A man is accepted into a church for what he believes, and he is turned out for what he knows. – Mark Twain
I was in grade school in the 1950s when many public schools in the U.S. began requiring students to place their hands over their hearts and recite the Pledge of Allegiance. Within days after the routine started, my mother began helping me memorize the Pledge, although she expressed her disapproval of the school’s policy. She said that we owe allegiance to God, not a flag. My siblings and I heard our mother repeat that statement numerous times during our early school days.
I don’t think mother was unpatriotic. But being black in America and having grown up under racist Jim Crow laws in a small North Carolina town didn’t inspire patriotism. I wonder if her strict religious upbringing also discouraged saluting the flag. Sometimes, during our chats on the subject, mother would emphasize the point by referencing Bible scriptures like those in Exodus. “Thou shall have no other gods before me.” “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image,” “Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them.”
From her perspective, the flag represented a graven image, a god of sorts, and her children reciting what was frequently referred to as the flag salute was disrespecting God.
In the 1970s, when mother began studying with the Jehovah’s Witnesses (I also refer to them as JWs or the group), she must have had a hallelujah moment and done a happy dance after learning that their long-dead leader, Joseph Rutherford, had declared that the flag salute and numerous other social activities and customs violate Biblical commands. (Rutherford, the second president of the incorporated Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society, renamed the sect Jehovah’s Witnesses following the death of the founder Charles Taze Russell).
I was a young woman when my mother – one of nine children of a pastor and his wife – rejected her Southern Baptist background and converted, so I escaped being born into a family that worshiped with the group. My dad never became a JW, nor did I.
Maybe I’ve been looking in all the wrong places, but I have yet to find anywhere in the Bible that says a Pledge of Allegiance to a flag or singing a National Anthem is sacrilegious. I didn’t say it wasn’t in there; I said I haven’t found it.
Because of my strong desire to understand what led my mother to convert from her Christian upbringing to join the JWs, I’ve done much research on the group, scouring books, articles, and websites over the years. I learned that Rutherford was disgruntled with the government following what he considered his unjust imprisonment in 1918 after he began promoting Russell’s anti-government book The Finished Mystery.
Following his release, Rutherford proceeded to reorganize the group and issued a blistering condemnation of things of “the world,” including the celebration of holidays and birthdays. He also disapproved of other religions, claiming that theirs is the one true religion.
Decades ago, years before my mother joined the group, I studied with Blanche, a JW whom I had met and befriended when we lived in the same high-rise building. After knowing her briefly, she invited me to “Bible study” with her. That’s when I learned she was a JW, and I suspected I had been targeted to become a baptized JW.
I may not be the brightest bulb on the string, but I have high wattage. It didn’t take long for me to understand that if I were to join the JWs, I’d have to give up my self-autonomy and conform to the group’s doctrine. I had been baptized as a Baptist when I was a young teen. One baptism was enough, thank you.
Soon after I stopped studying with Blanche, I learned that Witnesses are discouraged from mingling with “pagans,” eventually, our friendship dissolved.
JWs are forbidden from questioning “the Word” and must adhere to the group’s rules. They are discouraged from having close relationships with “worldly” people because they (we pagans) are seen as bad influences. In addition to not saluting the flag, JWs avoid military service, singing national anthems, jury duty, and voting. They do not celebrate holidays or birthdays, and they don’t accept blood transfusions because they believe the procedure creates a risk of losing eternal salvation.
In 2018, Derek Miller and a CTV investigative team published some facts about the JW religion that many people might not know.
People can and will worship however and whomever they choose, and for various reasons, I choose to avoid all organized religions.