Counting the Days to Armageddon
...is this the same guy?
Yes, folks, it's still me. Before turning to fiction I spent a few years working on a major study of a well-known but little understood religious movement, The Jehovah's Witnesses. I grew up in the movement but by my early twenties I realised that I didn't actually believe any of it. So I cut loose. Not an easy thing to do because it led to a break with my family.
After leaving the Witnesses and rebuilding my life, I read lots of books about them. They were pretty mixed. Some were good, some weren't. But I could find nothing which dealt fully with what I was most interested in - where their ideas about the "time of the end" came from, and how they took it all many steps further. So I thought, if the book I'm looking for hasn't been written, I'll just have to write it myself. And that's how "Counting the Days to Armageddon" came to be written.
Charles Taze Russell, who started the Watchtower movement, began with ideas which he found well within the Protestant mainstream. Prophetic speculation - setting dates for the second coming of Christ - had run its course and was thoroughly discredited. But Russell had new and very ingenious ideas of his own. He devised an entirely new set of dates in his countdown to the end of the world. One last-ditch attempt, you might think, to make sense of it all.
Russell, with his own end-times calendar, fared no better than his many predecessors. The end didn't come. Joseph Rutherford, his successor, tried to pick up the pieces. But Rutherford had little understanding of the tradition or the methods which Russell had used. He had a different approach altogether. With cunning and domineering rather than sensitivity and understanding, he transformed the Jehovah's Witnesses into a very different movement.
Read this fascinating story in Counting the Days to Armageddon.