Sects: On from Yankee Stadium

Jehovah’s Witnesses share a lot of characteristics with Boy Scouts. They are trustworthy, helpful, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, reverent—and (to many outsiders) confounded nuisances. They are conspicuously meek and devout in their big Yankee Stadium meetings, but can be tiresomely importunate in their door-to-door convert hunts and their litigious defenses of their “God-given right” not to vote, bear arms or salute flags.

The U.S. has long since got used to the ways of this made-in-America faith, but the rest of the world often treats it as an unwanted import. In Sweden, young male Witnesses regularly spend a total of ten months in prison for refusing to accept compulsory military service. In the Soviet Union, dozens of Jehovah’s Witnesses are found guilty each year on charges that range from subversion to smuggling.

The Cardinal Disapproves. It is to this foreign resistance that the Witnesses are addressing themselves this summer—one of the few summers left, they feel, before Armageddon. In 24 massive rallies, starting June 30 in Milwaukee, they are rolling eastward around the world: New York, London, Stockholm, currently Milan and Munich, then on to Jerusalem, Hong Kong, Singapore and Honolulu, ending in Pasadena in September. In Germany, where the sect numbers 79,000 (compared with 308,000 in the U.S.) and can boast that 12,000 of the faithful served time in Nazi concentration camps, opposition is particularly high.

Weeks before the Munich convention opened, Julius Cardinal Döpfner and Lutheran Bishop Hermann Dietzfelbinger approved the publication of a broadside called “A Word to All Christians,” which attacked Witness beliefs and urged homeowners not to rent rooms to the visitors. When Witness missionaries appeared on Munich streets to hawk the sect’s publications, they were flanked by church-affiliated Boy Scouts, who rather unkindly passed out anti-Witness pamphlets.

A Million Members. Much of the hostility was understandable, since the zealous Witnesses quite openly accuse traditional churches of being unBiblical and deride their leaders as servants of Satan. But many Munich residents were appalled by the bitterness of the churches’ attack on the Witnesses, and sect workers found no difficulty in finding rooms for assembly visitors. In the end, the convention assembled and housed 110,000 members from all over Northern and Central Europe. Witness President Nathan Knorr announced that the number of Witnesses had in creased 15% in the past year. Witness total worldwide: about 1,000,000.

Spiritually speaking, most of them are going to be out of luck when Armageddon comes. According to their belief, only 144,000 Witnesses will be called upon to reign in heaven with Christ. The rest will have to settle for 1,000 years of a second-class paradise on earth; afterwards Satan will be permanently overcome and all non-Witnesses consigned to darkness.