At the conference meet last week, my girlfriend and I found a Little Free Library and, both being English majors and book addicts, we looked around to see if there was anything worth reading. There wasn’t, it was mostly just children's books, but there was something very much not worth reading that we had a wonderful, albeit horribly depressing, time reading together. It’s a booklet put out by the Jehovah’s Witnesses entitled What Does the Bible Really Teach? Here are some of the more memorable parts. At first I planned on categorizing each selection as either hilarious or awful, but I can’t. All of them are really both.
All True Believers Get Elephants: Yeah, I get it: everyone wants a fulfilling marriage, three happy kids, and a long beach on a sunny day to stroll down. But really? An elephant? Also, why does that girl get her own elephant and her poor brother only gets a pail and beach-ball? Did the elephant-owning-girl command her elephant to eat her other brother and, if so, why is he so happy about it? And, more generally, is getting an elephant from God necessarily a good thing? I mean, what if God’s elephant tramples your kid? Are you still supposed to love the elephant? Or what if you just don’t want an elephant? Will God get offended if you ask for something that’s a little easier to take care of? This raises a whole host of complex theological issues, none of which are so much as mentioned in the pamphlet.
Hamfisted Apocalypse-Porn: “With each passing year, the world is becoming more and more dangerous. It is overrun with warring armies, dishonest politicians, hypocritical religious leaders, and hardened criminals. The world as a whole is beyond reform. The Bible reveals that the time is near when God will eliminate the wicked world during his war of Armageddon. This will make way for a righteous new world.” I can’t tell if it’s hilarious that they think people will fall for this, or terrible that people actually do. Because the first two sentences could come right out of any political attack ad (likely Republican, but I know Democrats aren’t above this). They play up vague and poorly supported fears, then offer salvation in some big, straightforward, easy action: vote or join the church. It demands such an odd mix of cynicism and trust, and asks little critical thought. I’ll admit it, it’s sometimes enticing to write off the whole world as doomed and dream of something better. But attaining the dream is never as simple as passive faith. I doubt that God has a master plan for remaking the world beyond encouraging us to do it.
3. Blood Transfusions (Part I): Something interesting and truly disturbing that I learned from this pamphlet: Jehovah’s witnesses use obscure Biblical laws (which, by the way, also allow slavery and demand liberal use of the death penalty) to oppose life-saving blood transfusions. There’s no moral justification, just blind faith without context or reflection. Still, on the morbidly-comical side of things, there’ a funny visual of someone getting a beer-transfusion straight into their vein, which I guess is a metaphor or something.
4. White Jesus: Credit where credit is due, Jehovah’s Witnesses actually make a sincere, if underemphasized, appeal to diversity (more on that later), showing multicultural communities in their illustrations. But they undo any goodwill by repeatedly showing Jesus, and other Biblical figures, as pasty white. Jesus lived in a desert; he had the skin tone that would get him stopped by the TSA if He were alive today. This is a pretty wide-spread misconception, and I’d wear myself out if I pointed it out everywhere I saw it, but since the Jehovah’s Witnesses also make such a big stink about Jesus not being born in December and Christmas being a pagan festival, that this lapse in historical accuracy seems pretty incriminating.
5. Sin: While we’re on the topic of race, I think that the fact that they personify sin with heavy-set, tattoo-laden, distinctly non-white guys showing off knives and guns reveals their prejudices. Also sinful: hiding a stolen hookah pipe under your probably-also-stolen fur coat or being the protagonist of a noir film, apparently.
6. Blood transfusions (part 2): And then there’s a two-page spread of a very avid coin collector, a man angrily miming eating a hotdog at his wife (who seems very disappointed that she married such a moron), someone appreciating the finer things in life, and a bishop holding up a finger to quiet the congregation as he delivers an eloquent burp. All in all, it's a hilariously overblown walkthrough of the four deadly sins (coin-collection, hotdog eating, happiness, and burping in church). But what is the deal with the woman looking of the brink of ecstasy while getting a blood transfusion? Do these people know how blood transfusions even work? I dunno, maybe whoever wrote this took the gin-transfusion example too literally. There are also soldiers lining the bottom, and I do have to say that I admire Jehovah’s Witnesses for their commitment to pacifism. But they never actually mention pacifism in the pamphlet. I guess opposing war isn't a politically viable stance for the church, but hating blood transfusion is?
7. Gender roles: Good news: there’s nothing explicitly homophobic in this pamphlet. Bad news: it pretty clearly lays out a heterosexual couple with children as the only real sort of family, and endorses terrible gender norms to boot. It claims that “A wife does well to remember that in God’s view, a quiet and mild spirit is of great value... By displaying such a spirit, she will find it easier to demonstrate godly subjection, even under trying circumstances.” Jesus never married, had women among His followers, and many women in the early Christian church joined specifically to avoid these kinds of subjugating marriages that the Jehovah’s Witnesses are endorsing. It really gets to me that so many people, Christian and non-Christian alike, see Christianity as a force of sexism. Often it is, but it doesn’t have to be, and shouldn’t be.
8. Multiculturalism: Aside from the tacit implications of having a white guy in a suit surrounded by adoring stand-ins for various cultures, why the hell is there a cowboy in the back left? Are cowboys their own ethnicity now? Between this, the elephant thing, and the booze-injections, I’m starting to think that the Jehovah’s Witnesses have a much livelier theology than they’re letting on.
9. Basically the Entire Book: Just look at the title: “What Does the Bible Really Teach?” The arrogance there makes me angry as soon as I read it, the same way that touching a stove causes pain on contact. There’s such a lack of humility before God and the universe, to assume that you know the final truth. Because we can’t ever know for sure. That doubt is what makes faith stronger than dogma: that we wrestle with inconsistencies and anxieties, and come out stronger from it. If you want to see what I mean, read Job; not the mangled interpretation that this pamphlet provides, but the real, viscerally painful text. The Bible isn't simple, faith is never really resolved, we just have to keep wrestling with it and hope that truth is somewhere out there. It's not religion because it doesn't have that essential element of doubt or unknown, and it's not science because it doesn't have any evidence. I really don't know what else to say about it, except that I hope no Jehovah’s Witnesses come to my door anytime soon, because I might have too many things to talk about with them.
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