Witnessing in Black: Jehovah's Witnesses, Textual Ethnogenesis, Racial Subjectivity, and the Foundational Politics of Theocracy

Abstract

This article attempts to show how the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society (Jehovah's Witnesses), has systematically worked to construct an anti-racial religious identity, through a multi-decade campaign against ethnic and national affiliation. Through a close analysis of Watchtower periodicals, pamphlets, and polemical literature, this work considers the ways that the Society has narrated specific historical examples of race-based political projects, to argue for a supra-statal, theocratic ethnicity that draws upon the aesthetic, cultural, and political sensibilities of predominately White, exclusively American male, leadership. For Witnesses, the legacy of the holocaust continues to loom large in Watchtower positions on race and nation. Given this legacy, I argue that the ideological work that occurred in the aftermath of the Second World War created new possibilities for the articulation of race politics that curtailed many meaningful opportunities for a truly multi-ethnic, multi-racial Watchtower Society. This was one where the expression and performance of cultural difference could be seen as a constructive rather than destructive constituent of one's religious identity. Ultimately, I demonstrate that the Watchtower Society is interested in its own form of nation-building, and that this political project requires the consistent delegitimization of all other national formations.