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How twisted isolated Bible verses and enforced silence enabled a global culture of child and women abuse
Sep 24
I was born into the Watchtower. I didn’t choose it, and I didn’t know any different. As a little girl sitting on those hard Kingdom Hall seats, holding my little bookbag, I really believed we had the only truth on earth. I felt sorry for everyone out in the world because we were taught they were doomed and lost, while we were the special, protected ones.
It took me most of my life to see the ugly truth behind all of it.
A faith that is truly from God doesn’t need secrets, and it doesn’t need to terrorize people to keep them quiet. But beneath all the pressed suits of elders and their friendly handshakes and the sweet smiles, life as a woman in Watchtower was exhausting.
You were always less. You were always kept down, always told to submit, and always reminded that men were the head and you were just supposed to follow.
Worst of all, that patriarchal Watchtower system shielded predators.
Sexual Abuse of Minors in the Watchtower Organization ( click)
Secrets of the Watchtower ( click)
When terrible things happened to innocent children, the men patted each other on the back, and swept it under the rug, all while mothers looked the other way. We were living a lie, and the cost of that lie was paid by the most helpless among us.
The whole setup was run by men, from top to bottom.
As girls, we were taught that God only talked through the men, and our job was to sit down, be quiet, and listen. The leaders loved using sweet, spiritual words to make it go down easy.
They would tell us that women are just as valuable to God, we just have a different role.
What a crock!
How can you tell someone she is valuable when she isn’t allowed to make a single decision, isn’t allowed to teach, isn’t allowed on any committee, and has to bow her head to every man in the room?
That is not “ valuable.”
It is an old boys’ club built to keep men in charge and women completely powerless.
That male club is the exact reason predators got away with hurting children for decades. In the Kingdom Hall, child abuse was never treated as a real crime. It was just a sin to be handled quietly in a back room by three men.
They hid behind their ridiculous two witness rule, telling people that unless two people actually saw the act happen with their own two eyes, they couldn’t do anything about it.
Think about that for a second. What predator invites an audience? It gave every sick monster a free pass.
Jehovah’s Witnesses Policies that Hide Crimes ( click)
When a child tried to speak up, the family was told never to call the police because it would bring reproach on the organization’s name. Little girls and boys were dragged into back rooms, made to sit across from older men, and forced to tell every dirty detail while these men took notes.
Then the elders would say, we don’t have two witnesses, so just leave it in Jehovah’s hands!
The abuser was usually just moved to the next town over to do it again, while the headquarters in New York kept secret files on thousands of them that the police never saw.
Eventually, the outside world forced the truth into the open.
The huge government inquiry in Australia ( click) blew the lid right off.
They dug through the Watchtower’s own secret records and found over a thousand alleged child molesters dating back to 1950. Out of every single one of those, the organization didn’t report a solitary one to the cops.
Not one.
Inquiries in Britain found the same rotten pattern, and court cases all across America proved it was not just a few bad men. It was the policy of the whole religion to protect the organization first and throw the children under the bus.
This is the hardest part for me to say, but I have to be honest.
I don’t just blame the men – I blame the women too.
I know how deep the fear goes, and I know how brainwashed they all are.
But God gave mothers an instinct to protect their babies, and so many of these women threw that instinct away to please men. When you suspect someone is touching your child, you do not go ask the local elder who cleans windows for a living what you should do.
You call the police.
Yet so many mothers sat there, kept their mouths shut, cried into their pillows, and obeyed their husbands. They were terrified of being kicked out and shunned, or afraid to disobey men – so they sacrificed their own flesh and blood just to keep their status in the Kingdom Hall.
The brainwashing was thick, but looking the other way while your baby is harmed is a choice.
You see this same sickness in a lot of other places, too. You see it in extreme fundamentalist groups, in King James Only crowds, and in churches that obsess over male authority ( click)
Abuse in Baptist Churches ( click)
Bill Gothard ( click)
Let us Prey… ( click)
These are not rare, isolated slip ups.
There are thousands upon thousands of these stories out there. These men love to slap a Bible verse on their cruelty and call it love, but let us call it what it actually is. It is just insecure men demanding that women act like helpless little children while enduring mental, emotional, and very often physical abuse.
They build their whole abusive setup by cherry picking single lines right out of the Bible and twisting them into weapons. They will scream Ephesians 5:22 at women, telling wives to submit to their husbands, but they completely skip the verse right before it that tells everyone to submit to each other out of love for Christ.
They never talk about the part that tells men to love their wives to the point of dying for them. Instead, they yank lines out of 1 Timothy about women keeping quiet, or passages in Colossians and 1 Peter about wives being in subjection, completely ignoring what was actually going on culturally when those letters were written.
They do not care about the gentle heart of Jesus.
They just want an excuse to rule their homes and churches like little dictators who can never be questioned. The harvest of that twisted teaching is pure devastation.
It creates terrified households where women are trained to choke back their own gut instincts, and children are left wide open to monsters in the dark.
Jesus said that you will know a tree by the fruit it produces.
When the fruit of your religion is broken children, silenced mothers, and protected predators, your tree is completely rotten.
You see, in 2010, Jesus completely found me. I had a real, beautiful encounter with Christ, and everything broke wide open. All those twisted rules and heavy chains just shattered.
Jesus never treated women like second class citizens. When He walked this earth, He went completely against the grain of every proud man around Him. He sat with women, taught them, defended them when men tried to condemn them, and when He rose from the dead, He didn’t run to the high priests or the men in power.
He went straight to the women and told them to go preach the good news.
Jesus shed His blood for His daughters just as much as His sons. He didn’t die so we could live under the boot of proud, insecure men in suits.
Real faith protects the little ones and it gives women same calling. It calls out evil for what it is, and it stands up for the truth.
Leaving that organization and walking into the real arms of Jesus finally showed me what true freedom looks like, and I am never letting any man steal that from me again.
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