“We have bloggers who are Christians, we have bloggers who are atheists, we have a blogger who is gay and God knows what else we will have next,” says Freeminds.org founder Randall Watters. “All I care about is that they are truthful and that we can all get along in spite of our differences of viewpoint, in spite of different world views.”

The Free Minds website is now home to more than a dozen bloggers, links to media stories involving Jehovah’s Witnesses and articles about Jehovah’s Witness doctrine and history. It grew out of Bethel Ministries, which Watters began in 1982 in an attempt to expose the inaccuracies of Jehovah’s Witness teachings. He says that it was a logical progression to develop a website that would host a variety of voices.

“I knew that people searching the Internet wanted the most objective facts that they could find, and often without your opinion or your biases,” he says. “So the title for the website, Free Minds, was appropriate, because I did not want to be seen as some bigoted Christian who only showed one side of the picture. … With the recent reorganization of the site, and a variety of bloggers, this has come full circle to what I intended in the beginning. It was just time.”

Watters began studying The Truth that Leads to Eternal Life with Jehovah’s Witnesses in 1971, and although he appreciated the simple answers to complex questions, he found some teachings hard to reconcile, including thousand-year creative days and the existence of two classes, one with an earthly hope and one with a heavenly hope, with one class partaking of bread and wine, and one not. Prior to becoming a Jehovah’s Witness, he had partaken privately, although he felt no urge drawing him to heaven.


“Once a year I would get a little bread and wine and pray and have my own commune in silence. That’s how important it was to me and how much I realize this was a key part of a Christian’s life.”

Photo courtesy of Randall Watters

He adds that another teaching he found absurd was that of the 144,000 ruling from the heavens, and the glory given to them by the organization.

“This favoritism did not exist in the New Testament, but I let it go as something that would be worked out later inside the organization…

“I experienced a great deal of cognitive dissonance in trying to reconcile this new world view with what I had learned up to that point all my life, and so the dissonance had to be resolved. It was resolved in much the same way as other religious experiences that are subjective — the pressure had driven me to decide on the witnesses as the one true religion. And like many decisions that are life changing, once you make them you will promote them as the way to go, the truth, and do not want to listen to alternatives, as you do not want to experience any more dissonance. So I made it a point not to doubt the organization once I had established this matter, once I had ended the dissonance in my head.”

As with a number of people who have realized that Jehovah’s Witness teachings aren’t all they’re cracked up to be, Watters spent time volunteering at the Watch Tower Society’s world headquarters in Brooklyn, New York, during which he began to experience serious doubts. When other volunteers with 10 or 20 years of service began to be dismissed for simply questioning doctrinal interpretations of scriptures, Watters did some research of his own, poring over a century of Watchtower magazines to determine how a Witness knows that he or she is anointed, the validity of the Gentile Times and the issue of two classes of Christians, as well as the dates and false prophecies the Witnesses had made.

“About this time in late 1979 I realized that this not only was not God’s organization, it did not represent or even resemble the early Christian church at all. This was primarily due to their misunderstanding of the message of the New Testament of salvation by grace, which they called ‘undeserved kindness.’ ”

As time went by, Watters became tired of the Governing Body’s treatment of anyone who disagreed with them, and he left Bethel, becoming an elder in a congregation in El Segundo, Calif. Six months later, he began attending a local church called Hope Chapel.

“I loved it, and decided to be through with the witnesses since I no longer believed it anyway,” he says.

After breaking away, Watters wrote a tract, What Happened at the World Headquarters of Jehovah’s Witnesses in the Spring of 1980?

“This was the year before Ray Franz wrote his book, Crisis of Conscience, so nobody really knew anything.”

When the pastor of his church found out about the tract, he volunteered to print 10,000 and send them around the world, which led to Watters’ creation of Bethel Ministries in 1982. Watters later became a pastor of the Hope Chapel, but separated Free Minds from that role in 1993, reorganizing it as a non-profit educational organization with no ties to any religious organization or church.

Photo courtesy of Randall Watters

“Basically, after all those years I still love Christ … but I no longer liked being in the limelight, and it does seem that most people were interested in doctrine and theology and so forth, which I’ve found rather useless in trying to help a person out of the Watchtower cult. What I wanted to do was to show people the real reason others joined these organizations and how to help them.”

After nearly 30 years of educating others about Jehovah’s Witnesses, Watters is pleased with the direction Free Minds has taken as it grew from a tract with a small circulation to a website accessible around the world.

“So far this is working very nicely, in spite of objections from the more fundamentalist side of Christianity,” says Watters. “We mean no harm to anyone, but our goal is to champion freedom of thought and to expose those who try to stifle thinking through religious, political or other types of oppression.”

Watters says that Free Minds has given his life a motivation, through which he has touched the lives of thousands of people.

“I have helped many of them to have their minds set free from the control of others, and to learn to think in new ways, and to open up new opportunities in their lives for a better future,” he says. “For several years I did interventions with Steven Hassan, so I learned a lot about how to specifically get people out of religious cults and that is one of the best things that has happened to me.”

Despite the millions of visitors to the Free Minds site, Watters says he has had very few negative responses.

“It’s probably because I am not a hateful person or bitter against the Watch Tower. They did not kick me out, I had no specific issues with any of the leadership or people in the organization — I simply knew it did not represent the Bible. I simply knew they were lying and what they wanted was power over other people. That I could not stomach and I will not stomach.”

It’s no surprise to her, either, despite the fact that she spent many years promoting the beliefs, and even volunteering for more than 10 years at the world headquarters in Brooklyn, N.Y.

“Writers should write about what they know, and I know a lot about the Watch Tower,” says Anderson, who lives in Tennessee with her husband, Joe. “I had so much invested in it. I was so heady about it, arrogantly heady, so I’m trying to passionately undo what I did for years. It’s very important to me to present the truth — I thought what I was doing was truth.”

Joe and Barbara Anderson — photo courtesy of Mrs. Anderson

Spending hours doing research is not a difficult task because every topic leads to another.

“Sometimes when I‘m working on one particular thing, my eyes catch something on the page or across the page that is enlightening. I make a note, and then I go back to it … and then I follow it through and see how they introduced a new slant on an old teaching. They don’t bring in a new teaching, they just slant it differently.

“Every rock you turn over you find a different bug. I don’t mean the Watch Tower is a rock; they’re sort of a rocklike religion — they’ve got their heavies, and they’re non-thinking like a rock,” she says with a laugh.

But proper research is about more than simply finding damning tidbits to use against Jehovah’s Witnesses. Anderson makes sure of everything she says before bringing a new item to light, a fact that many readers appreciate.

“Generally speaking, since I try to abide by an ethical approach, the comments and responses are generally very favorable because I don’t come across as having an agenda,” she says. “I don’t have agenda. If the Watch Tower has the truth, then I want it. If I can find positive things to say about them, I do, on a specific subject.

Barbara in 1957 — photo courtesy Mrs. Anderson

“People are appreciative of it, not because I’m the best writer in world, but because I’m inviting them to share in what I was part of. People are curious about Mecca — and it is like the Mecca of our past religion.”

Anderson became involved with Jehovah’s Witnesses when she was baptized as a teenager in 1954. From June 1982 to December 1992, she served several departments in the Brooklyn Bethel, including the shipping and accounting departments, and later the writing department, where she put her passion for research to good use compiling historical information for the Jehovah’s Witness history tome, Jehovah’s Witnesses: Proclaimers of God’s Kingdom.

Of  course, women aren’t usually involved in the writing department, and Anderson’s placement in it didn’t happen overnight. Although she stated on her application that she was allergic to toxic chemicals, Anderson was assigned to tape duplication — which used a variety of chemicals. So Anderson was shuffled over to the shipping department, where, at 42 years of age, she worked for almost a year with much younger men and women.

“I really became mom to those kids,” she recalls. “Our son was actually just a year or two older than most of the young men there at the time.”

She later moved to the engineering department, finally able to put her secular skills to good use.

“I did specialized bookkeeping for construction companies,” Anderson says. “I knew my way around the field.”

Her bookkeeping skills helped her uncover a scheme that explains why many Kingdom Halls built in the 1980s and 1990s have identical chairs.

At the time, construction was being simplified and congregations could pick from five or six hall designs, but they were told to buy their chairs from a specific Canadian company, for which the department’s assistant overseer was a commissioned salesperson — a fact Anderson discovered with a quick glance at an invoice.

“He found the company that could provide the chairs and signed up with them as a rep,” said Anderson. “Because he was a rep, for every chair that was purchased, he got two per cent. That man is dead now, but how many chairs have been purchased with him getting two per cent? You know it had to be tens of thousands over the years — until it was discovered, and then it was stopped.”

Anderson became a personal secretary for a Bethel project manager, and became involved in several projects, including the initial development of the Watchtower’s property at Patterson, N.Y., and the remodeling of the Bossert Hotel. Her passion for research was utilized in this role, in which she prepared environmental impact statements and studied city zoning requirements for a projected new 30-story building.

“Since this (Bethel’s Brooklyn location) was a historical area, you couldn’t remodel unless you obeyed the rules,” Anderson says. “If a group was working on the windows, they had to have a new window that looked just like the original window. How do you know what the original window was like? The building could have been built in 1914.

“It got around that I liked to do this kind of thing. When a need came up, I’d get to go and do it. I went to the library or the Long Island Historical Society, which had records going right back to the Revolutionary War — the Battle of Long Island was fought right there where Bethel is.”

1983, First winter in Brooklyn — photo courtesy Mrs. Anderson

When a lull came in Anderson’s job when the city did not approve the construction of a 30-story building on Brooklyn’s waterfront, she was loaned to another department, and spent a month cataloguing the wiring for Bethel’s telephone system — just Anderson, a computer and a rickety chair in a cold room full of wires.

“I could have kicked myself for even asking to be there,” she said with a laugh, adding that the younger workers to whom she became “Mom”, felt sorry for her and tried to brighten her day. “They felt so sorry for me that it wouldn’t be unusual for me to find a rose on my little table. It was so sweet!”

Following another lull and a loan to another department, Anderson’s supervisor received a call from the writing department, which was hoping to utilize Anderson’s research talent for the book that came to be called Jehovah’s Witnesses: Proclaimers of God’s Kingdom.

“I went to the interview and there were five women, me and four others, and they were all housekeepers — so I got the job,” Anderson says. “I do think the deck was stacked — I was with housekeepers who couldn’t even type.”

When Anderson’s position became known, she was quickly given access to files that contained some of her best known “discoveries”.

“They say women gossip, but I’m telling you it was the men who gossiped at Bethel. And that inner group passed the word.”

That led to Anderson being directed to an old cabinet from former president Charles Taze Russell’s day, full of card files that linked up with actual files stored in a vault.

“I could spend as much time as I wanted to. There were all kinds of file cabinets in there, and I just started pulling them out.”

In one cabinet, she found the Watchtower Society’s first account book from 1881 — but despite that discovery, she still maintained her modesty.

“When that discovery got around in the inner sanctum, my resume really got special,” she recalls. “I was scared to talk about what I was doing. I never told anybody. At the table, when people asked me, ‘What do you do?’ I barely let them know I was in writing because I just thought that this draws too much attention to the person — I was a purist. … You want to do what Jehovah expects of you — that was our motto — and these were God’s spokespeople.”

Anderson’s work uncovered some interesting facts about the Watch Tower Society’s history, some lost to time, others covered up. For instance, the schism that resulted between Russell and associate Nelson H. Barbour in 1878 wasn’t as much over Christ’s ransom, as over which man was God’s mouthpiece.

“The fight between Russell and Barbour — the Watch Tower keeps talking about over the years that it was all about the ransom. It wasn’t; that was secondary. It was over who was the channel. That’s what was going on behind the scenes.”

Her research on behalf of the Watch Tower Society turned up another intriguing discovery — one that started her on the path out of the organization.

“Russell was not the man the Watch Tower portrayed him as,” Anderson says. “Russell supplied the information and then later his associates supplied the information for any published material. They didn’t tell the history accurately. They were revisionists. The late material on Russell was taken from material that was written 40 years before, and that was written based on 20 years before and 40 years before, and so on, and so it was inaccurate and nobody bothered to check.

“So what surprised me the most was when the Proclaimers book paints him as this man who made his fortune from the haberdashery that his father started, that all of that income was behind Watch Tower and he was such a generous, wonderful man. The true picture is not that way at all. He was a wheeler-dealer. He was into the stock markets, and he was an oil and real estate speculator.”

He was also an abusive husband, she notes — her conviction solid because her research included reading the cross-examination of Maria Russell during the couple’s divorce proceedings, which paints a far different picture.

“There was one point when she was very ill,” Anderson says. “She had a bacterial infection and she was very ill. He was trying to get her to sign a paper that would say that she didn’t have any complaints about him. … He kept her up all night, as ill she was, and he badgered her and badgered her and badgered her. … That shocked me so much because when I was studying child abuse and domestic abuse for the society, that kind of behavior is psychological abuse. …

“When I read it, I was so moved that it was the only time in all of this, from the very beginning, that I cried. … He fit the profile of an abuser. It just blew away everything I ever thought. That probably was the first, most shocking thing.”

In 1997, Anderson severed her ties with the organization over the Watch Tower Society’s child abuse policies. In the ensuing years, she has since been actively working to increase education about Jehovah’s Witness teachings in an attempt to help others see the truth behind the organization.

“I have a passionate personality. … I’m of that nature that I would like to right injustices,” she says. “People who are in cults generally are of that nature — not the ones who are born in them, the ones who convert to a cult. … People join cults because they’re passionate about justice and a better life, and they want to share it with others and I’m of that nature.”

Her son, a former elder who served in Bethel for 16 years before he and his wife left to have children, doesn’t share her passion for the cause.

“My son hates it, of course,” she says. “He’s supportive of the Watch Tower through and through. He said I do a noble work but I should never have gone public with it.”

Because of the mandates of the Jehovah’s Witnesses teachings, her son is forced to shun her and her husband — a policy that disgusts Anderson.

“Shunning destroys families. If you destroy families in any way, through any other organization anywhere in the world, society would do something about it, but because it’s a religion, they can get away with it.”

But while she researches the organization, she always remembers that it is driven by men, not God.

“If I live for anther 10 years, it’ll probably be a smaller, well-operated organization,” Anderson says. “Will it be more spiritual? I don’t have any idea. Each bunch of Governing Body members bring in their own administration. …

“I don’t care anyway. They’re corrupt, but not financially corrupt — they’re ethically corrupt and they don’t even know it. And they’re mean as could be to do what they’re doing to people in the name of God. There’s no love. If you pattern yourself after Jesus, you’d never do those things.”

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To learn more about Barbara Anderson and her research, visit www.freeminds.org to read her blogs.