Besides his recollection of the warm weather, Karama Sadaka has no happy memories of growing up in New Orleans. He didn’t go to parades or dress up for Mardi Gras or eat king cake on Three Kings Day.

When his father, Robert McCoy Sr., was murdered when Karama was five, his mother, Anna Easterling, said Robert would be resurrected from the dead. If Karama followed her rules, he would see the earth transformed into a lush paradise and his father would be alive. There would be lions, tigers, and panda bears docile enough for Karama and his new baby brother to play with. Best of all, everyone would be immortal. For the next 25 years, Karama worked to make sure he was there to see it happen.

Anna was a Jehovah’s Witness, a Christian denomination with approximately 8.3 millions members globally, that teaches the world will end in Armageddon. After the world comes to a violent end, they believe it will be replaced with the paradise Adam and Eve lost in Genesis. Then, Jehovah’s Witnesses and a few others resurrected from the dead will live forever in that paradise.  

Like many young Jehovah’s Witnesses, Karama ignored his natural academic gifts and opted out of college. Door-to-door ministry takes precedence over higher education as Jehovah’s Witnesses wait for life in a new world, so young Witnesses are discouraged from pursuing long-term education plans. Because of this, 63 percent of Jehovah’s Witnesses in the U.S. only have a high school diploma.

After Karama married another Witness and had two daughters, an uncle who wasn’t a member began asking Karama questions that challenged his faith. One such question involved Karama considering whether he would allow a blood transfusion—forbidden by Jehovah’s Witnesses—for his eldest child if it were necessary. Karama couldn’t say no. Soon his uncle’s questions drove Karama to websites documenting accounts of former members, which were prohibited by the organization. His discoveries and eventual disavowal of the religion jeopardized his most precious relationships.

To outsiders, the words “Jehovah’s Witnesses” may just call to mind an unexpected knock on the door, but their shunning practice, called disfellowshipping, devastates hundreds of former members and their families every year. The emotional fallout rests in the uncomfortable terrain between grief over a death and the joy of discovering a new existence.

THE ART OF THE BUBBLE

On December 5, 2017, the Watchtower sign perched in view of the Brooklyn Bridge transformed to neon against the night sky one last time. The next day, the sign was removed after more than 40 years on the city’s skyline. It was 36 years after Karama’s father, Robert, was murdered.

Donald Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner’s development company brought the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ headquarters with the iconic Watchtower sign for $340 million last year and the Witnesses began moving operations to Warwick, New York. The organization sold another property for $18 million, and a third one for $87.5 million. The organization, which has paid millions in settlements to sexual abuse victims, encourages modest livelihoods for members. Nearly half of Jehovah’s Witnesses in the United States live on less than $30,000 a year. Only nine percent have an undergraduate degree, the lowest percentage among similar religious groups.

Jehovah’s Witness don’t don a particular style of dress or live in cordoned communities. In the U.S., they are almost equally racially and ethnically mixed among whites, African Americans, and Latinos. Only the hallmark rules of the religion—no holidays, including birthdays, Christmas, and Easter; no saluting the flag, serving in the military, or accepting blood transfusions—differentiate them.

Isolation happens in other ways. The governing body of seven men who disseminate rules and develop doctrine, warns members to limit association with non-Witnesses, including family members. The time commitment required for evangelizing, alongside that needed for jobs or school, does not leave room for much else.

“Jehovah’s Witnesses have perfected the art of keeping you in a mental bubble. They don’t ask people to live in separate quarters, but they have ways of keeping you isolated anyway,” said Ruben Ortiz, a former Witness from the Bronx, who left the organization more than a decade ago. 

IN THE BEGINNING

In the late 1880s, a first-generation Scottish-Irish haberdasher from outside of Pittsburgh, named Charles Russell yearned for a deeper understanding of scripture. Russell soon developed a new interpretation of the Bible and wrote a monthly journal that garnered a few hundred followers.

Russell said that Christ returned to rule in heaven in 1874, which signaled the beginning of the last days of earth. According to Russell, Jesus had kicked Satan out of heaven and Satan began to stir maelstrom on earth. Armageddon, Russell prophesied, would come in 1914 when Jesus would finally send the devil into oblivion.

Russell’s prophecy didn’t materialize, so Joseph Rutherford, the organization’s second president, made a new one: Armageddon would come in 1975.

A KNOCK ON THE DOOR

There are approximately 8.3 million Jehovah’s Witnesses worldwide, and they evangelize in 240 locations around the globe.

A person usually gets involved after a Jehovah’s Witness offers one of their publications and a free home Bible study course. After the person accepts and begins to attend meetings, they are eligible to begin evangelizing. The person, now called a publisher, is expected to put in around three hours weekly of the door-to-door ministry. If the publisher fulfills the hourly requirement and attends all meetings, she is allowed to be baptized. Baptism is a lifelong commitment to the tenets of service. An infringement of the rules could result in removal and shunning.

Besides this mode of conversion, about a third of Jehovah’s Witnesses are indoctrinated as children of JW members, known as being “born in.”

Members are required to attend weekly meetings, to study the Bible and assigned publications, and to evangelize actively among friends, neighbors, and strangers, according to David Voas, a sociologist of religion at University College London. The weekly time commitment is around 10 hours for the average Jehovah’s Witness.

The Witnesses teach that heaven is only for 144,000 people. At death, most people will lie in their graves for eternity. There is no hell other than soil and dirt. At a future date—currently unknown since the 1975 prediction didn’t pan out—God will destroy non-believers and the earth will be restored to the paradise Adam and Eve lost in the book of Genesis.

CAST OUT

For twelve years, Helen Travers annually sent two cards to her mother. That was their only communication. Helen’s mother, who is a 90-year-old Jehovah’s Witness, only responded once, begging her to return to the organization.

Despite the anger Helen felt at her mother for cutting off communication, she said the anger she felt at the religious mandate of shunning was greater.

Officials at the Jehovah’s Witness headquarters in Warwick, New York referred to their website for questions on disfellowshipping and repeatedly stated that the organization’s official comment is on jw.org. The same refrain was repeated by an elder from a congregation in Jersey City named Wilson Nowicki. “I can’t give you any answers,” he said. “Our arrangement is on jw.org.”

Jehovah’s Witnesses who commit “a serious sin” without expressing sufficient repentance are disfellowshipped by a judiciary committee, according to an article published in the August 2015 Watchtower magazine, archived on the website. Serious sins include watching pornography, engaging in premarital sex, smoking cigarettes, and marital infidelity, but there is no exhaustive list. According to former members, judiciary meetings are long processes, where elders frequently ask for uncomfortable details about indiscretions, sometimes sexual in nature, and use nebulous guidelines to determine punishment.

While Helen was still an active member, she married a man who introduced her to a new lifestyle. He was bad with money and convinced her to work as a prostitute to make ends meet. Her religious life faded and guilt consumed her.

One day Helen made an offhand remark about the doctrine that offended her mother. Weeks later, Helen’s mother mailed a letter that said she would no longer be in contact.

Psychologist and life coach Marlene Winell coined the term religious trauma syndrome to describe the lasting effects of “authoritarianism coupled with toxic theology.” She lists the emotional symptoms of the syndrome as depression, anxiety, anger, grief, loneliness, difficulty with pleasure, and loss of meaning.

Lee-Ann Harrhy developed a fear of being disfellowshipped when she was 10 years old.

Despite recurring doubts, Lee-Ann stayed in the organization because she didn’t want to lose a relationship with her devout mother.

Lee-Ann was date-raped when she was 18 years old. She felt guilty and told the elders what happened. Instead of getting medical attention, the elders publicly reproved her, a JW punishment one step below disfellowshipping.

When Lee-Ann was 27 years old, her mother, still a devoted Jehovah’s Witness, committed suicide.

AT HOME AND DISFELLOWSHIPPED

When a person who lives with a Jehovah’s Witness family is disfellowshipped, the rules that govern family life, entangled with religious expectation, become knotted invisible lines cast over the home, with each family member treading cautiously among them.

“Even though the relationship isn’t there, you still remain polite. If a loved one dies, for instance, you’d still give your condolences,” said a member from a congregation in the Queens, NY, neighborhood of Far Rockaway, who asked to remain anonymous.

But when she was asked about disfellowshipped people under the same roof as a Jehovah’s Witness family, she took out her phone to find articles on jw.org. “It’s not like there are walls up and you completely shut the person out,” she finally said, when she couldn’t find the answers.

When a new friend invited Debbie Depuis to go for ice cream, her mother forbade her because the invitation was from a non-believer. Debbie snapped.

“Well I’m not one of Jehovah’s Witnesses,” she told her mother before leaving with her friend.

When Debbie returned home that evening, a group of congregation elders were waiting. Debbie made it clear that she didn’t believe the teachings and the family began a long, icy process of shunning.

Debbie wasn’t allowed to eat with her family, but she was too proud to relent, despite the shame the arrangement was meant to inflict. She decided to be strategic. She started eating two meals per day: a breakfast that she could take on-the-go and lunch at school.

It’s been 32 years since Debbie was disfellowshipped as a teenager. She has a son whom she raised to be a free thinker who is on his way to college. She says she could use a bit more education to make more money, but she’s otherwise happy. Despite the accomplishments, her voice was barely above a whisper, cracked by tears, when she spoke of her childhood shunning.

“I’m still broken,” she said. “I’m never going to be whole without my family.”

Violeta Dias had a happy childhood as a Jehovah’s Witness. Her parents allowed her to go to college.

“I wasn’t one of those Jehovah’s Witnesses whose parents didn’t let them go to college. My parents valued education,” she said from her office in Santiago, Chile, where she works as a research and development engineer.

During her first year of college, when she still lived in the family home, Violeta sensed chemistry with a guy that she couldn’t resist. But he wasn’t a Jehovah’s Witness. For Witnesses, dating only happens with vows in mind and always with a chaperone present. Dating outside of the organization is forbidden.

The first kiss Violeta shared with her college boyfriend was an ugly mix of emotions. “It was supposed to be a beautiful experience, but I felt so guilty,” she said. She hid the relationship from her parents, telling them she was with a Witness friend when she spent nights with him. When another Witness saw Violeta with her boyfriend, he blackmailed her: two months to come clean or he would do it for her.

She confessed and the judiciary committee disfellowshipped her. Relatives who lived in the home could to speak her in small amounts, but other interactions would be limited.

THE CHASM

As Jehovah’s Witnesses in the 1970s, Mona Miller’s family believed Armageddon would come in 1975. Her family was constantly on alert. She grew up looking for war on the horizon.

But she constantly wondered why non-believers in her small town in eastern Oregon, who seemed like good people, wouldn’t survive the war.

Her father died of cancer when she was a teenager and she began working at a grocery store part time to help support her mother. Elders repeatedly reprimanded her for working on meeting nights. “It became unbearable,” she said.

Mona’s 20s waned on with no romantic prospects; she had never been on a date before. And then a man in a cowboy hat came to the grocery store where she worked. They flirted. He came back the next day and a relationship blossomed. They saw each other for eight months this way, among the grocery store aisles. Then one day, he came to Mona’s house and formally asked permission to date her. Mona’s mother couldn’t let her daughter date an unbeliever, but she knew Mona’s prospects for marriage in their small congregation were bleak. So she came up with an idea: he would study to become a Witness and she would chaperone their dates.

But congregation elders didn’t approve of the arrangement and they threatened to disfellowship her. An elder also privately threatened her relationship with her mother. Dreading the shame disfellowshipping would cause her mother, Mona drove to a cliff and contemplated suicide.

“I kept thinking if I killed myself, my mother would never forgive me for not talking to her about it first,” said Mona.

Mona decided to tell her mother about the meeting with the elders. Alarmed, her mother wrote a letter to headquarters and got a reply, which said that Mona had not committed a disfellowshipping offense. But the damage was done and Mona stopped going to meetings. Soon after, her brother told her he could no longer speak to her.

Religious sociologists Rodney Stark and Laurence Iannaccone attribute the growth of the organization, in part, to the practice of disfellowshipping. They argue that an organization’s strictness increases the value of membership by weeding out “free-loaders,” their term for members who don’t do their share of evangelizing. Disfellowshipping creates a sense of solidarity and members know that their commitment has value, they say.

Dan Adams was sitting in his car when he caught sight of his two daughters. It was his first time seeing them in six years. Instead of jumping out of the car from behind the driver’s seat where he was dozing off, he watched them from a distance. He noted, through the windshield, “how old they now looked,” he said. The occasion was his mother’s funeral. His daughters had emailed him a few days earlier asking that he not try to speak to them.

Dan decided to leave the organization after witnessing things that disturbed him when he was an elder, like the congregation not warning families when they had reasonable evidence that a member had sexually abused children.

“It wasn’t until I allowed myself to ask questions about what I was teaching and what I was learning that I started to see that it didn’t sit right with me,” he said.  

The day he saw his daughters from inside his car at his mother’s funeral was his last time at a Kingdom Hall. No one spoke to him while he was in the building. He sat against a wall several feet behind his family listening to the sermon about his mother being resurrected to a paradise where he, presumably, would not be.

But when he was driving away, a man who had said a prayer approached his car and thanked him for coming.

Some former Jehovah’s Witness return their family’s shunning by not accepting occasional phone calls or by engaging in otherwise cold treatment.

Cheryl Ching, a family and relationship therapist in Brooklyn, bases her process with each client on how the individual defines the relationship.  

“It’s important to feel that sense of power, that it is possible to have a relationship that’s based on your terms,” Ching said. It’s important too for the person to feel that they’re not always a victim of the group, at the mercy of the damaging system.

For Amneris Cruz, a 44-year-old former Jehovah’s Witness from Puerto Rico, recovery is a line in the sand drawn by her own hand.

Her father, a Jehovah’s Witness, sexually abused Amneris, from around the ages of five to nine years old. When it came out that her father had abused 15 other girls, the congregation excused his actions and he was unpunished.

After the family moved to Indiana from Puerto Rico, Amneris continued practicing as a Jehovah’s Witness, but Amneris couldn’t forgive her mother for not taking action when she found out the sexual abuse and felt uncomfortable in the group. Even so, Amneris feared losing her relationship with her brothers and sisters-in-law. In the end, her doubts won.

Amneris stopped practicing and mother and brothers stopping speaking to her. She barely spoke English and she didn’t know anyone in the states.

Since Jehovah’s Witnesses do not encourage going to college, Amneris found herself unable to find a job and with no marketable skills. But she was buoyed by an insistent vision; her life would be better and she wouldn’t be like her mother. She eventually became a certified massage therapist and fell in love with Ruben Ortiz, the founder of an ex-Jehovah’s Witness recovery group on Facebook with over 10,000 members, who had also helped Karama Sadaka.

THE GRAY AREA

The organization may mandate that family members and friends cut off communication, but members sometimes choose to speak to disfellowshipped or disassociated loved ones anyway.

But the choice is complicated. The organization tells members that doing so undermines punishment or that they may be punished for communicating with nonbelievers. Sometimes, feeling too conflicted, members suddenly withdraw communication even after years of contact with a former member.

Chayla Gibson’s parents had spoken to her everyday for years after she stopped attending meetings. After they heard a talk at last year’s Jehovah’s Witness convention at Cow Palace in San Francisco, they visited Chayla and told her that they could no longer speak.

Andrea Rota, a professor in the sociology of religion at The University of Bern in Switzerland whose research focuses on Jehovah’s Witnesses, does not like to use the term “controlling” when discussing the influence the organization exerts on members’ lives.

“When you say control, it negates the fact that many Witnesses choose to stay and are quite happy with the sect,” he said. Rota said that there are Jehovah’s Witnesses who practice while maintaining a sense of freedom to do as they choose in the privacy of their homes, even if their actions violate religious rules.

“I know Jehovah’s Witnesses who are faithful, but they may choose to watch an R-rated movie at home, but they won’t talk about it with other Witnesses,” Rota said.

A 25-year-old Jehovah’s Witness from South Carolina who chose to remain anonymous agreed. “You just do what you have to do. I don’t think having a tattoo is wrong, but I’d cover it when I go to the [Kingdom] Hall,” she said.

Chayla says that her parents shun her because they feel obligated to.

Chayla was baptized when she was 11 years old, not because she necessarily wanted to, but because she felt pressured, she said.

Chayla’s best friend was disfellowshipped when she was a teenager. Chayla shunned her as a matter of duty. It was “just what you did,” Chayla recalled.

Steven Hassan, a mental health counselor who specializes in mind control, coined the term BITE, an acronym to describe the ways organizations control members. BITE stands for behavioral, informational, thought, and emotional control. Julia Gutsell, a criminology researcher based in Brussels, applied Hassan’s research to Jehovah’s Witnesses in a paper called “A Loving Provision- How Former Jehovah’s Witnesses Experience Shunning Practices.”

The organization controls behavior by regulating relationships, among other things, says Gutsell. Information control starts during recruitment by “withholding or distorting information about the group,” discouraging members from seeking outside information, and promoting peer-to-peer surveillance. Thought control is accomplished by weaving in the notion that the group possesses the ultimate truth. Finally, they establish emotional control by making members think how sinful actions “make Jehovah feel.” The organization sometimes refers to members as “good-for-nothing slaves.”

AFTERSHOCKS

“That religion’s robbed me,” said Matthew Fudge. His tone was defiant, his cadence stamped with disbelief.

Matthew was raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, but by the time he was in his twenties, he couldn’t quell his curiosity about other denominations. Churches are forbidden parts of “Christendom,” a JW catch-all word for other Christian denominations. In order to maintain a clear distinction, members never refer to the Kingdom Hall as church. Witnesses are also not permitted to listen to gospel music or any music associated with holidays, like Christmas carols.    

Compared to African American churches, Kingdom Halls are somber places. Pre-recorded music without percussion plays as attendees sing from hymn books. No choir sways left to right, lifting voices in harmonies; no one dances in the aisles, catches the holy ghost, or speaks in tongues.

Matthew took his questions about church to two co-workers. One of them told him she was directing a gospel play and asked Matthew to audition. As a child, Matthew would have never imagined that one day he would be in a church, or performing in a gospel play.

“I was good at it!,” he said, reliving the initial joy almost 20 years later.

A few months after acting in the gospel play, he stopped attending the Kingdom Hall.

“God called me out of it,” he told his Jehovah’s Witness mother, after months of going to a church without telling her.    

Their relationship was severed.

When his mother began to suffer with dementia, Matthew was stricken with the urgency to repair their damaged relationship. One Sunday when Matthew didn’t go to church, he decided to go to the Kingdom Hall to check on his mother. He planned on finding an elder and asking how his mother was doing. He saw his mother first instead. She was standing by another woman, close to her age, Matthew recalled. When the woman realized who Matthew was, she stared at him with a look of contempt. Within moments, his mother began to weep, begging him to return to Jehovah.

Their relationship was so damaged that, at her funeral, he felt like he was looking at a stranger.

“I have to keep forgiving and keep forgiving because memories keep coming up,” he said.

When Leon Cowan met his girlfriend, who is now his wife, she knew he was an excommunicated Jehovah’s Witness who toyed with the idea of returning. But in the 10-year period that Leon had been disfellowshipped, he began to recognize inconsistencies in the JW doctrine, many of which his wife had pointed out.

When Leon’s wife asked him to explain a complicated teaching about 1914, he floundered. The organization once taught that the generation alive in 1914 would be around to see Armageddon, but had since changed the definition of the word “generation.” As Leon spoke, he began to see things that struck him as logical fallacies.

Some former Jehovah’s Witnesses experienced the lapse of their belief system in stages. Others, like Leon, describe one epiphanous moment.

Leon initially felt relieved, but then memories of how he treated people when he was a Jehovah’s Witness began to haunt him.

RECOVERY

Marlene Winnell’s description of the cultural effect of religious trauma syndrome says that former members frequently feel “fish out of water” feelings, difficulty belonging, or experience information gaps that are out of sync with society.

Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005 when Karama Sadaka was 30 years old. Completely disoriented, he feared that he was on the wrong side of the war he been raised to believe would end the world.

He wandered around New Orleans until FEMA relocated him to Nashville. Away from New Orleans and the only religion he had ever known, he saw an opportunity to start fresh.

“There were so many things I had to learn about the world. Sometimes I feel like I’m a baby,” said Karama, on starting his life over after he left the organization.

After a stint in Nashville, he moved to New York City, where he eventually got involved in an ex-Jehovah’s Witness recovery group on Facebook founded by Ruben Ortiz, a former Witness from the Bronx, who has grown the group to over 10,000 members.

Karama remembers the comfort he got from the promise of seeing his father again in paradise, but he’s worked hard to reprogram his thoughts. He still deals with anger, but he’s channeled his emotions into helping free people from what he calls “the mind control of the Witnesses.”

Mercedes Varas, a 31-year-old from Miami, only realized the trauma of her Jehovah’s Witness upbringing years after she left.

Her doubts about the religion that began early, but she didn’t make a break until years later. She was baptized when she nine years old. By the time she was 14, Mercedes was homeschooled, a choice common among Jehovah’s Witnesses families. But Mercedes had romantic feelings for a girl in the Kingdom Hall and she began visiting online chat rooms.

“I started to feel like there was a struggle in me. Like there was something more out there,” she said.

She ended up getting involved with a man almost 10 years her senior whom she met online. She tried to end the relationship when she realized “it was toxic and he was controlling,” she said. But then he showed up to her Kingdom Hall pretending to be interested in joining. The man told Mercedes that he wanted to become a Witness, but he needed to confess to the elders that he and Mercedes had slept together. Mercedes had nowhere to turn.

After the confession, Mercedes was disfellowshipped. The shunning put Mercedes on the brink of an emotional collapse. The man began spreading rumors about their sex life in the Kingdom Hall. Mercedes complained that she was being harassed, but “the basic attitude was ‘what did you expect? That’s what you get for having sex’,” she said.

Following being disfellowshipped, she was reinstated, but she distanced herself from the organization. She moved from her mother’s house, but she wondered if she had made the right choice. Then she started dating a professor who challenged her old beliefs. After beginning therapy, she realized that helping other former Witnesses would aid her recovery. She decided to form a Meetup group for former Jehovah’s Witnesses in Miami.

“The only encouragement there is to think for yourself -- find your own voice,” she said of the group’s philosophy.

THE WAY FORWARD

One chilly fall day in a suburb of Boston, Karen Wilson hosted a workshop for victims of spiritual abuse. Wilson had taped large sheets of easel paper on the walls of the meeting room adjoined to a church where the workshop was held. The sheets had information on the ways religious groups control members and blank spaces for participants to write in their experiences.

“Recovery is a process. It happens bit by bit,” she said.

Former Jehovah’s Witnesses have carved out networks in the ground of recovery. The underway is illuminated with insider jokes, information on current doctrine changes, and encouragement for shunned former members. The shared stories of milestones juxtapose old visions of Armageddon on the horizon.

Dan Adams says that starting a retirement fund was a landmark moment of his new life. “Just knowing that there’s not some mystical force guiding my life and protecting me. I’m taking care of Dan now,” he said with a tone of simple contentment, albeit one tinged with grief.

Dan, Debbie Depuis, Violeta Dias, Mona Miller, Lee-Ann Lea, Matthew Fudge, Amneris Cruz, and Mercedes Varas are still fully shunned by their families. Lukewarm shunning compounded with micro moments of alienation fractured family relationships in more subtle ways for Helen Travers, Chayla Gibson, and Leon Cowan.

But the dark tapestry of estrangement is flecked with bright spots too. Last year, Dan married another ex-Jehovah’s Witness whom he met in an online JW recovery group named Amy. After twelve years of shunning, Helen Travers enjoys a cordial relationship with her mother. Matthew Fudge, now a member of the Mt. Calvary Missionary Baptist church, still sings in the choir and attends church every Sunday. Chayla Gibson is a proud basketball mom whose son will graduate high school this year. Karama Sadaka salvaged a relationship with his daughters and is working hard to put his eldest through college.

Like so many victims of systemic trauma, they had chosen difficult paths -- treacherous, winding, and unpredictable -- to recovery. And somewhere on the way, they chose to speak out. ◾