Ex-Jehovah’s Witnesses break silence on shunning After suicides, some point to denomination’s treatment of those who ‘mess up’
Amber Sawyer was just 8 years old when it happened.
She was watching cartoons on the living room floor of her Mississippi home when she heard the bang.
She went to investigate and found her 21-year-old sister, Donna, dead in her bed. She had shot herself in the heart with their father’s hunting rifle weeks after their church excommunicated her for getting engaged to a man who was not a Jehovah’s Witness.
For Sawyer — who sat on the bedroom floor near her sister’s body for hours that day, waiting for her mother to come home from her door-to-door missionary work — it was the beginning of a long, painful journey that would one day tear her family apart.
Years later, Sawyer was excommunicated, too, after seeking a divorce from an abusive husband. She ended up leaving the husband — and the faith. Her family cut all ties. “Jehovah’s Witness kids grow up knowing that if they ever mess up, their parents will leave them — and that’s scary,” Sawyer, now 38, said in an interview from her home in Pascagoula, Miss. “The shunning is supposed to make us miss them so much that we’ll come back. … It didn’t work.”
Sawyer and many others like her are denouncing the church’s shunning practices in the wake of a murder-suicide in Keego Harbor, Mich., last month that killed a family of four former Jehovah’s Witnesses who were ostracized after leaving the faith.
The deaths sparked outrage among scores of former practitioners of the faith nationwide who took to Facebook, online forums, blogs and YouTube, arguing that the tragedy highlights a pervasive yet rarely publicized problem within the church: Shunning is pushing the most vulnerable people over the edge and tearing families apart, they say.
In the Michigan case, a distraught mother shot and killed her husband, her two grown children and herself in their home about 25 miles northwest of Detroit, shocking the small and quiet community.
They chose to leave
The shooter was Lauren Stuart, a part-time model and personal trainer who struggled with depression and spent much of her time working on her house, her friends said.
She and her husband, Daniel Stuart, 47, left the Jehovah’s Witnesses faith more than a decade ago over doctrinal and social issues.
Among them was their desire to send their kids to college, which many former Jehovah’s Witnesses say the church frowns on and views as spiritually dangerous.
“University and college campuses are notorious for bad behavior — drug and alcohol abuse, immorality, cheating, hazing, and the list goes on,” read an Oct. 1, 2005, article in Watchtower, the church’s official publication. (Editions before 2008 are not available online.)
The Stuarts sent both their kids to college: Steven Stuart, 27, excelled in computers, just like his father, who was a data solutions architect for the University of Michigan Medical School. Bethany Stuart, 24, thrived in art and graphic design.
After the parents left the faith, the Stuarts were ostracized by the members of the Kingdom Hall — the churches where Jehovah’s Witnesses worship — in nearby Union Lake and by their families, friends said.
Lauren Stuart, whose mother died of cancer when she was 12, struggled with isolation, mental illness that went untreated , and fears that the end was near, friends and officials familiar with the case said.
One friend who requested anonymity said she believes the killing was the result of depression, not religion.
Longtime family friend Joyce Taylor, 58, of White Lake, Mich., believes depression, shunning and religion-based doomsday fears all played a role. She said that about six weeks before the killings, Lauren Stuart started getting religiously preoccupied and telling her: “It’s the end times. I know it is.”
Weeks later, Taylor saw her friend again. Stuart had a vacant look in her eyes.
She was emotionally distressed. A week later, with her home decorated for Valentine’s Day, Stuart killed her family. She left behind a suicide note.
“She said in the suicide note that she felt that by killing them it was the only way to save them,” recalled Taylor, who said police let her read the letter. “She said she’s sorry that she has to do this, but it was the only way to save them all.”
Taylor, a former Jehovah’s Witness herself who left the faith in 1986, explained, “Jehovah’s Witnesses believe that if you die on this side of Armageddon, you’ll be resurrected in paradise.”
In Stuart’s case, Taylor believes her friend never deprogrammed after leaving the church — a state she describes as “physically out but mentally in.” She believes that Stuart’s indoctrinated doomsday fears never left her and that the shunning helped push her over the edge.
If her tightknit community that once was her entire support system had not excommunicated her — and left her with no one to share her fears with — Stuart might not have done what she did, Taylor said.
“People do things when they are desperate,” Taylor said. “And that was an extreme, desperate act.”
Shunning “can lead to great trauma among people because the Jehovah’s Witnesses are a very tightknit community,” said Mathew Schmalz, a religious studies associate professor at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass.
“If you’re separated out, you’re really left to your own devices in ways that are very challenging and very painful,” Schmalz said. “Once you leave a group that’s been your whole life, letting that go is a kind of death.”
Police have not disclosed details about the death of the Stuart family except for calling it a murder-suicide.
Being ‘disfellowshipped’
The tragedy has emboldened many once-quiet ex-Jehovah’s Witnesses to speak up. Many say they suffered quietly on their own for years until they discovered an online community full of isolated, ostracized people like themselves — people who had lost someone to suicide or attempted suicide themselves because their families, friends and church community had written them off for making mistakes.
The church calls it being “disfellowshipped.” Members can return if they repent, change the behavior and prove themselves worthy of being reinstated. But unless or until that happens, members are encouraged to avoid those who leave the faith.
Mothers go years, even decades, without talking to their children. Siblings write off siblings. Friends shun friends.
An estimated 70,000 Jehovah’s Witnesses are disfellowshipped every year — roughly 1% of the church’s total population, according to data published by the Watchtower.
Their names are published at local Kingdom Halls. Of those, two-thirds never return.
However, within a faith representing millions of people worldwide, many members believe the religion is pure, good and loving. Those who are speaking against it are disgruntled and angry people who have an ax to grind because they were disfellowshipped, current members argue.
Almost 8.5 million people are Jehovah’s Witnesses worldwide, including
1.2 million in the United States, according to the website JW.org.
The Jehovah’s Witnesses national organization did not return calls and emails for comment on disfellowshipping. Multiple members and elders were contacted, but all declined to speak on the record, many saying they were not authorized to publicly comment on scripture and church teachings.
Schmalz, the religious studies professor, said mainstream Christians often misunderstand the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ faith. Their beliefs may seem “unorthodox” to other religious groups and their rules too strict or extreme.
But Jehovah’s Witnesses, a Protestant denomination that began in the
1870s as a Bible study group in Pittsburgh, have rational reasons for much of what they believe and do, he said.
“We should look at the Jehovah’s Witnesses not as a bizarre religious group but as a religion that has its own internal means of discipline,” he said. “They can be very harsh and have very unintended and tragic consequences.”