For Jehovah’s Witnesses, an insular culture and archaic rules have created a “recipe for child abuse.”

A second was all it took. A second was all he needed.

The little girl was 4, round-faced and freckled and dressed in her Sunday best. She was fidgeting next to her father inside the Jehovah’s Witnesses Kingdom Hall in Red Lion, York County — a safe, familiar space for a family that spent nearly all of its free time preaching and praying.

Martin Haugh was momentarily preoccupied, doling out assignments to his fellow Witnesses for their door-to-door ministry work. When he looked down for his daughter, she was gone. Haugh plunged into the slow-motion panic of every parent’s worst nightmare.

He scrambled through the one-story brick building, calling her name, the anxiety piling up like concrete blocks on his chest with each passing moment. She wasn’t in the bathrooms, she wasn’t in the lobby. He tried a coatroom next, and found her there. But she wasn’t alone.

Haugh’s daughter was perched on the lap of a teenage boy who had quietly lured her away. He was molesting her. “He wanted to give me a special hug,” the girl told her father.

The English language can’t adequately give shape to the horror of such a discovery, to a parent seeing his child’s innocence being corrupted and shattered. But what came next was just as hard to describe. When Haugh and his wife, Jennifer, told the elders who oversaw their congregation about this October 2005 incident, they were greeted with muted concern. Then came the threats.

“We were told on more than one occasion that if we told other parents about this, we would be disciplined,” Haugh, 41, said during a recent interview.

“We never heard the words ‘Go to the cops!’ or ‘Are you considering therapy for her?’ ” his wife added. “Then people stopped talking to us.”

The Haughs were deeply enmeshed in the world of the Witnesses — Martin was fifth generation — but this was their first brush with the wall of silence that the religion’s leaders have relied on to prevent allegations of child sex abuse from reaching law enforcement.

Internal documents show that the Witnesses’ leadership, the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York, has long enforced a policy of secrecy in any potential legal matters. “The need for elders to maintain strict confidentiality has been repeatedly stressed,” reads one passage from a 1989 memo that instructed elders to resist cooperating if police ever showed up at their kingdom halls with a search warrant.

Another memo, from 1997, focused entirely on the topic of child molesters. Elders, the equivalent of priests, were told to inform one another if known pedophiles moved from one kingdom hall to another — and to withhold the information from the congregations.

But thanks to a growing number of court cases, criminal prosecutions, and whistle-blowers, light has been shed on some of the monsters who lurk in the shadows.

In the U.S., lawsuits have been filed on behalf of abuse victims from Philadelphia to California, where a Superior Court judge last year fined the Watchtower more than $2 million for refusing to turn over a secretly compiled list of known child molesters. A $66 million class-action lawsuit is looming in Canada, and more than 1,000 abusers have been identified by a royal commission in Australia.

Watchtower officials declined to participate in an interview, opting instead to send a statement that read in part: “Jehovah’s Witnesses abhor child abuse, a crime that sadly occurs in all sectors of society. The safety of our children is of the utmost importance.”

But the child-abuse claims are just one piece of the complicated puzzle that lies at the heart of the inner workings of the Witnesses, an often misunderstood religion that grew from humble beginnings in Pittsburgh to become an organization with eight million followers around the world, more than a dozen congregations in Philadelphia, and a real estate empire in New York that, during the last few years, has been partly sold for more than $1 billion to the development company formerly run by Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law.

I spoke to 14 former Witnesses, ranging in age from 19 to 77, about the experiences that drove them to leave the faith, a process they called “waking up.”

Some are sexual-abuse survivors, while others saw firsthand how top leaders buried evidence of disturbing crimes. Some cracked under the weight of a dogma that deliberately cuts followers off from the rest of society, with the promise of being saved when the world comes to an end.

 

There’s a heavy price to pay for speaking out. Witnesses are taught to sever ties with anyone who strays from the teachings that have been handed down by the governing body, an emotional punishment known as shunning.

The Haughs know it well. They finally left the religion for good in 2016. “My in-laws held a wake for us,” Jennifer Haugh said. “Like we were dead.”

In an uncertain world, people yearn for reassurance. That’s as true now as it was in the early 1870s, when a charismatic young man from Allegheny County named Charles Taze Russell began analyzing the Bible with a group of others who became known as Bible Students.

The U.S. was only a few years removed from the trauma of the Civil War, and large swaths of the country were being remade by the engine of the second industrial revolution.

Russell, who owned several clothing stores and briefly lived in Philadelphia, favored first-century Christian teachings, and believed that mankind was entering its final days. He calculated that the end of society as they knew it would begin in 1914.

But the Bible Students softened the Armageddon talk with assurances that believers and their families would be resurrected from the dead. That comforting message helped win over converts in the 1890s like Dwight D. Eisenhower’s parents, who’d lost a child to diphtheria. (Eisenhower became a Presbyterian after he was elected president.)

When Russell died in 1916, his followers split into different factions. Some stuck with his successor, Joseph Rutherford; they adopted the name Jehovah’s Witnesses in 1931. Rutherford doubled down on promising that the end was close at hand, a tactic that gave the religion’s leaders even greater sway over those who took the warnings to heart.

Fear, after all, is a powerful tool.

Eccentric new rules were introduced. Witnesses were forbidden from celebrating their birthdays and holidays, including Christmas and Mother’s Day. Military service and voting weren’t permitted, and followers weren’t allowed to receive blood transfusions, even in medical emergencies.

But those restrictions weren’t emphasized by the pleasant, well-dressed Witnesses who began knocking on doors across the country, offering warm smiles and a few words about salvation.

Barbara Anderson was a teenager living in Long Island in 1954 when she began studying with a Witness she met at a friend’s house. “I was a very curious kid, and I wanted answers for why we are here,” Anderson, 77, said from her home in Tennessee. “She answered all of my questions.”

That peace of mind — being able to trust that there’s a special plan for them in the grand scheme of an unpredictable universe — helps many Witnesses to endure a challenging lifestyle. Children aren’t allowed to play organized sports or form friendships with kids outside of the religion, and adults are expected to spend a minimum of 10 hours a month on field ministry. Attending college is largely discouraged, especially for women.

Still, the religion has boasted plenty of celebrities among its ranks over the years. Prince shocked some Minnesota residents by knocking on their doors after he converted in the early 2000s. Tennis superstars Venus and Serena Williams, the actor Donald Glover, and musician Patti Smith were all raised Witnesses. Michael Jackson left the religion in the late 1980s, a few years after he faced blowback from elders who were unhappy with the ghouls that he featured in the video for “Thriller.”

More than 120,000 Witnesses call Pennsylvania home, according to a Pew study that was released in 2014, with at least 7,775 practicing members in Philadelphia. Many of the kingdom halls are in North and West Philadelphia, where they have attracted predominantly black congregations. Nationally, their followers are diverse: 36 percent are white, 27 percent are black, and 32 percent are Latino.

They’re often portrayed in the media as quirky characters whose wholesomeness seems leftover from another era. More than a dozen stories have been written by news outlets across the country since 2010 about members who scrub arenas by hand — including Temple University’s Liacouras Center — prior to annual conventions. “Overall, they’re nice, sincere people,” Anderson said of the faith’s rank-and-file members.

But she also had a rare glimpse at the inner workings of the Witnesses’ governing body, a group of eight men who claim to receive instructions from God. Anderson’s husband was a high-ranking elder, and she was assigned to the Watchtower’s massive world headquarters in Brooklyn, where she was one of the only women in the male-dominated hierarchy to work in the writing department for their magazine, Awake!

In 1991, the publication included an article on surviving child abuse, which triggered a stunning response: Thousands of abuse survivors contacted the Watchtower. Some claimed they had been molested by elders, others by friends and family members. “It was awful,” said Anderson, who personally fielded phone calls from some victims.

She discovered the governing body had specific protocols for dealing with molestation. Elders were supposed to notify the Witnesses’ legal department if they learned of abuse by sending the information to New York in a special blue envelope. Victims were required to recount their allegations in front of their abusers, and produce two eyewitnesses who could support their claims. Discipline was handled internally.

“By their policies, they were inadvertently protecting pedophiles,” Anderson said.

John Reeder saw those policies in action. As an elder at the Bradley Beach Kingdom Hall at the Jersey Shore, Reeder said he participated in conversations with other elders in the early 2000s when they received word that a twenty-something man had fondled the breasts of a friend’s 12-year-old daughter.

“We said, ‘You have to make it right with the father,’ ” Reeder, 59, recalled during a recent interview. “We were following [the legal department’s] directions. I don’t think we ever spoke to the father.”

There was a complication: Clergy are among those in New Jersey who are required by law to report suspected child abuse. Reeder said the legal department offered advice on how to alert authorities discreetly.

“They told us to have someone go to another town and make an anonymous phone call to the police department from a pay phone,” he explained. “They considered that valid reporting. I said: ‘This is ridiculous! Do we have to wear a trench coat, too?’ ”

Reeder’s final breaking point came in 2004, when other elders worked to have his 20-year-old daughter “disfellowshipped” — excommunicated, essentially — for running afoul of their rules. Reeder was forced to cut off all contact with her. The experience, he said, left her deeply traumatized.

Barbara Anderson, meanwhile, decided to go public with her knowledge about the Witnesses’ untold abuse stories, and appeared on an episode of the NBC show Dateline in 2002. She and her husband were condemned by the Witnesses’ leaders and disfellowshipped.

“I’d had enough,” she said. “I thought: ‘What kind of people are you? How can you be God’s organization?’ ”

An iPad flickered to life, and Sarah Brooks appeared in a FaceTime window.

It was a rainy February evening, and the 30-year-old was sitting in her driveway in York, trying to explain to me all the ways she’d been violated when she was younger.

The trouble started in 2002, when she was 14. Two adult Witnesses who were close to her — Joshua Caldwell, a family friend, and Jennifer McVey, her then-sister-in-law — started secretly providing Brooks with wine coolers and Yuengling. A year later, the duo allegedly graduated to something more sinister.

Brooks worked with Caldwell, clearing out abandoned houses before they could be winterized; McVey tagged along as a chaperone of sorts. “It was during working hours, in abandoned, nasty homes, that he would abuse me,” Brooks said matter-of-factly.

For two years, Brooks said, Caldwell and McVey, who were then in their 20s, allegedly took turns sexually assaulting her. “I did not understand what was going on at the time,” she said.

Eventually, she worked up the nerve to tell her father. “He called the elders from our congregation, who were relatives of my abuser. They came over and questioned me,” she said. “I was told to go to my room.” Things got worse from there. Brooks said the elders singled her out at the local kingdom hall, announcing to a congregation that she had been “reproved.”

 

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