Not All Apostates: What the Andersons’ Story Says About the Millions Who Leave

Note: This post is best understood, not just with Barbara’s story as background, but also the experience of her late husband, Joe. You can read his letter here:

There is a word that ends conversations among Jehovah’s Witnesses before they begin, and the word is apostate. It arrives pre-loaded. It carries the image of the poisonous viper, the traitor at the gate, the man who once ate at the table and now spits on it. Applied to a person, it does something remarkable: it makes everything that person says unhearable, in advance, regardless of content. A Witness who has absorbed the word properly does not need to evaluate an argument from a former member. The label has already done the evaluating. And so a question that ought to be simple — is this claim about how children were protected true or false? — never gets asked at all.

This essay is an attempt to take the word apart. Not to attack Jehovah’s Witnesses, and not to argue anyone out of their faith, but to say something narrower and, I think, harder to dismiss: the picture of the ex-Witness as a bitter crusader bent on destroying the organization does not survive contact with the actual population of people who have left. It does not even survive contact with the small, visible fraction of that population that the word is usually aimed at.

Start with the scale, because scale is where the myth first breaks. Jehovah’s Witnesses publish their own numbers with unusual diligence — publishers, baptisms, memorial attendance, year by year, country by country. Set annual baptism totals against annual net growth over any long stretch and a gap opens up that can only be accounted for by people leaving. Independent survey data points the same direction: Pew Research Center’s U.S. Religious Landscape Study found Witnesses to have the lowest retention rate of any major American religious tradition, with only about a third of those raised in the faith still identifying with it as adults. [Verify the current figure and study year before publication.] Whatever the precise number, the order of magnitude is not in dispute. Across the decades and across the world, the people who have been Witnesses and are no longer Witnesses number in the millions.

Now ask the obvious follow-up. If there are millions of former Witnesses, and if leaving the organization turns a person into an enemy propagandist, where is the propaganda? Where are the millions of websites, the millions of books, the millions of voices? They do not exist, because the premise is wrong. The overwhelming majority of people who leave say nothing at all. They fade. They stop attending, stop reporting time, move house, get a job with Sunday hours, and quietly reassemble a life. They do not write. They do not post. Many actively avoid the subject for the rest of their lives, because it is painful and because they still have a mother or a brother or a daughter inside whom they do not wish to lose. Silence is not the exception among ex-Witnesses. Silence is the overwhelming rule.

What remains is a very small, very visible handful. And here is where the myth gets its fuel, because that handful is loud, and to a Witness the loudness looks like malice. It is worth asking where the loudness actually comes from.

It comes from the training. A person raised or converted in this faith is taught, from the beginning, that a truth you hold privately is a truth you have not fully accepted. You knock on doors. You return. You place literature, conduct studies, work toward baptism. Conviction that stays indoors is treated as a defect. Then, one day, that same person concludes — often after years of resistance and grief — that something they were taught is not so. What do they do with the new conviction? They do the only thing they have ever been trained to do with a conviction. They tell people. They organize the evidence. They knock, metaphorically, on doors. The former Witness who will not stop talking is not exhibiting the influence of Satan. He is exhibiting the influence of a very effective discipleship program that no longer has an off switch.

There is a second layer to it that deserves more credit than it usually gets. Witnesses are taught that the Bible is the standard, and that human traditions must yield to it. That teaching does not evaporate when a person walks out. Someone who leaves because he now reads a passage differently has not abandoned the principle he was given; he is applying it, at considerable personal cost, to the body that gave it to him. He would say — and I think he is entitled to say — that if the Bible really is the guide, then upholding what he now believes it says is precisely as obligatory as it was when he believed something else. From the inside, this looks like treachery. From his side, it looks like consistency. Both descriptions can be sincere.

There is also a category confusion at work that does real damage, and it is worth naming plainly. Within the organization, doctrine and policy tend to be treated as a single fabric, on the reasoning that policy is derived from Scripture and is therefore as principled as Scripture. The practical effect is that a person who questions a procedure — how an allegation is handled, whom it is reported to, what evidentiary threshold is applied — gets sorted into the same bin as a person who denies a teaching. There is no available category for the loyal member who accepts the doctrine entirely and believes a particular administrative practice is producing terrible outcomes. That person must be an apostate, because the taxonomy has no other slot for him.

Which brings us to Joe Anderson, and to a letter he wrote on June 5, 2002.

Joe was an elder in the Manchester, Tennessee congregation. His letter to the Service Department at Patterson is a resignation from that office, and it is the single most useful document I know of for dismantling the apostate stereotype — because whatever it is, it is not the work of a man who hates Jehovah’s Witnesses. He opens by noting that the Society’s own spokesman, J. R. Brown, had told Dateline NBC that the organization would hear views and opinions from individuals within the framework of the congregation, and he says: “so I take this time to ask that you resolve some of my differences of opinion according to Scriptural principals.” That is a man accepting an invitation. He quotes the Awake! of October 8, 1993. He quotes James 1:27 and says he has quoted it many, many times from the platform. He reasons from the elders’ own letters of February 15 and May 24, 2002. Every authority he appeals to is an authority the organization itself supplied.

And his objections are not theological. They are operational, and several of them are the objections of a man who has thought carefully about what elders are actually equipped to do. “We are ministers of God, not police,” he writes, and asks why a body of untrained men should be adjudicating a criminal allegation at all when no one would dream of asking them to adjudicate a murder. He identifies the trap in the January 1, 1997 policy that a known molester may not hold a position of authority — known to whom, and by what determination? If an accusation cannot be corroborated by a second witness, the accused is thereby “known” to be innocent, and the position stands. He points out that telling members that reporting is “a personal decision for each individual to make” was, at that time, simply wrong as a matter of law in seventeen states, including his own Tennessee, where the reporting duty dated to 1972. And he takes apart the sentence “We have long instructed elders to report allegations of child abuse to the authorities” by observing what the written instruction actually said — call the Legal Department, and report only if your state requires a minister to do so. He calls that a half-truth. He does not call it apostasy, because he was not writing against the organization. He was writing to it.

He also does something the stereotype says an apostate never does: he describes his own compromised position honestly. A woman had told him she was molested years earlier by a man who is “a very good friend of mine for over thirty years.” Joe’s response is not accusation. It is: “I’m in a dilemma because I want him not to be guilty. How can I provide justice when I’m partial?” That is the sentence of a conscientious man, not a hostile one — and it is an argument against the whole design of the system, made from the inside, at his own expense.

After that letter, Joe was disfellowshipped for causing divisions. So was his wife, Barbara, for what amounted to the same reason, at the moment she was preparing to go public about the policy failures he had described.

Barbara Anderson’s history makes the “enemy of the organization” framing even harder to sustain, because for years she was as close to the organization’s heart as a member can get. She and Joe served at Brooklyn Bethel, and she worked in the Writing Department as a researcher, including on the 1993 history Jehovah’s Witnesses — Proclaimers of God’s Kingdom. [Confirm dates and the exact scope of her assignments from your own records.] That is not the résumé of an infiltrator. It is the résumé of a trusted, capable volunteer given serious work, and by every account she loved it. The archives, the research, the sense of contributing to something that would outlast her — she enjoyed it. She has never pretended otherwise, and that ordinary, unforced honesty about a happy period is itself an answer to the caricature.

It is also worth saying that she came to the child abuse material through that work rather than in opposition to it. The knowledge arrived in the course of doing what she had been asked to do. What followed — the years of correspondence with survivors, the accumulation of case after case — was not a campaign she went looking for. Joe describes the texture of it in his letter: “Almost every day for the last several years, I’ve read accounts sent to my wife from victims describing their disagreeable encounters with elders and the Society.” A household absorbing that volume of other people’s grief, daily, for years, is not a household nursing a grudge. It is a household that had become a destination for people with nowhere else to go.

And here is the detail that most reliably surprises Witnesses who assume the worst: Barbara still speaks warmly of her years among Jehovah’s Witnesses. She remembers the friendships, the shared work, the genuine kindness of people she served alongside. She is in contact with many who feel the same way — people who left, people who stayed, people who cannot say publicly which they are. The premise that leaving requires hatred is refuted by the plain fact of her life. You can conclude that a policy caused terrible harm and still hold your memories of the people intact. Millions of former Witnesses do exactly that, every day, without writing a word about it.

Her website reflects the same disposition, and anyone can check this for themselves at watchtowerdocuments.org. What is published there is overwhelmingly documents — letters, policy statements, historical publications, primary sources with dates attached. The method is: here is what was written, here is when, read it and judge. That is a very different enterprise from mockery, and it is the reason the material has been useful to journalists, attorneys, and inquiries who need something firmer than testimony. It is also, incidentally, the method Joe used in his letter. Neither of them argues from contempt. They argue from paper.

The charge that ended their membership was causing divisions. It is worth sitting with what that phrase does and does not say. It does not allege that anything they stated was false. It does not allege wickedness, immorality, or any of the conduct Paul actually enumerates in the chapter that was cited against Barbara — a point Joe made bluntly at the time, and one to which no answer was ever offered. What “causing divisions” names is the reputational consequence of speaking, which means that under that standard the truth of a statement is not a defense. Joe’s parallel was pointed: Paul publicized sensational immorality in the Corinthian congregation and recorded the accusation for two thousand years of readers. Whatever one thinks of the comparison, it identifies the real question. Is the offense saying something untrue, or is the offense saying something at all?

And then there is the part the myth cannot absorb at all: it worked. Not completely, and not quickly, but demonstrably. In the years since 2002, the handling of child abuse allegations among Jehovah’s Witnesses has changed under sustained external pressure — litigation, government inquiries such as the Australian Royal Commission, and journalism that in many cases began with documents obtained from researchers like Barbara. Instructions to elders have been revised. Reporting practice has moved. [Specify the changes you want to cite, with dates, from your own files.] These were not concessions the organization volunteered in 1990. They followed exposure, and a meaningful share of the exposure traces back to a former Bethel researcher who kept the paperwork and would not stop pointing at it. Children who will never know her name are safer for it.

So here is what I would ask of any Witness who has read this far. You do not have to agree with Barbara Anderson about God, or the Governing Body, or 1914, or anything else. You do not have to accept that she was treated unjustly. You are asked to consider one narrower proposition: that a woman who loved her years at Bethel, whose husband resigned as an elder in a letter built entirely out of the Society’s own publications, and who has spent twenty-four years publishing verifiable documents rather than insults, is not adequately described by the word viper. And if the word does not fit her, it is worth wondering how many of the millions of others it does not fit either — the quiet ones especially, who never said anything at all, and who are still your sister, your father, your friend.

The myth says they left because they hated you. Read Joe’s letter. He resigned because he could not, in conscience, keep sitting in judgment over a child’s account of what happened to her, using rules he believed were built to fail her. That is not hatred. On the evidence, it is closer to the opposite.