Documentation of Communications

This is the master page where I document the communications that have gone on between my family (mostly my parents) and myself. The point of this is to show just how destructive the Watchtower cult is to families. I have had only very limited communication with my family as a result of the Watchtower cult’s shunning practices. I’m not gonna lie, it has been difficult and heartbreaking. And there’s no doubt that the Watchtower cult takes it to an extreme. As this pew poll shows, the Jehovah’s Witnesses cult is one of the most homophobic religions in the world.

Still, while Jehovah’s Witnesses undoubtedly take it to an extreme by carrying out the practice of shunning, there’s no good reason to think that familial rejection of gay folks is a rare practice. This is one of the most destructive harms that religion commonly imposes on my community. Although, when polled, the situation among the religious seems to be improving these numbers should be taken with a grain of salt. So, for instance, Pew also performed this poll:

If true, these are numbers in the right direction, and I have no doubt that some progress has been made. However, there is reason to think that these numbers are overly optimistic. Some people might feel uncomfortable with expressing their true beliefs to pollsters, though they don’t feel similar compunctions about sharing their true beliefs with their family members. Also, this kind of polling – even if everyone answers honestly – can only capture explicit attitudes that the person being polled is aware of. But it cannot capture implicit or subconscious biases that the person is largely unaware of. So we might expect that the numbers would look very different if the person being polled is an LGBTQ+ person reporting on the attitudes of their family members. And, as expected, when polled, despite the fact that roughly 62% of parents report that they have affirming attitudes, we find that the reverse of this poll reflects the feelings of safety that LGBTQ+ youth feel in these same homes. So the Trevor Project actually did exactly this poll, and it was found that only 38% of LGBTQ+ youth feel that their home is an affirming place.

So, while progress has undoubtedly been made, we still have a long way to go towards acceptance of LGBTQ+ people in American society.

Shunning

As an xennial, I would imagine that my own experience was somewhat worse than contemporary LGBTQ+ youth, especially in the school environment and online – which, the internet was only in its nascent form when I was growing up. But given that only 16% of Jehovah’s Witnesses when polled say that they have affirming attitudes towards the community, I would imagine that my experience growing up as an LGBTQ+ person in the Jehovah’s Witnesses religious cult will be more or less the same as contemporary LBGTQ+ youth raised in the cult. And, while other religions may not practice the shunning that is the hallmark of the Witnesses, there is good reason to fear for the safety of the LGBTQ+ youth in the more conservative or evangelical religions as well. They, too, experience the phenomenon of familial rejection. This phenomenon, disturbingly common in the community, really gets almost no media attention. I would call this the number one public health problem that our community faces. And members of our community are routinely forced to build their own “families” from scratch because of very poor support from their families of origin. But often, there is some limited contact between LGBTQ+ folks and their families of origin, even if the support level is nothing approaching what is needed. But not so with Jehovah’s Witnesses. Their disfellowshipping policies come with an extreme form of shunning, and it is common for individuals who are not technically disfellowshipped to experience shunning as well.¹

Now, part of the problem is that the Witnesses are dishonest about the extent of their shunning. They do admit to the practice. However, they are dishonest about the scope of the practice (just who is expected to shun the disfellowshipped former members) as well as how extreme the practice is. So, for instance, on their official website, when faced with the question of whether they shun members who leave, they first deny by raising the case of Inactive members. “Those who were baptized as Jehovah’s Witnesses but no longer preach to others,” we are told, “are not shunned. In fact, we reach out to them and try to rekindle their spiritual interest.” This sounds perfectly reasonable to most people, but is only a half truth. They are relying on the public’s general lack of knowledge about the Watchtower’s way of classifying members. They are referring only to inactive members, not to people who have formally left. These “disassociated” members who formally resign are indeed shunned. But they do not so much as even mention this fact. Moreover, they also do not mention the fact that if the inactive person stops following all the Witness rules, they will indeed be shunned.

The JW.org website is pretty clear on the consequences to someone who has been disfellowshipped formally. So they continue: “We do not automatically disfellowship someone who commits a serious sin. If, however, a baptized Witness makes a practice of breaking the Bible’s moral code and does not repent, he or she will be shunned or disfellowshipped. The Bible clearly states: “Remove the wicked man from among yourselves.”—1 Corinthians 5:13.” They are admitting to the practice of shunning because they cannot deny it. But they are also trying to make it seem reasonable. Someone might be forgiven for reading this and imagining that this only applies to people who are living a sinful life. But keep in mind that what the Watchtower considers “evil” is not at all like what a normal person considers “evil.” There are a long list of rules that members are expected to keep. And I am told – although I do not have access to an actual copy of the Elder’s manual because it is kept confidential, that there are a list of 35 disfellowshipping offenses. These are:

SEXUAL IMMORALITY

1. Strong circumstantial evidence of porneia
2. Adulterous marriage
3. Child abuse

GROSS UNCLEANNESS

4. Momentary touching of intimate body parts or caressing of breasts
5. immoral conversations over the telephone or the Internet:
6. Viewing abhorrent forms of pornography
7. Misuse of tobacco [ANY use at all is considered misuse]
8. Use of marijuana, betel nut
9. Abuse of medical, illicit, or addictive drugs
10. Extreme physical uncleanness:

BRAZEN CONDUCT

11. Unnecessary association with disfellowshipped or disassociated individuals
12. Dating though not scripturally free to remarry
13. Brazen conduct in different situations

DIFFERENT ACTIONS

14. Gluttony
15. Bloodguilt
16. Deliberate, malicious lying; bearing false witness
17. Fraud
18. Slander
19. Obscene speech
20. Gambling
21. Greed
22. Bride price, high
23. Refusal to provide for the family
24. Fits of anger
25. Professional boxing
26. Violence, domestic violence

APOSTASY

27. Celebrating false religious holidays
28. Participation in interfaith activities
29. Causing divisions of any kind
30. Employment promoting false religion
31. Spiritism

DISASSOCIATION

32. Leave JW
33. Accepting blood transfusion
34. Violating Christian neutrality
35. Resigning from Jehovah’s witnesses leads to shunning

So long as you only leave the Witnesses, and continue to follow all their rules (so far as they know) and are not critical of the Watchtower, then you might be able to avoid being shunned. In other words, so long as you are a Witness in all but name. But the moment you attend another Church service or put up Christmas lights, etc., then your family will shun you.

That’s another thing they are dishonest about: they try to make it seem like family members are exempt from the shunning policies. From that same article from JW.org: “What of a man who is disfellowshipped but whose wife and children are still Jehovah’s Witnesses? The religious ties he had with his family change, but blood ties remain. The marriage relationship and normal family affections and dealings continue.” This makes it seem like the only thing that changes in terms of your family is that your family will not talk about religion with you, but all other matters will still be the same. But notice the case that they are using: A man who has a wife and children living in his home. But what if the children are no longer children, but are adults? And what if they no longer live in the home? The case that the Watchtower presents as the normative case is really the best case scenario. They don’t even address the other cases, at least, not on their public facing site. In the Watchtower, though, they are constantly exhorted to keep contact with disfellowshipped family to a bare minimum:

“The situation is different if the disfellowshipped or disassociated one is a relative living outside the immediate family circle and home. It might be possible to have almost no contact at all with the relative. Even if there were some family matters requiring contact, this certainly would be kept to a minimum,” in harmony with the divine injunction to “quit mixing in company with anyone” who is guilty of sinning unrepentantly. (1 Cor. 5:11) Loyal Christians should strive to avoid needless association with such a relative, even keeping business dealings to an absolute minimum. –See also The Watchtower of September 15, 1981, pages 29-30.”

Watchtower of April 15, 1988, page 28

3 This means that loyal Christians do not have spiritual fellowship with anyone who has been expelled from the congregation. But more is involved. God’s Word states that we should ‘not even eat with such a man.’ (1 Cor. 5:11) Hence, we also avoid social fellowship with an expelled person. This would rule out joining him in a picnic, party, ball game, or trip to the mall or theater or sitting down to a meal with him either in the home or at a restaurant.

4 What about speaking with a disfellowshipped person? While the Bible does not cover every possible situation, 2 John 10 helps us to get Jehovah’s view of matters: “If anyone comes to you and does not bring this teaching, never receive him into your homes or say a greeting to him.” Commenting on this, The Watchtower of September 15, 1981, page 25, says: “A simple ‘Hello’ to someone can be the first step that develops into a conversation and maybe even a friendship. Would we want to take that first step with a disfellowshiped person?”

5 Indeed, it is just as page 31 of the same issue of The Watchtower states: “The fact is that when a Christian gives himself over to sin and has to be disfellowshiped, he forfeits much: his approved standing with God; . . . sweet fellowship with the brothers, including much of the association he had with Christian relatives.”

Kingdom Ministry August 2002 pp.3-4

My Experience

I left the Watchtower, informally, in the Spring of 2004. At this time, I was considered an “Inactive” person, and my family, therefore, maintained contact with me. In November of 2007, however, I came out to my parents as gay. I was not sure how they would take it, but in the immediate aftermath, not much changed. My coming out conversation was surreal, in the sense that my father seemed obsessed with HIV and kept saying that he didn’t “want me to get AIDS.” I felt like this was an anachronistic kind of worry, and he couldn’t seem to focus on the emotional experience that coming out to one’s parents actually is. But on the whole, the conversation went better than I had expected. The thing is, I wasn’t seeing anyone at the time, which meant that they could kind of compartmentalize my being gay as a kind of abstract concept. Once I began seeing my partner, though, things changed drastically and I soon began being shunned completely.

I’m a pretty assertive person, as anyone who knows me well can testify. I am not going to be passive aggressive about a problem, but I’m going to address it head on. So that’s what I did. I wrote my parents a letter. Specifically, I wrote them this letter:

August 17, 2011

Dear Dad and Mom,

I am not entirely certain about writing this letter; part of me wanted to just ignore the issues entirely, trusting to my own ability to forgive to assuage the situation. Part of me wanted to call you to give you the ability to explain; but the fact is that the spoken word leaves too much possibility of leaving out important things that need to be said, so writing this letter seems to be the best way of handling the situation.

I have also wanted to avoid assuming anything, and that has been particularly difficult because, absent any explanation from you, assumptions are all that I have to go on. Nonetheless, I will try to keep the assumptions to a bare minimum and will only speak to you about my own feelings. Nor will this letter be particularly bitter; I have no intention of criticizing you for minor details or being overly harsh. Nor, in fact, will I criticize your religion. Your decisions are your decisions alone, and you must take the credit when they go well, as well as take the blame when they fail.

Silence has been my modus operandi, but silence will no longer do; many of these things need to be said. If they are difficult to hear, it is not because of any desire to hurt you, but merely stem from a pressing need to communicate with you the effects that your actions have, not only on me but also on other people.

My concerns with your behavior are several; many are in the past and there is frankly nothing that you can do to rectify them. Still, I think that these things need to be said so that you can contextualize my current situation. We are all products of our past, and the things that have happened in the past influence who we are at present. Rehashing the past also serves, hopefully, to prevent similar mistakes from being made in the future. Although there is nothing that you can really do to rectify many of these matters in my own case, it is my hope that understanding your failures better will lead to a righting of the wrongs by adjusting how you handle matters in the case of [my nieces and nephews]. It is my hope that this letter will spur a degree of humility in you that will help you avoid the same mistakes with your grandchildren as you made with me. I understand that your children will have more influence on your grandchildren than you will, and since your children are already grown and their attitudes have already been shaped, your ability to make a meaningful difference may be somewhat limited. But, while your influence is limited, you do have some influence, and it is my hope that that influence will be positive.

So, where do I start? I probably should start with the one that that you can change, and that is your complete and total neglect of my emotional needs. The fact is that I feel abandoned by you. While [my partner’s] family has been very welcoming of me and has made me feel a part of their family, that cannot replace my family. To be frank, I feel like you have disfellowshipped me. I am not disfellowshipped, nor am I disassociated. And yet, you appear to feel completely free to neglect me completely. Please understand, I am not acquiescing to a parent’s right to neglect their children if they are disfellowshipped. To the contrary, I believe that no one chooses to be born. The fact that I live and have needs is, frankly, a result of your decision. And when any person makes the decision to have children, he morally obligates himself to care for that child’s needs. And while some needs clearly expire, (after all, you obviously no longer have any moral obligation to change my diaper because I no longer need that service,) other needs last a lifetime. And chief among needs that have no expiration date are emotional needs – the need to have a support system, the need for love, the need for mentoring. Personally, I can think of no action that is more fundamentally immoral than abandoning one’s offspring. So it seems to me that any disfellowshipping action cannot ever morally apply to one’s own children. Even if they are “grown”. But the simple fact is this: that crisis wherein you are forced to choose between the dictates of your religion and your moral obligations has been avoided by me. I have not been disfellowshipped and thus have saved you this crisis of conscience. And yet, you continue to neglect me.

Let me be perfectly clear about what I am saying: You practically never call me, not even to let me know when there are major things going on. How many times have my grandparents been in the hospital without me even knowing? When you do call, you do not express an interest in my life at all. Several months ago, mom called me. Her only purpose in calling, so it seemed, was to advocate that I go to one of your meetings. When I told her exciting news about my life, (namely, that I was buying a house,) she was apparently unconcerned. At the very least, she expressed no concern or emotion about it, really didn’t even comment on it at all. In the same conversation, she commented matter-of-factly that she had not heard of my college. “Wouldn’t a caring parent,” I thought to myself, “take the time to learn a little bit about the college that her child is attending?”

I don’t really know what, specifically, was going on in mom’s head when she made that call, but I can imagine. I imagine that she figured she was taking care of my “spiritual” needs, which are in her estimation perhaps more important than emotional needs. But you need to understand that when you neglect me completely, you lose any legitimacy when you comment on anything else. You cannot help me “spiritually” or in any other way by neglecting showing interest in my life. In the same conversation, mom told me all about her life and the things that were going on in it – her learning a new language so she can preach to third world immigrants, her struggles with her father’s health, and her joys at seeing her grandchildren grow. And throughout her recalling these events in her life, I showed interest and tried to best to express interest because, even if I do not necessarily approve of everything that she does, (I have reservations, for instance, about exploiting someone’s economic peril for religious proselytization, in the same sense that I cringe when I hear about Baptist homeless shelters that require an individual to hear a nauseating sermon in order to have a place to sleep for the night,) but I nonetheless withheld comments of that sort because I realize that the action has a profound meaning for mom and it would be disrespectful of her to challenge the choices she makes in life. The point is that I was not granted the same treatment. Her very purpose in calling was to try to incite me to take a particular religious course of action; at least, that was her purpose if the discussion as it occurred can be any indication. But that isn’t the sort of “interest” that I want in my life. I have no interest in being told what I am doing wrong (from your perspective). Rather, it would be nice to have people who “rejoice with those who rejoice” by sharing in my life. Frankly, suggesting that I need to be doing a particular thing implies a criticism, and is disrespectful of my decisions. I am not a child; I am not uninformed such that I need you to enlighten me, nor am I stupid such that I need you to spell out the proper way to think. I am an adult; frankly, I am a very intelligent and thoughtful adult who makes decisions with a lot of consideration, and I reserve the right to make my own choices in life, and it is disrespectful on your part to criticize those decisions. It is particularly disrespectful to criticize those decisions when you don’t ever take any time to involve yourself in my life on other occasions. Imagine it from my perspective: You never call me, neglect me, abandon me for all intents and purposes, but once a year take the opportunity to do a drive-by criticism. Hardly an impressive interaction.

And do not think I am letting dad off the hook. At least mom called, even if it was a distasteful interaction. Neglect seems to be dad’s main way of dealing with me. I am sometimes more harsh in my feelings towards mom than I am towards dad. After all, mom can be a bit more…I guess confrontational is the word. But in the past few years she has visited twice and in the last year she called me once. I don’t think dad has found any time in the past couple years to take out of his busy schedule of watching syndicated television to ever turn off the t.v., get up off the sofa, and call his son. And that speaks volumes.

Let me be very clear here, just so there is no misunderstanding. I am aware that you don’t approve of my life in certain respects. I also don’t frankly care. Truth be told, I have some pretty deep reservations about the way you live your lives, but I don’t harass you about those or try to impose my thinking about your life on you. And I expect the same consideration from you. I cannot make this point strongly enough: I am not ashamed of my life. I do not have anything to hide. I don’t care if anyone finds out about my life. On the contrary I am proud of my life and what I have achieved and am achieving. I repeat, I am proud of who I am! Any attempts to change this opinion, any attempts to try to make me feel bad about myself are completely unwelcome. And this would include neglecting me for the purpose of trying to emotionally blackmail me into changing my life. I have overcome a lot of obstacles in life. Frankly, many of those obstacles were put there by the two of you. You have no right to try to undermine my self-esteem. In many ways, you are the reason that I had such low self-esteem to begin with. The best way of rectifying many of the wrongs that you committed against me is to let me live my life in peace and not try to impose your way of thinking on me. From my perspective, your way of thinking and your way of life holds nothing for me but stagnation and self-loathing. I have already tried your methods for the better part of twenty-seven years and found them to be destructive and damaging. I have every right to live my life how I see fit, and I have every right to try to make my life as happy and fulfilling as it can be. And you have no right to use my emotions as a bargaining chip in any attempt to control me.

In several respects, you did me great disservice. And it is important that you understand just how much damage your way of life did to me. I remember at one point when I was living in New Hampshire, dad called me to try to beg me to come back to the Watchtower. I told him that would make me a hypocrite because I do not believe what the Watchtower teaches, and I asked him if he wanted me to be a hypocrite. Incredibly, he said yes, and backed up that statement by saying something to the effect of, “Caleb, even if it isn’t true, it’s not a bad way to live.” Well, I’m sorry but I disagree with that sentiment. I do not think that it is a particularly good way to live. It puts stress on family relationships, it misdirects energy that could be spent taking care of one’s family, and finally, for a gay person the religion is downright destructive. But, even so, you have the opportunity to mitigate those negatives through the application of your own conscience. So you cannot blame the Watchtower for the accusations that I am about to make against you. As you will see, at every point your beliefs permitted you a different course of action. It was you who chose to apply your beliefs in destructive ways. So please don’t come at me by blaming your religion for your actions.

In general, the accusations that I am about to make against you fall into two broad categories. First, you failed to ensure that I had sufficient life skills to survive and thrive. Second, you failed to provide me with good, reliable information about sexual orientation that would permit me to contextualize the emotions that were happening to me from a young age. As a result, I grew up not only misunderstanding who I was, but even hating myself, inasmuch as what limited information you did choose to present to me about sexual orientation always presented homosexuality as something wicked.

Respecting your failure to provide me with sufficient life skills to survive and thrive, one of the most frustrating things about this failure is your own hubris, your own arrogance about this failure. You seem to want to blame everyone except yourselves. You obviously want to blame me. One one occasion, mom said to me, “well, you never seemed interested in college…” as if it was supposed to be me who was preparing myself for life’s challenges. You want to blame Papaw. I heard mom on many occasions lament that Papaw had hired me to work for such high wages. “He spoiled you” or sentiments to that effect. As if the fact that someone did something to try to help me learn to take care of myself was the real problem. Perhaps Papaw would have been better off simply leaving it in my hands, trusting me to train myself how to take care of myself? That, after all, appears to be what you thought your responsibilities were. Yet you never once blamed yourselves. It is as if in your world parents have no responsibility to teach their children life skills or ensure that they are properly educated. Last time I came to Indiana, I told mom that I was about a decade behind on my education. How did she respond? “I’m sorry you feel cheated.” This is an exact quote. Not, “I’m sorry that we failed to prepare you for the need to provide for yourself.” Nope. No taking responsibility. Instead, she had the audacity to apologize on my behalf. The problem is mine, apparently. It’s my feelings that need to be apologized for, not your actions.

Young people have no idea about the challenges of life; that is why it falls on their parents to instill in them the importance of things like education. It is no doubt convenient to blame me for never going to college when I was young, while failing to note the things you did to undermine anyone’s attempts to help me appreciate the value of a higher education. We were told to be uncooperative with any teacher that suggested that we ought to go to college. You appeared to believe, and many times told me, that I would never grow up in “this system”… so apparently you saw no need to prepare me for the need to take care of myself. Education just simply wasn’t an option in our household. Sure, it changed a little once I had grown up,² but by that time the attitudes that you had instilled in me were already set. You cannot blame me for failing to show an interest in college when from the time I was very little that was the attitude that you instructed me to have toward college.

Look, I can understand if you believe that the end is coming and your children won’t need to ever provide for themselves. But if that is your belief, surely you are not absolved of blame if you fail to even prepare for the possibility that your belief may be wrong. I do not blame you for holding the belief. I blame you for failing to prepare for other contingencies. And it is me who has to bear the brunt of your failure. All you had to do was say to me from the time I was very young, “Caleb, Armageddon will probably be here before you grow up, but if it isn’t, it is very important that you go to college so you can make enough money to take care of yourself. So start thinking about what you want to be when you grow up.” Sounds simple, doesn’t it? I don’t think I am being unreasonable here. Yet somehow college was considered “disloyal”, as if preparing for the possibility that the end might come later than anticipated was somehow evidence of doubt. And as a result, I never got the education that I needed to prepare myself for life.

Now, onto the sexual orientation issue. There are certain concrete facts about sexual orientation. These facts are not in doubt. They are disputed by almost no reputable experts. What is also clear is that homosexuality is a topic that is almost taboo among witnesses. To the extent that it is discussed, the discussions are not scientifically accurate, and are filled with prejudice and hatred. My own brother uses the term “gay” as a pejorative to mock anything he finds distasteful. He uses this term in your home, (“that’s gay!”) and has never once been sanctioned, at least not in my hearing.

Homosexual orientation is very confusing. That is one of the facts about it that is not in dispute. At a time when most other boys are discovering girls, a gay boy is discovering other boys, despite a social expectation that he ought to be discovering girls. This is incredibly confusing. A person who is not prepared with accurate information about homosexual orientation is bound to wonder what is wrong with him. Why am I different? When the only information that he is exposed to leads him to believe that he has a desire to “work what is obscene and receive the recompense which is due for his error” a person can come to believe that he is in fact wicked. And, try as one may to rip those sorts of inclinations out of one’s heart, they don’t go away. And that is another fact about homosexual orientation that is not in dispute: the feelings don’t go away because they can’t go away. Just like a thirteen year old straight boy cannot help but notice girls, a thirteen year old gay boy cannot help but notice boys. He can wish it were different. He can pray to God and make whatever bargains he wants with God, but the orientation will not go away. The only difference is that whereas our culture smiles knowingly at the little thirteen year old straight boy, it looks upon the developing gay child with far less understanding. His orientation is considered by many to be “perverse”, he ought to just keep it to himself and hopefully it will go away. Or if it doesn’t go away, he should just repress it. Yeah. That’s healthy.

The only antidote to this is accurate information. You don’t know whether a young adolescent is going to be straight or gay, so why withhold accurate information about homosexuality from him? Why try to force gay children into a straight box? To my mind, this is analogous to the parent who tries to force a left-handed child to be right-handed. Even if you succeed, you are still doing damage.

Do you have any idea what these heterosexual expectations do to a young gay person? They are possibly one of the most damaging forms of psychological control that our culture imposes on young people, and the results are often deadly. Every year, thousands of gay people take their own lives as a result of the trauma that these heteronormative expectations force upon them. It is truly tragic.

Between 5% and 10% of any human population is gay. That means that any particular individual has a 5-10% chance of being gay. Given how damaging, even deadly, heterosexual expectations are upon gay people, it is callous to withhold proper education about sexual orientation from young people. If I had been told from the time I was an adolescent, “It’s ok if you have feelings for others of the same sex. It’s fine. It doesn’t mean you are weird or wicked or evil, or anything like that. And you should love yourself and accept yourself for who you are, because no matter what we will love you for who you are.” If that was the simple message you had told me, do you have any idea how much heartache I might have spared myself? You no doubt felt a lot of pleasure at how zealous I was at a young age.³ But did it never occur to you that I was overcompensating for something? Did it never occur to you that I might be trying desperately to prove to myself that I wasn’t evil and wicked? In all fairness to you, it probably never did occur to you. But it should have.

Your probably wonder, at this point, “What does Caleb want us to do about these things?” I obviously cannot expect you to be able to change the past. Nor do I imagine that there is really anything that you can do to rectify these wrongs. In fairness to you, there really isn’t much need. I have grown a lot in the past few years, and I have already taken plenty of steps to undo the damage that was done. I realize now that I am ok. That I am lovable. That there is nothing wrong with me. That my life can be what I choose it to be. That nothing can hold me back from what I put my mind to. I have also taken a lot of steps to prepare myself for life. I have a decent job; at work, I am trying to get into management. I am also in college. I am going to Pitzer College and am receiving enough financial aid that my tuition is basically free. … So as you can see, there isn’t really anything for you to do to fix the situation in my own life. I have already fixed it. However, you can begin to change your attitudes and start righting the wrongs by preparing your grandchildren for college, to the extent that you are able. Education, like food, clothing, and shelter is an obligation which parents have to their children. You had no right to shirk this obligation to your children, and because of the attitudes that you instilled in your own children it may become necessary for you to pick up their slack where it comes to your grandchildren.

A second thing you can do to make these things up to me also involves your grandchildren. You can begin teaching them about real love. Unconditional love. Love which isn’t part of a strategy to control. You can teach them to love themselves. You can instill in them the truth that you will love them no matter what, and that they are loved and appreciated, and that nothing will cause you to stop loving them….

And that comes right back around to how you deal with me. In many ways, the biggest influence that you have on the little ones stems from the fact that they are watching you! You probably cannot get away with lecturing your grandchildren on how homosexuality is perfectly acceptable and that you will love them even if they are gay. I can only imagine the look on my brother’s face if he heard you saying this to his sons….But children aren’t stupid. They realize that you will probably behave the same way toward them that you behave toward me. Right now, at this very moment, by your treatment of me you model behavior for your grandchildren. They look and see how you behave toward other people and infer how you will behave toward them in similar situations. They pick up on those attitudes. And right now, the attitudes that they are picking up from your treatment of me are not good. They are learning that love in conditional, that if they don’t conform to your expectations you will neglect and abandon them. Frankly, they are hearing a lot of hate, and you don’t even have to say a word — all you have to do is model atrocious, immoral behavior by the way you treat your own son.

Like I said, I am doing fine. I don’t need you in my life. I am doing just fine emotionally, and can get along without you. But while I don’t need you in my life, I do want you in my life. But I want you in my life in a healthy way, not as a function of your attempt to control me. I cannot control you; if you choose to model bad behavior for your grandchildren, I cannot stop you. But I will not be a part of it. As things stand right now, things between you and me are not good. And I cannot pretend otherwise. I welcome your involvement in my life. I welcome you calling about my life and sharing your own. But if you call only rarely and the sole purpose of your call is to preach at me I will only hang up on you.

[Concluding paragraph lost to electronic glitch]

Love,

Caleb

Now, I don’t know how you would feel if you received a letter like this from your adult child. But I would personally be grief stricken. I would be motivated to pick up the phone (or even drive over to their home!) and try to heal the rupture. That is not, however, how my parents handled it. Soon thereafter, I received the following letter from them:

Hello Caleb,

Since your mother and I received your friend request from Facebook, we have been thinking about what we want to say to you. First of all, we love you. It’s in our hearts regardless of how you assess our actions or inactions. And our love is unconditional. We will always love you no matter what you do and no matter what you might have to say about us or our parenting. Yet we well know that love isn’t always an emotion producing joy and happiness but oftentimes just the opposite, sadness and grief. Our intent hasn’t been to neglect or abandon you. It’s been more in keeping with what you said about letting you live your life in peace. And we need the same, to try to keep the heartache at bay.

We wish it was possible for you to remember back to when you were a Witness also. Back when you also had faith in Jehovah God and in the Bible. If you could, then you would understand our dilemma and our heartbreak. We don’t believe we are right so much as we believe that the Bible and its teachings are inspired of God and always right. Living by Bible standards is always for the best, even when it’s difficult to do so. Jesus said to Jehovah, “Let not my will but yours take place.” Everyone serving Jehovah will, at times, have to submit to God’s will rather than carrying out their own. We haven’t changed, Caleb, it’s you that changed, carrying out your own will, forsaking your dedication to Jehovah and abandoning your faith and your upbringing. And it’s not just your mom and dad that have been affected. Your brother and sisters, your grandparents, and others who love you, your friends in the truth have all been hurt by your choices.

The Bible doesn’t leave any room for doubt. It’s not that we might be wrong. Homosexuality is condemned and those practicing it will not inherit God’s kingdom. We can’t support you in this, no matter how much we love you and unfortunately it affects our relationship with you. Jesus said he came, not to bring peace to the earth, but to cause division even among family members. The division would be caused not by those accepting Christ and his teachings, but by those rejecting him and choosing to live by their own standards. Jesus said, “Did you not read? … male and female he created them”. You chose to put a sexual preference over adherence to Jesus’ teachings and Jehovah’s moral standards. We have nothing against [your partner]. Maybe his choice is due to ignorance regarding God’s moral standards and he would choose differently if he came to know Jehovah. Did you mention God’s standards to him or in selfishness leave him uninformed?

As for how we raised you, you were raised the same way your mom and I were raised, in the truth, by god-fearing parents. In fact, your spiritual heritage goes back almost 100 years, to some of the parents of some of your grandparents. It never occurred to your mother or me to attack our parents regarding their parenting or to repudiate the training we received from parents who loved us. We were young parents who had four children in succession. And we were Witnesses, in the truth, trying to raise all of you to love Jehovah and accept his standards as correct. By the time were were 33 and almost 34 (your age), you were 12 years old, [your brother] was 5 with [your sisters] in between. With Jehovah’s help, we were certainly wiser and more experienced about raising children than you are today, with no children, no experience and only your own wisdom to go by. But we were imperfect and made many mistakes, although we would differ from you as to what those mistakes were. You are the only one of the four who is maligning us about their upbringing. The other three know that we made mistakes, but that we loved them and did our best.

Your sexual orientation? Who knew? We knew that you liked [several young women at the kingdom hall] and maybe others and then finally [your ex-wife.] You seemed so much in love with her. When you finally told me [your dad] about it over the telephone, I was shocked! Of course at that time you told me that you weren’t going to do anything about it other than to accept it as your sexual preference. You told me that you knew it was wrong. At that time you were still claiming to follow Jesus although not the Witnesses. As time goes on, you continue to move more and more away from the truth and your upbringing. This is you changing and not us and not anyone you knew from growing up in Indiana. We’re all the same.

Rather than worry about our influence on our grandchildren, you should be concerned about how your siblings feel about the influence your lifestyle and attitudes would have on their children if there were to be normal, close, family interactions. It’s all very sad, Caleb, but this is what you’ve done to yourself. You’ve abandoned your family and your upbringing and you’ve abandoned Jehovah and neglected your relationship with him. In fact, you’ve offended him by your unnatural choice. It’s not what anyone here wants, but it’s the sad truth. We all feel the same. We are so sorry, actually heartbroken about the situation that exists and we will always love you.

Your parents,

Mom and Dad

So, basically, we are going to ignore everything you’ve said to us, ostracize you for falling in love, act like you’ve somehow harmed us when we are the ones ostracizing you … but … we love you. Love doesn’t mean the same thing to me as it does to them, apparently. So I wrote them back with a short letter:

August 25, 2011

Dear Dad and Mom,

“Wow” is all I have to say. I sent you a letter pretty much telling you that I would respect your beliefs, but that I also expected you to respect mine. I asked simply that you agree to disagree with me, but show me enough respect to keep critical views to yourself. I also told you that I found emotional blackmail and neglect to be the antithesis of love. You may call it love. But I think you have the wrong emotion. That’s not love, it’s control. How did you respond? You sent me a letter wherein you a) preached at me; b) continued your attempts to use emotional blackmail to control me; c) justified neglect and abandonment. I took a black sharpie and I marked through all the preaching, emotional blackmail, and justifications. The result is that there was nothing left to your letter except your protesting that you love me. I’m sorry, I don’t see any evidence of that.

I suppose everything has been said that can be said. You appear to be incapable of understanding that you can disapprove of something someone does without neglecting and abandoning them. You appear to be incapable of understanding that love is unconditional and does not incorporate control. Many parents are disappointed in their children some way; it takes a special kind of parent to think that disappointment warrants neglect and abandonment.

For all this, you have taught me something: how not to treat my own children in the future. [My partner] and I plan on having children in the relatively near future, and I cannot imagine anything that would separate us from loving them. I cannot imagine anything that would cause me to abandon them. [My partner] and I were talking the other day, and he told me, “I don’t care if my child is a mass murderer, I’m still going to go visit him every week in prison. You always love your kids. That’s the rule.” Apparently, that’s not the rule in [your] home, or else you reserve the right to redefine love in such a way that you cannot see the contradiction. Your version of love sure leaves a lot of casualties – [My uncle], [my cousin], now me. Who knows who the next casualty will be? But I’m sure that when the next casualty complains you will just reassure him that he seems to be the only one complaining, and if he would just let you control him you would dole out an appropriate amount of love.

For all that, I’m not a mass murderer. I’m actually a pretty great kid, one that you would rightly be proud of if you could get your head out of your ass long enough to stop defining a person’s worth by how exactly their metaphysical speculations match up with your own. This universe is a pretty big place. It must be convenient to think you have all the answers, but thinking you have all the answers doesn’t make it so, it just makes your story even more tragic.

So like I said, I think that’s all there is to say. My conscience is clean knowing that I didn’t keep silent, that I tried to reconcile things with you. If we are estranged, we all know that it is your fault not mine. I have tried to mend bridges and recall you to your senses. You have only burned bridges. You may think that you are judging me, but judgment works both ways here. Like I said, I cannot imagine anything more fundamentally immoral than abandoning one’s offspring.

As always, I pray for change. Til then,

Love

Caleb

And that’s pretty much where we left it. I say, “pretty much” because I have had some limited contact with them. In 2017, we visited Indiana and I stopped by their place and introduced them to their grandkids. My partner gave them his cell phone number and told them they could FaceTime the kids any time they wanted. They haven’t really shown much interest in contacting their grandkids, though. Which all I can say about that is that it’s their loss because my kids are wonderful. I also contacted my father a couple years ago to give him some information that I thought he needed to know about his own father. Other than that, we haven’t really spoken. I did, however, receive an anonymous submission in the comments to one of my blogs. Given the email address (it’s in the name of one of my nephews) and given the IP address (at the home of my brother), I am pretty sure that this was either my brother or his wife, which would mark the only contact that I have had with my siblings since 2007 or so. This communication also demonstrates the Witness mindset, that people are simply disposable and you can and should brutalize anyone who doesn’t share your religious views, especially if they happen to be LGBTQ+:

To which I responded:

I got the following response, which confirms my view that this was either my brother or his wife:

And I responded with the final communication (in March of 2013) between me and any of my siblings:

And that’s where we left it. To this day, I continue to be ostracized by my family as a result of my sexual orientation and the exercise of my freedom of religion. It’s all very sad, but this is what the Jehovah’s Witnesses cult does to families and this is exactly how they want their members to treat LGBTQ+ folks.

I am often asked what I want the government to do about this. It’s a particularly thorny problem because, although the policies and attitudes are instilled by the cult leaders in Walkill, the punishment is enacted at the personal level. It is difficult to regulate how family members treat each other. I can only say that if the religion were to be regulated, then the attitudes would, in time, change to align with the new teachings. It is bizarre to me that, as a society, we allow hateful policies – really, we tolerate hate speech as being part and parcel of religious practice. And no one ever stops to think and to question whether such hateful practices should be promoted by major religions. We just kind of shrug our shoulders and say, “Eh, what’re you gonna do?” But I don’t see why we have to tolerate this. We give tax exemptions to these hate groups. We are, in effect, subsidizing hate speech. Is it too much to ask that religions preach love and tolerance and not resort to this kind of behavior? Apparently so. But would it really be so harmful if we passed legislation that prevented the dissemination of hateful ideologies and apocalyptic or judgmental theology? Like, what if religions were simply prohibited from teaching gay kids to hate themselves? Or what if a religion couldn’t preach about God’s coming “War of Armageddon” where God plans on going on a murdering spree against anyone who isn’t following a certain list of rules? Or what if we told religions that they couldn’t even teach a child that they would be tortured eternally in hellfire if God gets mad at them? (Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t actually teach this, but a lot of religions do.) If religions – by law! – had to be cuddly and affirming and not be harmful or cause trauma for children…would the sky really fall in?

1. My own case is instructive; I am not technically disfellowshipped. (Disfellowshipping is a formal process by which the Witness elders expel you from the group involuntarily, and often with inactive members they will not put forth the effort to carry out formal judicial committee processes.) And for awhile, my family did not shun me. I left the Watchtower cult in around the Spring of 2004. And for awhile, my family of origin still kept in contact with me, largely because I did not formally leave the organization. People who leave the organization informally are classified as “Inactive” and are not typically shunned completely, though they are treated as “worldly” people. “Worldly” people is the designation for anyone who is not a member of the organization or actively “studying” to become a member. As anyone who has had their previously close family members convert to the Watchtower can attest, Witnesses are advised to limit their association with “worldly” people generally. So an “Inactive” member will find that their family members who are Witnesses will keep aloof from them and limit their active association with them. However, they will not shun them completely. If they see you out in the store, they will converse with you and they might participate in the occasional social function, but the relationship will not be what it was previously. So, this informal way of leaving the Watchtower is used by a lot of people as a way of leaving the Watchtower without being shunned. This strategy is only of limited effectiveness, however, because, while a former member who leaves informally can avoid being shunned, they will only avoid being shunned so long as the active members believe that they are avoiding any major infractions (so-called “sins” or “disfellowshipping offenses”). If they believe you to be “sinning” (voting, using tobacco products, having sex outside of marriage, etc.) the active members will shun you just as if you were disfellowshipped, even though you have not been formally “disfellowshipped” nor have you had the Watchtower’s version of due process. Individuals who formally leave the Watchtower – most often by writing a formal letter of resignation – are classified as “disassociated” and are treated exactly as if they are disfellowshipped. In fact, many Witnesses consider disassociated individuals to merit even worse treatment than disfellowshipped individuals because, the thinking goes, the disassociated person willingly chose to leave whereas the disfellowshipped person may still want to be a Witness but were disfellowshipped involuntarily. ↩︎
2. For most of my life, the Watchtower strongly discouraged “higher education.” There was a brief window of time, when I was in my early 20’s, where things changed a little bit and the Watchtower began encouraging college, so long as it was done with the intent to use the job opportunities after college to support oneself in full-time ministry for the cult. But things appear to have regressed back to the cult discouraging education, as this recent propaganda video that the Watchtower produced seems to indicate. ↩︎
3. I began “regular pioneering” when I was 15 years old, and continued as a regular pioneer until I was 23. “Regular pioneer” is the Witness nomenclature for full-time ministry. ↩︎