Richard E Kelly

I am currently writing a sequel, The Ghosts from Mama’s Club. The book is an autobiography of my life after Bethel, and it prompts the question, “So what are these ghosts?” In my story, they are dysfunctional behavior patterns, residue from the time spent in a highly controlled religious group. These ghosts can be toxic and debilitating roadblocks to a full, happy life after leaving the Club, if they’re not identified and exorcized. They are:

1. Prodigious amounts of misinformation acquired wittingly/unwittingly.
2. Constant guilt due to thinking one is not pleasing God. This occurs when old religious fears are not properly cremated.
3. The loss of cognitive thinking skills, an inability to think for oneself.
4. An insatiable need to have other people or groups do one’s thinking.
5. The inability to articulate well-thought-out religious/philosophical beliefs.
6. A potentially unhealthy attraction to high-control fundamentalist groups promising God’s truth & the correct interpretation of the Bible.
7. The inability to tolerate the insecurity of anything outside the sphere of physical science and a person’s conscious experiences.
8. A need to control other people. (When you’re abused, you can abuse)
9. A lack of self-control related to sex, alcohol or drugs.
10. The inability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time.
11. Black and white thinking, as answers were always found in the WT.
12. Difficulty understanding that the only things a person can control are one’s beliefs about events, people, circumstances, etc.
13. Difficulty assimilating into mainstream society due to JW phobias.
14. Stuck on constantly blaming the organization for robbing the best years of one’s life and unable to acknowledge one’s duplicity.
15. Obsessive time and energy spent on projects intended to topple the organization. (Expose them, yes. Toppling them isn’t going to happen as JWs fill a market niche for people in need of heavy-duty structure.)
16. A propensity to underline in ink key points in magazines and books.
17. Suffering persistent shunning by JW family and friends. (For many people, this is the most brutal ghost, and can be severely debilitating.)

I believe the most invasive of the ghosts is misinformation. Shedding “things a person knows that ain’t so” is a very challenging task. It requires cremating old religious fears. It may take years. But it can be done. If I were to leave the organization today, my recovery plan would include reading the following six books, in this order, and here’s why:

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Although a bit apprehensive at first, I was recently asked to help a non-JW mom in a child custody hearing. Due to my story of Growing Up in Mama’s Club – A Childhood Perspective of Jehovah’s Witnesses, she believed I could help convince the court that her three school-aged children should not be baptized as JWs, if that was their choice, until they were 18 years old.

She had married a disfellowshipped JW and early on made a non binding verbal agreement with her husband that the kids would not be raised as JWs. After their divorce, the dad had a change of heart. He was reinstated and began attending meetings sporadically. Several months ago, he started taking the kids to the Kingdom Hall on the Sundays he had custody. As soon as the mom found out, she filed a complaint.

The mom did her homework and provided good documentation to the court to support her concerns. And, she petitioned for me and another ex-Bethelite to be her expert witnesses. The questions and our testimony were to be as follows:

State your name for the Court: Richard E. Kelly

Briefly describe your experiences and expertise related to the Kingdom Hall and the Watchtower Society:

I was raised as a Jehovah’s Witness after my mother became a convert when I was four years old. I was baptized at ten. In 1958, my family answered a special calling to “serve where the need was great” and we moved to a small rural town in Nebraska. I started giving one-hour public talks at 15, appointed a ministerial servant at 16, and began to “pioneer” (a special 100-hour per month door-to-door ministry) at 17. At 18, I was invited to live and work at Bethel, the world headquarters for JWs. While there, I was selected to serve with an elite group of public speakers.

After two years, I left Bethel to get married. A year and a half later, I officially resigned from the church. Since my wife decided to stay, we worked out an amiable agreement on how to raise our children. However, in September 1981, a new policy of “shunning” was instituted. Because I was baptized and no longer a believer, I, along with thousands of ex-JWs, was shunned. My parents and siblings refused to speak to me.

In 1998, my youngest sister was murdered by her husband. My mother didn’t inform me until a week after her death. I soon began to write articles and a book about, “Growing Up in Mama’s Club – A Childhood Perspective of Jehovah’s Witnesses.” In 2008, I printed a revised, third edition. I am currently writing a sequel called, “Ghosts from Mama’s Club.”

State for the court within your experiences, what beliefs were of concern for you, not only from your own life, but for that of your children:

• As a child: 1) my grandparents and I would meet a violent death at Armageddon if we didn’t believe the way JWs do. My mom tried to give it a positive spin, saying I would live forever in a paradise-like new world after God destroyed the world, but I knew in my heart that I wasn’t a true believer, so if Mama was right, I wasn’t going to live in paradise with her; 2) I would not be able to go to college; 3) in order to please God, I could not celebrate holidays, my birthday, or associate with non believers; 4) the country I lived in was demonized and serving in the military, pledging allegiance to the flag or standing when the national anthem were cardinal sins; 5) I could not challenge or question church beliefs or policies without being made to feel guilty and I was often told that this kind of reasoning was a sign that I didn’t really love Jehovah God.
• As a parent: I reached an agreement with my wife that: 1) our children would receive blood transfusions if their life depended on it; 2) they could not be baptized until they were adults; 3) our religious beliefs were personal decisions based on research and spiritual needs and I didn’t love God less, and my actions and beliefs were not controlled by the devil, because I wasn’t a JW. 4) While my wife respected our agreement, behind my back, relatives and other well-meaning JWs would send our children letters, talk to them on the phone, or tell them in person things like Armageddon was close and they needed to go to the meetings and read the Watchtower if they didn’t want to be destroyed, etc.

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My wife, Helen, walked out of her last Kingdom Hall meeting in 1986 after spending thirty years as a JW and has never looked back. While her story and more is told in an upcoming sequel that I’m writing, Ghosts from Mama’s Club, I want to share an event that happened to Helen two weeks ago. But first, I’ll need to share a little background information.

While Helen was never disfellowshipped, her JW siblings treated her departure like she was. When my step father passed away in 2001, Helen and her JW sister had a pleasant two-hour conversation after his funeral. Still miffed by the silliness of it all, Helen said sarcastically as her sister announced it was time to go, “See you in another fifteen years Esther.”

In July of this year, I organized a meeting with my JW brother, who is ironically married to Helen’s sister, to persuade my JW mother to move into an assisted living facility. Esther joined us and the hour-plus conversation preceding family business went well. Lots of laughs, hugs, and conversation you’d expect from family members. It prompted my mother to say to me later, “You could really see the love Helen and Esther have for each other.”

Two months later, Helen received a letter from Esther and a copy of the September 2006 Watchtower, featuring the article on page 17, “When a Loved One Leaves Jehovah.” Esther wrote, “My intentions in sending this is not to upset you, but rather is out of love and concern for you and Dick, (me) especially in view of the worsening world conditions and the nearness of Armageddon.” She went on to underline the following expressions:

…when a person chooses to leave Jehovah and the way of life set out in the Scriptures, faithful family members typically experience deep anguish. ‘I love my sister very much and I would do anything to see her come back to Jehovah. This has been hard for me to bear because in every other respect she has been a wonderful sister to me.’

Why does the spiritual loss of a child or other loved one cause such deep distress to Christian relatives? Because they know that the Scriptures promise eternal life on a paradise earth for those who remain loyal to Jehovah. They look forward to sharing these blessings with their mates, children, parents, siblings, and grandchildren. How it pains them to think that their loved ones who have stopped serving Jehovah may miss out!

Are such Christians overreacting? Not necessarily. In fact, they may to some extent be reflecting the qualities of Jehovah, in whose image man was made. He implanted in humans the capacity for having similar loyal attachments, and the bond between family members can be especially strong. So it is not surprising that humans would grieve over the spiritual loss of a beloved relative. Indeed, the spiritual loss of a loved one is among the most difficult of trials that come upon true worshipers.

Do not give up hope. Love “hopes all things.” Indeed, experience has shown that many who have left the truth eventually do return.

Respect Jehovah’s arrangement for discipline. (Hebrews 12:11)

Have you left Jehovah? If so, whatever the reason, your relationship with Jehovah and your eternal prospects are at risk. Remember, the storm clouds of Armageddon are swiftly approaching. Moreover, life in this system is short and uncertain. You cannot know if you will be alive tomorrow. If you have left Jehovah, now is the best time to return.

Esther’s letter, and especially the Watchtower quotes, were too much for my normally tacit wife. Her dander was up and she needed to respond. To do otherwise would make her culpable. So here is Helen’s response:

“Dear Esther, I don’t like discussing religion or politics. People generally believe what they do, not because of objective research, but because that’s what they want to believe. If anything, people look for evidence to support what they already know to be true and they aren’t comfortable when those beliefs are challenged. Having said that, I’m going to make an exception as you took the time to show your “love and concern” for me by sharing your beliefs. Hopefully, as you said, my beliefs will not upset you.

“I’m personally embarrassed by the number of years I allowed a group of self-anointed men, the Governing Body and writers of the Watchtower, to tell me who are Jehovah’s friends and how to please Him. If you’re interested, I’ve attached a list, Telling It Like It Is, of things I believe about Jehovah’s Witnesses. If not, you can toss it. Although, I read the 2006 Watchtower you sent me.

“As you observed during our recent visit in Mom’s house, I’m a very happy person. I lead a good life and am grateful that I can use my mind, without being made to feel guilty, to challenge beliefs that aren’t healthy for me or my family. I’m proud to have broken free from the bondage the Watchtower put on me. It’s opened up windows of opportunity I wouldn’t have experienced as a JW and I’ve had a full life that’s been productive and satisfying.

“Esther, you will always, irregardless of the big differences in our beliefs, be my little sister that I love very much.”

Telling It Like It Is
(An edited copy of a September Freemind’s post based on this original article.)

1. Joining Jehovah’s Witnesses is a one-way street. They will pretend to intensely love you while you walk in and they will openly despise you if and when you choose to walk out.

2. They love to say only they are from God and to point out that everyone and everything else is from Satan.

3. Flattery is one of the tools they use to win people over. They like to make potential converts feel special, so that they continue to ‘feel good’ about studying the Bible with them.

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