Anusha Bradley Anusha Bradley, Investigative Reporter
@AnushaBradley anusha.bradley@rnz.co.nz
Something Evil
RNZ
August 10, 2023
What happens when people are shunned from the Jehovah's Witnesses
CONTENT WARNING: This story discusses severe mental distress, depression and suicide.
"I had the reputation of being a very studious, level headed, discerning sister in the congregation … and then literally overnight, I went to being something evil, something dirty, something to be afraid of."
For Rachel Jackson, it's all over in two weeks.
After 22 years in the Jehovah's Witnesses, she feels her whole identity disintegrate within a fortnight of confessing to doubts about the religion.
Why, she had asked, is it only us who go to heaven? There are so many other good people. Why not them too?
She started questioning the religion's governing body, who are deemed the mouthpiece of God.
"I got reported by someone in the congregation," Jackson says.
"I said something to her and then she got very upset with me and reported me to the elders in the congregation."
Two elders tried to change her mind, to no avail. They told her to resign or be kicked out - 'disfellowshipped' - she says.
But Jackson, who had converted from Catholicism, refused. A committee of elders was formed to decide what to do with her.
"I met with three elders and they accused me of apostasy because I didn't accept that the governing body was the men that Jehovah was using."
She says she was told her disfellowshipping would be announced to the congregation in two weeks.
"So two weeks later, all my friendships of the previous 25 years just went up in smoke."
No one was told why Jackson was disfellowshipped, but they all shunned her.
In the Jehovah's Witness faith, anyone who leaves or is expelled from the church cannot be spoken with again. They're cast out to carry on life without the meaningful support of anyone who remains a Witness.
There are 8.7 million followers worldwide, including 20,000 in Aotearoa.
Many who have left - like Jackson - say the very threat of shunning causes serious long-term harm. And the practice, they say, is a breach of human rights.
All of the 19 former or current Jehovah's Witnesses spoken to for this story want shunning to end, either by the religion softening its stance or by the government recognising its harmful impact and stepping in.
"When you are disfellowshipped, your voice is taken away," says Jackson.
"You are silenced and you can't defend yourself to the people you love because you are shunned. It feels extremely cruel and unjust, and it threatens your whole identity."
"I had the reputation of being a very studious, level-headed, discerning sister in the congregation…and then just literally overnight, I went from being that person to being something evil, something dirty, something to be afraid of.
"If I saw someone I knew from the congregation, like at the supermarket, they would look away from me and I could almost see the fear, like I was something dangerous to them."
Jackson feels immense frustration that her friends will not know why she's left.
"I remember asking myself: Who am I? And what are my values? What do I even like? Because my whole identity was tied up with being one of Jehovah's Witnesses."
A young woman stares at the voice message from her disfellowshipped mother playing on her phone. "Elsa, please pick…I miss you so much," the mother pleads.
She puts the phone down and walks away, but while later looking at photos of her mother she asks herself: "What's the harm in just calling her once in a while to chat? Maybe I can even help her come back to Jehovah?"
The same woman is later sitting at a Kingdom Hall meeting where she's told Jehovah will reward her with a new 'spiritual' mother if she is patient.
The scenes are from two official Jehovah's Witness videos that were, until recently, on its global website, showing exactly how disfellowshipped followers should be shunned.
In June, the videos were deleted, only a few days after they were put up.
But the religion's followers are left in no doubt how to act towards those who leave the faith. The organisation's official website hosts several other videos and even explicit instructions on how to shun close relatives.
In online tutorials and magazines that followers are expected to study several times a week, shunning is called a "loving provision" as the bible tells followers to remove unrepentant sinners from their midst.
The religion, founded in the United States in the late 19th Century, is heavily based on a literal translation of this bible they call the New World Translation of Holy Scriptures, which predicts the end of the world. Only those who belong to what they call 'The Truth' will survive this armageddon and live in paradise.
Exact dates for when the world is going to end are no longer given - the Armageddon has been wrongly predicted at least five times since 1914 - but believers are frequently reminded in study materials and sermons that they are living in the 'last days of the last days', and the end is 'imminent'.
Much of these materials come from the religion's global headquarters in Warwick, New York, where a 'governing body' of nine men, who are said to be appointed by the holy spirit to communicate with followers, set the organisation's policies and practices. It has a highly organised global structure, with each congregation reporting to a 'circuit overseer' - a bit like a travelling minister who oversees several congregations - who reports to a local branch office. All New Zealand congregations report to the Australasian branch office based in suburban Sydney.
There are only two reasons a believer is shunned: The first is when a baptised member is 'disfellowshipped', or secondly, when they are 'disassociated.'
Disfellowshipping is when a member is excommunicated and expelled - usually as a punishment for committing a serious sin. A person who leaves by choice, usually by sending in a letter quitting the religion, is said to 'disassociate' themselves.
Whatever their method of leaving, the punishment remains the same: An announcement is made at a congregation meeting that a person is no longer a Witness - they are never told why - and no one is allowed to speak to them ever again.
Anyone who doesn't follow the rules faces being cast out themselves.
The rules, officially at least, are slightly different for disfellowshipped relatives living in the same household as believers. The Jehovah's Witnesses say only religious ties are severed with disfellowshipped family members but there is "no change" in the family relationship.
Former Witnesses say that's the rare exception, rather than the norm and question why, if disfellowshipped family members are allowed to remain in the home, is there this video on the religion's own website showing a father throwing his disfellowshipped daughter out of the house.
At 20, Brad Miller experienced the real-life version of that video on the Jehovah's Witness website when he was brought before a judicial committee for having premarital sex.
"The committee asked me very detailed questions," Miller says.
"Like they wanted to know every intimate detail of what I had done. It was awful."
He quickly married his girlfriend to spare her the ordeal he went through.
"The elders had to ask my permission to speak to my wife at the meeting. I let them speak briefly to her, but I made sure to field all of the 'detailed' questions so I could spare her from the worst of the questioning. I used their system against them."
After he was disfellowshipped, Miller says his father told him he could only stay with the family if he was trying to return to Jehovah.
"He told me that if I wasn't trying to come back [to the religion], I wasn't allowed to stay."
Miller and his new wife found a flat of their own and he was eventually reinstated into the church. But the seeds of doubt about his religion were starting to grow.
He tried to ignore the doubts, because as a third generation Witness he knew leaving would mean losing everything and everyone. He'd be shunned.
"It was terrifying," Miller says.
"I knew once I made the jump to actually leave, I was going to lose every support person I had in my life.
"When you're raised a Witness, you're not allowed to have friends outside of Witnesses, you're not allowed to do anything socially that is not Witness-related. I'm thinking … what am I going to do?"
When one of his best friends left the religion, he saw how they were viewed by his congregation.
"They convinced me that he was this evil person, that he had decided to choose Satan over God. As I got older I saw more people eventually fade away and leave and the same thing happened.
"They strip your identity once you are gone. You are not human any more, you are this evil thing."
When he finally left a few months later his worst fears were realised. He begged his wife to come with him, but she refused. His wife, friends, family and eventually even his parents refused to have any kind of contact with him.
Two years on, Miller is still reeling from the "deep grief and loneliness" of being shunned and suffers from anxiety and depression as he tries to forge a new life in a strange new world.
"It feels like everyone that I'd ever known, all died on the same day."
Miller's cousin, Cassie Dean, knows exactly what he is going through.
The pair grew up together in rural Waikato, often attending Kingdom Hall meetings together and preaching on doorsteps around Te Kuiti and Ōtorohanga each Saturday.
But at age 17, Dean left home and stopped going to meetings to escape a "toxic" home life. Although she didn't officially quit the religion for a few years, her parents shunned her all the same.
Her mother told her she could no longer associate with her 'because of what she's done'.
"What Mum was referring to was having sex with my non-Witness boyfriend. This is something I should have felt guilty for, but never did."
A decade on, the impact of losing her family is still keenly felt.
"Having a whole family is everything that I've ever wanted…like a hug from my mum, a hug from my dad…that's what I think about every single day.
"It chews you up inside. It's like a living grief."
LISTEN: Hear Cassie and Brad share their full story in a special feature episode of The Detail podcast, out on Saturday August 12
Holding the threat of shunning over people's heads is enormously controlling, says American psychologist Marlene Winell, who grew up a fundamentalist Christian and now helps people who have left 'high-control' religions.
"It keeps people in the religion and people stay in much longer than they necessarily would. Sometimes people stay and pretend to participate, because they can't tolerate the idea."
The threat is so powerful there's even a commonly used term that Witnesses who want to leave, but don't, use to describe their situation: 'PIMO'. It means 'Physically In, Mentally Out' and refers to those who remain in the faith and pretend to believe so as to not lose their families.
That's how Naomi* describes herself.
She's currently a member of a North Island congregation. Her real name and congregation is withheld in order to protect her safety and wellbeing.
Naomi says she wants to leave but doesn't want to be shunned. She hasn't been to a meeting in months and is now getting phone calls, multiple texts each day and visits from fellow congregation members wanting to check up on her.
"I know they're coming from a loving place…they say they are worried about me, or they're thinking about me and they don't want me to leave Jehovah.
"But I can see why people do put the letter in to disassociate, because I'm being harassed and it's stressful. I just want them to leave me alone."
Naomi doesn't want to officially disassociate herself from the religion because she doesn't want to lose her family. She also knows how harmful shunning can be. She believes her 19-year-old brother killed himself because he was so worried about being disfellowshipped.
He committed suicide a few days before he was due to appear before a 'judicial committee' of elders for drinking too much alcohol and watching horror movies.
"He was scared about the repercussions, and getting into trouble. Mum and Dad were very staunch Jehovah's Witnesses growing up, you basically had to be dead to miss a meeting.
"He was smoking cigarettes by that stage, which was a huge no no, and the elders did not know. So my brother would have been absolutely shitting himself about the judicial committee he was facing."
Danny de Hek knows that feeling. At 23, he was disfellowshipped for having premarital sex. Desperate to be reinstated, he would sit in the back of his Kingdom Hall in Christchurch sobbing.
"I spent four months going to the Kingdom Hall three times a week. I used to sit at the back bawling my eyes out every single meeting because I was so mortified at what I'd lost," he says.
Shunned, no one in the congregation would speak to him. After four months, he was reinstated, only to be disfellowshipped again a year later for having more premarital sex. And again, he spent months trying to get back in.
Why?
"Because I lost everything. And the loneliness. What they bargain with is your family and friends," de Hek says.
His mother refused to communicate with him while he was disfellowshipped and he lost his business because his business partner was also a Witness.
"I also lost everyone I grew up with because we were told never to go to sports, never to join clubs, never have anything to do with the world."
At 25, de Hek eventually stopped trying to return to the organisation. Thirty years later he still has no contact with his mother and says he's had suicidal thoughts and suffered from extreme loneliness as a result of his disfellowshipping.
"My mum's last words as I walked out the door was 'I love Jehovah more than you'."
A small study of former Jehovah's Witnesses, published in Pastoral Psychology journal earlier this year, suggests shunning has a "long-term, detrimental effect on mental health, job possibilities and life satisfaction". The study cites several cases of people driven to suicide after being shunned.
Asked to comment on the study, the Jehovah's Witnesses Australasia branch says it is "not aware of any evidence, empirical or otherwise" supporting claims that disfellowshipping or shunning can lead to suicide.
"We categorically reject the suggestion that the Bible-based practice of disfellowshipping causes individuals to commit suicide," spokesman Tom Pecipajkovski says in a statement.
He says ex-members, known as 'apostates', are not reliable sources of information and quotes Centre for Studies on New Religions, Massimo Introvigne, who writes on his website, Bitter Winter that media and courts "would do well to keep in mind that aspostates are not representative of the larger universe of ex-members of new religious movement."
"Accepting that what the apostates report is 'the truth' about a new religious movement would be similar to assessing the moral character of a divorced person based on the testimony of an angry ex-spouse, or basing the perception of what the Catholic Church is all about on the sole testimony of disgruntled ex-priests," Introvigne writes.
Pecipajkovski says the Jehovah's Witnesses "strongly object to any suggestion that the practice of disfellowshipping is harmful."
American mental health counsellor and cult expert Steve Hassan disagrees.
He believes shunning, coupled with the religion's rigid rules about how to behave, dress and who to associate with, are all the hallmarks of a cult. He believes the religion fits into the "worst part" of his 'BITE' model of authoritarian control. BITE stands for Behaviour, Information, Thought and Information control, and the model is used to analyse how controlling a group or organisation is.
According to this continuum, healthy organisations at one end allow free thinking, encourage authenticity and hold leaders to account. At the other end, unhealthy organisations create dependency, obedience and its leaders have absolute authority.
The consequence of living under such authoritarian control is that followers comply with shunning, even though it has devastating impacts, says Hassan.
"It's what mental health professionals call a dissociative disorder. You're so cut off from your own thoughts, feelings, your conscience and you are doing what the group says is the right way to think, feel and act."
Victoria University of Wellington religious studies lecturer Sara Rahmani doesn't agree the word cult applies to the Jehovah's Witnesses, but says there's no doubt shunning can be an "extremely painful process" for followers to leave the religion, regardless of whether they are expelled or leave by choice.
"You can experience grief, you can experience loneliness, guilt, despair, all sorts of these emotions."
Rahmani, who studies people's experiences of leaving religions, says the practice is about placing the blame and emotional burden on the person who is leaving.
"Shunning is a way to control the narrative," Rahmani says.
"So, for example, they would say this person left because they're wicked, they left because they're sinners. It's quite a strategic and manipulative attempt at creating this hard insider-outsider boundary. You're either in or you're out.
"It is also meant to send a message to existing members and prevent the spread of controversial behaviours."
The fear of being shunned also plays on a human's basic instincts not to be cast out of the group, says Marlene Winell.
She describes the practice as "massively cruel".
"We want to be accepted and loved by our parents, by our family. Just think about this in an evolutionary kind of way, we are tribal people. The idea of being isolated, the idea of being alone, kicked out of the cave, kicked out of the tribe is the most frightening thing."
Winell coined the term Religious Trauma Syndrome (RTS) in the 1990s to describe the emotional and physical damage a high-control religion, like the Jehovah's Witnesses, can inflict. While not an official diagnosis in the psychiatric handbook known as DSM-5, she says the symptoms of RTS are similar to that of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
"Religion can really define who you are...and then it's like a rug is ripped out from under you. People feel quite lost," says Winell.
A little girl sits on the couch between her parents leafing through a photo album. "I have a question," she asks her father, "how do you get baptised?"
It's the latest episode of the Jehovah's Witness cartoon series for children, Caleb and Sophia.
"You can be young like your mother," Sophia's father explains. "What matters is that you love Jehovah."
The episode provokes outrage among former Witnesses online. They say the pressure to get baptised - which makes a child an official member of the religion and subject to disfellowshipping and shunning - is immoral and starts too young.
Cassie Dean and Brad Miller agree. Dean regrets succumbing to the pressure and getting baptised at age 13.
"I definitely had my doubts, but it was the only thing that would make my parents proud of me," Dean says.
"Now I'm punished for making that decision when I was 13, trying to make them happy. Now I'm disfellowshipped, I have no relationship with my parents because of this decision that I've made…this contract that I signed."
Dean believes children under the age of 18 should not be allowed to get baptised.
Miller, who was baptised at 10, agrees. "I think it's dangerous, actually, getting kids that young to make a commitment like that, because they can't understand the consequences."
He says the fear of the imminent armageddon is used by the faith to stop people from leaving and push people to get baptised.
"Because they believe only the baptised will survive and go to paradise. This is the reason why young children are being encouraged to get baptised, so they'll survive the armageddon."
Miller knows, however, an age limit for baptism is unlikely to ever be adopted by the church or imposed on it. Juliet Chevalier-Watts, a senior law lecturer at Waikato University, agrees.
Watts, who specialises in religion and law, says the issue rests on the competency of a child to make a decision rationally, and case law shows there is no set age for such a test.
"Some 10 year old children are perfectly competent to understand the ins and outs of what is required of them, or what will occur to them, whereas some 16 year olds are not," Chevalier-Watts says.
"There have been a number of instances to do with parental orders with parents wishing to stop children from joining a particular faith or being baptised and the courts in New Zealand have found the child competent and said: 'We can't stop your child from undertaking this particular desire.'"
The church's spokesman, Pecipajkovski, says followers are baptised when they are old enough to comprehend what the bible teaches. "That is why Jehovah's Witnesses do not baptise infants as many religions do," he says.
"We strongly object to the suggestion that anyone, including minors, is pressured or coerced to get baptised.
"We believe that those who worship God must do so willingly, from the heart otherwise such worship is invalid. This is true of children whose parents are Jehovah's Witness parents.
"As they grow, they must make a personal decision whether or not to learn, accept and apply what the Bible teaches, before they can qualify for baptism."
Lisa* wasn't even baptised but still was shunned by her Jehovah's Witness mother when she discovered she had a boyfriend.
"She treated me as if I was a baptised Witness," Lisa says.
At 17 years old, she was kicked out of home.
Five years on, her boyfriend is now her husband and they live in another town. She has no contact with her mother and she worries the younger sister she left behind will feel pressured to be baptised.
"There are a lot of kids in there where it's just kind of forced on them, they don't really have a choice. They've openly spoken to me and my sisters about how they would prefer not to be doing that."
Lisa too wants to see an end to shunning.
"I could never do that to my daughter. Shunning is just so unnecessary. It breaks a lot of people's hearts."
Former witnesses claim shunning is a breach of human rights, but it's a claim that has not been very successful in overseas courts - apart from one - and has never been tested in New Zealand.
Courts in several countries have ruled that teaching and practising shunning, while possibly harmful, is either protected by religious freedom, or that it's not up to the courts to interfere in religious matters.
Norway is the only country to recognise the harm caused by the Jehovah's Witness practice of shunning. Last year, the religion was stripped of its official registration in that country over the matter.
While people are still free to practise the religion in Norway, the loss of official registration is a huge deal, says former Norwegian Witness-turned-activist Jan Frode Nilsen.
"It prevents it from collecting about 17 million Norwegian Kroner ($2.6m) in government grants each year and stops the religion from conducting legal marriage ceremonies."
The move is now being appealed by the Jehovah's Witnesses, with the case expected to be heard in January.
The Norwegian government believes shunning, as practised by the Jehovah's Witnesses, is a violation of the country's religious freedom laws, and is particularly concerned about the impact on minors.
However, in a June paper former European Court of Human Rights judge Paulo Pinto de Albuquerque argues it is Norway that has breached the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), not the other way around.
"My firm conviction is that the Government has indeed crossed that fundamental line, since the three impugned administrative decisions are a form of direct discrimination based on one of Jehovah's Witnesses' foundational religious principles and therefore on an identifiable trait of the targeted community, its religion, which is protected under article 14 of the ECHR," he writes.
Former Witnesses spoken to by RNZ in this country would like to see New Zealand follow in Norway's footsteps, but Chevalier-Watts says the two countries have different law and legal systems so "there's no clear answer" on whether this could happen.
"There are a number of pieces of legislation in New Zealand that might be said to be in conflict, one way or the other," she says.
The New Zealand Bill of Rights enables every person to manifest their religion or belief, and gives freedom of thought, conscience and religion, while the Human Rights Act prohibits religious belief to be grounds for discrimination. The Bill of Rights also secures the right not to be subjected to torture, cruel treatment, or degrading or disproportionally severe treatment or punishment.
"So you've got the right to be able to carry out your worship and your religion or your belief, but also there is this right not to be subjected to a torture or cruel treatment.
"But then you then have to define what you might mean by torture or cruel treatment, or degrading or severe punishment, but at the same time, you also have to consider what is meant by disproportionately severe treatment or punishment.
"So if a religion or a belief system has a method of 'punishing' its members in some way, then is that disproportionate to their particular faith? Or to the social morals of our country?"
While the argument hasn't been tested in New Zealand, Chevalier-Watts believes it may be difficult to prove.
"Because there is that entrenched right to have your religious belief, and for it not to be interfered with in any way."
That's unless there was a law change making shunning illegal, like conversion therapy was last year made illegal, but even this could open a can of worms, she says.
"If you judge one religion, then you have to judge all religions and many religions have practices that people outside of these religions would potentially find uncomfortable. Catholics, the Amish, some Muslims, Scientology and Church of the Latter Day Saints all have some form of what we could potentially call shunning."
Human Rights lawyer Tony Ellis agrees common law cases in the US, Canada and Britain show courts are all "very, very reluctant to interfere with the rights to religion, because, where could it go next?"
But he says specific wording in the Bill of Rights Act allowing every person to manifest their religion 'in community with others', could give rise to the "possibility of using that to argue shunning is unlawful."
Former Jehovah's Witnesses also question how the religion can be registered as a charity - with all its tax-free benefits - when its shunning practices and a history of concealing child abuse has caused so much harm.
Again, the law in this area has not been tested in New Zealand, says Chevalier-Watts.
Churches qualify for registration because they "advance religion". The Charities Services and the Independent Charities Services Board received a complaint about the Jehovah's Witness practice of shunning in 2017, but it did not investigate.
"Charities Services focus our resources on serious wrongdoing, high risk matters and matters that may impact whether a charity continues to qualify for registration. The matters raised in the complaint did not fall within these areas," says Internal Affairs general manager of charities services Charlotte Stanley.
Hassan argues charity and human rights laws need to catch up with the science around the harm caused by some religions.
In his 2020 doctoral thesis he argues his BITE model of authoritarian control could be used as a framework for the legal system to discern "what is ethical or undue influence when it comes to mind control and brainwashing" from certain organisations.
"It's similar to corporal punishment. We now know from brain imaging studies that children's brains and their development is harmed by corporal punishment. It's illegal in a lot of civilised countries because we know it causes harm.
"Just because something was taught 1000 years ago in the Old Testament, if we know it's harming people, we shouldn't allow it to be done.
"When it comes to undue influence…I think the law needs to revisit this."
Rather than violate human rights, the Jehovah's Witnesses uphold and respect them, says church spokesperson Pecipajkovski.
That's because international human rights declarations and covenants protect freedom of thought, religion and guarantee rights to association, which includes choosing not to associate with others, he says.
"This is an exercise of human rights," he says.
"Really, there is nothing unique in the fact that Jehovah's Witnesses have a religious process to expel (disfellowship) adherents who unrepentantly commit a serious sin, such as adultery, alcohol and drug abuse, domestic or other violence, or theft.
"Professional associations, such as lawyers and doctors, also have prescribed standards that members must meet and that failure to meet those standards might result in the person being removed as a member.
"It is a fact of life that a large percentage of families in modern society choose to entirely cut off contact with a family member due to a "clash in values" which, in most cases, has nothing to do with religious beliefs.
"In contrast, if one of Jehovah's Witnesses is expelled, it is usually for a relatively short period of time. Moreover, an expelled (or disassociated) person is welcome to attend our religious services, share in singing religious hymns at those services, receive religious publications and meet with the elders for pastoral help.
"If repentant, the individual can apply to be reinstated as one of Jehovah's Witnesses. Many who have been disfellowshipped or disassociated themselves have later been reinstated and expressed that the disfellowshipping arrangement helped them rebuild their relationship with God."
Miller and Dean say they'll never return to the religion and are instead focused on rebuilding their new lives on the 'outside'. After a bumpy start, the road ahead is looking a little brighter for them both.
They're grateful to have each other and have worked hard to create a new family of friends who support them. Dean has a career she loves in the food industry and Miller is completing his high school qualifications while working in hospitality with the hope of starting university next year.
"It's getting a lot easier every day and I'm starting to make some friends," says Miller, "I've realised the world is my oyster. My attitude, it's moved from one of terror to excitement."
But the pain of losing his family over religion never fades.
"When something good happens, or even something bad happens, and the people you normally go to call - like 'I'm gonna tell mum or dad about this' - and then I think, 'Oh wait, I can't'.
"I know I am better off out, but that still hurts."
Credits
Reporter - Anusha Bradley
Visuals - Cole Eastham-Farrelly
Design - RNZ
Executive Editor - John Hartevelt
https://www.rnz.co.nz/programmes/in-depth-special-projects/story/2018901718/something-evil
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