Articles in the Witnesses’ magazines and books were now published anonymously, concluding a process initiated during the Rutherford era. Presiding over the Witnesses in an era that was now suspicious of charismatic leadership, Knorr struggled to depersonalize the movement’s hierarchy and almost consciously organized a sustained routinization of charisma within the group. The 115,000 active Witnesses, still committed to radical pacifism, were again experiencing difficult times in most countries of the world. Again, the transition from one president to the next took place during a world war. Nathan Homer Knorr (1905-77) succeeded Rutherford in 1942. Several hundred died in Nazi concentration camps. Although Rutherford would be later criticized for his early and, in retrospect, naive attempt in 1933 to contact the Nazi regime and present a positive image of the German Jehovah’s Witnesses, such contacts quickly failed and the Witnesses were severely persecuted in Nazi Germany, as in Fascist Italy and Communist Russia. With a peculiar and abrasive populist rhetoric, Ruther ford consistently attacked organized religion, politics, and big business as “rackets” and corrupt monopolies up to no good. Not only did Rutherford promote speculations about a new date for the end of the world, 1925, he also transformed the loose network of Russell’s times into a strongly centralized organization, changing its name in 1931 into the current one of Jehovah’s Witnesses.
In this climate, the election as president of the Watch Tower Society of Joseph Franklin Rutherford (1869-1942) was not welcome by everybody, and several schismatic groups separated from the mainline movement, although all these splinter organizations remained quite small. In several countries they were arrested in significant numbers. The Bible Students, however, were radical Christian pacifists, who adamantly refused to be drafted and to fight in war. The prophetic failure of 1914 did not stop the movement’s progress. This confirmed to later social science that new religious movements, in order to gain a large following, should exhibit only a moderate discontinuity with respect to mainline religion. Russell’s notable success (almost all his books sold millions of copies) did not come so much from the alleged revolutionary character of his teachings as from the fact that they were perceived as being in continuity with, if not part of, mainline Christianity. In the late nineteenth century, however, they were shared by quite a few preachers. These doctrines would later seem highly heterodox to mainline Christians. He also preached conditionalism, a rejection of the traditional view of the immortality of the soul. Russell’s ideas involved the denial of Trinity (Jesus Christ was regarded as God’s first creature). Russell’s followers were known simply as Bible Students, but in 1884 the preacher formally established an organization known as the Zion’s Watch Tower Society, later the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society. In 1878, Russell separated himself from other factions of the movement and started editing a magazine, Zion’s Watch Tower and Herald of Christ’s Presence, which is still published today as The Watchtower. Russell both predicted the end of the world as we know it for the year 1914 and shifted his focus on teachings other than prophetical date setting. After the new disappointment, the young Russell emerged as one of the leaders of those who had placed their hopes in 1874. Some of those who would still calculate prophetic dates focused their hopes on the year 1874, and constituted a loosely organized movement. Those who renounced any further date setting eventually became the Seventh Day Adventists, a large international denomination.
After 1844, Adventists divided into several competing groups.
Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Russell became involved in theological controversies within the American Adventist movement, which had predicted the end of the world for the year 1844 based on numerological speculations drawn from the Bible. The Jehovah’s Witnesses are the largest among a group of several religious movements that claim the heritage of Pastor Charles Taze Russell (1852-1916).
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