Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

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Insider's View

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SOURCE: “Insider's View,” in Christian Century, Vol. XCVI, No. 7, February 28, 1979, p. 224.

[In the following review of Visions of Glory, Mills lauds Harrison's study as both perceptive and insightful.]

Jehovah's Witnesses are believers in a fundamentalist, apocalyptic, prophetic religion; they have been proclaiming, since the 1930s, that “millions of our living will never die.” To the extent that they are known—their notoriety arises from their refusal to receive blood transfusions, salute the flag, or serve in the army of any country, as well as from their aggressive proselytizing—they are perceived as rather drab, somewhat eccentric people and dismissed as irrelevant. But this book Visions of Glory provides both an “inside” and an “outside” story written by one who for 12 years was a Witness and for three of those years served on the Watchtower Society's headquarters staff.

By using historical and psychological analysis, Barbara Harrison describes the religion as a closed system that relished disaster; rejoiced in the evil of human nature: lusted for certitude; ordered its members to disdain the painful present in exchange for a glorious future; and corrupted ritual, ethics and doctrine into ritualism, legalism and dogmatism. To look closely at the psychology of a single all-consuming religion, the author contends, is necessarily to examine human nature, while to understand its ideology, to trace its historical genesis and development, is to gain insight into the contradictions, necessities and turmoil of the society and culture that gave it life.

The Witnesses' impact on the author was to produce a dream existence of fear, hallucination within a closed system, and the belief that “I had the truth.” That the Witnesses were racist and sexist further complicated her existence. Because God will accomplish all things without the collaboration of humanity, Witnesses do not strive to achieve the Kingdom of Heaven on earth. They have never been able to reconcile love of God with love of the world. Until the time of her departure from the Watchtower Society, the author's life was increasingly a crazy-quilt of conflicting desires. In retrospect she now sees the Jehovah's Witnesses as a microcosm of humankind trying desperately, often pitifully, to find possibility, hope and grace in a moral wilderness.

Barbara Harrison's progress from dedicated Witness to orthodox believer is told perceptively and frankly. The multidisciplinary approach enhances this work, and the quotations from first-hand participants enliven the narrative. Whether or not one accepts the assertion that the Jehovah's Witnesses are a microcosm of humankind, the reader will gain valuable insights into the people and country that gave birth to this religion.

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