Leaving the ‘cult’ of the Jehovah’s Witnesses behind
The Press, New Zealand/October 11, 2024
By Philip Matthews
The world was supposed to end in 1975. Shayne Mechen was 7 years old and living in Hawke’s Bay when he waited for it to happen. He remembers a sense of dread, but perhaps there was some expectation too. As Jehovah’s Witnesses, he and his family would be among the saved.
Of course Armageddon never happened. We’re all still here.
Mechen was born into the faith, and was 4 days old at his first Jehovah’s Witnesses meeting. It was his entire life. He remembers weekends spent on faith activities, with no time for sports, no associating with people outside the faith, not even visits to the homes of school friends who were not also Jehovah’s Witnesses.
A complete world was created from rules and beliefs set by a governing body of men in upstate New York, but there were occasional glimmers of a life outside. Mechen remembered when he was 15, a man stormed into the Kingdom Hall and threw his copies of the Watchtower publication among the fellowship. The man and his wife were quickly identified as people who challenged the teachings and were “disfellowshipped”.
Mechen grew up hearing “the world” and “the worldly” were to be avoided.
“You’ve always been told that if you go out into the world, you’re going to turn into a drunkard, get drugged up and sleep around,” Mechen says. “The world is such a horrible place and you’re going to be sad.”
Higher education was also discouraged. After Mechen left school at 15, he became an auxiliary pioneer, which meant 60 hours of knocking on doors every month. He soon graduated to regular pioneer, which upped the rate to 90 hours per month, or roughly three hours a day. That was on top of a day job.
He moved around in the faith, wherever pioneers were needed. Waiheke Island, Dargaville, Wellington, Pahiatua. He was promoted to ministerial servant and by the age of 28, he was an elder. He had a job and a young family, and there were meetings, shepherding calls and visits almost every night.
Above him, there was a circuit overseer and if there were morality cases, involving issues like sex or drinking, he might be asked to sit on a judicial committee. The committee would send its review to headquarters in a blue envelope. Personal notes were destroyed and some details went unrecorded. The faith kept its problems strictly in-house.
Mechen stayed in the faith until he was 42. One day, he asked questions, doubted the belief system, and got out. His marriage ended then and there. His daughter later followed him out, but as far as he knows, his son is still in it. He doesn’t know where his son lives, and doesn’t even have a recent photo.
Mechen now lives in Palmerston North and has a good counsellor nearby who equipped him with the tools he needs to deal with spiritual trauma. But he says there are still too few skilled therapists to help those coming out of “the Jay Dubs” and similar high-control groups.
“I was in the Jehovah’s Witnesses for 42 years,” he says. “If I tried to work by myself on those things, I’d be over 80 before I would feel calm enough, but because I’ve taken the steps to get help from qualified individuals, you start becoming…” He pauses. “I don’t know if normal’s the right word but you’re no longer affected largely by indoctrination.”
He tells people who have left more recently that getting out of the faith’s mentality is “going to take a hang of a lot of work. It may take the rest of your life to start coming right from the indoctrination they gave us.”
After he left, he worked with a group called JWs 4 Justice and still takes part in various “meet-ups” with ex-members.
“Some are too terrified to go to a meet-up,” he says. “It might be their first contact with somebody who has similar experiences. They are literally petrified to be in the room with someone the Jehovah’s Witnesses call ‘apostates’.
“They go down rabbit holes. They get angry, they’re bitter, they’re hurt.”
He has also become an unofficial scholar of the faith he left, and has amassed a collection of Jehovah’s Witnesses publications going back more than a century. He can tell you about changes in doctrine over the decades, such as the famous refusal of blood transfusions, which only started in the 1940s despite claims of a Biblical basis.
His eyes were opened by the shocking findings in the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sex Abuse, which included the Jehovah’s Witnesses and delivered its final report in 2017. So he told his own story and appeared as an expert witness during New Zealand’s Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care that delivered the massive 16-volume Whanaketia report in July, and featured the Jehovah’s Witnesses as a case study.
He was not afraid of speaking out, he says. What is there to be afraid of?
‘They rule the place’
The Jehovah’s Witnesses were resistant to being included in the abuse in care investigation. Their argument was that they do not run homes and schools, like other churches, and therefore do not come under the umbrella of “care”. But the inquiry determined children were in the care of adults or elders, and included them.
The royal commission shone a light on a faith that has never enjoyed publicity. Numbers have stayed unusually stable in New Zealand over recent decades, with 18,471 people identifying as Jehovah’s Witnesses in the 2023 census. In the same year, there were 1576 elders, all male.
“They rule the place,” a former member told the inquiry. “Everything goes through them.”
In its response to the inquiry, the Jehovah’s Witnesses said its teachings and practices required elders not be alone with children, and that policies did not support elders being alone in a child’s home.
Not true, says Mechen.
“I was in rooms with kids all the time,” he says. “Not that I did anything or thought of doing it. But that was just the amount of trust you had from the congregation.”
The Australian investigation heard from 70 survivors of child sexual abuse in the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Of them, 80% were female and the average age at first abuse was 8. Historical records found 1006 alleged perpetrators over several decades, who were dealt with internally. There were more than 1800 alleged victims. The vast majority of allegations were from between 1980 and 2015.
Although 40% of the alleged perpetrators were disfellowshipped, about 57% of the disfellowshipped were later reinstated. And 19% were disfellowshipped more than once over child sexual abuse allegations.
If families were considered fatherless, elders took responsibility for making sure women and children were looked after. That also gave elders one-on-one contact with children.
Of a sample who came forward to the UK’s Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse between 2016 and 2018, 11% were from Jehovah’s Witnesses, putting the denomination third behind Anglicans and Catholics.
While the New Zealand investigation was not about sexual abuse but abuse in care, it found “credible evidence” of sexual abuse, and saw “the practice of elders questioning children or young people who were victims of sexual abuse during investigations and judicial committee processes was inappropriate and emotionally or psychologically abusive”.
At least one allegation of sexual abuse against a child in the care of the Jehovah’s Witnesses was reported during the inquiry period, but the full extent of abuse could not be quantified “for reasons including inadequate record keeping and the barriers to disclosure”.
Those barriers included the place of women and girls in the faith, fear of exclusion and relative disconnection from the secular world.
In addition, it found other children and young people were sexually abused but not while in “care” as it was defined by the inquiry. Some of the allegations involved elders.
As in other countries, the inquiry found problems with the “two witness” or “two person” rule. It says a sin needs two witnesses if there is no confession, which has an Old Testament basis. But while it protects against false accusations, it hinders reporting of sexual abuse, although two victims of the same alleged perpetrator can count as two witnesses.
The inquiry found no evidence that Jehovah’s Witnesses had ever referred sexual abuse allegations to police. Mechen explained that members were discouraged from going to the police, who were worldly.
“The police are seen as evil and under Satan’s control,” he told them.
The practice of “shunning” was also criticised. It means believers cannot associate with those who have left or been disfellowshipped. The inquiry quoted from a US study on the psychological impact of shunning, which threatens the four basic social needs of belonging, self-esteem, control and meaningful existence.
Mechen told the inquiry that “when young people are disfellowshipped or shunned, their whole support system is taken away. Some leavers are so impacted by being separated from everything they know that they become suicidal.”
Another ex-member went into more detail.
“I would be at the supermarket and see my auntie or a long-time childhood friend and they would see me, only to completely ignore me or walk the other way,” she said. “I saw my mother doing street preaching and she looked the other way. Family would have gatherings, wedding events and celebrations, and completely shun me.”
She added: “I have seen many therapists and counsellors, and no one can ever understand the terrible damage that this religion’s shunning of people causes.”
The Australian royal commission found shunning “had the very real potential of putting an abuse survivor in the untenable position of having to choose between the retraumatisation of having to share a community with their abuser, or losing that community altogether”.
And while 1975 came and went, a belief in an imminent Armageddon has always been central, as the royal commission in New Zealand found. A high degree of fear comes with it. An ex-member said: “I was taught that if I did not uphold the beliefs of the church and adhere to its practices, I would almost certainly die at Armageddon.”
Some language has been softened, Mechen says. The church no longer talks about “disfellowshipping” and prefers the term “removing”, although he says the practice is the same.
In his witness statement, Mechen offered some recommendations for change. They include the vetting of caregivers and others working with children, the mandatory reporting to police of child abuse claims, the end of child baptism, child indoctrination and shunning, and the investigation of human rights breaches.
When he talked about the blood transfusion rule, he told the inquiry “it’s a human right to choose your own medical care”.
Finally, Mechen called for the cancellation of the faith’s charity status.
“Absolutely,” he says. “What good do the public get from the Jehovah’s Witnesses?”
If you ask them, they will say they spread the word. But they’re not running charity shops and food banks like the Salvation Army or the Anglicans.
They don’t help the community, he argues. They help each other.
In its statement responding to Whanaketia, the Australasia branch of Jehovah’s Witnesses, which is based in Sydney, said the report did not present a “fair and accurate” picture, and they have “deep sympathy for all victims of abuse and are committed to providing them with support and comfort”.
They added: “The protection of children continues to be of utmost concern and importance to all Jehovah’s Witnesses.”
The next step after the royal commission is a formal apology by the Government, to be delivered on November 12.
Erica Stanford, the minister responsible for coordinating the Crown response to the inquiry, said in July “the Government is working with survivor groups to deliver an event that gives it the dignity it deserves”.
‘A bunch of retraumatised people’
But before that, the Jehovah’s Witnesses will be under the spotlight again in Christchurch next weekend at New Zealand’s first Decult conference. A Saturday afternoon panel discussion titled “Rock the Watchtower” will feature Mechen and three other ex-members, plus RNZ journalist Anusha Bradley.
Luke Hollis has talked of being sexually abused as a child by an adult man in the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Australian Lara Kaput started an online campaign called “Say Sorry”. Micki McAllen, a New Zealander who lives in the UK, makes TikTok videos as “Apostate Barbie” and will present virtually.
There will also be the New Zealand premiere of the film Witness Underground, made by US ex-member Scott Homan. It features Jehovah’s Witnesses who “deprogrammed” themselves by playing rock music that had been forbidden.
The Decult conference is the brainchild of journalist Anke Richter, and it grew from her work on cults and her book Cult Trip, which features the New Zealand groups Centrepoint and Gloriavale. Both will be covered at Decult.
There will be survivors, journalists, experts. What will it be like to bring all these people together in one room?
“You’re going to have a bunch of retraumatised people,” Mechen says. “Who knows what might happen. But I do know Anke has worked on that and there are going to be therapists there.”
UK psychotherapist and cult recovery expert Gillie Jenkinson will be among them. She will run workshops once the conference is finished, which means New Zealand might start to see more of the therapeutic expertise Mechen and others think we desperately need.
According to its online information, Jehovah’s Witnesses do not consider themselves a cult. Rather than being a new and unorthodox religion, they say they pattern their religion after the first-century Christians. And they do not look to a human leader, as cults tend to do.
The Sydney head office of the Australasia Branch of Jehovah’s Witnesses told The Press: “Jehovah’s Witnesses are a well-established Christian denomination with more than 8.8 million adherents in 239 lands. Adherents to our faith are valuable members of the community. We have been active in New Zealand for almost 130 years and have been legally registered for more than 75 years.”
They say they are aware of the Decult conference in Christchurch.
“We respect everyone’s right to express their personal accounts of the past,” the spokesman says. “While it is important to acknowledge and empathise with the personal experiences of former religious adherents, it is equally crucial to avoid generalising these experiences to an entire religious group.
“We share the opinion of well-respected scholars who have long encouraged caution and balance when considering the narratives of former adherents.”
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