![]() ![]() Reading the book shows there are exceptions to the practice, say to encourage the disfellowshipped member to see the light, repent, and return to the fold. This includes family members, even when living in the same house. They even use the term “disfellowshipping.” If you want all the details, you can read a good summary of the whole apparatus at the Wikipedia article “ Jehovah’s Witnesses and congregational discipline.” Let’s just talk about shunning.Ī TJ is supposed to have no contact with a disfellowshipped member. If you read the book, you will see that exiting the Jehovah’s Witnesses is as difficult and traumatic for a TJ as leaving the LDS Church is for a Mormon. In the eyes of mainstream Christians, both sets of beliefs are equally strange. Both sets of beliefs appeal to a few obscure Bible passages. Both TJ and Mormon spirit beliefs are seen as heresy by orthodox Christians. Just like TJs, Mormons believe good Mormons eventually get reanimated physical bodies and go to paradise (everyone else goes somewhere else). Mormons are at the exact other end of the spectrum, not only asserting the continued existence of spirits after death in temporary spirit prison/paradise, but extending spirit life backwards into a spirit Pre-existence. Instead, your spirit goes dormant or sleeps until the resurrection, when good TJs get reformed and reanimated bodies and go to paradise (the rest of us go somewhere else). How about spirits and resurrection? TJs believe and teach that at death there is no continuous spirit existence. Guess what? TJs say the same thing about the collateral damage from abstaining from blood transfusions. Leaders and mainstream Mormons say that’s just the price we pay for following God’s truth, and in the end we will be blessed, etc. But the ongoing hardline position and rhetoric that Mormons deploy against gays leads to depression, ostracism, and suicide for a small number of gay LDS youth. That seems needlessly harsh compared to passing on a morning cup of brew. Stranger than thinking God doesn’t want you to drink coffee? But declining blood transfusions means some TJs, even some TJ children whose parents refuse to allow a blood transfusion for their child, will die as a consequence. You probably think refusing blood transfusions is a strange belief. Mormons also see TJs as rather quaint and strange, with bizarre beliefs and practices, whereas Mormons are a lot more normal. ![]() What do Mormons think of JWs or TJs? (If you went on a foreign mission, you probably still think of them as “TJs” or Temoins de Jehovah.) Mainstream Christians kind of lump Mormons, TJs, Christian Scientists, and Seventh-Day Adventists into the category “strangely appealing American-born churches” or simply “cults.” Mormons see TJs as direct competitors (who else goes door to door looking for converts?). This is the gripping account of a fully active Jehovah’s Witness who grows up in Vancouver, BC, goes to China as a JW missionary (under the radar, of course), gets a job, recruits “Bible students,” then exits her church, exits her marriage, and moves to New York. This week’s offering is Leaving the Witness: Exiting a Religion and Finding a Life (Viking, 2019) by Amber Scorah. There are things about leaving your own religion that you will learn only by studying how people leave someone else’s religion. Exit narratives throw an extra twist into the mix. It is said, “He who knows only one religion, knows none.” In other words, there are things about your own religion you will learn and understand only by studying someone else’s religion. ![]()
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