Thoughts on Amber Scorah's "Leaving the Witness"

 

Leaving the Witness: Exiting a Religion and Finding a Life by Amber Scorah. Available on Amazon.

I recently read Amber Scorah’s memoir Leaving the Witness: Exiting a Religion and Finding a Life and thought I share some of my highlights about her story and how it helped me reflect on my own. If you haven’t read it yet, be aware there are spoilers!

Amber was raised as a Witness, and although her parents were inactive, her grandmother made sure to indoctrinate her. As a teenager, she formed a romantic relationship with an older Witness man, which eventually lead to both of their disfellowshipping. When the relationship ended, she returned to the congregation and married a spiritually strong Brother, whom she did not love. Preaching became their focus and their Pioneer careers led them to Shanghai as incognito missionaries, where she finally awakened.

I actually remember hearing of a Pioneer in China going apostate when I was a Witness. Missionaries turning apostate during their assignment in a foreign land was also something I heard about over the years, but of course, I don’t remember reading anything about this sort of thing in publications, just some service car backseat whispers.

On the other hand, white Pioneers in the Chinese congregation or groups going to China, are a whole type of Witness. What she doesn’t say in her book is that these types of Pioneers are considered badasses, even by Witness standards. They get all the work of being a missionary without the privilege and status that comes with being a Gilead School graduate. Since they have to go on their own, they don’t have access to the financial or legal resources afforded by the Watchtower society.

Maybe since she was previously disfellowshipped, she didn’t qualify to apply to Gilead to take the traditional route to become a JW missionary. Learning Mandarin and serving as a Pioneer in Taiwan was an alternate route. I can’t imagine she would be the Bethel worker type, so serving in China would probably be the most exotic and highest level of privilege she could reach.

My years supporting the Filipino Group in Portland taught me that not fully established service groups, congregations, or territories attract the misfits in the religion. Lord do I have stories about that! But I’ll save it for another time...back to the book.

One of my favorite lines in the memoir is about what it’s like being a Witness.

Paradise was as real to us as a memory—and even though it wasn’t concrete, our minds were already there in it.

How true is that! For those that were genuine believers, the promised Paradise after Armageddon was so real we could practically taste it. The Elders encouraged us to regularly meditate about what Paradise would be like. To make it real. Witness children typically have their “pet” wild animal they’ll get in Paradise picked out by the time they can talk (mine was an elephant). One of my book study groups would often play a game where each of us would say a Bible character we’d like to meet in Paradise, and why and speculate on the conversations we might have. One of my Overseers, an especially strict ex-Bethelite, would remind us when we were studying pre-Christian characters, that we need to learn their stories well because the time will come soon when we have to teach them about everything that has happened since they died so we better be prepared (except me, a sister, that privilege will probably go to an Elder).

We even sang about it.

Just see yourself, just see me too; Just see us all in a world that is new. Think how you’ll feel, how it will be, To live in peace, to be truly free.

—Song 134, See Yourself When All Is New, Sing to Jehovah, 2009

(Apologies if you now have that melody stuck in your head.)

It’s interesting that Amber was disfellowshipped as a young adult but she didn’t adjust to living in the world and was reinstated. I don’t think she was deprogrammed at this time. And I have a suspicion that the shame/guilt cycles that Witnesses are subjected to when they connect with a worldly person becomes (dare I say) one of the “strongly entrenched things” to overturn. In hindsight she reflects:

...I was so trained to be wary of the world, even when I had been totally kicked out of the congregation and the world was all I had, when the world would have picked me up and taught me that all of this was insanity was wrong, I still preemptively rejected it. I was afraid of it.

Ironically, as Witness kids we learned to trust blindly the Watchtower and the Congregation, but we weren’t taught how to build trusting relationships ourselves. It's tough to get a crash course in relationship-building after leaving the religion. I can vouch for that and so can the many poor friend choices I made after leaving (not you, of course 😉).

Not surprisingly, years later when she left for good and had no friends, she learned how to make friends, so much so that they are her family now and that is beautifully shown when she arrives in New York City, and forms an unlikely friendship with her sixty-five year old landlord, waiting out their unemployment sharing a bowl of popcorn and watching old movies.

Just like the rest of us cult survivors, entering the world came with challenges. I was delighted to read that this did not dampen her Kimmy Schmidt like joy of her newly claimed freedom:

Everything seems magical to me, because though they are the same streets that existed before I was part of them, when you are of something, rather than outside of it, everything feels important and interesting in a way it hasn’t before.

The first birthday party I crashed was days after I had made my leaving official. I didn’t know anyone, but the birthday gal was an ex-Witness and friend of Joel (my only worldly friend at the time). In the car on the way there, I started to panic because I realized I didn’t know the words to the “Happy Birthday” song. You’d think I’d know from sitting out all of my schoolmate’s birthdays but my Mom always taught me to leave the room! I googled the lyrics and quickly tried to memorize and practice in the car (with strict instructions from Joel to sing “and many more...on channel four...” at the end). When the birthday cake showed up, it was go-time and I was bubbling with excitement. Midway through the rather short song, I couldn’t hold back the tears. Even in a group of strangers, just being able to join the group was incredible.

Since leaving the Witnesses, I’m fascinated to see how other ex-Witnesses apply their Witness skills in “the world.” Years in the Theocratic Ministry School training have stuck with many of us, as we have a lot of public speaking experience. Kingdom Hall cleaning assignments paid off, and I’m especially skilled at cleaning toilets and urinals. For Amber, her Pioneer experience flowed into her podcast host gig:

All those years of prying into people’s lives, drawing them out so as to convert them, was a skill I could use in the real world.

It’s kinda creepy, but we ex-Pioneers have a sadistic knack for crossing boundaries to prove our points. Some of my earliest preaching training as a little girl was to quickly notice everything about the house as you walked up to knock on the door and listen intently to what the householder would say, so that you might pick the right Bible Tract to give to them. Did you see children’s toys in the yard? Family Happiness Tract. Did they mention something negative from the news? Will this World Survive. When all else fails, use Life in a Peaceful New World, it has a panda on it.

Eventually, I was able to take that early training and expand it into less of a plug-and-play presentation and a unique experience for each person I talked to. Shortly before my awakening, I was starting to get quite good at recruiting Bible students, which landed me an interview at the Circuit Assembly. I had worked my way through all the suggested presentations from the Reasoning from the Scriptures book and the Our Kingdom Ministry issues, but honestly, they’re outdated and don’t work well. So I tried focusing the first visit on being super interested in them. Like a stalker's level of interest. I would preach less, get to know each other, and lead them to feel like I was interested in them and their lives (I really wasn’t). When the visit was over I would sprint back to the car and write down every detail in my Return Visit tracking iPad app (yeah, I was that Pioneer). I analyzed all the data points I collected to construct a highly personalized persuasive sales pitch for the next visit, and kept refining with each new data point collected. It didn’t always work, but for the people that it did work on, I was delighted that they considered me a friend.

It wasn’t surprising to me that the preaching strategy in China was to first befriend potential Bible students. Although this was the safest way because of the ban on missionaries in China, it was also a tough territory to persuade people to convert to Christianity. But I think this approach influenced Amber. It gave her the freedom to see the people around her and the world she lived in, in a different light. A brighter one I think.

She mentions the problem with preaching:

Curiosity is a bad quality for the preacher. You preach because you are sure. You preach to people who don’t need to hear it, because possibly you are the one who needs to be saved.

I’m convinced that my way out of the Witnesses was through. What I mean by that is, like Amber, when I reached a new spiritual peak, being a successful pioneer, gave me a different vantage point to view my beliefs. Although I had many mini-awakenings during my descent, none made more of an impact on me than realizing during a Bible Study I was conducting in the Kingdom Hall library, that I could convince my student to believe anything. I had just done so with life-changing doctrine, which was successful by Witness standards, and knew I could keep going until she would decide to get baptized. I didn’t know it was brainwashing at the time, but I did know that it wasn’t right and the power I held over her was dangerous. Yet, I was trapped in this religion, needing to be saved from it.

Having left the Witnesses, establishing herself in New York, and founding her life partner, Amber experiences an unspeakable loss of her baby due to an incident on his first day of daycare. I’m not a parent, so I can’t even begin to imagine the pain these parents felt or the struggle to continue on with their lives. In her grief, she decided to fight for advocating paid parental leave, becoming a known activist. Wow.

What I think is truly inspirational about this, despite all her heartbreak—growing up a Witness, experiencing religious abuse, recovering from a failed marriage and a relationship with someone she loved, being shunned by everyone, and escaping a cult—she has used her freedom to help others. Many ex-Witnesses have done the same, dedicating themselves to advocacy for reform on the “no blood” policy, activism for the child abuse survivors, and educating the public on the destructive influence of this cult. I’ll be honest, I’ve struggled to understand this. In a way, it still feels like being a Witness to me, working for a higher cause to make the world better. But I’m starting to think that maybe the world needs more advocates, activists, and educators. We ex-Witnesses have survived a great deal, and hopefully, it has made us stronger. So why not use our unique perspective to help others?

Like so many ex-Witnesses, Amber’s story is truly inspirational and fills me with the hope that maybe I’ll figure out what my calling is and make my mark on the world.