How Jehovah's Witnesses Blame the Victim for being Shunned

In a 2026 episode of JW Broadcasting, Clive Martin — a helper to Watch Tower's writing committee — read Psalm 27:10 as part of a devotional talk on the ransom. Soft voice, gentle pacing:

Even if my own father and mother abandon me, it's unthinkable, but even then, Jehovah himself will take me in.

It sounds like comfort. A faithful Jehovah's Witness nodded along. Most people hearing it will, too. But that specific verse, in a Watch Tower context, does very specific work — work the organization has been training its members to do with it for at least six decades. When a family member leaves the organization, the one who left is the abandoner. The faithful JW is the one who gets abandoned. Jehovah, operationalized as the organization, is the replacement family. I want to show you exactly how that machinery works.

How Shunning Actually Functions Inside the Organization

For anyone unfamiliar with how this plays out in practice: when a Jehovah's Witness gets disfellowshipped — rebranded in 2024 as being "removed from the congregation" — family members who remain active are required to shun them. Not softly. Totally. The current jw.org policy states that

loyal family members should not look for excuses to have dealings with a disfellowshipped relative not living at home.

Contact is to be

limited, kept to a minimum only for necessary family matters.

And this isn't a personal suggestion. A parent who maintains normal contact with a disfellowshipped adult child, while not disfellowshipped themselves, can be counseled by elders and will be regarded as spiritually weak — which carries real social consequences inside the community. The shunning is not optional.

Here is the part that matters. Watch Tower doesn't just tell members to do the shunning. It tells them in print that the shunning isn't the abandonment. The person who left is the one who did the abandoning.

The 1981 Article That Named the Aggressor

A 1981 Watchtower article titled "If a Relative is Disfellowshipped" puts the question directly as a paragraph heading: Who is at fault over family problems that disfellowshipping may cause? The same paragraph answers it. Not Jehovah, not the faithful Christian relatives. The disfellowshipped person, the article says, has brought this on himself and on his family the way Korah, Dathan, and Abiram did.

That comparison isn't casual. In the Hebrew Bible, Korah, Dathan, and Abiram rebelled against Moses' God-appointed authority, and the ground opened under them and swallowed them whole. That's the reference Watch Tower reached for in print to describe what a disfellowshipped relative has done. Not mistaken. Not struggling. Cosmically condemned.

That framework — the person who leaves is the aggressor, the faithful are the victims — is the context you need in place before you hear Psalm 27:10 the way the organization intends it to be heard.

The 2021 Study Article: Psalm 27:10 in Parentheses

In 2021, a study edition article called "When a Loved One Leaves Jehovah" softened the language but kept the machine running. The article gives grieving parents this exact instruction:

Fight the tendency to think that this tragedy must be your fault.

A mother is instructed by her organization to stop speaking to her own child — and then instructed by the same organization to actively fight off any instinct that she might be part of the problem.

The article in its sixth paragraph states that sometimes a parent abandons the truth and "even the family." And then, in parentheses immediately after that sentence, a single scripture citation: Psalm 27:10. A parent who got disfellowshipped is, in the same parentheses as the verse about abandonment, cast as the abandoner.

It's worth being precise about what a study edition article is. It's not an opinion piece or a regional newsletter. The study edition is what every JW congregation in every country works through together, paragraph by paragraph, on a specific assigned week — an elder reading the printed question, members raising hands to recite the answer. When that parenthetical citation of Psalm 27:10 hit the page in November 2021, millions of people went through it in unison. That's the distribution scale at which this rhetorical move was deployed.

The article then introduces a young JW named Esther whose father was disfellowshipped. According to the article, Esther describes frequent tears when she came to see his departure from the organization as a conscious choice rather than a slow drift, along with ongoing worry and panic attacks.

Read that slowly. Esther's father didn't leave the family. He left the organization. But the article has already done the equivalence: leaving the truth equals leaving the family. And Psalm 27:10 is the verse Watch Tower placed in the parentheses next to it.

A Template That Runs Back Sixty Years

This isn't a one-off article. A 1964 Watchtower titled "Loyalty to Jehovah's Organization" uses the same verse the same way. A Filipino pioneer driven from home by their Catholic family after refusing to vote — on JW neutrality grounds — leans on Psalm 27:10 for comfort. Sixty-two years. Same verse, same move. When someone rejects or leaves the organization, Psalm 27:10 is deployed to cast them as the abandoning party, and Jehovah, operationalized as the organization, is the replacement.

So by the time Clive Martin picks up that verse in 2026 for what sounds like a soft devotional segment about the ransom, his audience has been trained for six decades to hear it a specific way.

What the 2026 Broadcast Does That Print Can't

Hold two things next to each other. On one side: the organization's established use of Psalm 27:10 — parents who got disfellowshipped are the abandoners, faithful children are the ones Jehovah takes in. On the other side: a 2026 broadcast where a teacher stands at a pulpit and reads that same verse as part of a talk on the daily benefits of the ransom. Soft voice. Nothing adversarial on the surface.

But think about who's in that audience. Some portion of those viewers — and the research data says the portion isn't small — have a disfellowshipped family member they no longer speak to. A son, a daughter, a parent, a sibling. Someone who left. Someone the organization told them to cut off. They're hearing Psalm 27:10 while sitting in a home that has been emptied by their organization's own policy.

And the organization has spent decades training them to hear this specific verse as a description of what happens when a family member leaves the truth — not what happens when the organization requires you to cut off your own child.

The article wrote the script. The broadcast performs it. A warm voice, gentle pacing, a production calibrated to land as consolation. That performance is doing work a printed paragraph can't do alone. It gives the audience a felt experience of the comfort the verse is supposedly providing — and the felt experience is exactly why the argument inside it is so hard to see.

The Inversion

The scripture that most cleanly describes what the shunning policy actually causes — one family member refusing contact with another — is being read to the people doing the refusing. And the people doing the refusing have been taught to hear it as comfort for the abandonment they suffered.

Somewhere right now, a Jehovah's Witness mother is watching that 2026 segment. She hasn't spoken to her son in years. He left the organization. He didn't stop loving her. He didn't disappear — she did, because the organization told her to, because staying in contact would have been, in the organization's own words, sharing in his wicked works. She misses him. She'd admit that if you asked. But she's learned how to house that loss. The organization taught her how. You call it loving discipline. You call it upholding Jehovah's standards. And when the feeling gets heavy, she reaches for a verse — a verse about being abandoned by her father and mother, a verse about Jehovah stepping in.

The organization wrote that moment for her. Not metaphorically. Literally. The 2021 article instructs her, by name of her emotional state, to fight the tendency to think this tragedy might be her fault. The 1981 article told her who the aggressor is. The 2026 broadcast gave her the verse that turns her loss into something Jehovah rescued her from rather than something she was instructed to cause.

An organization doesn't accidentally build a sixty-year archive of this kind of rhetorical work. It builds it because the work is effective. It keeps the mother inside. It keeps her convinced. It keeps her from asking the question that would unravel the whole thing: whose policy it actually was that stopped her from seeing her son.

Psalm 27:10 is the cleanest current example. But the template is general. Any scripture about faithfulness in the face of opposition, any scripture about family rejection, any scripture about Jehovah as a replacement parent — the machinery works on almost any verse. The verses are interchangeable. The inversion is the constant.