Religion: Waiting for Armageddon

The pennant of baseball’s 1949 world champions was missing from the Yankee Stadium last week. A speakers’ stand stretched across the infield, and huge posters plastered the stadium, bearing messages like Saarnaa Sanaa and Pregetha y gair. They all meant the same thing: “Preach the Word” (II Tim. 4:2). Beneath this slogan, spelled out in 77 tongues, some 77,000 hot, hungry and happy Jehovah’s Witnesses had gathered together from 48 states and 68 nations.

For eight days they packed the ballpark, protecting their heads from the sun with handkerchiefs and folded newspapers while they listened to reports and speeches, prayed and sang hymns. They kept 7,000 of their brethren busy cooking and serving meals in batches of 20,000, giving first aid to the heat-prostrated, returning lost children, painting signs, running a post office and arranging transportation. At night hundreds of them trekked back across the Hudson River to a 90-acre tent and trailer camp at New Market, N.J., where another 9,000 had listened in over loudspeakers. And in between times, they managed to give New Yorkers the impression that there was a Witness on nearly every street corner, cheerfully hawking his sect’s two periodicals, The Watchtower and Awake.

The most surprising thing about them was the quiet orderliness of a sect whose best-known trait is getting thrown into jail. A day &. night cleanup squad of 500 Witnesses kept the stadium spotless with brooms, buckets and dustpans; pop bottles were banned from the stands. Exclaimed one police sergeant in astonishment: “That’s the best-behaved crowd I’ve ever seen in my life!”

The Decisive Battle. Unconventional as its members are, Jehovah’s Witnesses is one of the three major worldwide sects (with the Mormons and the Christian Scientists) that can be properly labeled “Made in the U.S.A.” Its founder was a thin, smallish Pittsburgh Congregationalist named Charles Taze Russell, who began preaching the second coming of Christ in the 18703, and organized his followers into the Zion’s Watch Tower Society. When Russell died, a pontifical, organ-voiced lawyer, Joseph Franklin Rutherford, took over, built the organization into more or less its present form (estimated membership: 300,000), and called it Jehovah’s Witnesses.*

The faith held by the Bible-centered Witnesses is concrete and uncompromising. Jehovah’s first Witness, they believe, was Abel. Noah, Abraham, Moses, et al. continued the line to the “Chief Witness” —Jesus Christ. According to Witness calculations, Christ did not establish His Kingdom until 1914. Since the Bible says that some who are alive when Christ enters His Kingdom will see the end of this world, it is clear to Witnesses that it is likely to happen any day now. Obviously then, the most important thing that a man can do is scramble onto the right side of the fence before Armageddon—the last and decisive battle between Satan and Jehovah.

Publishers & Pioneers. All Witnesses consider themselves ministers, but not all ministers are the same. Part-time workers are called “Publishers,” and devote most of their free time to spreading the word. Full-time workers, the backbone of the organization, are known as “Pioneers.” They are expected to work a minimum of 100 hours a month. Pioneers and Publishers doggedly ring doorbells of the areas assigned to them, lugging portable phonographs on which they play recorded harangues, giving away books (for a 35¢ “contribution”), and patiently explaining their Bible commentaries at the slightest spark of interest.

Witnesses are most in their element when they are challenging the kingdom of Satan—that is, the rest of the world. They refuse to salute flags or to involve themselves in politics. Most of them refuse to serve in the armed forces (on the grounds that they are ministers). Such behavior keeps them constantly in hot water. Last year two of them were executed in rightist Greece; last month the sect was banned as subversive in Communist Poland (TIME, July 17). Their history in the U.S. has been punctuated by Supreme Court decisions, injunctions, jail terms and mob violence.

Atomic Popgun. Last week, as the Witnesses met in New York City, 20 of their members coming from abroad had been detained at Ellis Island on suspicion of “extreme pacifism.” But to the faith-filled, world-defying women and men who “come in the truth” for Jehovah, the internments, the slammed doors, the sneers, and the outright persecution seem to bring a surer sense of belonging to God’s Kingdom than any amount of public honor and religious respectability.

Disregarding the snubs and slights, they applauded the announcement of a “New World” translation of the New Testament, prepared by Witness scholars to replace the “infected and corrupted” translations of all other versions. They turned out in force for a high point of every convention—the mass baptism of new members. In a 25-by-75-yard swimming pool rented for the occasion, 34 Witnesses, working in relays, immersed 3,381 bathing-suited converts in four hours.

Later the Witnesses thunderously approved a resolution to forswear subversion and “as long as this world lasts, render to Caesar what is Caesar’s.” The Witnesses, said Witness President Nathan H. Knorr, are “pointing neither east nor west, but heavenward.”

“Jehovah’s Witnesses are not pacifists,” he shouted to the convention. “We are fighters, but using no carnal weapons . . . We merely sound the trumpet as the advance guards of the mighty heavenly hosts led by the Great Warrior, Jesus Christ. These legions of warring angels follow us with mighty weapons of warfare that will make the atomic bomb, the hydrogen bomb, and all other inventions of warfare by men look like the popgun of a child in comparison.”

At week’s end, after a final exhortation from President Knorr, the Witnesses headed home again, ready for more publishing and pioneering.

* Adapted from such passages as Isaiah 43:10, “Ye are my witnesses, saith the Lord.”