The Things Unseen

“Sometimes the things unseen are just as important, if not more important, than the things seen.”

Words to live by. 

For example, under the Minimum Wage laws...
of the United States, the Government has made it illegal for an employer to pay his employees less than a specified wage, regardless of the skill level or productivity of said worker. On its face this all seems fine. “Well the employees all get more money” one might say. “They are better off now than they otherwise would have been.” Yes, that might well be true, for the employees who actually have jobs. Those are the ones who are visible, who we can physically see with our eyes benefiting from the law. But what many people tend to ignore are the more invisible effects of Minimum Wage laws.

As was mentioned, the Minimum Wage laws are a mandate to employers that they must discriminate against low skill workers in favor of higher skill workers. The workers with more skills and more experience get the jobs, and those are the ones we see. But the lower skilled workers (who are mainly composed of young people and minorities), never get the jobs to begin with, because the Minimum Wage is higher than what their productivity justifies. These are the ones we do not see, the ones who never get a chance to begin with.

If you have heard a young person, looking for their first job, complain, “But all of these companies only want people with years and years of experience, but how do I get experience if nobody will hire me?”, the Minimum Wage laws are a major cause. Without the Minimum Wage laws that young person could compete with the more experienced workers by offering himself at a lower wage, and then increase his wage over time by building his skills, experience and overall market value on the job. But thanks to the Minimum Wage laws it is illegal for him to compete with the more experienced workers, and so he never gets the job, never gets a chance to build his skills and thus silently drops off the map, along with tens of thousands of young and minority workers like him.

So how is Teary going to tie all of this rambling to the Witnesses you may ask? Good question! The answer is this:

On internet forums revolving around Jehovah’s Witnesses especially, we tend to see very large concentrations of disgruntled, angry, allegedly abused and completely obsessed ex-Witnesses. Every single one of them, it seems, has their own personal little horror story to tell. “My Elders beat me with rods and threatened me if I talked about it!” “The Witnesses in my old congregation stole my wallet and spit in my face!” "They put sugar in my gas tank!” “They sexually abused me, my grandma, my dad and my dog!” etc., etc. It is a truly fascinating phenomenon, and one could easily get the impression that every ex-Witness has been abused or mistreated in some way or another, and that the Witnesses themselves must be horrible, evil people. But this is not necessarily the case in reality, precisely because of (1) the principle at the very beginning of this article and (2) the typical psychological dynamics of leaving a New Religious Movement.

Statistically some people are going to be abused, or raped or hate going out in service violently even if it is not the norm. Statistically many people will have warm loving parents but some won’t. Statistically many will have good hearted, sincere elders, but some will have ‘evil little power trolls' (as I have heard some people lovingly put it). That the worst of THAT gets on these various Witness discussion forums makes sense, because the people that would have the most against the Witnesses –the ones who did get abused or who got the unloving parents or the power troll elders or who hated service violently, or even the ones who imagined serious offences and simply blew small incidents out of proportion– would naturally be the ones to yell and complain the loudest about it. They are the ones who are likeliest to seek out these internet based, collective masses of Witness hatred as a way to vent and justify their own experiences.

In many cases we are seeing primarily only the ones that are hurt the most (whether real or imagined hurt), and while their stories are hard to take, they are not outrageous on their face, because statistically they are inevitable in any social group, regardless of religious affiliation. Crap happens, as the wise man once said. But now, also note that actually showing that there is a statistically higher rate of abuse among Witnesses than there is among any other comparison group, is a different argument altogether (and one that I personally have never seen proved).

On the other hand, as was mentioned, there is another side that is not so loud and not so visible, but still much larger, like the hidden underside of an iceberg. We cannot forget that there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of ex-Witnesses and studies that simply go away, vanish, silently for whatever reason, who haven't suffered sexual abuse or who didn’t have the unloving parents or evil elders or bad congregations, and who don’t feel any particular need to vent their rage on internet forums. These we do not see, and unfortunately many forget about them entirely. 

"Most former members do not become apostates. They remain — in sociological terms suggested by David Bromley and others — "defectors" (members who somewhat regret having left an organization they still perceive in largely positive terms), or "ordinary leave takers" with mixed feeling about their former affiliation. However ordinary leave takers (and, to some extent, defectors) remain socially invisible, insofar as they do not like or care to discuss their genuine representatives of the former members. In fact, quantitative research shows that even in extremely controversial groups, apostates normally represent less than 15% of former members." Massimo Introvigne, Religious Liberty in Europe: Apostate

Dr. Lonnie D. Kliever (1932 - 2004), Professor of Religious Studies of the Southern Methodist University…claims that the overwhelming majority of people who disengage from non-conforming religions harbor no lasting ill-will toward their past religious associations and activities, but that there is a much smaller number of apostates who are deeply invested and engaged in discrediting, and performing actions designed to destroy the religious communities that once claimed their loyalties. He asserts that these dedicated opponents present a distorted view of the new religions and cannot be regarded as reliable informants by responsible journalists, scholars, or jurists. He claims that the lack of reliability of apostates is due to the traumatic nature of disaffiliation, that he compares to a divorce, but also due to the influence of the anti-cult movement, even on those apostates who were not deprogrammed or did not receive exit counseling. (Kliever 1995 Kliever. Lonnie D, Ph.D. The Reliability of Apostate Testimony About New Religious Movements, 1995.)

So do not fall into the trap of assuming that the high concentration of disgruntled Ex-Witnesses that you see online, translates proportionally into real life, and that all Ex-Witnesses must necessarily be the same and share similar atrocity stories. Even if the number you see is 90% disgruntled and angry, that 90% that you can “see” may only be, in reality, only a small fraction of the whole, which you cannot see.