Visions of Glory is a brave, enormous, painful book. As she exorcises the past, Barbara Grizzuti Harrison asks, “What does it mean to believe in God?,” a question that embarrasses many, but enthralls some.

When she was nine, Barbara Grizzuti and her mother became converts to the Jehovah's Witnesses. An ardent member of that “fundamentalist, apocalyptic, prophetic” religion, she “preached sweet doom” from door to door. After high school, she lived for several years at the Witnesses' central headquarters in Brooklyn. Yet fervor and faith were insufficient. Passionate, intelligent, she could not suppress her curiosity, her doubts, and her rebellion against a Jehovah who would condemn decent, lovable people, who were not Witnesses, to eternal death. In 1956, at 21, close to a nervous breakdown, she left, or, to use the sectarian idiom, she “disfellowshipped” herself.

Reborn into the secular world, she lived in Greenwich Village, in India, and in Latin America. She had affairs, the first with a black jazz musician, that symbol of street wisdom and freedom in the 1950s. She married; had two well-loved children; got a divorce; began to write. She became a reasonably free woman, that symbol for the 1970s. Then, while working on this book about a dogmatic, totalitarian Protestant movement, she discovered the Roman Catholicism into which she had been baptized as a baby. She found a religion that satisfied her thirst for magnificence; for celebration; for a surrender to grand forces that would enhance, not destroy, the self. She could reconcile “love of God with love of the world.”

Harrison speaks ruefully of the skepticism of friends about her new commitment. Though far, far too skimpily, she admits that “to be a Catholic and a feminist and a leftist sometimes appears to be a fantastic juggling act.” But such responses seem trivial to her in comparison to the sense of well-being that her grasp of the sacred brought and brings—a combination of ecstasy and health that devotees of several religions have described.

To grow in this way, Harrison had to break with her mother, whom she had confused with Jehovah Himself. She was reunited emotionally with her father who had not been allowed to share a bedroom with his wife after she became a Witness. As an adult, then, Harrison both abandoned some of her childhood and reclaimed other parts of it that the Witnesses had taken away from her. Part of the poignancy of her autobiographical passages is that she was such a very young zealot; that one of Jehovah's special souls was a psychologically and morally battered child.

Visions of Glory is more than a modern confession; more than a lucid, often brilliant, first-person account of doubt and belief. Harrison also analyzes an extraordinary group that we must understand if we want to grasp the complexities of certain conservatives. Today, there are only about as many Witnesses as there are Albanians. However, because of their persistent proselytizing, their organizational skills, their money, and their clarity of purpose, the Witnesses seem larger than their numbers might suggest. They are a comparatively new sect, founded in the late 19th century by a manipulative, messianic haberdasher from Pittsburgh, Charles Taze Russell. He began the Witnesses' habit of fixing a firm date for the end of the world. Necessarily, the date had to shift as history messily defied those who believed they could control and survive time.

Harrison's attitude toward Russell signals her attitude toward the Witnesses in general. She sometimes laughs at their freakishness, the comedy of the loon and buffoon. She loathes their isolation; smugness; hypocrisy; repression; flagellation that consists of guilt and shame; bigotry; and bland acceptance of secular injustice. She writes: They move in our midst like disdainful strangers, waiting for Jehovah—a hard and irritable judge. … They spit out the world as if it tasted of ashes; they reject the large idea of a mystical union with God, a communion of brothers and saints. Their God is querulous and small; their religion nourishes damaged deserters from the world, offering them a brittle certainty. When she can, she respects their contribution to the civil liberties of freedom of speech, of the press, and of the separation of church and state; their capacity for labor, courage, and discipline; and their desire for God, no matter how aridly expressed.

Much of the strength of Visions of Glory is Harrison's willingness to struggle with her feelings about the Witnesses and to be as fair as possible. An honorable historian, she rejects rigid interpretations, diatribes, and oversimplifications, errors of the Witnesses themselves.

As a result, her sense of Witness psychology seems plausible. To “victims, to the marginal, the exploited, the disenfranchised,” the religion offers an orderly, highly regulated community within which they can feel superior to the world outside. The Witnesses sanction some aggression; glamorize persecution; endorse a sacred text; outline a cosmology; and promise a comfortable immortality. Its appeal is such that blacks will dismiss its racism, women its sexism. Harrison says sympathetically: For disaffected women whose experience has taught them that all human relationships are threateningly volatile, capricious, and unreliable, the Witnesses provide an answer. Relate to God. God is a safe lover, a constant lover, a consuming lover. … Explicitly antifeminist, the Witnesses nevertheless provide a vehicle for downtrodden women—their religion allows their voices, drowned by the voices of the menacing world, to emerge.

Harrison reminds us that an unfair world generates escapes that are, in turn, distorted and distorting, limited and limiting. As if seeking to preserve their present life, Witnesses refuse to assault the social and political causes of the pain that is to them one more proof of their belief in an impending end of all evil. They apparently prefer compensation to change.

Despite the richness of its insights, despite its massiveness and (sometimes repetitive) detail, Visions of Glory often seems disturbingly unfinished. One chapter, about Witnesses in other countries, reads as if Harrison's facts had overwhelmed her and it was all she could do to get them down with some cogency. I wonder, too, if she had trouble integrating the public history of the Witnesses with her private history of having been one. Even after her obsessive self-examination, Harrison's past still partly baffles her. Her motives and actions as she longed, not only for “equality to cherish” but for “a God to adore,” have an enigmatic residue. This may be less a failure of style and of psychological acumen than a comment on the difficulties of the task she has set herself: to know believers. As she says: “the leap into belief (or into fancy) is still unsusceptible of analysis, still mysterious.” Perhaps our language, no matter how competently or poetically we use it, must ultimately profane and fail to reveal the sacred—if it exists.