“Personally I find it a bit scary, sleeping alone in a tent in the open air. But it’s for a good cause.” Henri Dahlem, president of the Against Shunning Watchtower Foundation, is gearing up for an unusual overnight stay. This Saturday he sleeps near the entrance to the Bucket headquarters of the Jehovah’s Witnesses.
According to Dahlem, it is a last resort to enter into a conversation with the religious community about the inhumane social exclusion of everyone who leaves the Jehovah’s, voluntarily or not.
At the end of last year, a group of thirty resigned members made themselves heard in the national media. They had difficulty with the ‘intolerant’ and discriminatory’ exclusion policy of the religious community. Anyone who leaves or is expelled from the organization will be excluded. Jehovah’s are then no longer allowed to have contact with these ‘evil doers’.
They also run the risk of being excluded. “We call it shunning, because there is no comparable word for it in Dutch. Because you end up with ignoring or avoiding, but it actually equals a social death declaration.” Because of this course of action, the group considered legal action.
The group has since been converted into a foundation, which, according to Dahlem, currently has a hundred members. The chairman says that he has tried several times in the past year to talk to the Jehovah’s. “We wrote a letter three times asking to sit down. First we sent a letter, but there was no response.”
Then the foundation decided to visit the Emmer headquarters of the Jehovah’s and deliver the letter in person. At the last time, on August 27, the police came to watch, says Dahlem. “We walked onto the site with ten people. We stood in front of the organization with the letter in hand, but they refused to accept it. The police were called and we were then escorted off the site.”