Chapter 2. The Politics and Business of Belief and Service

Mom leaving home for door-to-door witnessing.

I remember once the organization was trying to unload some old publications.  Instead of throwing these pamphlets out, which is where they belonged, we ran a “sale” and gave bunches of them away for next to nothing.  But at least they weren’t going to waste.  My mother had the temerity to read one of them, something no one was expected to do.  It was entitled Judge Rutherford Uncovers Fifth Column.  As I recall, it was published in the early years of World War II and made some absurd predictions as to the outcome of the war.  We were distributing these pamphlets in the mid-fifties, long after the war was over, and the predictions made in this publication were embarrassing.  My mother wanted my father to explain how we were in good faith expected to distribute this material to the public.  My father told her that no one was expected to read it.

Later when I was at Bethel I found it most interesting how an organization based on faith endeavored to teach the flock not to act on faith in their business dealings, and to adjudicate their differences when they failed to act rationally with each other. It was only much later that I understood that to live at all “by faith” means to suspend rational judgment and accept what rational judgment will not support (or faith, by definition would not be needed), and that in order to live by faith, one has to compartmentalize one’s life.  The exigencies of daily survival often require a higher level of intellectual integrity than does one’s philosophy, and so usually these two parts of your life have to be divorced from one another.  It never occurred to me at that point in time that if living a successful temporal life required you to practice your beliefs hypocritically, this was a condemnation of your philosophy:  your philosophy was not life-supporting or life-enhancing, but quite the opposite.  And if your beliefs condemned you for seeking your own life and happiness as your logical highest achievement, your beliefs in effect put you at war with yourself, with unearned guilt as the result; self-esteem, if not outright impossible, becomes possible only by further compartmentalizing your life.  Our family practiced our beliefs with considerable integrity and consistency; we had little guilt and were very unhappy.

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