I haven’t blogged often about the weird Christian sect known as the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Yeah, I’ve mentioned them a time or two, but generally they’ve flown below my radar. That’s unfortunate, because aside from the general oddness and apocalypticism of their version of Christianity, like the Roman Catholic Church and some other religious institutions, they have procedures and policies that allow them to shield evildoers in their midst from prosecution.
Well, it seems they’d decided, a couple years ago, to ramp things up a little further, and make themselves even harder to go after. As the Philadelphia Enquirer reports, their head of records management has ordered the sect’s followers to destroy records (Archive.Is cached version):
A Jehovah’s Witnesses official delivered an urgent message to a group of elders at a 2017 seminar in Britain: The time had come to rethink the record-keeping policies of the organization, which has come under fire for its handling of child sex abuse complaints.
Shawn Bartlett, the Witnesses’ record management overseer, explained that handwritten notes and drafts of internal documents needed to be destroyed because of the potential legal harm they posed to the organization, which has eight million followers worldwide and more than a dozen congregations in the Philadelphia area.…
“Well, we know that the scene of this world is changing, and we know Satan’s coming after us, and he’s going to go for us legally. We can see by the way things are shaping up. So the organization has said, ‘We’ve run into difficulties in the past because of the records we have.’”…
At one point during the seminar, Bartlett told the attendees that they should destroy drafts of any documents in their possession. “And the reason is, is because there’s many comments that are sometimes made on drafts,” he said. “Those are the ones that get us in trouble.”
As the Enquirer notes, the JWs have a history of defiance with regard to releasing records:
A judge in California fined the Watchtower Bible & Tract Society of New York, the Witnesses’ corporate nonprofit, more than $2 million last year [cached] for refusing to turn over a secretly compiled list of 775 suspected child molesters within the organization.
Also, like the R.C. Church and many other sects, they’ve had to settle many lawsuits over child sexual abuse which had been shielded by the organization.
I’m genuinely sorry I haven’t paid more attention to this scandal within the Jehovah’s Witnesses sect and the Watchtower organization. That’s going to change, beginning now. They deserve all the scrutiny one meager agnostic blogger can provide — especially now that it’s clear they have a lot to hide and have actively worked to hide it.
Note, the Enquirer says the original video was taken off Youtube at the JWs’ request, but the paper saved it from digital oblivion. Here it is:
Hopefully it will remain online, for all to see — so we all know what this sect has really been up to.
Also note, I love how this creep suggests that police, prosecutors, plaintiffs and/or their attorneys are “Satan” coming after them. Yeah right. I suspect that if there actually is a Satan, rather than go after the JWs, he’d probably much rather congratulate them on providing him with such a great venue in which to work evil on humanity!
Photo credit: JWsurvey.
Hat tip: Raw Story.