sedition Act, due in part to the publication of a book, The Finished Mystery, which criticized the U.S. government and the militarism that it asserted led to America’s involvement in WWI. According to a Jehovah’s Witness publication on the history of their denomination, when their leaders were released in 1919, the Bible Students approached their mission of sharing their beliefs with renewed vigor; 1927 saw believers formally encouraged to devote some of their time to “witnessing,” or sharing their faith with others. In 1931, inspired by a verse from Isaiah (“‘You are My witnesses,’ said the Lord, ‘And I am God.’”), they changed their name to Jehovah’s Witnesses. By 1933, when Hitler came to power as chancellor of Germany, their numbers in Germany had grown to an estimated 30,000 since their arrival in the country at the end of the previous century.
Jehovah’s Witnesses’ faith commits them to remain neutral toward secular things like politics, military service, and nationalism. In Nazi Germany, then, they resisted joining the military or the Nazi party. They abstained from participation in elections, from working in government factories that supplied the military, as well as from saluting the swastika, the Nazi flag, or Hitler.
“In the distribution of their literature and in door-to-door missionary work,” writes one 2001 reviewer of a book of essays on the Jehovah’s Witnesses in the Holocaust, “the Jehovah’s Witnesses […] offered a real and visible challenge.”
The Third Reich began putting Jehovah’s Witnesses in concentration camps after they realized their 1933 ban on the group’s activities had failed. Jehovah’s Witnesses, who were drawn primarily from the urban working classes, and whose earliest converts were within a generation of the existing contemporary communities, carried on their proselytizing and meetings in secret, even after members were temporarily jailed by authorities.
Once they were placed in camps, Jehovah’s Witnesses were made to wear purple triangles. Because they were some of the earliest detainees, according to the authors of the 2017 Genocide Studies article, Sabrina C.H. Chang and Peter Suedfeld, Jehovah’s Witnesses often served as mentors and advocates for those who arrived after them. In contrast to the Jews and the other ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities the Nazis put in concentration camps, Jehovah’s Witnesses were allowed to recant and leave if they so chose, by signing a statement repudiating their beliefs. While some certainly did, it is thought that, per the 2001 review, appearing in the journal Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte, “the majority of Witnesses simply refused to give to the state what they knew belonged only to God.”
Unlike other Christians who were persecuted during the Holocaust, usually interned and killed for speaking out against the regime, or for hiding Jews, Jehovah’s Witnesses were a different case. Not an ethnic or sexual minority, “[w]hile other opponents of the regime were persecuted for what they did, the Jehovah’s Witnesses suffered because of what they refused to do,” wrote Jon S. Conway of the University of British Columbia, in a 2004 review of the same essay collection (Persecution and Resistance of Jehovah’s Witnesses during the Nazi Regime 1933-1945, edited by Hans Hesse).
For this reason, Conway asks in his review whether Jehovah’s Witnesses, who were often treated more favorably by their captors due to their race, could properly be thought of as engaging in resistance. Similarly, Chang and Suedfeld observe that Jehovah’s Witnesses could perhaps afford to conduct themselves differently than other prisoners, since unlike the Jews, they were not “marked for annihilation,” and accordingly, “presumably felt less imperiled.”
Even so, Jehovah’s Witnesses did suffer torture, abuse, and death in the camps. Jehovah’s Witness women were often sent to Auschwitz’s female camp, the horrific conditions of which are documented in an educational module on the Auschwitz memorial website. Those who survived faced ongoing physical, mental, and emotional trauma after the war ended and camps were liberated. First-person testimonies from interned Jews include Charles de Gaulle’s niece, Genevieve, who attested to the inspiration other prisoners drew from Jehovah’s Witnesses, and their daily refusal to renounce their faith, even in the face of deteriorating conditions. Their faith and courage, she said in a recorded interview through a translator, made them stronger than all the SS officers together.
However, even if their religion prohibited them from political activity, the Jehovah’s Witnesses may be thought to have offered one crucial form of resistance: They continued to publish. By writing about the persecution their fellow believers were experiencing, they added to the chorus of voices working to inform the world about Nazi atrocities. And it seems every voice was needed. Despite a steady stream of news out of Germany since the 1930s about Hitler’s demonization of Jews and human rights conditions in the country, half of American respondents to a 1943 opinion poll believed the murder of 2 million Jews to be rumor, and while the next year as many as three-quarters were willing to acknowledge the existence of concentration camps, they still severely underestimated the death toll.
As early as 1936, according to a 2001 article in Jehovah’s Witness publication The Watchtower, “some 3,500 Witnesses distributed tens of thousands of copies of a printed resolution regarding the ill-treatment that they were suffering. Respecting this campaign, The Watchtower reported: ‘It was a great victory and a sharp stab at the enemy, to the indescribable joy of the faithful workers.’” By the war’s end, the article says, Jehovah’s Witness publications had named and reported on the conditions of 60 different camps and prisons.
Critics assert that the Holocaust narratives put out by the Jehovah’s Witness organization tend to ignore antisemitic statements made by different members and, indeed, leadership, at the time. These accounts, they say, also omit initial attempts by Jehovah’s Witnesses in Germany to reach a kind of detente with Hitler in the early years. There are examples of Jehovah’s Witness publications and public remarks trafficking in stereotypes about Jewish financial and political control of America, responsibility for Christ’s death, and supersessionist theology (a view that God’s covenant with the Jewish people has shifted to Christianity). This was the case even in a 1933 document, known as the Declaration of Facts, which was co-written by Jehovah’s Witness President Judge Rutherford. The declaration was a defense in the face of persecution by Hitler’s government, intended to clear up misunderstandings about their religious activities and literature, and to correct a Nazi claim that their work was supported by Jewish financing (the so-called “Anglo-American Empire” and Irish Catholics also come in for sharp criticism in the declaration).
The detention, torture, and execution of Jehovah’s Witnesses under Hitler were not widely talked about in the first few decades following the war.
But as noted by one reviewer of Hesse’s book, Richard Singelenberg, although German-language Jehovah’s Witness publications did not become critical of the Nazis until after Kristallnacht in 1938, English-language ones were condemnatory “from the moment that Hitler started to persecute the Jews.” Nevertheless, contemporary antisemitic tropes and stereotypes, and the Declaration of Facts, remain controversial parts of the Jehovah’s Witness legacy. Singelenberg, writing for a 2002-03 edition of Journal of Law and Religion, sounds a note of caution, however, stating a belief that “post-Holocaust social sensitivity concerning anti-Semitism” may cause present-day observers to engage in a backward projection of outright Nazi sympathies onto the Jehovah’s Witnesses of the 1930s and ’40s.
Estimates vary on just how many Jehovah’s Witnesses were held in captivity by Hitler’s government. Numbers published in the Jehovah’s Witness publication The Watchtower estimate around 1,500 members died in the Holocaust, and about 10,000 were either imprisoned or held in concentration camps, with about 2,000 estimated specifically to have been interned in the camps; Genocide Studies cites roughly similar numbers in its 2017 article. Moreover, the children of some Jehovah’s Witnesses were forcibly removed and placed with Nazi families or in reeducation camps.
Conway notes in his review that the detention, torture, and execution of Jehovah’s Witnesses under Hitler were not widely talked about in the first few decades following the war. Conway attributes the scarcity of information to a belated realization by Jehovah’s Witness leadership, around the turn of the 21st century, that there was value to sharing these stories. He writes that the denomination then began in earnest to confront this part of their past, holding meetings for survivors, and making an effort to document and record contemporary accounts.
As with all Holocaust survivors, opportunities to hear their firsthand recollections are increasingly scarce. While this is a problem from the standpoint of posterity and the historic record generally, more scholarly interest in this field could be of more immediate use, as well.
For example, the authors of the Genocide Studies article point out, “the fact that Jehovah’s Witnesses are still being persecuted in other parts of the world, such as Russia, Singapore, and China, may give researchers the opportunity to compare Witnesses who are currently being persecuted to those who have lived through their persecution.” The result, they say, could be “a fuller understanding of the impact of these experiences on the survivors, and of the latter’s subsequent readjustment,” which may be a benefit not only to today’s Jehovah’s Witnesses, but persecuted minorities around the world.
That reporting on the camps, by Jehovah’s Witnesses and others, failed to gain much moral traction in the United States may also be instructive for our time. In 2018, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum mounted an exhibit, Americans and the Holocaust, which sought in part to dispel a common perception that Americans simply weren’t aware of the ongoing atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis against Europe’s Jews. “It’s not that the story was buried,” curator Daniel Greene said in a Time magazine interview about the exhibit. “Just like news is there today of Syria or of the danger to the Rohingya, it punctures through our consciousness at certain times.” But with the Depression dominating the news for most of the 1930s, he said, and the Roosevelt administration’s prioritization of defeating the Nazis militarily, rather than freeing their victims, it simply wasn’t the most salient topic for most people when they considered the U.S. war effort. To understand how this might be possible, add to Greene’s examples, which are still applicable in 2022 as they were in 2018, the relative lack of popular outcry over reports of the imprisonment and forced sterilization of Uyghur Muslims in China, the ongoing ethnic cleansing campaign in Ethiopia, or Russia’s forcible deportation of Ukrainians to Russia and Russian-controlled areas.
There is also the continued persecution of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Russia today, where the religion was banned in 2017 as an extremist organization, in violation of the country’s anti-extremism laws. The Jehovah’s Witnesses’ internal statistics as of late last year estimated that approximately 643 Jehovah’s Witnesses had been charged with “organizing the activities of an extremist organization” in the country, where, as in Germany in 1933, their literature and their refusal to serve in the military brought them under the government’s suspicion. According to the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, persecution of Jehovah’s Witnesses is practiced throughout the former Soviet Union. Speaking on an October 2022 USCIRF podcast, Jehovah’s Witness spokespeople Jarrod Lopes and David Williams described abuse and poor living conditions for imprisoned members of their faith, increasingly facing “longer and harsher sentences,” and the trauma visited upon their families.
“Every day at the moment,” said Jehovah’s Witness international spokesman Paul Gillies, “I’m getting information fed through to me about various fellow believers who have been convicted. I think most days this month we’ve seen examples of that.” The day we spoke, Gillies said a regional court in Russia had upheld a Jehovah’s Witness’ six-year sentence to a penal colony for reading the Bible.
Gillies said he was at the Russian Supreme Court in Moscow in 2017 when they banned Jehovah’s Witnesses. “They were very adamant that all they were doing was banning the religious organization, but believers could believe what they like, and they could practice their faith. That’s not what’s happened in practice,” he said. “They removed our facilities, our branch office,” just outside St. Petersburg. “All our Kingdom Halls, places of worship, throughout Russia were closed. They felt that by doing that they would put a stop to our activities, but people continued to worship in the way that they do,” said Gillies. “And so then now the authorities have moved against them just for practicing their faith.”
Gillies sees parallels between what happened to Jehovah’s Witnesses in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s, and what is happening in Russia in 2023. Their members’ preaching activity, outreach to people interested in discussing religious questions, political neutrality, and conscientious objection to military service, are once again attracting government suspicion in Russia.
The Russian government has investigated and banned Jehovah’s Witness literature, including the Bible and a book of children’s Bible stories, he said, with one court deciding that Jehovah’s Witnesses were sowing religious discord by claiming they were the true religion (something, he notes, the Russian Orthodox Church, among others, also do).
Gillies believes that Jehovah’s Witnesses’ neutrality, coupled with their insistence that a divine kingdom is being established, make governments nervous. He also notes the irony of labeling conscientious objectors alongside violent terrorists as “extremists.”
“We say that Jesus at his time will intervene, but there’s nothing Jehovah’s Witnesses are going to do to bring that on,” Gillies said. “We don’t try and replace governments today. In fact, our relationship with governments is very clearly defined.” He cites Romans 13:1 as the basis for that practice: “Any government that’s in place, we’re subject to the laws of the land,” he said in summary. However, per Jesus’ command to his followers in chapter 22 of the Book of Matthew, Jehovah’s Witnesses hold that while they must render under Caesar what belongs to Caesar, they must also render to God those things properly belonging to God.
“We’re obedient to the laws of the land,” Gillies said. “But when the law asks for worship, then that’s a red line for us.”
This story is part of a series Tablet is publishing to promote religious literacy across different religious communities, supported by a grant from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.
Maggie Phillips is a freelance writer and former Tablet Journalism Fellow.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/community/articles/purple-triangles-jehovahs-witnesses