“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.”