As I've mentioned elsewhere, my mother got into the Jehovah's Witness cult when I was a young boy. I was fortunate to be raised by her father and not with her. She was safely 2000 miles away in Arizona while I remained in our small town in western Pennsylvania.
My first exposure to my mother's religion came when I was just shy of eight years old. She came home for her mother's funeral. We'd escaped the crowded houseful of post-funeral well-wishers who'd converged on our home with food and drink by sitting on the basement stairs. And it was here that she started telling me about God.
He was everywhere, she told me. I'd heard this in Sunday School, of course, but my teachers there had never spoken with the same tone of voice that Mom did. She was really intense about it, making sure that I understood what she was saying. My young and inquisitive mind then said, "Does that mean that the devil is everywhere, too?" She assured me this was true.
I didn't like that. Specifically, I didn't like sitting on the wooden stairs of a dank and cobwebbed basement, where the devil could reach out and jab me in the ribs from any of a thousand different shadowy hiding places.
She went on to tell me a little about her newfound religion. I don't recall very much of that conversation at all, today, with the exception of something she told me about the Pledge of Allegiance that I spoke aloud in school every morning. She said Jehovah's Witnesses didn't believe in the Pledge. It was, essentially, worship of a flag. And you couldn't worship objects. The Bible said so.
I came to agree with her on that one. Not because of the Bible, but because when you think about it, swearing your allegiance to a piece of cloth is pretty stupid. It's just fabric, after all. Even if it's supposed to just be a symbolic thing, and you're really pledging your allegiance to the concepts behind the flag, it still struck me as silly. And in later years, I came to despise the Pledge because of the inclusion of "one nation, under God" in the last portion.
It was this somewhat sensible view of the Pledge that threw me off-track, I suppose. I agreed with it. So for the longest time, I viewed the Jehovah's Witness religion as being just as acceptable as any other. It would be a long time before I found out just how much like a cult it was, far more than any other "standard" religion in America, with the possible exception of Mormonism.
It wasn't until I was in my late teens that Mom dropped the bombshell on me that made me realize that she wasn't firing on all synapses. I don't recall the exact conversation, but she told me that she saw demons. Everywhere.
I assumed that she meant in the figurative sense. People that did evil things, whom she'd label as demons. But no. She meant literal demons. She saw them. Everywhere. In her house. On the street. In stores.
I honestly didn't know what to say to that. I mean, this was my mother! And she was saying things that, had anyone else said them to me, I'd have suggested a visit to a room with rubber walls.
Over the following years, our friendship deteriorated as she continued to try to convert her atheist son to the light. And a series of events eventually allowed me access to a psychological profile of her. In this report, I learned that she was officially diagnosed as schizophrenic.
It didn't surprise me. I knew she didn't have a firm grasp on reality. But the written confirmation of this made me wonder about the progression. When had it started? Before her big religious kick or after? Probably before, given stories related to me by other family members, stories of her life before I was even born.
Schizophrenia is far more common than most people realize. At its most basic, it is simply a loss of the proper relation with the world around you. In earlier days, we called it "dementia." Funny how "demen" and "demon" are so close, huh?
There are most likely quite a number of people in our society who suffer from mild schizophrenia, unnoticed by the people around them. My mother's disorder wouldn't have been noticed if it weren't for certain circumstances, the nature of which I can't go into here.
It makes me wonder just how many deeply religious people out there, whether JW's or not, have psychological disorders that could be treated by modern therapy or medication. And would they retain their zealousness afterward?
My suspicion is they would not. My suspicions go even further, and would probably cross the border of being offensive to most people. Let's just say that I wonder if religious faith could be "cured" by modern psychology.
