Over the course of the twentieth century, Jehovah's Witnesses came into conflict with governmental authorities the world over, democratic and authoritarian, from the United States to the Soviet Union, from Nazi Germany to Malawi, from Australia to Singapore. This history of conflict has persisted into the twenty-first century, as evident in cases brought by the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania,Footnote 1 the corporate body of the Witnesses, to the European Court of Human Rights and the Supreme Court of the United States. In the present as in the past, the Witnesses' self-avowed political neutrality, rigid worldview and persistent proselytism have drawn criticism from state authorities, civic organizations, and mainstream Christian churches – and raised the hackles of the public (often on its very doorstep).
In the United States, the steadfast refusal of the Jehovah's Witnesses to perform some of the most basic rituals of citizenship has led champions of Americanism to cast them as unpatriotic and even seditious. Self-styled patriots have criticized the Witnesses as un-American, identified them as the enemy other, and denounced them as a danger to their children, their communities, and the nation. The Watch Tower Society has responded to these accusations by presenting Witnesses as upstanding citizens, only ever departing from the letter of the law when there is a conflict between secular legal directive and scriptural injunction. This essay argues that the gulf between the popular perception of the Witnesses as poor citizens, particularly during the middle decades of the twentieth century, and the society's own representation of its members as assets to their communities highlights the contested and mutable nature of the label “un-American.” Furthermore, it argues that there is a paradox in the place of the Jehovah's Witnesses in modern American history: though operating beyond the pale of understood norms of citizenship, they have been fundamental to extending First Amendment freedoms for all citizens. The Witnesses are one outgrowth of Adventism, a distinctly American current in modern religious history, further illustrating the tension between ascribing un-American traits to home-grown phenomena. It is the chasm between their domestic origins and their rejection of the rituals and rhetoric of patriotism which brings into especially sharp focus the Witnesses' departure from other premillennial groups in the United States – and has made them particularly vulnerable to charges of un-Americanism.
A broader aim of this essay is to write the Jehovah's Witnesses into American religious history. If religion is “everywhere and nowhere” in the history and historiography of the United States,Footnote 2 then the Watch Tower Society, a worldwide organization with its origins in nineteenth-century Pennsylvania, is almost entirely absent from the small corner that religion does occupy in studies of the modern history of America and largely absent from the history of religion, with the exception of a few specific contexts.Footnote 3 Although legal scholars have long recognized the society's integral role in shaping interpretations of the religion clauses in, and of the ways religious expression is protected elsewhere by, the Constitution, they have not explored the role of the Witnesses as the other in mid-twentieth-century America.Footnote 4 Likewise, scholars have overlooked the theological basis of the society's approach to secular authority, political ideology, and patriotism.Footnote 5
This essay intersects with another largely unwritten history: that of un-Americanism. In its broadest sense, the term, used only in a pejorative way, refers to a lack of loyalty to the nation. Un-Americanism is often taken as a byword for subversive and traitorous.Footnote 6 Its opposite, Americanism, is just as contested. The historians Michael Kazin and Joseph A. McCartin observed that it usually refers to a “bundle of ideals,” among them “self-government, equal opportunity, freedom of speech and association, [and] a belief in progress.”Footnote 7 Yet self-defined proponents of Americanism expect their compatriots to be more than merely committed to these ideals, defining it in contradistinction to un-Americanism. For example, the American Legion, a patriotic organization for veterans, campaigned for “one hundred per cent Americanism” after World War I, by which it meant unconditional and conspicuous support for the nation and all of its symbols, most notably the flag, and eternal vigilance against the subversive influence of aliens and outsiders, the mutable “un-American.”
Un-Americanism has always been a politicized term. Given the avowed political neutrality of the Jehovah's Witnesses, charges of un-Americanism, levelled especially by Legionnaires, raise questions about why the society's scriptural interpretations are regarded as part of an ideological campaign to undermine the unity and security of the state. The context of the un-American is a particularly illuminating lens through which to examine the history of the Jehovah's Witnesses, one of the most highly visible, doctrinally distinctive, and litigious religious communities in the United States, as well as that of un-Americanism. To this end, the essay will open by examining when the Witnesses were first implicated in un-Americanism and the historical junctures at which this criticism has been sharpest. Second, it will question whether the Witnesses can accurately be described as un-American given the society's teachings on the United States in particular and on state authority in general. Third, it will assess whether patriots' accusations of un-Americanism bear scrutiny given all the society has done to expand First Amendment freedoms, focussing on Supreme Court rulings on public ministry in 1938 and on ministry and military service in 1953. Fourth, it will turn to the society's motivations for its far-reaching and sophisticated legal campaign, which has secured its own freedom to minister, unimpeded, to the public. Finally, it will shed light on what, taken together, these tell us about how the term “un-American,” so readily invoked yet so elusive to define, has been understood by the Watch Tower Society's opponents. This essay draws on a wide range of sources, among them the society's voluminous literature. As has been argued elsewhere, the society presents a sanitized and selective version of its own history and Witnesses are discouraged from critiquing its origins, development, and doctrine.Footnote 8 Sources emanating from the society are examined with this in mind. The essay also draws on legal rulings and court documents relating to cases before the Supreme Court, as well as contemporary newspaper reports which offer insights into the ways the Jehovah's Witnesses were popularly regarded. It turns first to their indictment as traitors.
“THEY ARE WORSE THAN TRAITORS”: JEHOVAH'S WITNESSES AS UN-AMERICANS
The Watch Tower Society has its origins in Allegheny City, now part of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in the 1870s, when Charles Taze Russell turned to the Bible to determine the chronology of the end-times. In this he was not alone, but part of a boom in premillennialism, a search to predict the second coming fuelled by the failed prophesies of William Miller (the Great Disappointment of 1844). Despite this heritage, the allegation that Jehovah's Witnesses are somehow un-American – if levelled not by explicitly using that term, then by claims that they are unpatriotic and seditious – has endured since the early twentieth century. This stands in marked contrast to the society's image around the world. It is regarded as peculiarly American. Indeed, the international headquarters are located in Brooklyn; the Governing Body, from which all doctrine emanates, is based there; and all of the Society's literature – which is of central importance to its mission – is produced by the Writing Committee, also based in Brooklyn, before being disseminated worldwide. The Witnesses thus demonstrate the gulf that can exist between “American” as a geographical term pertaining to the territory of the United States and “American” as an ideological term pertaining to Americanism. For some, the organization represents both: so strongly was it identified with the United States that two Soviet critics described it as “American in origin and in essence.”Footnote 9
According to Jennifer Henderson, most Americans regarded the Jehovah's Witnesses as “annoying but harmless” until the issue of saluting flags in public schools hit national headlines in 1939.Footnote 10 In fact, they were viewed with suspicion well before the Gobitas children of Minersville, Pennsylvania refused to perform this morning ritual in the classroom.Footnote 11 In 1918 eight leaders of what at that time was known as the International Bible Students Association (IBSA) were convicted for threatening national security under the Espionage Act of 15 June 1917. President Joseph Franklin Rutherford and his associates published The Finished Mystery in 1917. It criticized the position of the US government on World War I, discouraged men from taking up arms, and argued that patriotism was an “untruth” spread by Satan, one with deadly consequences: “under the guise of Patriotism, the civil governments of earth demand of peace-loving men the sacrifice of themselves and their loved ones and the butchery of their fellows.”Footnote 12 The organization was promoting a central tenet of contemporary sedition with its warnings of the bloodlust of the government. With this conviction, the court tarred the Bible Students with the same brush as other, overtly political, antiwar agitators, an association strengthened by the Supreme Court ruling in Schenck v. United States in 1919. Like Rutherford and his associates, Charles Schenck, secretary of the Socialist Party of America, was sentenced under the Espionage Act for the production of literature against conscription and US involvement in the war, and for the circulation of it to potential draftees.Footnote 13
The court's ruling in the Rutherford case reflected a broader concern that anti-war attitudes, rooted in overtly political agendas, would find traction amongst the men of America. Following a fifteen-day trial in the US District Court in Brooklyn, H. B. Howe, the ruling judge, claimed that the “religious propaganda” in The Finished Mystery posed “a greater danger than a division of the German Army.”Footnote 14 Of the convicted men, he reportedly later commented to a fellow judge, “They are worse than traitors. You can catch a traitor and know what he is about. But you cannot catch a man who does what they did under the guise of religion.”Footnote 15 Seven of the men were sentenced to twenty years in prison, and the eighth to ten years. Following a retrial, they were exonerated on the grounds that the trial was not impartial, after spending just nine months in a federal penitentiary in Atlanta, Georgia.
At the time, “American” meant those endorsing the government's position on World War I, and “un-American” meant those opposed to it.Footnote 16 Rutherford and his associates displayed a different understanding of these terms, however, demonstrating a willingness both to use the language of their opponents and to defend themselves from accusations of espionage. In 1918, the IBSA condemned the campaign against it as explicitly un-American in a petition addressed to President Woodrow Wilson. In it the Bible Students objected to the interference of Catholic and Protestant clergy with independent Bible study, describing their activities as “intolerant, un-American and un-Christian”; to the banning of some pages of The Finished Mystery; and to the suppression of this aid for their Bible study.Footnote 17 Typical of the Rutherford era, the mainstream Christian churches were blamed for inciting the persecution.Footnote 18
In the wake of the conviction, Bible Students across the United States were subjected to verbal vitriol and physical assaults by members of the public, who were often passively observed, occasionally even abetted, by law-enforcement authorities.Footnote 19 The Bible Students were an easy target given the political climate immediately after World War I. In 1919, returned troops founded the American Legion, and shortly after it launched a campaign for Americanism, which fed into the First Red Scare of 1919–20. Historian Stanley Coben observed a “ferocious outbreak of nativism,” characterized by “hostility toward certain minority groups, especially radicals and recent immigrants, fanatical patriotism, and a belief that internal enemies seriously threaten national security.”Footnote 20 The Bible Students were not recent arrivals, of course, but on other counts (resistance to the draft, criticism of the American government, international operations) they fitted the profile of subversives. Germans were a particular target of hostility and, after the Russian Revolution of October 1917, were conflated with the Bolsheviks. Judge Howe's association of Rutherford and his circle with a division of the German army reflected the widespread antagonism towards minorities of all stripes and the nativists' equation of nonconformists with foreign enemies in 1919 and 1920.
The attacks after World War I were on a modest scale compared to the persecution that the Jehovah's Witnesses, as the Bible Students were known from 1931, suffered immediately before and during the United States' involvement in World War II. The high profile of the Supreme Court case Minersville School District v. Gobitis brought the subject of the Jehovah's Witnesses and patriotism to the forefront of national debate. The language used by critics of the Witnesses' refusal to salute the flag was shaped by the devastation of war in Europe and by the sharpened sense that the nation was under threat from hostile forces in its midst. Dr. Charles Roudabush, superintendent of public schools in Minersville, testified before the Supreme Court that in his view the flag salute ritual in his schools was not a religious exercise but a patriotic ceremony essential to inculcate in children respect for, and loyalty to, the institutions and ideals of the country for which the flag stands. The failure of some children to participate would be “demoralizing” for the wider group and “it would be no time before they would form a dislike, a disregard, for our flag and country,” a likely scenario given the presence of “foreigners of every variety.”Footnote 21 As in 1919, a state authority likened the attitudes of radicals like the Witnesses to those of aliens.
The Supreme Court upheld the expulsion of the Gobitas children from their school. In an 8–1 majority ruling, Justice Felix Frankfurter, who delivered the opinion of the Court, noted, “National unity is the basis of national security,” and affirmed that the state educational system could compel children to perform patriotic exercises in order to bind its citizenry together through shared loyalty to the nation.Footnote 22 The Gobitis ruling was criticized by both legal and academic commentators for its violation of the free exercise of religion.Footnote 23 Together with a number of other developments – chief among them personnel changes, namely the replacement of Justice James Byrne with Justice Wiley Rutledge; but also the questioning of the Gobitis decision as a precedent in Jones v. City of Opelika, which upheld the conviction of Jehovah's Witnesses for the sale of religious literature without a license;Footnote 24 and the rapid reversal of Opelika the following year in Murdock v. Pennsylvania on the grounds that it violated the religious rights of the Witnesses – this led to a reconsideration of the flag salute issue.Footnote 25 Famously, the Court reversed the decision just three years later in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, when it ruled that the mandatory flag salute was a violation of school students' First Amendment rights.Footnote 26 The Barnette reversal highlighted the shifting constitutional culture of the 1940s.Footnote 27
The Court's reversal came only after an uncoordinated, populist campaign of violence and intimidation had been unleashed on communities of Witnesses across the United States. A wave of legal and extralegal persecution was prompted by what Shawn Peters called the “explosive combination” of the Gobitis ruling and fear of an Axis Fifth Column.Footnote 28 This was expressed in a letter by Mrs. K. W. Edwards in the Daily Dispatch published in Henderson, North Carolina: “Anyone who can think above his ears will know that this is a sinister movement and un-American … who with Hitler want to rule the world and are stealithily trying to get a stranglehold on the American government.”Footnote 29 A report published by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in January 1941 began, “Not since the persecution of the Mormons years ago has any religious minority been so bitterly and generally attacked as the members of Jehovah's Witnesses.” It catalogued 335 instances of mob violence in forty-four states between May and October 1940, involving 1,488 men, women, and children.Footnote 30 The report noted the complicity of law-enforcement officials and the approval of editorials in newspapers. This was encouraged by President Roosevelt's fireside chat of 26 May 1940, in which he referred to a “Trojan Horse” which “betrays a nation unprepared for treachery,” and warned of the need to “deal vigorously” with “spies, saboteurs and traitors,” the “actors in this new strategy.”Footnote 31 According to Peters, some listeners understood this to be a reference to the Witnesses and sought to root out the traitors in their midst.Footnote 32 The attacks were carried out across the country by what one (Witness) commentator estimated to be more than 2,500 separate mobs from 1940 to 1944.Footnote 33
The society condemned the catalogue of assaults as “a record of un-American acts” and, in its 1941 Yearbook, accused “the un-American Legion under demon influence,” as well as the Roman Catholic Church, of kindling mob violence.Footnote 34 It thus applied the same term used by Legionnaires and other self-styled patriots to demonize the Witnesses to those same groups. The society did not define what specifically was un-American about the acts, but the reader infers it was rampant violence against law-abiding citizens and wanton destruction of property and literature in violation of the First Amendment.
The decline of the number of assaults on the Witnesses may reveal why they were popularly regarded as un-American. Henderson argues that with the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941, “suddenly Jehovah's Witnesses were no longer the primary target of Americans' fear and aggression.”Footnote 35 In this understanding, Japanese Americans stood in for the Witnesses as the enemy within (and later, she argues, communists took their place).Footnote 36 There was certainly a decline in attacks on the Witnesses once this new internal foe came to the forefront of popular consciousness. This was not the end of the Witnesses' persecution, as Henderson suggests, though the number of assaults did fall in the following two years.Footnote 37 By 1945, when the tide of war had turned, the number of attacks on the Witnesses was negligible.Footnote 38
Jehovah's Witnesses have stood for the enemy at historical junctures when domestic loyalty needed to be reinforced by appeals to national solidarity. On 23 May 1940, just ten days before the Gobitis decision, the New York Times reported that three “professed Nazi agents,” a man and two women, had spent three days visiting homes in Del Rio, a border town in Texas, forcing the occupants to listen to Nazi propaganda played on phonographs and leaving with them pamphlets bearing the swastika. Legionnaires presented the Nazi agents with an American flag and demanded they salute it, which they refused to do. They were run out of town by an “angry crowd of 400 persons” led by veterans, escorted by the police for their own safety.Footnote 39 The following day, the New York Times reported that the agents were in fact Jehovah's Witnesses.Footnote 40 Moreover, it is not only during wartime that the Witnesses were popularly perceived to be in league with the ideological opponents of the United States. During the Cold War, and especially during Joseph McCarthy's era, they were perceived to be communists. This was so widespread that it prompted the society to produce the flyer Jehovah's Witnesses: Communists or Christians?. The title was answered with another question: “If communists, why outlawed in Russia?”Footnote 41 As these examples show, the tendency to define what it is to be a good American in opposition to an other had swept up the Jehovah's Witnesses, aligning them with ideological enemies and foreign intruders. We must turn to their theology for an understanding of what has made them such a ready and reliable opponent for those flying the flag for Americanism.
“NO PART OF THE WORLD”: JEHOVAH'S WITNESSES AND THE SECULAR STATE
The position of the society towards the American state is determined by its interpretation of Scripture and, in particular, the doctrine of political neutrality which arises from it. The justification for neutrality is found in John 15:19, which refers to the righteous as being “no part of the world.”Footnote 42 In Russell's words, Witnesses should see themselves as “strangers and pilgrims here, and to some extent aliens and foreigners.”Footnote 43 For the Witnesses, this means refraining from participation in earthly government and secular struggles. This ostensible detachment from secular affairs and political ideology has led governments and fellow citizens alike to regard the Witnesses with suspicion, in particular during times of war, when the state demands utmost loyalty of its citizens, and in authoritarian states, in which every aspect of life is politicized. It is hardly surprising, then, that in the United States the Witnesses came under greatest scrutiny during World War II and in the early to mid-1950s, with McCarthy's campaign to root out subversives.
Although Russell believed that the United States was a particularly fertile country in which to spread his message of salvation,Footnote 44 it does not have a special significance for the Jehovah's Witnesses beyond its place in the chronology of the end-times. The society teaches that the USA's role in the modern world is described in the Book of Daniel, which details a conflict between the King of the North and the King of the South. Though the conflict is enduring, the identities of the kings have shifted over time. After World War I, the southern king became the “Anglo-American world power,” and it remains thus to the present, thereby giving the United States and Great Britain a prominent position in biblical chronology. The King of the North has been interpreted as various secular entities over the course of the twentieth century, ranging from the German Empire to the communist bloc. The Cold War era had a particular significance for the Witnesses because the Book of Daniel describes a major escalation of tension as a harbinger of the end, provoking the King of the North into a final assault against the King of the South, one which foreshadows Armageddon.Footnote 45 The USA and the USSR represented twin evils because of the conviction that all world governments are controlled by Satan.Footnote 46 The significance of the United States was therefore very different for the society than for other evangelical churches, many of which regarded the United States as having a special, God-given role in countering godless communism. Likewise, the society departed from other premillennial groups, which pointed to the wickedness and spiritual decay in modern America as evidence of the imminence of the end.Footnote 47 For the society, the United States was just another arena in which the chaos which portends the end was evident. Its failure to engage with the dominant ideological discourse of the Cold War further marked it apart from other American religious groups.
Given the society's commitment to remain aloof from the secular world, it is perhaps surprising that it has explicitly rebuffed the charge that Witnesses are un-American. An article in Awake! magazine in 1974, entitled “What Are Jehovah's Witnesses Like?”, asked and answered four questions frequently posed by nonmembers, among them, “Are They ‘Un-American’?” It reframed the question as follows, revealing a legalistic understanding of the term (and an international sense of community): “Do they seek to undermine the law and order of the United States or of any other country in which they live?” By way of an answer, the article reproduced an extract from a report in the black newspaper Amsterdam News, published in New York City, which praised the exemplary behaviour of attendees at a large Witness convention, then asked, “Rather than their being a lawless, subversive people, does this not sound as though Jehovah's witnesses are an asset to the community?” According to Awake!, the behaviour at Witness gatherings around the United States exposed the lie that they are against the best interests of the nation, a mistruth spread by Protestant and Catholic clergy.Footnote 48 Indeed, the society frequently points to the public conduct of the Witnesses as evidence that they are good citizens, and emphasizes their upstanding nature in its literature. In 1962, Watchtower advised that “Christians should win, or, at least, deserve praise for being orderly and for respectfully abiding by the laws by which good order and public welfare are kept up in the community.”Footnote 49 The Witnesses regard themselves as members of a worldwide Christian community (and indeed, as the only true Christians) rather than as members of narrowly national communities. The strict moral codes by which they abide are viewed not as specific to national or cultural contexts but laid out in the Bible through the examples set by Jesus and the Apostles.Footnote 50 The society contrasts the Witnesses' behaviour with that of its fiercest critics, such as when it compared the comportment of attendees at an American Legion convention with that of Witnesses at a district assembly in Raleigh, North Carolina held in the same week in 1949.Footnote 51
The society's emphasis on the disciplined and law-abiding nature of the Witnesses would seem incompatible with challenges to federal, state and local authorities. As always, the justification for its stance is found in Scripture; in other words, “their attitude on the matter of government is the one that is advocated in God's own Word, the Bible.”Footnote 52 M. James Penton has shown that the society's position on state authority has vacillated according to its shifting interpretation of the superior authorities referred to in Romans 13:1, which instructs, “Let every soul be in subjection to the superior authorities.”Footnote 53 Russell initially advised Bible Students to avoid involvement in political affairs whenever possible but to ultimately obey superior authorities, which he interpreted as secular officials. Penton observed that in his final years Russell's position hardened, presumably in reaction to the bloodshed of World War I, and that this was taken to an extreme by Rutherford, who adopted a position of unequivocal hostility toward secular authorities.Footnote 54 In 1962, the society reinterpreted the superior authorities as spiritual, rather than secular, officials, and adopted a softer line, which was that unless the state's law directly contradicts Jehovah's, Witnesses should remain strictly obedient to governmental and political authorities.Footnote 55
Thus, although the Witnesses ostensibly respect the temporal authority of the state, their loyalty lies first and foremost to Jehovah and to their own particularly insular and exclusive religious community, thus privileging their spiritual identity as the only true Christians over their secular identity as Americans, and their religious practices above their civic obligations. In this respect, the Witnesses are not unique; Christians may identify themselves as part of a worldwide community of believers before the narrowly constituted (and historically recent) identity marker of the citizen of a particular nation-state. Of course, in their challenges to state authority the Witnesses are not unique, nor is their dogged adherence to doctrine in the face of state oppression or public approbation: in 2011, for example, eight men from an Amish sect were jailed in Kentucky for refusing to pay fines levied for their failure to display bright safety signs on their horse-drawn buggies.Footnote 56 The Witnesses are set apart by their tenacious efforts to challenge obstacles to their beliefs and practices, particularly their extensive legal campaigns, and their high level of visibly because of their imperative to conduct public ministry. This has attracted attention to their lifestyle and brought them into conflict with both the secular authorities and their fellow citizens more often than it has the adherents of other Christian denominations, in the United States and elsewhere.
The careful reader of the literature produced by the Watch Tower Society can discern a tendency for it to adopt the language of its critics at times of greatest pressure. For example, the society presented the Jehovah's Witnesses as patriots in the booklet Fighting for Liberty on the Home Front, published in 1943. It explained that while there were “millions of men on many fronts battling the totalitarian aggressors against freedom and truth,” there was also an altogether different type of battle raging in America:
A real fight has been going on incessantly on the home front that, when the millions of patriotic citizens return from the total war to their homes and civilian life, they may enjoy the right and the liberty to learn and accept the truth and to receive comfort and the hope of life and happiness in a new world of righteousness.Footnote 57
The battle was thus cast as a war to save the (patriotic) souls of the nation. In these references to liberty, the home front, totalitarianism, and patriotism, the society echoed the language of its critics in the recognition that appeals to patriotism might engender a warmer public response to the society's message despite its unpopular positions on military service and patriotic exercises.Footnote 58 For the same reason, it introduced an alternative Pledge of Allegiance, in which Witnesses affirmed their loyalty to Jehovah but also declared respect for the flag of the United States and for those laws consistent with God's laws.Footnote 59 The society's position had clearly softened since the condemnations of patriotism in The Finished Mystery. Witnesses were not against patriotism per se, but the obligation to carry out its rituals against the dictates of their conscience.Footnote 60
The patriots' casting of the Jehovah's Witnesses as “un-American” sheds light on how unpopular religious minorities have been marginalized and stigmatized in a country which celebrates religious diversity and places this central to its foundation myths. In turn, the Society's robust response to charges of un-Americanism – at times adopting a politicized language, including that of its detractors – offers insights into how one religious organization has sought to counter this pejorative label by defining it in secular (namely legalistic) terms. In 1952, for example, the society praised officials in Rockford, Illinois for upholding its right to rent premises for a district assembly in the face of opposition from the American Legion: “state officials did the American thing by standing for freedom of worship, not being cowed by the un-American position of the Legion.”Footnote 61 The society thus condemned the Legion for its lack of the very trait that Legionnaires across the United States campaigned so fiercely to promote and protect. In doing so, the society's understanding of what is “American” is revealed to be not the “bundle of ideals” usually associated with Americanism,Footnote 62 but a more narrowly defined set of principles, legalistic in nature but largely confined to the guarantees found in the religion clauses of the First Amendment. This takes in freedom of speech and association, to be sure, but in relation to the freedoms to proselytize, to circulate literature, to worship, and to meet for Bible study and other group activities. Rutherford made this connection clear when he declared in a radio broadcast in 1934, “Censorship is un-American and, above all, ungodly, and hence unrighteous.”Footnote 63 The society also seized on this discourse as an opportunity to illustrate how the Witnesses dutifully uphold the obligations of citizenship except when these violate biblical injunction. The contested territory thus becomes the interpretation of Scripture, and returns the discussion to the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment, in which the Witnesses have consistently sought protection. As we shall see, First Amendment legal protections offered the Witnesses a defence against charges of a lack of loyalty to the nation. This article will now turn to two areas of conflict between secular law and the laws of Jehovah: public ministry and military service.
“DEFENDING AND ESTABLISHING THE GOOD NEWS”
The protections offered by the First Amendment have been of particular importance to debates about un-Americanism. The patriots' view that certain liberties might be curtailed for, or even denied to, particular groups at times when matters of national unity and security are most urgent has led to conflict between rights watchdogs, such as the American Civil Liberties Union, and the government, especially during times of war, when the arguments that national interests need to be protected from internal enemies, and that dissenting views need to be contained to limit their influence, tend to prevail over the constitutional protections of individual rights.Footnote 64 The ACLU has lobbied for the liberties of the Jehovah's Witnesses alongside other groups unpopular with self-proclaimed protectors of Americanism. By challenging federal, state, and local laws curtailing the Witnesses' activities, the society has secured legal victories applicable to a remarkably wide range of civil liberties. This was acknowledged by the ACLU as early as 1943.Footnote 65 In this essay, the issues of public ministry and of ministry and military service are examined to problematize the dichotomy presented by both the society and its critics of Witnesses as good citizens, on the one hand, and as un-American, on the other.
Public ministry
The importance of public ministry to the Jehovah's Witness cannot be overstated. A defining feature of a Witness is participation in door-knocking as far as he or she is able. Those unable – because of limited mobility, advanced age, or otherwise – are encouraged to evangelize in other ways. Other faiths with a strong evangelical imperative usually prescribe a discrete period of missionary service for adherents, as does the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. In contrast, the Witnesses are simply not regarded as Witnesses in good standing unless they engage in evangelism.
This emphasis on outreach has been present since Russell's time. He promoted two aspects of ministry which remain central today: speaking individually with non-Witnesses and leaving them with printed material.Footnote 66 This has shaped the Witnesses' distinctive ministry perhaps more than anything else, though the form this has taken has changed considerably because the organization has always embraced emerging media. For example, a high-tech audiovisual presentation released by Russell in 1914 – The Photo-drama of Creation – represented the latest in motion picture technology (and reached a worldwide audience of 12 million within two years).Footnote 67 Rutherford exhorted Witnesses to redouble their efforts to reach nonmembers and introduced the phonograph to ministry. Pioneers carried records and gramophones and played short recordings of Rutherford's speeches to the householder. So-called information marches, processions with placards advertising Witness events down city streets (often targeting mainstream Christian churches on Sundays) were also introduced. These activities greatly increased the Witnesses' visibility across America, from major cities to rural towns, and exposed the American public to a theology steeped in references to Satan's rule over secular governments and the imminence of Armageddon, which seemed at odds both with loyalty to the American government and with the belief in progress identified by Kazin and McCartin as one ideal of Americanism. Consequently, it was not only the Witnesses' visibility which increased in the Rutherford era, but also the opposition to their message and to their methods.Footnote 68
The practice of house-to-house ministry led some communities to introduce ordinances in an effort to stop Jehovah's Witnesses from mounting their doorsteps. Many of these sought to restrict the distribution of literature by requiring a permit from local authorities or imposing a tax or fee. In some cases, the target of the ordinance was made explicit: in June 1940, for example, the small town of Waynoka in Oklahoma adopted an ordinance which read in part,
It shall be unlawful for any person to distribute in any manner the pamphlet issued by the sect or organization known as “Jehovah's Witnesses,” or to play any phonograph records upholding the belief of the said “Jehovah's Witnesses,” within the corporate limits of the town of Waynoka …Footnote 69
In one of the many instructional booklets produced by Hayden Covington, the society's legal counsel between 1939 and 1963, Witnesses were advised never to apply for permits, to resist arrest or to pay fines or bail fees imposed for distributing literature or visiting householders.Footnote 70 Instead they accepted jail time on the grounds that they should not bow to secular authorities when presented with obstacles to their ministry. Rather than this defiance of authority being un-American, the society argued that it was protected by the Religion Clauses.
The first case to reach the Supreme Court involving the Jehovah's Witnesses centred on these local ordinances. Mrs. Alma Lovell was arrested in 1936 and later sentenced by the Recorder's Court in Griffin, Georgia to fifty days in jail for refusing to pay a fifty-dollar fine issued for distributing literature without first securing written permission from the city manager, as required by a city ordinance, which had only recently been introduced. Lovell v. City of Griffin reached the Supreme Court in 1938.Footnote 71 J. T. Wilson, the arresting officer, attested that he witnessed Lovell put a pamphlet through the door of one Mrs. Smith. When Mrs. Smith came to the door, Lovell handed her the pamphlet as well as an issue of Golden Age (a forerunner of Awake! magazine). Mrs. Smith did not want either. Wilson admitted that whilst he could not hear the exchange between the two women, it was clear Smith was not interested in Lovell's message of salvation. He then arrested Lovell for distributing literature without a permit.Footnote 72
During the trial, Lovell emphasized the centrality of the distribution of literature to the society's work, and ultimately to her own salvation:
I did not ask for a permit, because I am sent by Jehovah to do His work. His law is supreme and above every human law. To apply for a permit to do His work would be an act of disobedience to His commandment. It would be an insult to the Most High which would in time result in my eternal destruction.Footnote 73
In a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court overturned Lovell's conviction, ruling that the ordinance was a violation of the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of speech because it was prior censorship of the press, applicable to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment. In delivering the Court's decision, Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes stated that the ordinance “strikes at the very foundation of the freedom of the press by subjecting it to license and censorship.” It was ruled that freedom of the press was not confined to newspapers and periodicals but extended to pamphlets and leaflets like the ones distributed by the Witnesses. Such publications were described as “historic weapons in the defense of liberty” by the Court, pointing to the importance of the printed word to the country's history, as it was to the society's mission.Footnote 74 In this, the Witnesses were enjoying the liberties accorded to them by the tolerance underpinning the very foundation of the United States.
Following the decision, the clerk of the Supreme Court received a large number of letters inquiring about the implications of the ruling, from those selling advertising door-to-door and individuals circulating religious literature right up to the law firm representing the Chicago Tribune. Many of the letters mentioned that local ordinances had prevented them from circulating material and from canvassing in residential areas.Footnote 75 It was understood that Lovell v. City of Griffin extended First Amendment freedoms to allow for the distribution of literature, however unpopular or marginal its message. The Lovell case has a resonance beyond the society's own activities, and beyond religious practice. Henderson suggested that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People took the Watch Tower Society's lead on challenging discriminatory local ordinances and followed “a blueprint for their own organizational litigation.”Footnote 76 The ruling is just one episode in the society's remarkably successful campaign to have the practices of the Witnesses protected by law on a wide range of issues, from trespassing to taxation.
Ministry and military service
As established, the doctrine of political neutrality means Jehovah's Witnesses will not fight on behalf of a secular government. It is widely believed that Witnesses are pacifists, but this is not the case: they believe there are just wars, though none more recent than those fought by the Israelites in the books of Judges and Joshua. The Witnesses' campaign to secure exemption from conscription focussed not on conscientious objection, as might be assumed, but on the issue of who might be classified a minister of religion. This is because it is not only the society's understanding of the duties of a member which sets it apart from other Christian groups with an evangelical imperative: its definition of a minister casts the net unusually wide by including any member who has been baptised.Footnote 77 The organization does not have a hierarchy which distinguishes ordained clergy from the congregation. Whilst this definition of minister may be academic during peacetime, during times of war it becomes controversial.
The Universal Military Service and Training Act of 1940 distinguished between conscientious objectors, who were required to fulfil civilian alternative service, and ministers or theological students, who were exempted from service of any kind. As Witnesses would neither enter the Army and Navy as noncombatants, like the Seventh-Day Adventists, nor fulfil alternative civilian service, like members of the Historic Peace Churches (the Brethren, Quakers, and Mennonites), attaining the status of minister or minister-in-training was essential to avoid conviction for draft dodging. During World War II most, but not all, of the drafted Witnesses applied for ministerial exemption.Footnote 78 The figures on how many applied for exemption, how many were granted it, and how many were denied it and subsequently jailed are hazy. According to Marley Cole, eight thousand Witnesses applied for ministerial status during the war.Footnote 79 In some cases, local draft boards recognized them as such and gave them the IV-D classification for ministers of religion or full-time students preparing for ministry. This was often the case for those Witnesses who at that time spent at least 150 hours each month door-knocking. In their study of conscientious objectors in the 1940s, Mulford Sibley and Philip Jacob observed that “it was in the classification of Jehovah's Witnesses that local prejudice was probably most pronounced.”Footnote 80 This especially affected those Witnesses working secular jobs but dedicating part of their time to ministry, usually thirty to sixty hours per month. Across the United States, Witnesses were denied ministerial status by draft boards, in some cases clearly influenced by local hostility towards the Witnesses.Footnote 81 Almost four thousand were convicted during the war for their refusal to fight.Footnote 82 They were given longer jail sentences than other violators of the Selective Service Act, including religious conscientious objectors.Footnote 83 These cases were heard against the backdrop of the assaults by Legionnaires and others on the grounds that Witnesses were un-American.
The Selective Service and Training Act did not define what was meant by “minister” for the purposes of exemption from service, an ambiguity which left it open to contestation. As in other areas of religion and law, it was the Witnesses who led the charge, in this case by virtue of their idiosyncratic definition of “minister.” Because Witnesses do not ordain clergy, as nearly all other Christian denominations do, the draft boards were compelled to assess ministerial status without the marker which usually invests an individual with an authority which sets them apart from the rank and file. This lack of clarity led to a case brought before the Supreme Court in 1953, Dickinson v. United States.Footnote 84 George Lewis Dickinson, a twenty-one-year-old Jehovah's Witness, was arrested in San Francisco in 1951 under the Selective Service Act for his refusal to be inducted to the Army. His application for exemption was refused by the draft board which heard his case. He reported for induction, as instructed, but would not step forward when called upon to mark the transition from civilian to soldier. He explained to the board that he was a “duly ordained minister” of the Watch Tower Society, which was a recognized religious organization under the provisions of the Act.Footnote 85 It would not give him the IV-D classification because Dickinson also had a secular job, as a radio mechanic, alongside his ministering work. Interestingly, the society had anticipated this challenge ten years earlier:
The fact that some of Jehovah's witnesses are unable to work full-time as ministers but must spend part of their time to earn their living through secular trade or calling and not through the work of ministration does not prevent their being properly considered as ministers of the gospel, duly ordained. If such requirements were insisted upon, the disciples of Christ Jesus were not qualified to be His ministers. All of them had some secular callings; none were graduates of theological seminaries.Footnote 86
Regardless, the court sentenced Dickinson to two years in a county jail. The case went to the Supreme Court on the grounds that Dickinson was convicted because of his faith and, Covington argued, “members of the Presidential Appeal Board [were] biased and prejudiced against the ministerial claims of Jehovah's Witnesses as a class.”Footnote 87
When the case reached the Supreme Court in 1953, Exhibit A submitted by the prosecution was a Watchtower magazine dated 1 February 1951. The cover read, “Why Jehovah's Witnesses are not pacifists” and “Pacifism and Conscientious Objection – is there a difference?” As established earlier, the Witnesses are not pacifists because of their willingness to fight in wars directed by Jehovah for the furtherance of His rule.Footnote 88 The distinction was used to argue that Lewis's conviction should be upheld. He explained that all Witnesses are minsters: “If they irregularly or incidentally preach, they are not classified as Jehovah's Witnesses.”Footnote 89 The training given to the Witnesses was also a key issue; Dickinson explained that the society has an educational institution of its own (the Theocratic Ministry School, established in 1943) and that “we send no minister forth without first giving him a very comprehensive education. The education is based upon the main textbook of Christians and that is the Holy Bible.” The prosecution also questioned whether Witnesses could be considered ministers given that they are not salaried. Dickinson testified that he lived on just thirty-five dollars a month from his job repairing radios, a paltry sum.Footnote 90
The Supreme Court ruling held that Jehovah's Witnesses who devote their time to preaching are ministers of religion and therefore exempt under the terms of the Universal Military Training and Service Act. The opinion read that Dickinson
was ordained in accordance with the ritual of his sect and … he meets the vital test of regularly, as a vocation, teaching and preaching the principles of his sect and conducting public worship in the tradition of his religion. That the ordination, doctrines, or manner of preaching that his sect employs diverge from the orthodox and traditional is no concern of ours …Footnote 91
The Jehovah's Witnesses' unique definition of minister was thus accepted as grounds for complete military deferment.Footnote 92 The Supreme Court confirmed the state's respect for a religious organization's own definition of minister and its arrangements for ministerial salary and time commitments, under the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment. The ruling was significant for the society.Footnote 93 Its unique structures and beliefs were protected by law and its members were accorded the same status as clergy in mainstream Christian churches. It also had broader significance because the Dickinson ruling was applicable to many other religious minorities, such as Readers in the Church of Christ, Scientist.
“CHAMPIONS OF FREEDOM OF SPEECH AND OF WORSHIP”? THE LITIGATION CAMPAIGN
From 1938 to 1955, the Watch Tower Society constantly brought cases before the Supreme Court.Footnote 94 Covington and others in the society's legal team worked tirelessly in the pursuit of legal redress for Jehovah's Witnesses who had been fined, imprisoned, or in other ways discriminated against for their beliefs and practices.Footnote 95 In an essay celebrating religious diversity in modern America, Alan Wolfe argued that “all religions benefit from religious freedom,” the “majority religion” (i.e. mainstream Protestantism) because it must continually reinvent itself in a lively and crowded marketplace, and “newcomer religions” because “they have room to practice their faith and to seek adherents.”Footnote 96 Without the legal protections fought for by the Jehovah's Witnesses, these newcomers would have limited room to worship and fewer means available to seek neophytes. Just as religious diversity is, for Wolfe, a defining feature of Americanism, so the protection of religious freedoms – and, conversely, their denial – was central to the society's understanding of Americanism and un-Americanism. This was revealed in an article in Awake! in 1950 which surveyed the Legionnaires' persecution of the Witnesses and noted, “On a hundred fronts over thirty years, the Legion, though it endorses ‘100-percent Americanism’ in its constitution and singles itself out as the ‘watchdog’ of American freedom, has in unquestionably un-American style repeatedly violated the constitutional rights and privileges of other Americans.”Footnote 97 By extension, the society proved its American credentials by insisting that the civil liberties of its members be upheld by law and by emphasizing the implications of its successes for Americans in other marginal faiths.
As established, the society's campaign resulted in legal rulings which expanded First Amendment rights for all Americans. Rather than merely an unintended consequence of the Witnesses' minority worldview, Henderson argued that it executed “a precisely orchestrated, deliberately instigated plan.”Footnote 98 She observed that cases involving women (especially mothers) were more likely to be fought, as were those involving white Witnesses, which were less likely to be clouded by racial prejudice and so threaten a favourable ruling. In some instances, the society deliberately created tensions between the Witnesses and particular communities: Covington provoked local authorities into action, sending Witnesses to broadcast Rutherford's anti-Catholic tirades on streets overwhelmingly populated by Catholics in order to instigate legal proceedings once the local authorities had responded.Footnote 99 In light of its commitment to remain “no part of the world,” it is interesting that the society uses the country's legal structures to protect its rights as an organization and the civil liberties of its members. Similarly, its wartime alliance with the ACLU was a rare example of cooperation with another body, either religious or profane.Footnote 100 The legal rulings resulting from the society's legal campaigns and the ACLU's lobbying profoundly shaped interpretations of minority and individual rights in the First Amendment – and secured the Witnesses a prominent position in constitutional law casebooks and histories.
The society presented these landmark legal rulings as evidence of the Jehovah's Witnesses' good citizenship, thereby answering charges of un-Americanism by those policing patriotism. The booklet Freedom of Worship claimed that the Witnesses “have valiantly fought on the ‘home front’ for liberty of speech, of press and of conscience, and push these fights through the courts so as to maintain these liberties for all.”Footnote 101 The claim that this was to defend “liberties for all” deserves scrutiny, however. Whilst there can be no doubt that through aggressive litigation the society has expanded liberties for all Americans, the claim that this has been a conscious strategy is disingenuous. Instead, its aims have been more specific: to spread the kingdom message as far and wide as possible, impelled by the belief that Armageddon, the final battle between good and evil, will only commence when Jehovah's word is ministered to the end of the earth. The doctrine of political neutrality has meant it has remained aloof from campaigns which it might have supported, such as conscientious objection. The society's impact has nonetheless been fundamental, indeed defining. Despite its rejection of the rituals and rhetoric of patriotism, the society has reinforced the ideal of the United States as home to a diversity of theisms.
The many successes of the society's campaign of litigation have not taken place in a legal vacuum, of course: the shift in constitutional culture during this period was vital in securing victories in the Supreme Court. Since the ruling in Cantwell v. Connecticut in 1940, which overturned the conviction of Newton Cantwell and two of his sons for soliciting contributions for literature and for breaching the peace by going door-to-door playing Rutherford's speeches (in an overwhelmingly Catholic part of New Haven), the Free Exercise Clause has been expressly applicable to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment due-process clause, extending First Amendment freedoms to the Witnesses (and others) at the local and state levels.Footnote 102 In addition, Roosevelt's appointment of justices with sympathies for civil and individual liberties made the Supreme Court more open to cases of these kinds. As Sarah Gordon has shown, the Jehovah's Witnesses benefitted from a new culture of tolerance in America but were not tolerant themselves. They fought for the right to distribute literature which contained screeds against the mainstream Christian churches.Footnote 103 The Witnesses' victories should also be seen against the backdrop of the broader trend for the Religion Clauses to be interpreted and applied to a range of issues beyond those traditionally viewed as the domain of religion.
CONCLUSION
By 1950, Covington was able to assure readers of Defending and Establishing the Good News, his legal guide for the Witnesses, that “our way of worship has, in America, become written into the law of the land by the Supreme Court and other courts.”Footnote 104 Whilst it is of little surprise that landmark cases came before the courts in the late 1930s and the 1940s, when the tensions of a world at war increased the persecution of those perceived as unpatriotic, it is remarkable that so many sympathetic rulings were handed down by the highest court in the country at a time when popular opinion against the Witnesses was at its most hostile. The Supreme Court became an important arbiter of Americanism not only through its rulings but also by its very existence; this hallowed national institution served as a reminder of the tolerance, for religious minorities as others, that the Founding Fathers sought to make a defining feature of the fledgling nation. The numerous constitutional victories secured by the society point to a vigorous and ceaseless campaign of litigation, a changing constitutional culture, and the expansion of civil liberties to accommodate this “out-of-step and out-of-sympathy minority,” as an article in The Saturday Evening Post described the Witnesses in 1940.Footnote 105
This essay has examined why patriots viewed Jehovah's Witnesses as un-American; what grounds this has in Witness theology and practice; and what, taken together, these tell us about how the term “un-American,” nebulous though it may be, has been understood by advocates of its antithesis. In the past century, the other in the United States has been defined variously in national (i.e. anti-German), ideological (i.e. anticommunist), racial (i.e. anti-Japanese), and religious (i.e. anti-Islamic) terms.Footnote 106 As we have seen, the Witnesses have been an easy target for Americans searching for the enemy within. Since World War I, the doctrine of political neutrality has led patriots to perceive them as disloyal. Though this has been sharpest during times of war, even before US entry into World War II and after 1945 the Witnesses were popularly regarded with suspicion. In different historical contexts, they have been the targets of those acting in the name of patriotism.
The Supreme Court cases examined herein are far less well known than the “flag salute cases” of the early 1940s, though no less remarkable for their extension of the reach of religion in constitutional law.Footnote 107 Paradoxically, the Jehovah's Witnesses are good Americans in their insistence that they enjoy the freedoms laid down by the Constitution. Today, in many legal cases in which a newspaper or magazine challenges an ordinance which limits the right to distribute a publication in a public space, the ruling in Lovell v. City of Griffin is cited as one of the leading precedents against the constitutionality of such a regulation. The right of religious communities to define and select their own ministers was guaranteed as a result of Dickinson, a position the Supreme Court reaffirmed in 2012 in a ruling relating to a Lutheran school.Footnote 108 The Jehovah's Witnesses have played a key role in defining the American way as one of tolerance of diversity. Rather than this influence being regarded as subversive and pernicious, the highest court in the land has protected it. The expansion of First Amendment freedoms was an unintended consequence of the society's efforts to secure the freedom of its members to knock on doors and circulate literature unimpeded by federal, state, or local authorities, and to ignore those secular laws they view as contrary to Jehovah's without prosecution. By seeking to secure its own rights, the Watch Tower Society has shored up guarantees of freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and the free exercise of religion for all Americans. The boundaries of the Religious Exercise Clause have been expanded as a result of their legal battles.
To close with the society's evaluation of its own importance in 1955: “In modern American history Jehovah's witnesses have left their indelible mark as fighters for civil liberties not only for themselves but for all honest, upright people.”Footnote 109 The six decades since have certainly upheld their status as proponents of civil liberties, but, as this essay has argued, the beneficiaries – beyond the Witnesses themselves – have been collateral rather than central to the fight. “The irrepressible Witnesses,”Footnote 110 as they were described by a former district court judge from Minnesota, have sought to depict themselves as good citizens in the face of persistent claims that they are un-American. The Witnesses represent a unique conception of the un-American given their domestic roots and Protestant heritage. It is further evidence of the intellectual poverty and ongoing politicization of the baleful term “un-American” – and, as importantly, its antithesis.
