Three years before “Armageddon” was supposed to happen in 1972, my parents became Jehovah’s Witnesses (JW’s). I was only 8 years old and I trusted them to make the “right choices” for themselves, me, and my younger brothers. How could I have known then that I’d become a researcher of cult characteristics and that such knowledge would lead me to leave JW’s in the spring of 2010? Consequently, my brothers, in-laws, and so-called friends started shunning me.
I was disfellowshipped in 2011 for sharing apostate teachings. I found several lies in JW doctrines, which I shared in PowerPoint presentations with some ‘brave friends’ who tried to bring me onto better thoughts, as a last and final attempt to “help” me.
To make matters worse, I was also falsely accused of spiritism and attending spiritist séances. Not so bad for a now atheistic naturalist.
My father-in-law, fellow elder and good friend with who I shared countless meals and vacations refused to see me, to answer my questions either by email or by phone. Although my mother-in-law still suffers from his behavior, she and her daughters and their families follow the same rules. Patrick is dead. To avoid being infected by my “poisoned ideas”, JWs were told to shun my wife and children as well.
Only weeks after we left in the summer of 2010, my wife couldn’t resist the habit—a cult-induced phobia—of attending the district convention. I drove her to the meeting place, just to see her coming back home within an hour and crying a river. Instead of treating her and comforting her as a “victim of an apostate husband”, everybody chose to treat her and our two teenage daughters as “fellow apostates”. Every JW looked down on them as scum. I still thank those cult members for showing my family the exit door. I couldn’t have done better.
During the last 20 years, my spouse Belinda and I have listened to more than a thousand heartbreaking stories of mandated shunning caused by the JW doctrine. We have traveled internationally to meet and to hearten people. And so, it became my quest to stop mandated shunning.
In the beginning, I heard phrases like:
- You are a Don Quixote fighting windmills.
- This organization has way too much money and power.
- This is wasting your time; get a life.
But we continued listening and encouraging people to come forward and tell their stories. Little by little the press started following, and the legal system beckoned.
I had conversations with lawyers, ministers, professors, and psychologists. I saw motivated people who were following the same path as we were and with much success, although being an activist takes its toll on a person.
Looking back, nobody can leave a cult-like organization and expect to receive a warm “thank you” and/or a bouquet of flowers. Long-lasting depression, and feeling abandoned and worthless are just three of the ugly gifts given by the cult. But the worst gift of all may be that the person being shunned thinks that he has done something wrong, that she is the perpetrator and not the victim. That’s the way it works in many domestic violence cases, when the victim is blamed for the violence enough times that she starts to think, “What did I do to make him angry?”
So, getting a person to tell their story may not be easy if they have this kind of mindset.
Therefore, I want to encourage everyone to read the Rome Statute. Then, try to convince me that mandated shunning is not a crime against humanity!
And please, tell us your personal story, share it with us on this website, about being shunned or of someone you know who was/is the victim of mandated shunning.