Crisis of Conscience

by Raymond Franz

  If on the other hand they believed the position taken in Mexico, allowing men to exercise their personal conscience as to obtaining the military certificate (even by illegal means), was right or at least acceptable, then they certainly should have accorded to the brotherhood in Malawi the same right to exercise their conscience in a matter that involved no bribing, no illegality, no falsification. Any fence-straddling, and ‘turning of a blind eye to the facts,’ ‘condoning by silence’ a double standard, perhaps out of “concern for their security of position,” would mean following the same course they condemned on the part of Malawian officials, from top to bottom.

  What was actually said by the Governing Body during the sessions in which the information from Mexico was called to their attention? The policy for Mexico had been developed primarily by only two men, Nathan Knorr and Fred Franz, but now the entire Body knew of it.16 What responsibility did they feel and how did they react to the obvious disparity between this position and that taken in Malawi?

  When I brought up the matter, not one word of disapproval or of moral indignation was heard from those who had argued in such forceful, uncompromising terms against alternative service. There was no call for some action to change the existing policy in Mexico for one boldly declaring against even the “suggestion” of compromise. Though the third and fourth waves of violence had hit Malawian Witnesses (in 1972 and 1975), I heard no expression of dismay at the disparity in the standard there and the one applied in Mexico. Most of the members apparently found they could accept the Mexico policy while simultaneously insisting upon a totally different standard for people elsewhere.

  Once more, I do not think the matter simply resolves down to personalities, the individual members involved. I have come to the conclusion that this outlook is in reality a typical product of any authority structure that takes a legalistic approach to Christianity, enabling those sharing in the authority structure to see double standards exist without feeling strong qualms of conscience. To their credit, brothers in Mexico were disturbed in their consciences at learning of the intense suffering of Witnesses in Malawi who refused to pay a legal price in a lawful way for a party card of the government running the country; while in Mexico they themselves were illegally obtaining a military certificate through bribes. Those in Brooklyn, at the “top,” in the so-called “ivory tower,” however, seemed strangely detached from such feelings, insensitive to the consequences to people from such double standard. This, too, I believe is an effect of the system, which is one reason why I find such a system so personally repelling.

  All Governing Body members were fully aware of the policy in Mexico by the fall of 1978. Almost a year later, in September of 1979, the Governing Body again resumed discussion of the undecided issue of alternative service, this time brought to the fore by a letter from Poland.

  Warning that alternative service could be a “trap for indoctrinating the brothers,” Milton Henschel urged extreme caution, speaking in favor of the practice of many Polish Witnesses who were taking the expedient course of going to work in coal mines to avoid induction. Lloyd Barry again urged that we hold to the position that Witnesses “should keep free from the entire military organization.” Ted Jaracz said that “our brothers are going to have problems and they look to Jehovah’s organization for direction,” that there was need to avoid diversity of opinions, that we should not give the brothers the idea that the Governing Body was saying, ‘go ahead and submit’ to alternative service orders. Carey Barber voiced the view that “there is no room here for exercising conscience, it is something where we just have to go right on through” without yielding. Fred Franz said our “conscience has to be Bible trained” and stated again his support for the traditional position against any acceptance of alternative service.

  By now, Ewart Chitty was no longer a member of the Body, having submitted his resignation in accord with the Governing Body’s wishes. Grant Suiter was absent from the session, both he and Chitty having voted for a change in policy at the November 15, 1978, meeting. But there were two new members on the Body, Jack Barr (from England) and Martin Poetzinger (from Germany), and they were present at the September 15, 1979, session. When a motion was finally presented, the vote was split right down the middle, eight in favor of changing the policy, eight (including the two new members) against doing so.

  In 1980, on February 3, the subject was once more placed on the agenda. By this time more than a year had elapsed since my visit to Mexico and Albert Schroeder had made another annual visit there. The Mexico Branch Committee members again expressed to him their concern about the practice of bribing to obtain falsified documents of military service, and Schroeder related this continuing situation to the Body after his return. Remarks by the various members during the session made it evident that no two-thirds majority would be attained either way on the alternative service issue and there was not even a motion made.

  The matter was “shelved.” From the time the letter from Michel Weber, the elder in Belgium, was received in November 1977, until February, 1980, the Governing Body of Jehovah’s Witnesses had tried on six separate occasions to resolve the issue without success.17

  What, though, of the people affected by the policy that continued in force, those of what the Watchtower had called “the rank and file”? Could they also “shelve” the issue? To the contrary, the inability of the Body to achieve that indispensable two-thirds majority meant that male Jehovah’s Witnesses in any country of the world who acted according to their conscience and accepted alternative service as a proper government requirement, could still do so only at the cost of being viewed as outside the organization, equivalent to expelled persons. It also meant that the Governing Body as a whole was willing for the twenty-year-old policy in effect in Mexico to continue in effect while a totally different policy in Malawi remained unchanged.

  TWO SORTS OF WEIGHTS FOR MEASURING

  Two sorts of weights are something detestable to Jehovah, and a cheating pair of scales is not good.

  — Proverbs 20:23.

  It may help to understand the reasoning of some Members if other circumstances then prevailing among Jehovah’s Witnesses in Mexico are reviewed. As a result of the Mexican revolution, and because of the Catholic Church’s long history of holding immense quantities of land and other property in the country, the Mexican Constitution until recently forbid any religious organization the right to own property. Churches and church property were, in effect, held in custody by the government, which allowed the religious organizations to use these. Due to past exploitation by foreign clergy, no foreign missionaries or ministers were allowed to function as such in Mexico. What did this result in for the Witness organization?

  The administration of the headquarters organization of Jehovah’s Witnesses many decades ago decided that, because of the existing law, Jehovah’s Witnesses in Mexico would present themselves, not as a religious organization, but as a “cultural” organization. The local corporation there formed, La Torre del Vigia, was so registered with the government of Mexico.18 So, Jehovah’s Witnesses in Mexico for many decades did not speak of having religious meetings or Bible meetings but of having “cultural” meetings. At these meetings they had no prayers or songs, and this was also true of their larger assemblies. When they engaged in door-to-door activity they carried only Watch Tower literature (which they said the Watch Tower Society provided them as an “aid to them in their cultural activity”). They did not carry the Bible while in such activity since that would identify them as engaging in religious activity. A group of Witnesses in a given area was not called a “congregation” but a “company.” They did not speak of having baptisms but did the same thing under the name of performing the “symbol.”

  This “double talk” was not done because of living in some totalitarian country that took repressive measures against freedom of worship.19 It was done largely to avoid having to comply with government regulations regarding ownership of property by religious organizations.20
Nor should it be thought that the arrangement was something originating with and decided upon by the Mexican Witnesses themselves; it was an arrangement worked out and put into effect by the international headquarters at Brooklyn.

  It is interesting to contrast the deliberate elimination of prayers and songs at Witness meetings in Mexico with the action of the Watch Tower Society in the United States, where they were willing to fight case after case all the way up to the Supreme Court of the country rather than give up certain practices, such as offering literature from door to door without a license and without having to register with the police, the right to use sound cars, distribute literature on street corners, and many other such practices which are covered by Constitutional rights. The organization did not want to relinquish any of these things. It fought to hold on to them, even though these particular practices are certainly not things that were done by early Christians in the first century and hence cannot be counted as among primary Christian practices.

  But congregational or group prayer was a primary religious practice in early Christian meetings and has been among servants of God from time immemorial. The Mexican government said nothing against prayer at religious meetings. Jehovah’s Witnesses, however, were instructed to say that their meetings were not religious. Few things could be viewed as more completely related to worship of God, as more purely spiritual, than prayer. When an imperial decree in Persia prohibited prayer to anyone except to the king for a period of thirty days, the prophet Daniel considered the issue so crucial that he risked position, possessions and life itself in violating the decree.21

  The headquarters organization, however, considered it expedient to sacrifice congregational prayer among Jehovah’s Witnesses throughout Mexico. With what benefit, what “accruing advantage”? By giving up congregational prayer and song and the use of the Bible in public witnessing activity, the organization could retain ownership of Society property in Mexico and operate free from governmental regulations that other religions complied with. They were willing to say that their organization was not a religious organization, that their meetings were not religious meetings, that their witnessing activity was not religious activity, that baptism was not a religious act—when in every other country of the world Jehovah’s Witnesses were saying just the opposite.

  Since they knew of this arrangement, some Governing Body members may have been inclined to accept the paying of bribes for falsified documents as being not far out of line with the overall policy for Jehovah’s Witnesses in that country. This may explain in part how they could at the same time speak so adamantly for “no compromise” in other lands. It seems evident that in the minds of some members it was not a question of a double standard. In their minds there was just the one standard. That standard was: doing whatever the organization decided and approved. The organization made decisions regarding Mexico and the practice of bribing there, leaving it to the individual conscience, and so that was acceptable and a man could pay such bribe for a military certificate and still be used in the most responsible way, with no need for particular concern before God on the part of those directing the work there. The organization decided otherwise regarding alternative service (as it also did regarding the situation in Malawi), and so any man who failed to follow that decision was unworthy of occupying any position at all in the congregation, was in fact a breaker of integrity with God.

  I could not understand then how Christians could adopt such a viewpoint and I can not understand it now. For me it made all the bold, almost strident, calls of some for ‘staying clean from the world’ sound hollow, like mere rhetoric, as impressive language that did not fit reality. I could not relate in any way to the reasoning that allowed for such expressions in the face of facts that were well known to all members speaking and hearing those expressions.

  I lived in Latin American countries for nearly twenty years and paid no bribes. But I know full well that there are some places, not just in Latin America but in various parts of the earth, where, although the law is on your side and what you seek is perfectly legitimate, it is almost impossible to get certain things done without money being paid to an official who has no right to such. It is not hard to see that a person confronted with this situation may view this as a form of extortion, even as in Bible times tax-collectors and also military men might exact more than was due and thus practice extortion. It does not seem fair to me to judge adversely persons who feel obliged to submit to such extortion. More than that, I am not presuming to judge those in Mexico who, not having the law on their side, acted against the law, who did not simply submit to extortion but instead deliberately solicited the illegal actions of an official through an offer of money to get a falsified, illegal document. This is not what I find so shocking and even frightening about the whole affair.

  It is instead the way that religious men in high authority can allow supposed “organizational interests” to be counted as of such enormous importance as compared to the interests of ordinary people, people with children and homes and jobs, individuals many of whom give evidence of being every bit as conscientious in their devotion to God as any man among those men who sit as a court to decide what is and what is not within the realm of conscience for such people.

  It is men in authority who accord to themselves the right to be of divided opinion, but who exact uniformity from all others; men who express mistrust of others’ use of Christian freedom of conscience, but who expect such others to put implicit trust in them and their decisions, while they grant to themselves the right to exercise their conscience to condone illegal maneuvering and obvious misrepresentation of fact.

  It is men in authority who, because the change of one vote reduces a majority down from 66 2/3 % to 62 1/2 %, are willing to allow this to keep in force a policy that can cause other men to undergo arrest, be separated from family and home for months, even sent to jail for years, when those men do not understand the Scriptural basis for the policy they are asked to follow and, in some cases, believe that the policy is wrong.

  It is men in authority who can apply a policy that calls on ordinary people, men, women and children, to face loss of home and lands, endure beatings, torture, rape and death because of refusal to pay a legal fee for the card of the organization that is, to all intents and purposes, the ruling power of their country, while at the same time telling men in another country that it is acceptable for them to bribe military officers for a card that falsely says they fulfilled their military service and are in the first reserves of the army.

  All this is what I find shocking. And, however sincere some may be, I still find it frightening.

  I could not personally comprehend how grown men could fail to see inconsistency in all of this, could fail to be repelled by it, could not be deeply moved by its effect on people’s lives. In the end it simply convinced me that “organizational loyalty” can lead people to incredible conclusions, allow them to rationalize away the grossest of inequities, relieve them from being particularly affected by any suffering their policies may cause. The desensitizing effect that organizational loyalty can produce is, of course, well documented, having been demonstrated again and again throughout the centuries, both in religious and political history, as in the extreme cases of the Inquisition and during the Nazi regime. But it can still produce a sickening effect when seen at close quarters in an area where one never expected it. To my mind, it illustrates forcefully the reason why God never purposed that men should exercise such excessive authority over fellow humans.

  It may be noted that, after nearly a half century of holding the status of a “cultural” organization in Mexico, the Watch Tower organization finally changed to that of a religious organization. The Watchtower magazine of January 1, 1990 (page 7) announced that a “change of the status” of Jehovah’s Witnesses had taken place in 1989. It described the Mexican Witnesses as for the first time being able to use the Bible when going from house to house, and for the first time being able to open meetings with prayer. />
  The magazine described how “thrilling” this change was to Mexican Witnesses and that it brought “tears of joy” to them. It attributed an immediate jump in “publishers” by over 17,000 to this change.

  The article told the reader absolutely nothing as to what the previous status had been, why it prevailed, or how the change in status came about. Anyone reading the article would assume that the change in status, with the benefits described, was something the organization had wanted all along. From reading the article one would assume that it was the government of Mexico or its laws that had till now prevented the Witnesses from praying at meetings or using the Bible in their door-to-door activity. It never told the reader that the reason the Mexican Witnesses were deprived of these things—for at least a half century—was because their own headquarters organization chose to have it so, voluntarily opted in favor of another status. It did not tell the reader that these “thrilling” changes that brought “tears of joy” had been available all along, for many decades, requiring only an organizational decision to abandon its pretense that the Witness organization in Mexico was not a religious organization but a “cultural” one. The only reason the Mexican Witnesses had not engaged in these things before was because the headquarters organization instructed them not to do so, in order to protect the status chosen of a “cultural” organization. These are facts known by those in responsible positions in the Mexican Witness organization. They are not known by the vast majority of Witnesses outside that country and the January 1, 1990, Watchtower let them remain in the dark on the subject. It presented a “sanitized” picture of the occurrence, one that was as misleading as the pre-1989 practice of pretending to be something other than a religious organization while knowing full well that they were.