Jehovah’s Witnesses Still Opening Doors

It is Saturday morning and you are sitting at home when the doorbell rings. You hurry to the door, expecting a delivery perhaps, and find two earnest-looking people holding Bibles and newsprint pamphlets.

Chances are they are Jehovah’s Witnesses, members of a fundamentalist religious organization founded in Pittsburgh 110 years ago by Charles Taze Russell, a men’s clothing retailer.

Russell, who started with a six-member Bible study group, created a religion that had thousands of adherents in the United States by the time he died in 1916.

Like other fundamentalist religions that have attracted members disenchanted with what they consider an increasingly immoral world, the Jehovah’s Witnesses are growing rapidly.

They now claim more than 4 million members worldwide, double their membership only 15 years ago.

Though the sect’s insistent door-to-door ministry has been the subject of many popular jokes, Witnesses adhere to an austere belief system. They say they try to live as closely as possible according to their interpretation of the Bible.

“Everything we need in dealing with life is contained in the Scriptures,” said Rodney Griffiths, a Witness from Johnstown, Pa. “We look at the Bible . . . as a book of daily living, for guidance, for direction.”

One result of that belief is those door-to-door visits. Jehovah’s Witnesses are required to act as missionaries because the Apostles and other Biblical figures did so.

Also as a result of their literal interpretation of the Old and New Testaments, Witnesses decline to pledge allegiance to any national flag or serve in any nation’s army.

“He who lives by the sword, dies by the sword,” Griffiths said.

Members were jailed in the United States during World War II for refusing to fight, and many died in concentration camps in Germany because they did not support the Nazi regime.

Witnesses also refuse blood transfusions, citing a passage in the book of Leviticus: “Whatsoever man . . . eats any manner of blood, I will cut him off from among his people.”

Spokesmen for the Witnesses, who have headquarters in Brooklyn, N.Y., deny that this practice has led to many fatalities, but medical authorities disagree.

“People do die,” said Gary Gruen, an orthopedic surgeon at Presbyterian University Hospital in Pittsburgh, who has treated members of the sect.

Without blood transfusions after serious accidents or during surgery, he said, “sometimes their heart has to work so fast that it puts them in jeopardy for heart attacks and decreased blood flow to the brain.”

Recently, 14-year-old Kevin Rattenbury died at a suburban Detroit hospital during surgery to repair injuries from a motorbike accident. His parents, Jehovah’s Witnesses, had refused to allow a blood transfusion.

A spokesman for the hospital said it had obtained a court order to allow the transfusion but it came too late.

Witnesses also believe, based on the Book of Revelation and other biblical passages, that the world as we know it will end by early next century and be replaced by a blessed community consisting mostly of Jehovah’s Witnesses.

In the meantime, do not expect the door-to-door visits to stop. They apparently work.