Disfellowshipped!

Abstract

Disfellowshipped! Peter Heinegg Leaving the Witness: Exiting a Religion and Finding a Life. By Amber Scorah, New York, NY: Viking, 2019. 279 pp. $28. The (sometimes sudden) gain or loss of faith, the religious or philosophical aha‐moment, is one of the great recurrent themes of western literature. On the positive side of the ledger, we immediately think of St. Paul, Augustine, Francis of Assisi, Pascal, Rousseau (who got his dramatic political prophetic calling en route to Vincennes to visit Diderot in prison) or John Stuart Mill (saved from the sterility of Utilitarianism by the beauty and warmth of Wordsworth's poetry). On the negative side, once the topic of atheism ceased to be taboo, books from ex‐believers began tumbling from the press: Renan, Nietzsche, Edmund Gosse, Joyce, Mary McCarthy, Fawn Brodie, et al. Though the dramatic models of Paul and Augustine, fusing a complex evolutionary process into an instant crystallization or bolt from the theological blue (or empty heavens) always had a undeniable seductive appeal, the simple fact seems to be that erecting or exploding a body of belief always takes time. But once the person involved realizes the immensity of the change that has taken place, he or she may well feel, in one way or another, thunderstruck. Amber Scorah started out as a Jehovah's Witness in Vancouver (throughout the book she is stingy with dates), indoctrinated not by her badly matched and lukewarmly practicing parents, but by her devout grandmother. She followed all the rules, crazy as many of them seemed, sitting through long, boring services in Kingdom Hall, avoiding outsiders, not celebrating birthdays, Christmas, or Easter, refusing blood transfusions, obeying the inerrant dictates of the patriarchal “Governing Body,” and buying into the absolute veracity of the Bible and the approaching apocalyptic Armageddon that will destroy all non‐Witnesses. College education is forbidden, and so Scorah never got past high school. Her story begins when, stuck in a loveless, lifeless marriage, she looks for adventure by becoming a missionary to China (legally forbidden, of course). She first spent three years or so in Taiwan, learning Mandarin and preparing herself for her underground assault on godless communism. Her earliest efforts were floundering, given her still imperfect Chinese and the vast cultural distance between the Watchtower and Shanghai (or anywhere else in China), and eventually (since she has to support herself), she got into producing and appearing in podcasts teaching Mandarin and various puzzling features of China to foreigners. All the while she had to disguise her proselytizing as harmless friendly contacts (which is what they mostly were) with random Chinese persons. She made no converts (her message was hopelessly foreign to them), but a few friends and engaged in modest amounts of touristic discovery, which were all the more stimulating after her hopelessly drab and narrow earlier life. In the meantime, the figure of her (unnamed) husband and theoretical fellow missionary is practically invisible and non‐existent. Her life takes on a radical shift when she starts exchanging emails with “Jonathan,” an LA‐based fan of her “Dear Amber” podcasts, who proceeds to mix flirtation with an extended tutorial on the cultic qualities of the Jehovah's Witnesses. This is, needless to say, an inappropriate relationship, but Scorah had already violated the JW code by engaging in a teenage premarital affair back in Vancouver. She gradually sees that he's right about the oppressive irrationality of her religion and even flies to California to meet and have a predictable, brief affair with him (he eventually dumps her). Now that she has seen the light, Scorah takes the fateful step of publicly announcing her apostasy to the Shanghai Witnesses, for which she is ruthlessly “disfellowshipped,” leaving her severed for good from “family members, all of my friends, my future, my past, my life with friends and family in it, my faith, my certainty, my hope, my purpose in life.” Physically speaking, her devastation is less than total because she still has “a rented apartment, a job, in China, people at my work who knew I existed and would notice if I disappeared, at least,” a handful of personal items, plus “my health, a couple thousand renminbi in...