Growing Up Jehovah’s Witness: How Religion Shaped My Worldview

The truth is what you believe.

They call the faith I was raised in the Truth. People would ask me how long have you been in the Truth, meaning: did I grow up as a Jehovah’s Witness or did I convert as an adult. I wonder if other religions have nick-names, so to speak, for the religion that was practiced.

I was taught that I would never die. It’s a different teaching than most religions; if I followed and obeyed the Truth, I would not have to die and live in heaven, I could live right here on a paradise earth, forever. The following is brief summary from my memoir-in-progress To Be Immortal. I won the Writer’s League of Texas Manuscript contest in 2024 for the first chapter of my memoir.

TO BE IMMORTAL

To Be Immortal is a hybrid memoir that gives voice to the coming-of-age of a black girl who was raised as a Jehovah’s Witness and taught that she was immortal. The writer offers unique observations of maneuvering through the social constructs of race, gender, and religion during the transformative civil rights movement, and provides unexplored perspectives of historical moments.

Between 1966 and 1975, Witnesses proselytized that Judgement Day would be here by 1975, and they artfully pummeled that declaration into the hearts and minds of their followers. When Armageddon did not come, it was as if the year 1975 was sucked into a black hole along with promises and illusions.

To Be Immortal is an excavation and reconciliation about how the author became an adult amidst the backdrop of the civil rights movement and the taught immortality of a hyper-organized religion.

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My parents were baptized as Jehovah’s Witnesses when I was five. My siblings and I learned that we could not celebrate birthdays, holidays, pledge allegiance to the flag, participate in sports, or associate with people who were not Jehovah’s Witnesses. Eventually, we would learn that college was not available to us, as the new world would make higher education unnecessary.

I had to learn how to live in a world that we were supposed to forsake. My memoir is a coming-of-age story, and my story extended well beyond my thirties. I learned how to deal with the belief that I and other Jehovah’s Witnesses would live on earth forever while unbelievers would not survive Armageddon. How do you handle such a juxtaposition? What is it like to be immortal?

Often, social constructs that are taught tell us that we should just accept what happened rather than try to understand it. I found that many former Jehovah’s Witnesses do discuss how they were raised, let alone express those experiences in a creative fashion.

As many of us know, Witnesses are often the butt of jokes or throw-away lines in plays, movies, or TV shows. I believe, first you cry, then you laugh, and then you know. I am exploring social constructs through writing, and I believe that how I was raised, in fact, how anyone was raised, is worth a literary exploration.

I just finished reading a memoir by Amber Scorah, a former Jehovah’s Witness, called Leaving the Witness: Exiting a Religion and Finding a Life. It was refreshing to see that her insightful words, mirror and illuminate many of the things that I experienced, even though she spent a good deal of her life in China. I am finding that sometimes you can’t express what you may have experienced until you speak it, or see it expressed by someone else.

Jacqueline Woodson’s beautiful verse memoir Brown Girl Dreaming, is a book that describes Woodson’s early childhood as a Jehovah’s Witness. Although it is classified as children’s literature, just reading the lyric expressions of her experiences validated my own.

Art and artistic expression heal, whether it be the spoken word, painting, writing, singing, or dancing; any type of creation upholds our experiences. I am inspired by Toni Morrison’s words, “If there’s a book you really want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” I am writing the books I want to read, and I hope to encourage others to heal and express themselves through art.

How does your religion or other facets of your life impact your view of the world? As the world was transforming through the civil rights movement, I was as well. And my religion had an undeniable influence on my worldview.

How did religion shape how you look at the world?