Norway and Jehovah's Witnesses
February 4, 2023 11:35 AM   Subscribe

So Norway has now removed all religious status and related state subsidies from the Jehovah's Witnesses. This on the heels of a recent move in which Norwegian courts reversed a disfellowship decision the Church made.

Norway is taking an interesting and progressive anti-cult line here.

The first YT link contains a good set of links to related and supporting news.
posted by Meatbomb (35 comments total) 12 users marked this as a favorite
 
It seems worth mentioning that the decision overturning the disfellowshipping was then overturned (this is noted at the bottom of the second link, which was written before that overturning).
posted by hoyland at 12:05 PM on February 4, 2023 [2 favorites]


I'll admit to not actually sitting through the video (he speaks way to slowly to tell me things I already know and maybe I didn't click the right link), but what did get their recognition pulled? I'm assuming the widespread tendency not to report sexual abuse, but JWs are also notorious for pissing off governments even when not being awful.
posted by hoyland at 12:19 PM on February 4, 2023 [1 favorite]


but what did get their recognition pulled?

Requiring faithful members to shun former members.
posted by Brian B. at 12:24 PM on February 4, 2023 [5 favorites]


hoyland - tldr: having official printed church rules about shunning was seen as human rights abuse and child abuse in the case of minors.
posted by Meatbomb at 12:33 PM on February 4, 2023 [26 favorites]


seems to fit iwith-in the Law of Jante.
posted by clavdivs at 1:00 PM on February 4, 2023 [1 favorite]


hoyland, I don't think he speaks especially slowly, but he repeats himself a lot. He conveys information very slowly.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 1:35 PM on February 4, 2023 [1 favorite]


Interesting. Here in my neck of the woods, the JW's have raised the hackles of local government by using shell companies to purchase local hotels (the shell companies said they were going to continue to operate them as hotels) and then promptly used them as dormitory's for workers being brought into the area to work on the expansion of their farm and printing operations into their new global headquarters. There has always been a low-level contentious relationship between the JW's and local government through the exploitation of the religious exemption tax loophole by the JW's to avoid paying taxes on a TON of land use operations that draw on public resources.
posted by KingEdRa at 2:32 PM on February 4, 2023 [14 favorites]


This is shockingly good news. Wow.
posted by Bottlecap at 2:35 PM on February 4, 2023 [4 favorites]


clavdivs: seems to fit [within] the Law of Jante.
Do they Jante that far north? I thought it was in places like Denmark and England.
posted by k3ninho at 2:38 PM on February 4, 2023


So Norway has now removed all religious status and related state subsidies from the Jehovah's Witnesses

But the Norwegian Supreme Court overturned the basis for that decision in May 2022 (Supreme Court decision here, commentary here), and the Oslo District Court suspended the de-registration of Jehovah's Witnesses in December 2022 (commentary here).

So as things currently stand, the statement at the top of the FPP is misleading. Norway has not removed all religious status from the JWs. This is an ongoing legal case still making its way through the Norwegian courts.
posted by verstegan at 3:28 PM on February 4, 2023 [13 favorites]


My YouTube recommendations (for reasons completely opaque to me) routinely suggests videos that take a recent JW video release for children (think like Veggie Tales or something similar, only more awful) and tear it to shreds. The things they tell their children through these videos are even more horrific than the "the fact you were born means you are no good and can never be any good" that normal Christianity teaches children. I've watched a few of them, but then I stopped because my god, I can't take in that kind of awful regularly.
posted by hippybear at 3:51 PM on February 4, 2023 [3 favorites]


I guess you're talking about Owen from Telltale? The one I watched instructed children not to make friends at school. Which is super fucked up.

This is a doomsday cult. Shunning children is child abuse. If child abuse is part of your church, I think your church should be illegal.
posted by adept256 at 4:15 PM on February 4, 2023 [14 favorites]


What about Islam?

There are several times as many Muslims in Norway as there are Jehovah's Witnesses.

Is the government trying to establish a less controversial precedent before going after them?
posted by jamjam at 4:46 PM on February 4, 2023 [2 favorites]


Fun fact: Jehovah's Witnesses used to be illegal in Canada, and in Québec they were charged with sedition. Their pushing back on that established some precedent that (if you ask JWs anyway) led to more rights for Canadians. They definitely had an effect on the landscape. It's interesting that trend may reverse.

I was a child JW for a couple of years, and it definitely was a lot of indoctrination. I used to spend bout 7 hours a week in bible study and another 3 going door-to-door or handing out Watchtowers. My parents weren't involved except to say it was okay, and I was still going to United Church some of the time.

1980 was a big year for predicting Armageddon, and I was at a national conference that year - since I was only 9 what stands out for me is that there were doughnuts, and full immersion nude baptism so I saw quite a few naked adults (very briefly for each.) Because I was relatively bilingual, I got a lot of encouragement to see myself as a future missionary to Québec.

Definitely "keeping apart from others" was a theme - no singing the national anthem, no holidays/birthday parties, etc. That said, the JWs I was studying with were, as far as child memory goes, really nice. They were kinder to me than almost anyone had been, and never gave me any idea that children could be judged.

Of course that's how cults work and in this case they failed to convert me.
posted by warriorqueen at 4:50 PM on February 4, 2023 [21 favorites]


Been seeing a lot of JW's hawk their social club in Estonia (of all places), which i believe to be Europe's most irreligious country. That said, cultish/pseudo-religious activity has a niche in a population without formal outlet for faith-based behavior and a sometimes cold social dynamic.

Honestly, the in-group/out-group behavior of the JW is horrifying and I wish nothing nice for them in this or any country.
posted by cryber at 3:12 AM on February 5, 2023 [1 favorite]


My experience with Witnesses has not been great. I have two in my family. They do not exude compassion and a willingness to heal the anima mundi.
posted by DJZouke at 4:52 AM on February 5, 2023 [4 favorites]


How does Norway view the LDS? Or is there much of an LDS presence there? They’re often lumped together with JW as being somewhat cult-ish.
posted by Thorzdad at 7:19 AM on February 5, 2023


he speaks way to slowly - hoyland, you can speed up youtube videos; use the gear/settings icon. It's really a great tool when someone's a s l o w t a l k e r.
posted by theora55 at 7:52 AM on February 5, 2023 [3 favorites]


Do they Jante that far north? I thought it was in places like Denmark and England.

Jantelov is generally a Denmark/Norway thing (and the other Nordic countries to a lesser degree. The term was coined by a Danish-Norwegian author. There are some elements of it present in British culture, but I wouldn't say it really applies here in the UK broadly.
posted by Dysk at 8:02 AM on February 5, 2023


Jehovahs Witnesses have many practices of which I strongly, strongly disapprove, but they are clearly a bone fide religion and have been persecuted in the past. Perhaps the problem really is giving special status to any religious bodies in the first place.
posted by plonkee at 9:13 AM on February 5, 2023 [6 favorites]


Or maybe if bona fide religions do not meet the modern Norwegian standards for upholding human rights, they do not get to exist there. Human sacrifices to the Sky God would likely still lead to murder and conspiracy charges regardless of religious justifications.
posted by Meatbomb at 9:28 AM on February 5, 2023 [9 favorites]


jamjam, why bring up Islam in this thread about Jehovah's Witnesses?

Islam has been around for literally thousands of years, and has more than a billion adherents in at least hundreds of distinct sects. In terms of scale it would be more appropriate to compare it to all of Christianity.
The JW kids started their thing in Pennsylvania in the 19th century.
But maybe you aren't using scale as a point of commonality between Islam and JW. Could you clarify the connection that makes you bring up Islam in this context?
posted by Rev. Irreverent Revenant at 10:58 AM on February 5, 2023 [4 favorites]


LDS: Less than 4600 according to their own web page.
posted by Harald74 at 1:07 PM on February 5, 2023


If you don't know much about JWs and want a roundup of how they came to be and what they believe and how things have evolved over time, you could spend an hour watching Knowing Better's video Temporary Residents In This World.
posted by hippybear at 1:33 PM on February 5, 2023


I'm entirely unsure there was any "common notion of democracy" in ~700ce.
posted by hippybear at 3:03 PM on February 5, 2023 [1 favorite]


Perhaps the problem really is giving special status to any religious bodies in the first place
I think it's fine to give (genuine) religious bodies the status of being a recognised religious body. What I don't think is fine and am a little shocked about is that Norway actually subsidises religious organisations with public money. That's quite a bog step beyond just tax-free status, in my mind and approaches the government endorsing the religious body.
posted by dg at 3:35 PM on February 5, 2023


I'm entirely unsure there was any "common notion of democracy" in ~700ce.

Hellenization was resisted despite Alexander the Great conquering so much. Democratic ideas aren't even mentioned in the New Testament, despite being written in common Greek for and by Roman citizens. It's easy to forget that religion is a conservative venture, to preserve the elite order, and giving no mention to something is to never plant the seed.
posted by Brian B. at 3:38 PM on February 5, 2023


Discussing the history of Islam seems pretty far from the pin here, which is about the adherents of a 19th century millenarian Christian splinter faction in modern-day Norway, where apparently (some people at least believe) just being a religion doesn't get you a free pass on human rights law violations.

That seems very progressive on its face, but overall seems to just show where they are placing the guardrails that constrain religious practice in their community.

The idea that church and state can be separate and non-overlapping zones of authority is a polite, frequently aspirational, fiction; virtually every secular state (and probably non-secular ones too) puts limits on what conduct is appropriate in the pursuit of religious ends, individually or as a group.

As others have pointed out, there are very few governments that are willing to tolerate human sacrifice in the name of religion, and that's a practice with an extensive history across many cultures. So even the most pointedly disinterested secular governments do regulate religion, at the limits of what's considered acceptable. Norway seems to be in the process of working out whether an official policy of shunning those who leave a faith group is outside the pale of their community norms.

It would be nice if more communities were able to reconsider that sort of thing periodically...
posted by Kadin2048 at 7:25 PM on February 5, 2023 [2 favorites]


My closest childhood friend is a JW and took me to service a few times. The local JW sect is more integrated (Black / White / Asian / etc) than nearly any other sect of Christianity around here and from my nonreligious Jewish perspective all church groups are cults. Other than not celebrating birthdays and holidays my friend's religion didn't seem that different from others to me although she is more passionate about it - being a JW is nearly my friend's entire life. But then on the same hand she STILL has a wider social circle than me because there are so many different kinds of people within the church.

OTOH, the service music was bland and a lot of the service time was spent on public debate of appropriate punishments for members' indescretions (imagine if instead of the Catholic confessional you instead confessed your sins at a town hall meeting).
posted by subdee at 7:53 PM on February 5, 2023 [4 favorites]


This discussion is an interesting dance across a pinhead. I support the idea that religions should not be allowed to break the laws of any country in which they reside. I was raised in a Christian household, and though my people did not belong to any denomination, they were fond of country churches with lots of singing. On the other hand, they allowed me to attend various churches growing up, including LDS, JDs, and Catholics. I enjoyed conversations with teachers but thought the Sunday School sessions were boring. At some point, I realized I was being fed dogma and lost interest except for the singing. As an adult, I rediscovered the beauty of the prose in the KJV Bible and have read it several times. Full disclosure: I am an atheist.

I believe I'm on firm ground when I say that the Christian Bible doesn't suggest that churches should be tax-exempt or subsidized in any way by the state. But, unfortunately, as our friendly Atheist in the video pointed out, churches in the US don't seem to have to obey any laws but the more egregious and lurid felonies. Too bad.

I guess if my partner and I wanted to tie antlers to our heads and celebrate the spring equinox by rutting in a field we should move to Norway. I think I could find another 48 souls and qualify to get a few bucks from the government.
posted by mule98J at 10:30 PM on February 5, 2023 [2 favorites]


Heia Norge, what a fantastic development!

What I don't think is fine and am a little shocked about is that Norway actually subsidises religious organisations with public money. That's quite a bog step beyond just tax-free status, in my mind and approaches the government endorsing the religious body.

I dunno, they're endorsing about 800 conflicting religious and humanist organisations if so. I guess you could argue that they're endorsing the idea of religion or humanism, of gathering for those purposes in a very general sense, but they also subsidise e.g. farmers and artists, so it's far from stone unique perk for religious (and humanist!) organisations.
posted by Dysk at 11:36 PM on February 5, 2023 [1 favorite]


I have spent a lot of time in authoritarian / parasitic regimes, and to me this idea is wonderful! The state supporting civil society with actual cash, holy shit. "We think it is good that people are in groups." Skeptics, Christians, Satanists, plastic model club, whatever, be out in society and share interests.
posted by Meatbomb at 12:17 AM on February 6, 2023 [2 favorites]


Here's a machine translated article from Norwegian state broadcaster NRK on who gets support on who doesn't.

The translation stumbles here and there, btw, examples include "gentiles" which should be "pagans" and "troslære" which was not translated, but I guess should be "dogma". And I think "goblin" probably should be "gnome" (nisse).
posted by Harald74 at 6:44 AM on February 6, 2023 [2 favorites]


Very interesting. I would definitely say that raising one's child as a Jehovah's Witness is a form of abuse, because children don't have the ability to decide whether it is something they want or not, and more often than not the adult making this decision is not someone who experienced the same growing up.

It is such a totalizing worldview (that the human-made world is wicked, God is going to destroy it any day now, interaction with non-JW's is bad for you, and any secular pursuit like science is a waste of time) that it can't help but screw up a developing mind.

And yeah, it's a cult.
posted by anhedonic at 4:04 PM on February 7, 2023 [3 favorites]


I dunno, they're endorsing about 800 conflicting religious and humanist organisations if so. I guess you could argue that they're endorsing the idea of religion or humanism, of gathering for those purposes in a very general sense, but they also subsidise e.g. farmers and artists, so it's far from stone unique perk for religious (and humanist!) organisations.

OK, I didn't realise that this goes beyond religious organisations. The idea of supporting such a wide variety of groups seems like a good idea in the sense that supporting people having a greater sense of community and having better access to groups that support them is a good and human thing that benefits everyone.
posted by dg at 2:01 PM on February 8, 2023


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