Introducing Lloyd Evans and the Episode

John Dehlin [00:00:31] Hello, everyone, and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories podcast. I'm your host, John Dehlin. It is March 6, 2019, and I could not be more excited for today's interview. This interview came about because a dear friend of mine, Jason Moore from Houston, has been following Lloyd Evans. Lloyd Evans has a website called the Reluctant Apostate, and I'll just read the bio. Lloyd Evans is an ex Jehovah's Witness author, activist, and filmmaker. In 2011, he founded JWSurvey.org, an online resource aimed at assisting those who wish to leave the witness faith. In 2017, Lloyd published his first book, the Reluctant Apostate, a part memoir, part reference work.

John Dehlin [00:01:19] Interweaving his story with Watchtower readings and history, Lloyd then published a follow up titled how to Escape from Jehovah's Witnesses, aimed as a guide for those who consider quitting his former faith. For those of you who've been following Mormon stories for some time, you'll know that last year I interviewed Tova Mirvis, and Tovah is nationally internationally recognized author, and she wrote a memoir called the Book of Separation, which chronicled her separation from Orthodox Judaism and her eventual divorce from her husband.

John Dehlin [00:02:00] And that was a really popular episode. And so we learned from that interview that you Mormon Stories listeners really want to hear the exit narratives of people from other faith traditions. And so consider this the second in what I hope to be a series. I want to interview, you know, ex Scientologists, ex evangelical Christians, ex Pentecostal Christians, ex lots of different people of lots of different faith traditions. And Lloyd is going to be the first for 2019, and we're just really excited. Normally we live stream this stuff, but Lloyd is joining us from. Where are you, Lloyd?

Lloyd Evans [00:02:42] Croatia.

John Dehlin [00:02:43] Croatia. And for some reason, we couldn't get Zoom to do a live stream, so we may broadcast this later on Facebook live asynchronously. But anyway, without any further ado, Lloyd Evans, I'm so super stoked to have you on Mormon Stories. Thanks for joining us.

Lloyd Evans [00:03:02] Thank you. It's an absolute pleasure and honor to be here. Thanks for inviting me.

John Dehlin [00:03:07] My pleasure. And again, shout out to Jason Moore, who made all this possible. Now, Lloyd, I'm just going to ask you a weird question. Have you ever heard of Mormon Stories? And have you ever listened? Just so that I can know whether or not you kind of know what you're a part of right now, I

Lloyd Evans [00:03:23] am a subscriber to Mormon Stories. Although I don't watch it religiously, I just have it on my radar, and it's great to see the work that you guys are doing.

John Dehlin [00:03:35] Thanks. And we, you know, one thing we do in Mormon stories is long form. So I've literally done 10, 15 hour interviews before. We won't have time for that today. But you understand that we do more than just kind of the shorter form interviews, right?

Lloyd Evans [00:03:51] Sure. I'm braced for some long form. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:03:56] Okay. So, Lloyd, is there anything you want to add to the intro just so that listeners know kind of a little bit about you and who you are before we dive into the actual story?

Lloyd Evans [00:04:09] Only that probably the easiest way to find me is to go on John Cedars. John cedars channel on YouTube. It's where I post videos mostly dealing with Watchtower propaganda and Jehovah's Witness teachings and practices, and especially some of the more abusive elements of those. You've already mentioned my book and everything. So, yeah, that's probably the easiest place to find me.

John Dehlin [00:04:34] Okay. And tell us where the name John Cedars comes from, because that's not your name.

Lloyd Evans [00:04:40] No. Yeah. So John Seeders was the pseudonym I chose to work under when I first started my activism, while still technically one of Jehovah's Witnesses, because obviously it's a disfellowshipping offense to be criticizing the organization. So rather than reveal my identity, I chose a pseudonym and I didn't show myself on camera. And then I reached a point where I thought, no, actually, I'm happy to be disassociated. You know, I'm happy to leave the organization. And that's when I started using my real name, which is Lloyd Evans. But I kept John Cedars as the title of my YouTube channel as kind of like a tribute to my journey. Journey, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:05:28] And so that already signals to us that the stakes are really high in the Jehovah's Witness tradition as it can be in Mormonism and Scientology and other, let's just say, fundamentalist or high demand religions. It sounds like we're about to hear an epic story.

Lloyd Evans [00:05:44] Easier to join than to leave. Definitely.

John Dehlin [00:05:49] I love it. Okay, so I want to begin not with your story, if that's okay, but with the history of the Jehovah's Witness tradition. And I was happy to see that your book covers this. Can you tell us how your religion started? And let's dig in as much as we need to, to kind of get a sense for the Jehovah's Witness tradition.

Origins of the Jehovah's Witness Movement

Lloyd Evans [00:06:10] There was a little bit of an overlap, actually. I mentioned this in my book that the year that Joseph Smith was shot dead in a. Was It. Carthage, Illinois. I'm stretching now.

John Dehlin [00:06:24] That's where Joseph was killed. Joseph was killed.

Lloyd Evans [00:06:27] So that happened in 1844. And in the same year, William Miller, in the Adventist movement predicted that the second coming of Christ and that he and his followers would be raptured to heaven. And obviously that didn't happen. But one or two of his followers kind of carried on his tradition of coming up with these rather fanciful dates for the second coming of Christ. And they influenced a man named Charles Taze Russell, who ended up founding the Watchtower movement. He.

John Dehlin [00:07:05] Okay, wait, wait, wait. Yeah, sorry, I'm interrupting. Okay, so what was the actual origin of the church? Are you saying was it started by a prophet like Joseph Smith?

Lloyd Evans [00:07:17] No. Well, the organization itself could be thought of as assuming that role, but it's not the same as with Mormonism, where you have leaders who claim to be prophets. What you have. In the early part of the history, you had presidents of the Watchtower Society who were responsible mainly for what was published.

John Dehlin [00:07:44] Then before that, how did it start? You're saying that there were just some people gathering somewhere?

Lloyd Evans [00:07:52] Yeah. So it started with, I guess you could say Charles Taze Russell gathering with his friends, reading the Bible in New York, Pennsylvania.

John Dehlin [00:08:03] Okay. It's in Pennsylvania. Around what year?

Lloyd Evans [00:08:07] Late 1870s.

John Dehlin [00:08:09] Okay. 1870s, Pennsylvania. Charles Taves Russell.

Lloyd Evans [00:08:14] Taze, yeah. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:08:16] Charles Taze Russell starts gathering some friends. And what do they gather about?

Lloyd Evans [00:08:22] Well, again, he's very influenced by some of the Adventist preachers that he's. He himself rejects Adventism.

John Dehlin [00:08:30] He tell us what Adventism is.

Lloyd Evans [00:08:33] Adventism as it was. The Adventism I'm referring to was the movement associated around William Miller and those who followed him, of those who believed in the second Advent or second coming of Christ by a certain date. And that's kind of what Charles Taze Russell rejected. He thought it was quite comical, at least initially, that the Adventists were coming up with specific dates that just ended up being wrong. And 1844 is referred to as the great disappointment because people obviously sold their homes and were really bought into the idea that they were going to be raptured to heaven. Charles Taze Russell rejected that thinking initially, but then he became more or less guilty of exactly the same thing after being convinced by followers of people who had followed William Miller that there was actually this new chronology, and this was the true chronology.

John Dehlin [00:09:34] Oh, this is awesome. Okay. I don't know any of this, and my listeners, I'm guessing most don't either. So forgive us Mormons. We can be very insular and Oblivious to everybody else. So I'm reading on Wikipedia, the great disappointment in the Millerite movement was the reaction that followed Baptist preacher William Miller's proclamations that Jesus Christ would return to the Earth by 1844. Ironically, as you noted, the year Joseph Smith was killed, what he called the Advent. And he studied Daniel 8 prophecy during the second great awakening, which inspired Joseph Smith, which led Miller to the conclusion that Daniel's cleansing of the sanctuary was cleansing of the world from sin when Christ would come and he and many others prepared.

John Dehlin [00:10:21] But October 22, 1844, came and they were disappointed. Okay, this is awesome. And that paved the way for the Adventists who formed the Seventh Day Adventist Church. Oh, wow. They contended that what had happened on October 22nd was not Jesus's return, but the start of Jesus final work of atonement, the cleansing in the heavenly sanctuary leading up to the Second Coming. Now, just to make a connection with Mormonism, we're called the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints because Joseph Smith very much believed also in a millennium and in the Second Coming. And they, I think, you know, early Mormons. I know for sure early Mormons thought that the Second Coming was imminent. So in some sense, we're kind of. We at least share some of that heritage. Right.

Lloyd Evans [00:11:10] The theology is so different, though. But it's. I think both of our former religions spawned in this kind of crazy, euphoric, eccentric, kind of flurry of strange ideas centering around the Second coming of Christ in 19th century America. I definitely agree with that.

John Dehlin [00:11:37] Okay, okay. So this guy's prophecies don't come true. We fast forward to Charles Taze Russell, who's studying the Bible with his friends. And you're saying at the beginning they're kind of laughing at Adventism and kind of a reaction to it in a negative way.

Lloyd Evans [00:12:00] Sure. So he had some friends who had kind of been swept along by the Miller movement and had carried through some of the teachings that Miller had, albeit not the chronology necessarily. And then Charles Taze Russell had a paper through the door by a man named Nelson Barber, and he saw that it was somewhat associated with Adventism. And he writes that he laughed because he thought, I want to see what date they've now come up with for the burning of the world. He said words along those lines.

John Dehlin [00:12:38] So he's mocking Adventism, right?

Lloyd Evans [00:12:40] Yeah, he's mocking. His first reaction to a newspaper through the door from this guy called Nelson Barber was this, that, you know, great, this is something to do with Adventism, but something that Nelson Basically, Nelson Barber says, guess What? It wasn't 1844. We had it all wrong.

Lloyd Evans [00:13:01] I can now reveal that it was 18. I think he said 1877, and it later became 1878. And Charles Taze Russell got completely. He completely bought into that. So much so that to begin with, he funded Barber to write a book where Barber spelled out all his chronology, a chronology that featured 1914. A lot of Jehovah's Witnesses think that 1914 came from Charles Taze Russell, but actually it came from Nelson Barber.

Lloyd Evans [00:13:36] And so, yeah, that's kind of where it began. Although Barber and Taze Russell ended up having a rather ugly split because Barber was so kind of disenchanted by the failure of his predictions, because obviously 1878 came and went, nothing happened. And he went completely back to the drawing board and started writing things that were, quite frankly, starting to sound atheistic. His version of Christianity swerved so far away from what Charles Taze Russell accepted that they had a rather ugly split. And.

Charles Taze Russell and Early Theology

John Dehlin [00:14:13] Yeah, so I appreciate you letting me process this through my own limited framework. So Russell initially is skeptical of kind of millennialism, but then Barber kind of wins him over to an 1878 date for the return of the Messiah. Right. But then the Messiah doesn't come, and so Russell and Barbara end up splitting partly over that and then partly over crazy things that Barber's writing that Russell doesn't approve of. Is that right?

Lloyd Evans [00:14:47] Yeah. Russell could forgive the failure of 1878 because someone came up with the brilliant idea that because they were expecting the presence of Jesus and the present, the word for presence in Greek is parousia. When the apostles asked Christ what will be the sign of your presence, they use the word parousia. And someone figured out that parousia, or presence needn't necessarily mean coming a single event of arriving. It could mean a period in which you are present, including present invisibly. So this. This kind of explained everything. It's like, oh, right, okay, Jesus did come in 1878. We just didn't see it because it all happened invisibly. And that's. That's what Russell believed. So lots of Jehovah's Witnesses think that Russell taught that Jesus would come in 1914, but that's not what he taught. He taught that Jesus came invisibly in 1878 because of the theology that he had inherited from Nelson Barber.

John Dehlin [00:15:54] So in Russell's mind, is it fair to say Jesus did come in 1878, but just came in some sort of invisible form?

Lloyd Evans [00:16:04] Yeah, I think that they found stuff that had happened, I think some events involving the Pope that in their mind proved that something extraordinary had happened in that year that made it significant in world events, that made it justifiable that they should attach that significance to the era. I'm really reaching back into a time. I mean, Jehovah's Witnesses don't believe anything like this anymore. So I'm kind of operating at the furthest reaches of what I know about Watchtower history at this point.

John Dehlin [00:16:39] No, but that's very familiar to Mormonism because The Mormonism of 1830 or 1835 or 1840 in so many ways would be unrecognizable to Mormonism today. And it's all gone down the memory hole. So we have, you know, there's some important similarities there. You'll also find Joseph Smith, you know, schisming or separating from many of his early colleagues and, you know, big nasty fights. So that all feels very familiar. And I think Mormons are going to understand that, but I guess so. Charles Taze Russell believes Something happened in 1878. Then he splits with a co founder. And then how does it, how does it go from there?

Lloyd Evans [00:17:23] So the Watchtower. Russell founds the Watchtower Society in 1881. Two years before that, in 1879, he starts publishing the Watchtower magazine. And he also starts publishing a series of books called Studies in the Scriptures, or as they were then known, Millennial dawn, which spelled out his kind of back to the drawing board chronology.

Lloyd Evans [00:17:51] Having again split with Barber, he had to come up with this extension of from 1878. Okay, what happens next? And through various readings of the Book of Daniel and even, believe it or not, through a bit of dabbling in pyramidology, because Russell believed that the Pyramid of Giza was God's stone witness and that the measurements of the internal passageways correlated to years in Bible chronology.

Lloyd Evans [00:18:24] He used these to come up with 1914 as the final limit of the last days, by which point Armageddon would need to come and the elect or anointed followers of Christ, including him, obviously, would be raptured to heaven.

John Dehlin [00:18:40] Now, surely it isn't just Daniel in the Bible inspiring him, but also the Book of Revelations. Right, sure.

Lloyd Evans [00:18:47] He quoted from Revelation, he quoted from Ezekiel, you name it. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:18:52] Okay. And okay. And that's, you know, I guess even Jews were expecting the Messiah to come. So, you know, this idea of a Messiah and the Messiah coming again, that's not just a Christian thing. That's, that's probably in its origins a Jewish thing. Right.

Lloyd Evans [00:19:09] Well, it Depends what Jews were talking about. Because there's obviously mainstream Judaism is, you know, again, doesn't take itself too seriously. Probably Orthodox Judaism and Hasidic Judaism. I don't know what their end times chronology is. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:19:28] Okay, so he comes up with the new chronology and a new timeline. And again, what's the year?

Lloyd Evans [00:19:34] 1914.

John Dehlin [00:19:36] 1914, which is right around the time World War I's about to start. In my mind, that's World War I

Lloyd Evans [00:19:43] came to Charles Taze Russell's rescue because just by sheer coincidence, something significant did happen in that year. It wasn't Armageddon. It wasn't. It wasn't the rapture of Russell and his friends, which is what they were expecting to happen, but they believed that. Okay, well, you know, okay, maybe Armageddon hasn't come, but at least something's going on over in Europe which could result in Armageddon. Maybe we were just out by a year or two. So Russell died in 1916, October 31, Halloween. Probably convinced that something approximating what he had predicted was underway.

John Dehlin [00:20:23] And I'll just say I just coincidentally, Margi and I just watched the movie they Shall Not Grow Old, which is an amazing documentary produced by Peter Jackson, the creator of Lord of the Rings,

Lloyd Evans [00:20:36] the Hobbit series, because he colorizes and remasters the footage from World War I, doesn't he?

John Dehlin [00:20:44] Yeah, it's really powerful. But we forget that the World War I, most, I don't know, Americans wouldn't realize that World War I was called the War to End all wars. And even just a million British alone died in World War I. Not to mention, I'm sure all the Prussians or Germans or whoever else died. But it was a massive war. So, I mean, you know, that's not too far of a stretch to say. It would have felt like Armageddon to many people back in. In 1914. Right.

Lloyd Evans [00:21:19] And it's so plausible. I mean, I kind of laugh at it a bit, but it's so plausible that the Watchtower today, Jehovah's Witnesses today, still hinge their chronology on that. They had to change the chronology from Russell's after he died. So Russell's successor was called Joseph Rutherford. He was kind of the David Miscavige of the religion.

Lloyd Evans [00:21:45] Think of Charles Taze Russell as, like, L. Ron Hubbard, the kind of roguish eccentric madman. And Rutherford is the kind of more calculated, okay, I'm gonna rise to the top here, and it's gonna be my way or the highway. And Rutherford revised entirely Russell's chronology.

Lloyd Evans [00:22:06] So he ditched 1878 altogether. He got rid of all mention of pyramids. And he said, okay, 1914 is when the last days started because of World War I. And he came up with this whole new chronology which involved 1919 because that's the year that he and his colleagues were released from jail. So this fulfilled prophecies about redemption and the freedom of God's people and that kind of thing.

John Dehlin [00:22:35] Okay, so yeah, and I get the Miskovich reference. I often think of Joseph Smith as Mormonism's L. Ron Hubbard and Brigham Young as Mormonism's David Miskovich in terms of somebody who just who knew the founder, but after the founder died, took it to a whole new level.

Lloyd Evans [00:22:55] Indeed.

John Dehlin [00:22:55] And you're saying this Joseph Franklin Rutherford

Lloyd Evans [00:22:58] was that nasty piece of work?

John Dehlin [00:23:01] What's that?

Lloyd Evans [00:23:02] He was a nasty piece of work.

John Dehlin [00:23:04] Right. Okay, really quickly, what year did, did Russell say 1914 was the year? I'm just curious, how many years prior?

Lloyd Evans [00:23:16] Well, would it have been. I don't know what the exact year would have been that he first said 1914, but it would have been around when he started publishing the Watchtower in 1879.

John Dehlin [00:23:28] Okay, so I mean, he did name a year that ended up being very, very, very significant, but a year that

Lloyd Evans [00:23:35] he borrowed from other people. And you get to 1914 using this magic number of 2,520 days, which they say, oh, when, when the Bible refers to this period, which it doesn't, that you have to really stretch the Bible to come up with the figure 25:20. But they say, well, it's not days, it's years. It's 2,520 years. And he came up with this chronology that had actually been already invented for him by again, Adventist preachers. But Jehovah's Witnesses today don't know anything about that. They just think, oh, Charles taze Russell predicted 1914 and that's when World War I started.

John Dehlin [00:24:15] That's so fascinating. So kind of superstition, numerology, Egyptology, a fascination with the Middle east and the ancient stuff was all in the air. And that's just like Joseph Smith. So instead of Charles Taze Russell coming out of all of this through revelation or through divine inspiration, he's really just co opting amoebatizing whatever's in the air and then munging it into his own sort of religious tradition.

Lloyd Evans [00:24:46] Indeed, although he, he thought that he was being at least guided or influenced by God's spirit, maybe I don't think he referred to himself as a prophet, but he didn't shy away from people who said, he's God's faithful and discreet slave. Borrowing from a verse in Matthew 24, I think, verse 47, where Jesus has this parable about the faithful and discreet slave and the foolish slave. And Watchtower takes that very seriously. They say, well, that's not a parable. That's a prophecy. There is going to be an entity in the last days that is the faithful and discreet slave. And to begin with, they thought it was Russell. Then they thought it was Rutherford, and nowadays they think it's the governing body.

John Dehlin [00:25:36] It's kind of this. Religions sometimes have to be this constant

Lloyd Evans [00:25:39] moving target, especially because the passage of time renders the teachings obsolete. So they just have to move the goalposts.

John Dehlin [00:25:48] Yeah, especially if you're trying to put timelines to things.

Lloyd Evans [00:25:52] Indeed.

John Dehlin [00:25:53] Okay, so Rutherford takes over and becomes the successor to Russell, right?

Lloyd Evans [00:26:05] Indeed.

John Dehlin [00:26:05] And it's kind of starting in 1917. So what happens then?

Lloyd Evans [00:26:11] There was a huge. It was kind. I don't know what the circumstances were with Brigham Young, but I think there was a bit of controversy when he took over. And it was similar with Rutherford.

John Dehlin [00:26:21] He like a power struggle with other people.

Lloyd Evans [00:26:23] It was very much a power struggle.

John Dehlin [00:26:25] Yeah, we had that, too. We had that, too.

Lloyd Evans [00:26:27] There were seven directors.

John Dehlin [00:26:30] Really quickly, had Russell designated Rutherford as his successor, or had he designated anyone as a successor?

Lloyd Evans [00:26:43] He had a will in which he said, rather than it be one person, I want there to be a committee, an editorial committee. He basically laid the groundwork for what we have today, which is the governing body.

John Dehlin [00:26:56] Okay.

Lloyd Evans [00:26:57] Rutherford didn't like the idea. In fact, Rutherford's name was on a B list that Russell wrote for the editorial committee. If these guys can't do it, you know, ask Joe to stand in. So that's how little. Actually, Rutherford was Russell's lawyer. So there were reasons for Russell to be endeared to him, but not quite endeared enough, it seems, to name him as his successor. But what Rutherford did was he very cleverly kind of used politics, and he managed to get himself in the good books of the people who mattered so that he got voted into the office of president. And having done that, he very quickly managed to engineer events so that anyone who opposed his authority or who were alarmed at how authoritarian he was was basically kicked out of the organization.

John Dehlin [00:27:50] Now, it's probably worth noting that Wikipedia is basically saying that by the time. By 1910, which is six years before Russell dies, there were 50,000 Jehovah's Witnesses across the world. And was it concentrated primarily in any geographical location? Was it in Pennsylvania mostly? Or was it. Had he sent missionaries out by this point prior to 1917? Had it started to become a global movement?

Lloyd Evans [00:28:23] Right. So I don't know about 1910, but certainly by the time Russell died, there were. It wasn't called Jehovah's Witnesses back then. It was called Bible Students. And there were Bible students in other countries. There was a branch office in London. I think there were some in Germany as well. So it was already sort of an international movement. But if you were going to kind of ask where this movement is concentrated, I would say it was concentrated on the Eastern seaboard. That's where most Ecclesiastes were back then.

John Dehlin [00:28:52] And the Watchtower was the name of the magazine still.

Lloyd Evans [00:28:56] It was the name of the magazine and it was the name of the society that printed the magazine. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:29:02] Okay. But there was no such thing as a Jehovah's Witness, you know, prior to 1917.

Lloyd Evans [00:29:08] No, that's. That name was invented by Joseph Rutherford in 1931.

Joseph Rutherford Takes the Helm

John Dehlin [00:29:12] All right, so let's. How does it progress? This is getting good.

Lloyd Evans [00:29:18] Well, Joseph Rutherford again recreates Russell's movement in his own image, completely redesigns the theology so that actually his imprisonment for a period in 1918, 1919, under the Espionage act was foretold in Bible prophecy. And his doing.

John Dehlin [00:29:39] What was he doing to get imprisoned?

Lloyd Evans [00:29:42] He published a book called the Finished Mystery that included a tirade against the American war effort during the First World War. Some of the pages in the book were actually written by a non. By a reverend who wasn't even part of the movement, who was so vitriolic against America and the Allies that the Germans actually dropped this vicar's words, the same words that were printed in the book. These words were dropped on Allied troops during World War I as propaganda. That's how vitriolic they were. And Joseph Rutherford, I don't think he even knew they were there, to be honest. Joseph Rutherford just commissioned the book to be printed.

Lloyd Evans [00:30:27] But when it got printed and distributed around America during the First World War, predictably, it didn't go down too well. And amidst war hysteria, they found themselves being tried under the Espionage act and imprisoned, I think unfairly, but yeah, the whole issue of them being imprisoned for any length of time at all continues to this day to be referred to by Jehovah's Witnesses as a fulfillment of Bible prophecy.

John Dehlin [00:31:01] So, okay, we're probably jumping ahead, but Jehovah's Witnesses, if my memory serves me, they're kind of anti war, right?

Lloyd Evans [00:31:08] Oh, yeah, they're pacifists yeah.

John Dehlin [00:31:10] Okay. They're pacifists. Which was also its own movement in the 19th century. Right, the pacifism movement.

Lloyd Evans [00:31:15] I guess so, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:31:17] So he. So Rutherford would have published a book that was anti war. Right. Which isn't a bad thing. Right. It's.

Lloyd Evans [00:31:27] I mean, he published the booklet Neutrality in, I think 1939. So just as the Second World War was hotting up. However.

John Dehlin [00:31:37] No, I'm saying that first book that got him into trouble, that got him in jail, was it an anti war book?

Lloyd Evans [00:31:42] No, it was an anti war, but not anti violence per se. So he was blasting America as an American. It was, it was an unpatriotic book, I guess you could say. But the unpatriotic pages weren't even written by Bible students. They were written. They were kind of. It was almost like an op ed that had been included by someone from a completely different church.

John Dehlin [00:32:08] Okay. And really quickly, and I apologize, we're going back a tiny bit. If you had to name three to five of the major doctrinal or theological tenets under Russell that sort of got congealed by the time Rutherford took over. What, what were the main theological or doctrinal tenets of, you know, of Russell's movement by the time he died? Those who were following him, the 50 plus thousand worldwide, what were they into other than the chronology of the return of Jesus? What characterized them?

Lloyd Evans [00:32:44] Chronology was quite a big deal. However, I guess if you're gonna say what were they most obsessive about? They rejected the Trinity, as I think Mormons do.

John Dehlin [00:32:56] Okay.

Lloyd Evans [00:32:57] That was a big thing for them.

John Dehlin [00:33:00] So God and Jesus and the Holy Ghost aren't one.

Lloyd Evans [00:33:03] Indeed.

John Dehlin [00:33:04] Okay.

Lloyd Evans [00:33:06] They took a big stand against evolution. They did. They spoke against hell. They didn't believe in hell, which they still don't. And they believed that the soul isn't immortal. So these were all kind of fairly unique.

John Dehlin [00:33:23] The soul isn't immortal.

Lloyd Evans [00:33:25] Isn't immortal, no.

John Dehlin [00:33:27] So what happened when you die, according

Lloyd Evans [00:33:28] to those who followed Russell, you wait to be resurrected. You can either look forward to being reborn in heaven or resurrected in a future paradise earth.

John Dehlin [00:33:43] Well, what's resurrected? For a Mormon, there's a soul and there's resurrection.

Lloyd Evans [00:33:47] Sure. So resurrected literally means, you know, like when Jesus resurrected Lazarus. So Witnesses believe that that's going to happen to all Jehovah's Witnesses who died.

John Dehlin [00:33:59] So there's no spirit or soul behind it. You are your essence is your body.

Lloyd Evans [00:34:06] Indeed. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:34:07] And so. So, okay, so Mormons teach resurrection is where your spirit.

Lloyd Evans [00:34:11] Yeah. There's a scripture In Ezekiel, that I think says, the soul that is sinning, it itself will die. So Witnesses say, well, it clearly says that a soul can die, so how can the soul be immortal? And that was one of the things that made them different right from the beginning.

John Dehlin [00:34:27] Got it. So resurrection and Mormonism is the reunification of the spirit with the body. In Jehovah's Witness, it's literally you are who you are when you're with your body. So resurrection is the restitution of your body, which is the restitution of you. Got it. Okay. That's interesting.

Lloyd Evans [00:34:47] Sure.

John Dehlin [00:34:48] Okay.

Lloyd Evans [00:34:49] I'm trying to. I'm stretching to think what else. I'm sure there were other things I could think of that were. That they were quite keen on. But again, it's a stretch for me because it's hard enough knowing what Jehovah's witnesses believe in. 20, 19, never mind 1880 or so.

John Dehlin [00:35:07] Okay. No, that's good. That gives us a flavor at least. Do they. So they believe in the New Testament and the Old Testament, but. But, you know, under Russell's administration, would they have read, believed in, you know, that Jesus lived and that he died for us and that sort of thing?

Lloyd Evans [00:35:22] Yes. Yes, they did. They believed that Jesus died for us to begin with. Like most people, they assumed Jesus died on a cross, but under Rutherford, they ditched the idea of the cross and said, no, it was a stake. And.

John Dehlin [00:35:36] Okay, so let's just. Let's move on to Rutherford if it's not worth digging more into Russell, because it sounds like Rutherford is the beginning of modern Jehovah's Witness movement anyway.

Rutherford's Doctrinal and Organizational Changes

Lloyd Evans [00:35:46] So he coined the phrase. Yeah. He coined the name Jehovah's Witnesses. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:35:50] All right, so how did Rutherford. Where did Rutherford take it all?

Lloyd Evans [00:35:55] Rutherford made it far more organizationally oriented. Under Russell, it was all kind of like a loose association of ecclesiastical congregations who all read the Watchtower magazine and who all considered Russell to be like their pastor. And Rutherford came along and he believed in the quote, unquote, theocracy that was being represented on earth by the Watchtower Society, of which he was president.

Lloyd Evans [00:36:26] So everything became more centralized under Russell. Every congregation had elders, and Rutherford got rid of elders because he didn't like the fact that they weren't all obedient to him. And he replaced them with one man in each congregation who was answerable directly to Watchtower. So rulership or authority became centralized under Rutherford, and he also departed quite radically from Russell's Zionism. So to begin with, he copied Russell in believing that the Repatriation of Jewish people to Palestine was part of Bible prophecy, and he started believing that. Or he even wrote a book called Comfort for the Jews, which extolled this teaching. But by the mid-1930s, he'd done a complete U turn and started writing what can only be described as anti Semitic diatribes against the Jews right about the time that fascism was becoming popular. What else can be said about.

John Dehlin [00:37:35] So he was pro Zionist and then he was anti Semitic.

Lloyd Evans [00:37:39] Completely switched. In fact, one of the controversies that Jehovah's Witness, most Jehovah's Witnesses don't know about, was that Rutherford attempted to ingratiate Watchtower with the Nazi regime. And only when they reacted very badly to this did Jehovah's Witnesses start a program of opposing Hitler to the point of asking Witnesses in Germany to defy bans and distribute information, even though they knew that this would lead to them being arrested and thrown in concentration camps. And 1200 Jehovah's Witnesses ended up dying in concentration camps, it could be argued, mostly because they'd been almost used as cannon fodder in a failed attempt by Rutherford to win over some kind of credibility with the Nazi government.

John Dehlin [00:38:34] Oh, wow, okay, so that's. So that's analogous in Mormonism to kind of our darker. You know, we have racist history with Brigham Young saying and doing some really racist things, including owning slaves and.

Lloyd Evans [00:38:48] Well, is it the Nephites as well?

John Dehlin [00:38:51] Oh, yeah. The Book of Mormon itself is a very racist text. And so Mormons would want all that information to go down the memory hole. And what you're. And what I'm hearing is that part of the controversy or an issue in your history that would cause a modern Jehovah's Witness to doubt or question would have been Rutherford's attempt to ingratiate himself and the movement with Nazi Germany and his anti Semitic history. That would be something that Rutherford and his followers would have wanted to sort of put down the memory hole and hide from. From modern members. And so that would have been forgotten in the minds of, let's just say, post World War II Jehovah's Witnesses. Is that fair?

Lloyd Evans [00:39:42] They didn't do a very good job of hiding it because one of the main pieces of evidence, Exhibit A, is a document called the Declaration of Facts, which is, again, it was written by Rutherford and it was basically pitching the Nazis with the Bible student movement, saying, hey, we're on your side. We also hate the Jews. We think that your. Your ideals and your principles are fantastic. And they made the mistake of reproducing the Declaration of Facts in one of Watchtower's yearbooks, the 1934 yearbook. So it's immortalized now.

John Dehlin [00:40:20] Oops.

Lloyd Evans [00:40:22] In. But you have to really be fastidious about digging through Watchtower history to know that it's there.

John Dehlin [00:40:30] That sounds analogous to our Journal of Discourses, which was our compilation of church records and speeches. That stands as sort of a condemnation in many. In many's mind to modern Mormonism. And. Okay, so the combination of the anti Semitism, plus, I guess, the death of those 12,000 Jehovah's Witnesses is a really dark, you know, moment in time for. For the movement.

Lloyd Evans [00:40:57] Then, although they spin it another way, they say, you know, these 1200.

John Dehlin [00:41:02] Oh, 1200, not 12,000.

Lloyd Evans [00:41:03] Yeah, they were. They died because they were faithful. And this proves that we're God's one and only true organization because we're the ones who are being persecuted. They're doing it now with what's going on in Russia, because Jehovah's Witnesses have just been banned in Russia again. They were banned under the Soviet Union, and then it got lifted after the breakup of the Soviet Union, and now under Putin, the bans back on. And they have literally said at their most recent annual meeting that they believe that this fulfills Bible prophecy, the prophecy of the King of the north and the King of the south in Daniel. So they've wasted no time at all in pointing to this as evidence that they're God's one true religion.

John Dehlin [00:41:49] Right. And so somehow they're able to spin even failed prophecies or disasters into a fulfillment of prophecy.

Lloyd Evans [00:41:59] Indeed, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:42:02] Okay, so how did it progress,

Lloyd Evans [00:42:08] Rutherford? I would say that the organization grew a bit over Rutherford, but it wasn't. It was still a fairly small movement, numbering only into, let's say, a couple of hundred, a few hundred thousand, let's say, by the time Rutherford died in 1942. But he was succeeded by a man named Nathan Knorr, who was phenomenal in growing the organization.

John Dehlin [00:42:35] Okay, really quick. Do you mind if I jump in? I'm sorry.

Lloyd Evans [00:42:39] Sure.

John Dehlin [00:42:39] So it looks like one of the things that as a. As a Mormon growing up, that I knew. I knew, like, three things about Jehovah's Witnesses. One of the things I knew was. Was this idea of the 144,000.

Lloyd Evans [00:42:52] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:42:53] And just because I'm cheating on Wikipedia, it looks like that was introduced under Rutherford. So it may be worth mentioning that along with any other major doctrinal changes that Rutherford may have introduced or theological or chronological innovations that Rutherford may have Added before we go on to more.

Lloyd Evans [00:43:13] So in 1935, and this was quite clever, by the way, it was kind of a masterstroke by Rutherford, because I just mentioned that the numbers were kind of around into the hundreds of thousands by the time Rutherford died. But this presents a problem because there's a verse in Revelation that numbers the amount of the elect, the number of those who rule in heaven with Christ at 144,000. And under Russell, they took this number very literally. So the movement was only ever going to be. Well, it had to be much less than 144,000, because this number included everyone, all Christians who'd ever lived, going all the way back to Jesus. So the number could only ever be quite a lot less than 144,000.

John Dehlin [00:44:07] Right.

Lloyd Evans [00:44:07] Then in 1935, Rutherford came up with this masterstroke, and he found a verse that Mormons use to refer to Jesus visiting the Americas, where Jesus said, let

John Dehlin [00:44:21] me predict other sheep I have which are not of this fold.

Lloyd Evans [00:44:24] Indeed. So Mormons use that to say, well, you know, the Aztecs were visited by Jesus. And Rutherford used that to say, well, the other sheep are those who don't go to heaven. And the number of those is unlimited. They are part of the great crowd that's referred to in Revelation. So the anointed are the 144,000 again, going all the way back to Jesus. And they're the ones who get to rule in heaven with Jesus. The other sheep are those who get to inhabit Paradise Earth after Armageddon's been and gone. And they can be. They can be. They can rise indefinitely in number. So this allowed, in a way, the movement to grow beyond 144,000.

John Dehlin [00:45:16] Okay. And this, as you said, once the Jehovah's Witness movement gets too big, they have to come up with this interpretation to justify the number exceeding some literal interpretation of the Bible somewhere.

Lloyd Evans [00:45:32] Yeah, indeed.

John Dehlin [00:45:34] Fascinating. Okay. And so now. But what a byproduct of that is, you've got all these members thinking, well, am I one of the 144,000? Are you? How do I make sure that I make that? I mean, I can already see how that is spinning in the minds of the members and creating some.

Lloyd Evans [00:45:52] Probably weird because it causes issues. It may be. Maybe was more of an issue back in 1935 when, you know, everyone was part of the anointed. And then they had to start figuring out who doesn't feel like they're going to heaven, who feels like they might be living on the earth, but certainly by the Time I was being raised as a witness, the vast majority were believing that they were going to live on a paradise earth. And it became a bit of a problem almost if you thought that you were one of the anointed. Because quite apart from the fact that it looked like you might be trying to kind of elevate yourself in the eyes of people in the congregation, and most people don't like to be perceived as doing that.

Lloyd Evans [00:46:34] It also, for example, if you're a husband and you say that you're anointed, what happens to your wife? You know, is she going to be living on her own in the paradise while you're in heaven? So it's not as straightforward as you think in people wanting to go to heaven.

John Dehlin [00:46:49] It sounds like it went the opposite direction where there was a cultural taboo to assume that you would be one of those.

Lloyd Evans [00:46:56] There was for a number of years. And that taboo ended around 20, I'm going to say, 2007. They changed the teaching to say they used to say that the door closed, that the majority of those who thought that they were going to be going to be ruling in heaven, that ended in 1935 when they came up with the new teaching. But decades later, they said, actually, forget about 1935. It didn't close then. It's, you know. And then lots of witnesses took that as the green light to start saying that they were going to heaven, too. So the number rose dramatically from I think around 8,000. I think it's in the 20 thousands now of witnesses who believe they're going to heaven.

John Dehlin [00:47:43] How do you know who believes that?

Lloyd Evans [00:47:46] Because it's complicated. Because if you believe you're going to heaven, it's incumbent upon you to partake of the emblems at an annual commemoration of Jesus death. When Jesus had the last supper with the bread and wine, he said, you've got to eat of the bread and drink of the wine. And the bread means my body, and the wine means my blood. Witnesses have this bizarre rule where, because if you're of the other sheep and you're going to live on paradise earth, you're not allowed to eat the bread or drink the wine. But you are supposed to observe the commemoration and pass along the. What are called the emblems.

Lloyd Evans [00:48:29] But if you drink of the wine and eat the bread, you're signaling to everyone else that you're part of the 144,000. And that number gets recorded. So in the statistics every year, it says these are the number who partook of the emblems at the memorial. So that's roughly the figure of those who at least think they're of the 144,000.

John Dehlin [00:48:53] And is that 20,000 since the beginning of the church or just at. Currently how many people are partaking?

Lloyd Evans [00:48:59] It's gone up from around. Before 2007, it was fairly stable at 8,000 a year, and now it's gone above, I think, 20,000.

John Dehlin [00:49:10] So you've got these individual Jehovah's Witnesses in modern day who have kind of decided that they are one of the 144,000. And the sign of that is they partake in what Mormons would call some sort of sacrament annually. And now that number is just going to keep building until it's too big, and then they're going to have to reinterpret Scripture again, because that's just another number that's building that's eventually going to become problematic. Right.

Lloyd Evans [00:49:36] Well, in 2011, they published a Watchtower article trying to kind of quell people's enthusiasm by saying, just because you partake of the emblems doesn't mean you are one of the anointed. It could be that you're wrong. It could be that you've got some kind of mental imbalance, not realizing that exactly the same thing could be said of the governing body, who all claim to be of the anointed. Why did they get to say that all of the other anointed ones have a mental imbalance? Why not them as well?

John Dehlin [00:50:05] So fascinating. Okay, so the leaders. It's assumed that the leaders are part of this chosen group.

Lloyd Evans [00:50:12] Yeah. You only get to be on the governing body if you are one of the anointed. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:50:17] Oh, man, that just sounds so messy. Okay, so going back to. So Rutherford, any other important, super important doctrinal theological innovations that come out of Rutherford's tenure?

Lloyd Evans [00:50:36] There were a few, I guess. Lots of the bands. Lots of the band things. He banned Mother's Day mostly because he hated women. Hated women.

John Dehlin [00:50:44] Okay.

Lloyd Evans [00:50:45] He was a massive sexist. He. It was slightly after Rutherford, actually, that they started banning Christmas, but lots of things just started being banned under Rutherford off the top of my head. But it changed a lot under. Under Rutherford. But I think I've mostly spelled out the big. The big things. The biggest thing was the chronology where he said, In 1919, Jesus invisibly inspected all of the world's religions and chose me and my pals to be his faithful and discreet slave. And that is still the teaching to this day that that's how we are God's organization. Because in 1919, invisibly which is convenient. Jesus elected Rutherford to be among the first of the faithful slave. That's what you have to believe as a witness.

John Dehlin [00:51:44] Okay, so he moves the goalpost on the date he says Jesus did come, and conveniently he invisibly anointed us as his one true church, basically.

Lloyd Evans [00:51:55] Yeah, indeed.

John Dehlin [00:51:57] Would that mean that he was anointed as Jesus leader or prophet on the earth? Or was that implied? Or was it the council?

Lloyd Evans [00:52:07] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:52:10] Was there any talk of authority, like with Mormons, it's priesthood authority lay on the hands. You're given the authority that Peter, James and John and John the Baptist all had. So there's.

Lloyd Evans [00:52:20] I would have to check whether he outright called himself the faithful and discreet slave. I think it was just a given under Rutherford that he was the faithful and discreet slave, or at least that the organization of which he was the president was acting as a prophet and was God's appointed organization.

John Dehlin [00:52:43] Did he claim a visitation, like a conversation with Jesus?

Lloyd Evans [00:52:47] No, no.

John Dehlin [00:52:48] How did he know?

Lloyd Evans [00:52:52] He just said, all he has to do is say, this is. This organization is part of the theocracy. This is Jehovah's organization. We're the ones who are being used.

John Dehlin [00:53:02] And, you know, he didn't have to claim a conversation.

Lloyd Evans [00:53:06] No, no.

John Dehlin [00:53:07] Well, that's how mind blowing Joseph is. Like the way Joseph did it is. He's doing all this folk magic.

Lloyd Evans [00:53:14] Yeah. Trust me. There were golden plates. Just trust me on this. I saw them. No one else saw them. But I saw.

John Dehlin [00:53:21] Don't mock my religion, I'm mocking yours. No, I'm kidding. No. But Joseph came up with this vision story after the church had already been formed, and he wrote it back into history. But he's claiming that God and Jesus came to him and said, start the one true church. And then he claimed authority again later after the church was kind of formed. And so what you're saying is Rutherford didn't even claim any conversation or kind of direct visitation. Just said, this is what happened. And everybody bought into it.

Lloyd Evans [00:53:58] It was all about the dates. And again, going back to the First World War, that was very, very convenient because the organization had been saying something would happen in 1914, and that turned out to be the start of World War I. So that's quite a compelling narrative because again, you have something in history that everyone can remember. And when you're there saying, actually, did you realize that we were predicting 1914? And actually, did you that during this World War I hysteria, our senior officials were imprisoned by the American government and the release was foretold. In Bible prophecy, that was basically their version of the Joseph Smith. Hey, I found some golden plates.

John Dehlin [00:54:44] Okay. So the miracle was the prediction of the 1914 date.

Lloyd Evans [00:54:48] Yeah, indeed. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:54:49] All right. All right. I love it. Okay. So that was Rutherford's contribution to Jehovah's Witness movement, as well as coming up with the name, a new timeline, and banning a lot of stuff. And the 144,000 thing.

Lloyd Evans [00:55:08] Yeah.

Nathan Knorr's Era and the 1975 Prophecy

John Dehlin [00:55:09] Okay, so tell us about Nathan Knorr. K N O R R Knorr.

Lloyd Evans [00:55:14] Nathan Knorr. Under Nathan Knorr, a lot of things happened. The main. The most important thing that happened under Nathan Knorr is that the religion ballooned in size into millions again.

John Dehlin [00:55:25] Wait a minute. He's still alive? Is that right?

Lloyd Evans [00:55:27] No, no, no, no. He died. Okay.

John Dehlin [00:55:30] Because the wikipedia page says 1942 to present. So 1942 would have been Rutherford's death. So they just mean the movement that Noor started is the church is now seen as part of Noor's iteration. Is that kind of the modern church looking at?

Lloyd Evans [00:55:50] But yeah. So Rutherford died in 1942. Nathan north took over until his death in, I think, 1977.

John Dehlin [00:55:58] Okay.

Lloyd Evans [00:56:00] And what Nathan Knorr did was he grew the movement into, again, millions. We wouldn't be talking about Jehovah's Witnesses. I wouldn't be a Jehovah's Witness if it wasn't for Nathan Knorr, because it would just be an inconsequential group huddled along the eastern seaboard of America. Nor made it an international brand. His focus was all on the preaching work. He introduced the missionary work. He introduced special schools in every congregation to teach people how to be better evangelizers, or you could say better salesmen. He was very kind of. He was very much an administrator and a businessman, and he applied almost a business ethic to growing the religion.

John Dehlin [00:56:46] Was he buddies with Rutherford? What do you.

Lloyd Evans [00:56:49] He was. He had a nickname among old timers at the headquarters of Brown Nose. He was a brown nose of Rutherford. He.

John Dehlin [00:57:00] Okay. Would he have ever known Russell? Would he have been alive when Russell was alive, or.

Lloyd Evans [00:57:08] No, no.

John Dehlin [00:57:10] Looks like he was born in 05. So he.

Lloyd Evans [00:57:13] Technically, Noor joined the movement as a teenager shortly after getting baptized, and he started. He got baptized. And there's a rumor that he was headhunted because Fred Franz gave the talk at his baptism. That's the rumor. And invited him to Bethel. And so almost immediately after his baptism, he went to work at the headquarters where he had this meteoric rise through the organization and ended up as president, taking over from Rutherford.

John Dehlin [00:57:43] Got it. Okay. So he joins as a convert.

Lloyd Evans [00:57:47] And then the other significant thing about Noor is that he was very good at delegating. So whereas everything under Russell hinged on Russell, everything under Rutherford hinged on Rutherford under Knorr, he accepted that he couldn't do everything. He couldn't come up with, you know, amazing new teachings about Bible prophecy and what have you. So he delegated, and in the case of Bible prophecy and theology, he delegated to a man named Fred Franz, who expanded. He. Fred Franz came up with the notion of the quote, unquote, governing body.

Lloyd Evans [00:58:30] And he started in the 1940s to refer to the leadership of the organization as the governing body. And by the time we reach the 1970s, people are saying, well, hang on. You keep talking about a governing body. Who is the governing body? And they say, well, okay, the governing body is, I guess, the. The board of directors of Watchtower. And then by 1971, it was an actual group, not just of the board of directors, but basically those who had been selected by Noor to join this inaugural governing body. And then in 1975, there was a power struggle where those who were on the governing body were saying, well, hang on.

Lloyd Evans [00:59:13] If we're going to be the leaders of the organization, we shouldn't just be like an advisory board to the president. The president, if anything, should be under us. We should be the leaders of the organization. And they won that power struggle in, I think, 1975. And ever since then, the organization's been run not by the president of the Watchtower Society, but by the governing body.

John Dehlin [00:59:41] Okay, so an emphasis on education, an emphasis on missionary work. It also says that he. Okay, and you said a decentralization of power or a delegation of power so that people felt empowered under.

Lloyd Evans [00:59:59] Nor they went back to having elders.

John Dehlin [01:00:02] Right?

Lloyd Evans [01:00:03] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:00:03] And then it also mentions a campaign of real estate acquisition. And I remember visiting my friends in Brooklyn and seeing this massive Jehovah's Witness building Right. In Brooklyn on what had to have been extremely valuable real estate. Right.

Lloyd Evans [01:00:21] Well, they ended up selling the. They've now moved out of Brooklyn altogether, and they sold the real estate in the end for 2 billion.

John Dehlin [01:00:31] Right. But the fact that they were able to get in there and purchase all that real estate and then see it grow to, I guess, what you're saying, 2 billion, that was probably really important to their financial viability.

Lloyd Evans [01:00:46] It was, but it was also necessitated by the enormous growth of the organization. They really started pulling in members. And a lot of it, a lot of this growth happened in the late 60s, early 70s, because they claimed that Armageddon was coming in 1975.

John Dehlin [01:01:04] Wow. And that was Knorr.

Lloyd Evans [01:01:06] It was Freddie Franz's idea. He wrote a book called Life Everlasting in Freedom of the Sons of God. I really should have prepared notes for this. And that was in 1966. And I think with Knorr. Knorr just kind of let Fred Franz do whatever he wanted. He had this. Fred Franz was like the wizard of the organization who had all of these pronouncements of wisdom. And Fred Franz became convinced that 1975 would be when Armageddon would come. And he enshrined this teaching in this book that he wrote in 1966.

Lloyd Evans [01:01:43] And the witnesses pushed it really hard. They were convinced that Armageddon was going to come in that year. And so the organization grew and grew and grew and grew. And of course, Armageddon didn't come in 1975. So then they had the problem of, well, what do we tell people now? And for the most part, they just kind of buried their heads in the sand or suggested that people shouldn't have taken things so seriously and they shouldn't have been working with a date in mind. And what have you. Basically blaming the followers for taking them seriously to begin with. They did publish an apology at one point.

John Dehlin [01:02:18] That's gaslighting. That's what we call gaslighting.

Lloyd Evans [01:02:20] Indeed.

John Dehlin [01:02:22] Okay, really quick. Like, part of me can imagine this conversation of Jehovah's Witness leaders at some point where it's like, hey, you know, this date thing hasn't worked out so well for us in the past. IGs nay on the eight day, eighth day, or whatever kind of thing.

John Dehlin [01:02:41] You know, Franz, stop mentioning a date, because if it comes and goes, then we're going to have this PR disaster. Like, I can imagine at some point, just the idea of picking a year on the one hand is your legacy. On the one hand is the whole point of the whole religion.

John Dehlin [01:03:01] And it gives people this marshaling, rallying vitality of something that they're expecting and working towards on the one hand. And on the other hand, I could see organizational concern, which is just like, don't put us. Fran, shut up. Don't put us in this position again. Is that. How do we have any sense administratively for how that conversation may or may not have happened? Or if it ever did?

Lloyd Evans [01:03:27] They've mostly learned that lesson now. The problem they had was that again, they gave Fred Franz a bit too much power and a bit too much influence. In the organization. And I believe that Fred Franz was, shall we say, how can I put this in a politically correct way? I think he had a few screws loose, quite frankly.

John Dehlin [01:03:47] Okay.

Lloyd Evans [01:03:48] And he's long since died. And I think that the organization today has learned that lesson. And in many ways, they're captive to the same sort of chronology that Fred Franz came up with, albeit without the 1975 date. They've kept almost everything else, and they've actually shown a remarkable inability to use their imagination in coming up with new teachings, so that they still cling to the 1914. 1919 chronology, even though there's a verse in Revelation that says that the last days, once they start, they're going to go on for only a short period of time. If the last days started in 1914, then this short period of time is what, 105 years and counting.

John Dehlin [01:04:36] Right. Okay. So it sounds like Nor was more of an administrator, salesman, bureaucrat, kind of organizational man. But the people still need to be inspired. And so Nor relied on Franz and others to kind of inspire the membership and that, that at some point got out of control. But again, it doesn't sound like your church imploded when, when 19, what, 75 came and went.

Lloyd Evans [01:05:10] Yeah, because they'd. It wasn't just about 1975. They, they had all of the infrastructure, infrastructure set up to make the organization very good at holding on to people. It wasn't. Not everything focused around Armageddon, necessarily. A lot of it was. They could easily say, for example, oh, we may have got it slightly wrong, but it is coming very soon. Just trust us.

Lloyd Evans [01:05:37] And who else is teaching the Bible with the accuracy that we're teaching it? You're not going to find, for example, the same peace and the same harmony in other organizations that we have. So it wasn't all necessarily just about 1975, although that did, I think, play a part in the growth of the organization. But in hinging everything on Fred Franz, Nathan Knorr made a rod for his own back because Fred Franz introduced the idea of the governing body. And when they had this power struggle in 1975, it was pretty much between the governing body and Nathan Knorr and Fred Franz, who'd realized, ah, we've created this monster that wants to take power from us. And this monster succeeded. And they, they went on to become the leaders that they are today.

John Dehlin [01:06:28] So the governing body kind of takes

Lloyd Evans [01:06:30] over under Nor and France, the Frankenstein's monster, you know, took over.

John Dehlin [01:06:36] Then it wrestles the power away from its creator.

Lloyd Evans [01:06:39] Yeah, okay.

John Dehlin [01:06:42] Okay. And I. And I read in Wikipedia that under normal, the doctrine of not accepting blood

Lloyd Evans [01:06:48] transfusions was introduced 1945. Yeah. That was another. Well, it's difficult to say exactly who came up with that teaching, but I believe, and many kind of rumor, that it was Freddie Franz who came up with that gem as well, which has resulted in the deaths of goodness knows how many tens of thousands of Jehovah's Witnesses. That's. The irony is that Hitler swore he would stamp out Jehovah's Witnesses. He said, I will exterminate this brood in Germany, was what he said. And he succeeded in killing 1200 Jehovah's Witnesses. But that's nothing compared to the amount of Jehovah's Witnesses that Watchtower has killed by denying them blood transfusions.

John Dehlin [01:07:33] And you estimate that to be how many?

Lloyd Evans [01:07:35] In the tens of thousands.

John Dehlin [01:07:37] Tens of thousands, yeah. So that's kind of a mini holocaust.

Lloyd Evans [01:07:41] Indeed. Indeed.

Doctrine, Sexuality, and Misconduct in JW History

John Dehlin [01:07:44] Any other important doctrinal or theological or organizational innovations?

Lloyd Evans [01:07:49] Under Noor, the main thing really was the governing body and bringing back the Elder Arrangement. And he was also very fastidious about rules regarding sex. So under. Under Rutherford. Rutherford wasn't so bothered about regulating people's sex lives, mostly because he was himself.

Lloyd Evans [01:08:11] How can I put this? Strongly rumored to be an adulterer. He didn't live with his wife, and he had an assistant who followed him round everywhere who was an attractive lady who was quote, unquote, his. His physician or something, even though she had no formal medical qualifications.

Lloyd Evans [01:08:36] Under current rules, he would have been disfellowshipped as an adulterer, because current rules allow for circumstantial evidence that you're an adulterer. So, for example, someone spends the night at their secretary's house, you can be disfellowshipped as an adulterer. That happened all the time with Rutherford, but he got away with it. But back then, it was only when Noor's presidency started. Noor was really prudish and really obsessed with sex, and he had, like, a puritanical approach. So it was under Rutherford that they became obsessed with things like pornia. And what constitutes fornication?

John Dehlin [01:09:17] Wait, what was the first word you just used?

Lloyd Evans [01:09:19] Pornea.

John Dehlin [01:09:20] What is that?

Lloyd Evans [01:09:22] It's the Greek word that's usually translated as fornication in the fornia.

John Dehlin [01:09:28] Fornia?

Lloyd Evans [01:09:29] I don't think so. No, I think fornix is the Latin, but pornea is the Greek word.

John Dehlin [01:09:35] Pornea.

Lloyd Evans [01:09:36] With a p. With a p, yeah.

John Dehlin [01:09:38] Pornea. Is that a word? The Jehovah's Witnesses use porneia.

Lloyd Evans [01:09:42] They do use it a lot. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:09:44] And it means. Pornea means what?

Lloyd Evans [01:09:47] It means sexual immorality.

John Dehlin [01:09:50] Okay.

Lloyd Evans [01:09:50] Or you could say fornication.

John Dehlin [01:09:53] So pornia and fornication are synonyms?

Lloyd Evans [01:09:57] Yeah, that became. Not necessarily. They've developed this kind of codified way of viewing the word pornia. This includes fornication. Pornia is basically anything involving sex that you're not allowed to do, one of which is fornication nowadays.

John Dehlin [01:10:17] Okay.

Lloyd Evans [01:10:19] All of that really started under Noel's presidency.

John Dehlin [01:10:21] So was there never any scandal with Rutherford and women?

Lloyd Evans [01:10:25] There was, but you really have to dig deep to find out about it because it's been very, again, very carefully hidden. But as far as I'm concerned, it's enough to say that he. Even though witnesses today put a lot of emphasis on the family and on marriage and on couples working things out, even to the point of telling women to stay with abusive spouses, Rutherford apparently was. Was able to go around without his wife by his side. In fact, his wife and son weren't at his funeral. He was completely estranged from them. And no one seems to bat an eyelid about that.

John Dehlin [01:11:02] Okay. And you know, are there any. Are there any rumors of him having fathered children with other women that would be interesting.

Lloyd Evans [01:11:11] I've not heard any, but.

John Dehlin [01:11:12] Okay.

Lloyd Evans [01:11:14] When you spread it about, then anything's possible. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:11:17] And it's not just the secretary who toured with him. Other women too, you think?

Lloyd Evans [01:11:24] Well, we know that you can make the strongest case for Berta Peel. Her name was because she actually divorced her husband to go and work for Rutherford and again followed him around the world pretending to be his physician, even though she, A, didn't have formal qualifications as a physician and B, Rutherford already had a male physician. So it was all very convenient, if that makes sense. It was, I think, more than a coincidence. But we don't have like a smoking gun in terms of he definitely had sex with her. But you'd have to really stretch to imagine these two spending so much time together and not having sex.

John Dehlin [01:12:10] Okay, but there's nothing in the history where like some woman accuses Rutherford of sex or some member accuses Rutherford of sex or anything like that.

Lloyd Evans [01:12:19] No, no.

John Dehlin [01:12:19] Okay, really quickly. What about Charles Taze Russell?

Lloyd Evans [01:12:23] Sorry, sorry, let me correct that. There was an interview with Hayden Covington, who was one of Rutherford's right hand men, in which he more or less admitted that he did, he was unfaithful to his wife. So there was.

John Dehlin [01:12:36] Rutherford was.

Lloyd Evans [01:12:37] Yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [01:12:38] Okay. With just one woman or Multiple.

Lloyd Evans [01:12:41] That he had multiple paramours was the word that was used.

John Dehlin [01:12:46] And was there a falling out where people were. Where modern leaders could discredit that testimony as being, you know, they don't have to.

Lloyd Evans [01:12:53] Because they don't have to. Because they have so much control over Jehovah's Witnesses, they've managed to convince them that they don't need to do any research themselves into Watchtower history because Watchtower has done the research for them.

John Dehlin [01:13:06] Now, that sounds very familiar. Yeah.

Lloyd Evans [01:13:08] So Witnesses aren't interested in researching Watchtower history. They have their own kind of whitewashed versions of the history that are published by Watchtower that completely ignore all of the unsavory aspects.

John Dehlin [01:13:21] Got it.

Lloyd Evans [01:13:22] So they don't have an appetite to look for where all of these stories can be found.

John Dehlin [01:13:27] Got it. And I'm dying to know if at some point there was some sort of liberal or progressive or even anti, you know, ex Jehovah's Witness sort of publications. But I don't want to get. I don't want to talk about that yet.

Lloyd Evans [01:13:41] But. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:13:44] So Charles Taze Russell, sexuality. Any. Anything about that worth mentioning?

Lloyd Evans [01:13:49] Yes. He. He also had issues. I think it's probably easiest to make it. Is it easier? I guess you could say it is easier to make a case against Charles Taze Russell for behavior that would have completely gone against current rules for Jehovah's Witnesses.

Lloyd Evans [01:14:10] He had a wife named Maria who he ended up divorcing. And in the divorce trial, Maria came up with an allegation that he had an affair, shall we say, with a girl who they had allowed under their roof, and he had behaved in a very inappropriate manner with her.

Lloyd Evans [01:14:37] You know, the insinuation being had sex with her. And when cornered on this, Maria Russell says that Russell said, I'm like a jellyfish. I float around, and I. The women that I see, I touch. He'd actually said that. And this came out in a court testimony in the divorce proceedings. But again, that's something that most witnesses are completely oblivious to. It sort of references it a little bit in the. In the whitewashed history book version. But all of the excuses that Watchtower comes up with don't fly.

Lloyd Evans [01:15:17] For example. How can I put it? Yeah. They come up with reasoning that doesn't negate the testimony that Maria Russell gave during the divorce trial.

John Dehlin [01:15:34] Okay, yeah, that sounds like Joseph Smith's Fanny Alger. So Joseph smith took in maid, 18, 30, whatever, 33, 34. And Emma, his wife, apparently caught him in the barn with Fanny Alger. And the way the church rewrote that, well, they excommunicated the leader that brought that to the church's attention, who called it an affair. And then later, the church kind of history is rewritten to say that she was his first polygamous wife. Just coincidentally, the affair happened before Joseph Smith received the revelation about polygamy. So you have to kind of rewrite history in all sorts of ways to make that work.

Lloyd Evans [01:16:18] But it's interesting as well with Joseph Smith is I think I'm right in saying that he had underage wives. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:16:25] Yeah.

Lloyd Evans [01:16:26] So. And what's interesting is that with Charles Taze Russell, because it was a huge scandal, the testimony of Maria Russell, and he even. He even wrote his own rebuttal to the. What came to be known as the jellyfish story. And one of the excuses he came up with was it couldn't have been anything sexual because around the time all of this, all of these things were happening. Rose Ball, which was the name of the girl. She was only a young girl, so it was almost like, don't worry, she was only a minor. Just totally naive. And certainly that made it acceptable.

John Dehlin [01:17:09] You know, certainly, I'm not capable of sleeping with a minor.

Lloyd Evans [01:17:13] But she wasn't a minor. That's the point. She was actually a young woman. In fact, she was, I think, listed as, like, an editor or something in one of the Watchtower issues.

John Dehlin [01:17:23] Oh, man. Okay. Yeah. So, you know, charismatic, prominent, powerful leaders often are sexually unfaithful to their spouses. And that's just the. That's just history, you know, until we get to Nathan Knorr, who you say was puritanical. Now, is there any evidence that Nora was unfaithful or gay or anything?

Lloyd Evans [01:17:49] No, I don't think so.

John Dehlin [01:17:51] Okay.

Lloyd Evans [01:17:52] He did seem to relish telling inappropriate stories of a sexual nature in the Bethel dining room. So when I was researching for my book, I came across people saying, oh, you've got to mention the fact that he seemed to almost take a perverse pleasure in recounting stories where he had kind of presided over a case of sexual impropriety and people had been ejected from Bethel. And he was telling them. He was telling those in attendance in detail what they. What they'd been found doing. And so, yeah, there was something weird going on there. Again, I don't think he was. I think he was a couple of cents short of a dollar, but I thought he was, what, a couple of cents short of a dollar.

John Dehlin [01:18:44] Okay.

Lloyd Evans [01:18:46] But I don't. There's certainly no stories as far as I'M aware of him being unfaithful.

John Dehlin [01:18:52] Okay. So he introduced an obsession and a prohibition on premarital sex and of any premarital sexual activity.

Lloyd Evans [01:19:04] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:19:05] Okay. What else about the history of the Jehovah's Witness movement is worth mentioning before we move on to couple other things. Yeah.

Disfellowshipping: Rules, Offenses, and Shunning

Lloyd Evans [01:19:19] Just under. Under nor. That was when they started disfellowshipping in. In 1952. So literally, just a few years before 1952, they'd written an Awake article about excommunication in which they said, excommunication is really terrible. And in fact, it's pagan. It's a pagan practice and it's unbiblical and it's not supported by Scripture, and it's terrible that the Catholic Church is doing this. And then just a few Years later, in 1952, actually, we've had another thought on this. It's actually okay, and we're going to start doing it. So.

John Dehlin [01:19:56] But they didn't call it excommunication.

Lloyd Evans [01:19:58] They called it disfellowshipping rather than excommunication.

John Dehlin [01:20:01] So they just changed the word.

Lloyd Evans [01:20:02] They just changed the word.

John Dehlin [01:20:03] Yeah, don't excommunicate, but disfellowship, which in a sense is the same as excommunication.

Lloyd Evans [01:20:08] Indeed. So they started disfellowshipping in 1952. Prior to that, you could kind of get disfellowshipped, but it would need to be the president who disfellowshipped you, which actually did happen on one or two occasions. But from 1952, it became possible for elders in a congregation to disfellowship someone for wrongdoing. But it was still possible back then to leave the organisation for conscientious reasons because you no longer believe. You could resign or disassociate and still have contact with other Jehovah's Witnesses. But then in 1981, that door closed and they said, no, if you disassociate, then you're just as bad as one of the wrongdoers and you're liable for shunning.

John Dehlin [01:20:49] So, okay, so what? So there's no such thing as excommunication in Jehovah's Witness.

Lloyd Evans [01:20:55] No, there is. It's just called disfellowshipping.

John Dehlin [01:20:57] Right. Okay. But that term is never. A leader of the Jehovah's Witness movement would never say, we excommunicated someone. They would. They would disfellowship someone.

Lloyd Evans [01:21:07] They would say disfellowshipping, but they may as well use.

John Dehlin [01:21:10] Okay, got it. No, no, I Get that?

Lloyd Evans [01:21:11] There's even a Watchtower reference where they say that it's the same thing.

John Dehlin [01:21:15] So, okay, so what were people getting disfellowshipped for in the early 50s?

Lloyd Evans [01:21:20] I have no idea. You'd have to ask someone from that period. I was only born in 1979, but I can only assume it was stuff to do with sex. Mostly nowadays they've increased the number of things that you can get disfellowshipped for nowadays. So, for example, it was only. It was only from 1961 onwards that you could get disfellowshipped for having a blood transfusion. So you weren't disfellowshipped for that in 1952, even though they said in 1945 that you can't have blood, by 1961, it became a disfellowshipping offense. And nowadays they very cleverly call it disassociation offence. So they say that if you accept a blood transfusion without being sorry, this is a sign that you have resigned. And whether you want to stay a Jehovah's Witness or not, you're going to be shunned.

John Dehlin [01:22:12] Okay, so you're thinking, in the 50s, it may have been adultery or premarital sex or even homosexuality, potentially, you ask

Lloyd Evans [01:22:19] an older activist than me.

John Dehlin [01:22:22] But over time, the. Okay, what did disfellowship meant? Mean, or what does it mean?

Lloyd Evans [01:22:30] It means being shunned by everyone who's a Jehovah's Witness, including your family.

John Dehlin [01:22:38] So that's probably one of the most severe topics in the movement for you.

Lloyd Evans [01:22:43] Yeah. And correct me if I'm wrong, but with Mormonism, I understand that shunning is a thing, but it's not codified as such. So if you're a Mormon parent and you choose to shun your child for being an apostate, you're not going to get grief about doing it from the. From the bishops.

John Dehlin [01:23:05] Oh, no, no, no. That's. That's, that's. That's a parent's business. That's not something I've ever heard the Church really get concerned about.

Lloyd Evans [01:23:15] But the point is, it's not like they are. They are ordered to shun.

John Dehlin [01:23:20] No, no, definitely not. But it's also not prohibited.

Lloyd Evans [01:23:23] Right. So with Jehovah's Witnesses, you are ordered to shun. It's even referred to as a command of God and a test of loyalty. And videos are made showing, for example, a disfellowshipped daughter calling her parents, and the parents seeing the name flash up on the mobile phone. Refusing to pick up the phone. Anything could be happening to the daughter when that's happening, but they won't even pick up the phone because she's disfellowshipped.

John Dehlin [01:23:52] Okay, so it's a. It's a requirement of the church. Disfellowshipment is a requirement of the church of its members to cease all communication with the member who's. Who's fallen astray.

Lloyd Evans [01:24:06] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:24:07] And is it permanent or is there a way for that member to become unshunned?

Lloyd Evans [01:24:12] It's permanent unless the person gets reinstated. And reinstatement involves what? Well, first of all, wanting to become a Jehovah's Witness again. But if you really want to be reinstated, you basically have to attend meetings. We're talking twice a week for a period of, I would say anything from six to nine months, maybe even longer, with the entire congregation shunning you. So you're going to the Kingdom hall and everyone's pretending you're not there there. But you've got to at least show that you are making an effort and that you are trying to get to

John Dehlin [01:24:48] the meetings for nine months. And then at some point, some elder decides you've proven yourself worthy.

Lloyd Evans [01:24:57] Yeah, okay.

John Dehlin [01:24:59] Yeah, okay.

Lloyd Evans [01:25:01] The elders will meet with you and say, congratulations, you know, you're back in. But yeah, it's very cruel the way that those who. And they might have left because of something that the organization had done to them. You understand? It might be, for example, a sex abuse victim who's been. Or the way they have dealt with their abuser, who they've been expected to forgive, and that they are made to go through this kind of humiliating process of attending meetings where everyone's ignoring them for a number of months.

John Dehlin [01:25:42] Wow, that sounds brutal. So as disfellowshipment has evolved, what are the classic disfellowship meant offenses?

Lloyd Evans [01:25:56] Okay, that's a good question. There are a lot of them. Smoking cigarettes, professional boxing, any kind of pornia, including fornication and adultery.

John Dehlin [01:26:13] What about premarital sex?

Lloyd Evans [01:26:15] Well, that would be classed as fornication. So, yeah, definitely that.

John Dehlin [01:26:19] What about viewing pornography?

Lloyd Evans [01:26:22] Viewing pornography is a little bit more of. It's very heavily frowned upon, but it's not necessarily a disfellowshipping offense. It would depend on the circumstances. So if you, if you were viewing pornography, you would probably receive a lot of counseling. Yeah, it's not. It's not like I'm not aware of people being disfellowshipped for viewing pornography, per se, but it is going to get you in Trouble.

John Dehlin [01:26:50] What about for masturbation?

Lloyd Evans [01:26:52] Not for masturbation, although it is prohibited for witnesses. So just to clarify, some lots of things are prohibited, but of those things, percentage are disfellowshipping offenses, if that makes sense. And so, for example, one of the disfellowshipping offenses is having dealings with disfellowshipped people who aren't your relatives.

John Dehlin [01:27:13] Wow. Wait, so you get an exception if they're a relative, but you still need to shun them? I don't get it.

Lloyd Evans [01:27:20] So again, there's a big long list of things that you're told not to do under no uncertain terms. But of those things, a percentage of things are things that you can literally be disfellowshipped for. So even though parents are commanded not to have any dealings with their disfellowshipped children as a matter of loyalty and in obedience to God's command, and they are shown propaganda to that effect, it's not actually a disfellowshipping offense. But that doesn't mean it's not wrong, if that makes sense.

John Dehlin [01:27:54] Got it.

Lloyd Evans [01:27:55] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:27:56] So they have to have some sort of exception if a kid needs some sort of legal matter or some sort of family matter,

Lloyd Evans [01:28:04] they allowed what's called necessary contact. So in my own case, my dad is shunning me, hasn't met his 4 year old daughter yet. That's how heavily we're being shunned. But recently I needed some documents from my family home in order to pick up some medicine. And he was very gracious in picking up the phone and speaking to me about that issue and sending me the documents, but no other conversing about anything else.

John Dehlin [01:28:33] And just to be clear, to the extent that which you're willing, and we have time, we're gonna switch in the, in the interview either today or next time, to go deep into your story. So I want to make sure you know right now you're gonna get a chance to tell your full story to the extent that you want to.

Lloyd Evans [01:28:48] Okay.

John Dehlin [01:28:49] So I don't want you to feel like we're glossing over that.

Lloyd Evans [01:28:51] Okay, no problem. I don't feel glossed over.

John Dehlin [01:28:54] Okay, good. So. Okay, so boxing, premarital sex, extramarital sex, any type of pornea, adultery. What is apostasy?

Lloyd Evans [01:29:07] Apostasy is disagreeing with the governing body,

John Dehlin [01:29:09] basically, in a way that's public.

Lloyd Evans [01:29:12] Yeah. Spreading teachings that are contrary to the teachings of the governing body.

John Dehlin [01:29:16] Okay. That's what got me excommunicated, by the way.

Lloyd Evans [01:29:20] Naughty, naughty.

John Dehlin [01:29:20] I know. I'm a Bad guy.

Lloyd Evans [01:29:22] I shouldn't be speaking to you. So compromising one's neutrality by, for example, signing up to the army or working for the government, that could get you disfellowshipped.

John Dehlin [01:29:36] Okay, so going to war, signing up for the military, and you said a blood transfusion gets you disfellowshipped.

Lloyd Evans [01:29:42] It's slightly different with blood transfusions. It's more or less in effect. It's the same thing as being disfellowshipped, but they call it disassociated instead.

John Dehlin [01:29:50] Okay, that's what you said earlier.

Lloyd Evans [01:29:52] So I'm not disfellowshipped. I'm disassociated because I resigned. I wrote a letter saying I renounce my affiliation with Jehovah's Witnesses. But if you accept a blood transfusion unrepentantly, you are deemed to have done that. You are deemed to have resigned. Even if you say that you want to continue as a Jehovah's Witness and

John Dehlin [01:30:13] the way you're treated is perceived as having resigned versus as being formally disfellowshipped. In effect, it's the same treatment.

Lloyd Evans [01:30:24] It is, although it's slightly worse if you willingly leave the organization, say as an apostate. It's slightly worse, I would say, than if you got kicked out for having sex with someone. Because in my case, I'm making a stand against God's one and only true organization. It's not like I've just screwed up and because everyone screws up, you know, and. Yeah, that's the view that's taken by Jehovah's Witnesses. I'm not convinced I could go back to the organization if even if I wanted to, because I really, you know, pissed off and what have you.

John Dehlin [01:31:01] For me to rejoin the church, I would have to. The prophet, the president of the church, would have to approve it, but that's how severe it is with me.

Lloyd Evans [01:31:11] You've just had a new president who's banned you from saying Mormon, I believe, or something along those lines, and everyone. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [01:31:19] Okay, okay. Any other major disfellowship. Mentable offenses?

Lloyd Evans [01:31:25] There's a. Seriously. There's like a book. There's like a chapter in a book with them all. I'd have to go through them all. There's a lot that I probably miss.

John Dehlin [01:31:33] Any more diet ones besides smoking?

Lloyd Evans [01:31:39] Good question. Yeah. Drugs. You're not allowed to take drugs. Okay, so you're. You're allowed to drink, but you could be disfellowshipped for being a drunkard. You could, in theory, get disfellowshipped for being a glutton, but no one's ever disfellowshipped for that, at least as far as I'm aware of.

John Dehlin [01:32:00] Right.

Lloyd Evans [01:32:00] You have some. You could have, like, some really quite obese elders, but no one's ever gonna disfellowship them for eating too much. But smoke one cigarette and you're out, you know, so. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:32:13] Okay. All right, so there's a big book, but any other major disfellowship mental offenses come to mind?

Lloyd Evans [01:32:21] They don't come to mind, but they will be there. Trust me. They're in there in the. It's called the shepherd the Flock of God book, which is a secret elders manual which only elders get to read, even though all of the. The rules apply to all Jehovah's Witnesses.

John Dehlin [01:32:34] Okay. That. That's parallel to our handbook of instructions that up until recently was not available to members. So that. Okay. All right.

Lloyd Evans [01:32:46] So

John Dehlin [01:32:49] any other important things about your history before we. We shift a little bit in terms of the history of the church? So I'm assuming Nor dies. Other people take over any other. You know. Oh, oh, you said the governing body becomes the powerful organization. Any other big changes that we need to talk about before we move to other things?

Lloyd Evans [01:33:14] There's lots to be. It's very, very difficult to condense a religion's history down to, you know, a conversation. But I think it's probably worth mentioning that after 1975, they reverted back to saying, well, it's just coming any moment now.

Lloyd Evans [01:33:35] They were a little bit more specific. When I was a kid, the teaching was, armageddon is going to come before the generation that are old enough to have witnessed the events of 1914 and understood what they meant. Before that generation dies. Armageddon's going to come.

Lloyd Evans [01:33:57] And in 1995, they got rid of that teaching because pretty much everyone had died of that generation. And it went through a series of changes. The generation teaching to the point where now the teaching is that, okay, so it was the original generation, but there's an overlapping generation of people who worked alongside those people. And once they die off, sorry, Armageddon's only going to. Armageddon isn't going to come until they die off. So it's. They've basically taken the word generation and completely changed. Changed it to mean any number of generations that we arbitrarily decide.

John Dehlin [01:34:42] Okay, yeah. All right. So the continual moving of the goalposts around when Armageddon's supposed to come.

Lloyd Evans [01:34:53] Indeed.

Watchtower Leadership Structure and Succession

John Dehlin [01:34:53] Okay, I'M reading about Franz and Henschel succeeding Knorr as president. Has there always been a president from Noor to today?

Lloyd Evans [01:35:10] There is, but from 1975 onwards, it became virtually irrelevant who the president was.

John Dehlin [01:35:19] Okay.

Lloyd Evans [01:35:19] Because the governing body, basically the watch, before 1975, it was the president of the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society who presided over the organization and had a quote, unquote, governing body advising him. And then after 1975, it was the governing body who were in charge of Jehovah's Witnesses, including. Including legal entities such as the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society with its president. So all of the legal entities now are there to do the governing body's bidding. So it's kind of inconsequential who the president is. I think the president of the Pennsylvania Corporation is now Siranko. I'm not entirely sure, but anyway, they are. They are in. What's the word? It's a token position, essentially.

John Dehlin [01:36:21] Okay. So just like the ceremony. What's that?

Lloyd Evans [01:36:25] It's like a ceremonial position that has no real significance.

John Dehlin [01:36:30] So just like the Mormon Church is called legally, the corporation of the president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, you have some. Pennsylvania Corporation is the legal name of the organization.

Lloyd Evans [01:36:43] Yes. So the. The Pennsylvania. The Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania is like the umbrella organization, and it has lots of other organizations with slightly different names.

John Dehlin [01:36:53] Right?

Lloyd Evans [01:36:54] Yeah, that. The. But it's all under. Under the oversight of the governing body of Jehovah's Witnesses.

John Dehlin [01:37:00] Got it. Okay. Well, yeah, I don't want to do a disservice to your tradition to have you condense another 25 or 35 or 40 years of history into a minute. But I just wanted to get a sense for whether on the major structural, doctrinal, theological changes, we're relatively up to date. Yeah.

Lloyd Evans [01:37:25] More or less. I mean, it's just. Yeah. I just hope I've done it justice. You know, I've. Obviously, I had to research a lot of this stuff for my book, and in my book, the reason why my book is so thick is because I decided to talk about the history, and that involved a lot of research. And. Yeah, there's a lot to it that needs quite a bit of explaining. And I just hope I've done it at least some justice so that I've at least given you a flavor of what the main changes were and how they. The teachings.

John Dehlin [01:37:59] No, I'm sure you have. Okay, well, thank you. So far, I'm at the edge of my seat.

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