The Watchtower Just Preached the One Thing It Never Does

On the June 2026 JW broadcast, governing body member David Splain addressed the newest graduating class of Gilead—Watchtower's missionary training school—with a talk built around a single theme: when someone disappoints you or does something you don't understand, don't assume the worst. You don't have all the facts. Only God has all the facts. Give people the benefit of the doubt.

If you never attended a Kingdom Hall, that sounds like reasonable Sunday-morning advice. If you're an ex-Jehovah's Witness—or physically in but mentally out, still attending for whatever reason while no longer believing—you heard the problem before he finished the sentence. What I want to show here isn't merely that Splain failed to practice what he preached. It's that the organization he helps lead built a system of rules designed to do the opposite of what he preached. And I can prove it from their own publications.

What Splain Actually Said

Splain built his talk around the Bible character Lot, Abraham's nephew. Lot doesn't come off especially well in the scriptures—he takes the best land when Abraham gives him a choice, he moves his family into Sodom, and a surface reading makes him look selfish and materialistic. Splain's point was: don't do the surface reading. The Apostle Peter—writing under what Jehovah's Witnesses and much of the Christian world regard as divine inspiration—called Lot righteous. Three times. Whatever Lot looked like from the outside, God's assessment was that he was a righteous man.

The lesson Splain drew from that is, credit where it's due, actually thoughtful. Maybe Lot was older than Abraham and had a customary right to choose first. Maybe he moved to Sodom to protect his family, not for the luxury. You don't know. You can't know. So extend grace. His talk, he said, was not about proving anything. Lot was only an example. The real point was that you need to give people the benefit of the doubt when you don't have all the facts.

He illustrated it with a story from his own experience:

I once served a congregation where I heard a lot of talk about a certain sister. People were saying she claims to be sick, but you see her at the grocery store. She has plenty of energy to shop for groceries, but you don't see her at many meetings. I visited that sister and I'm glad I did. It turns out that she was suffering from a crippling disease. She was almost constantly in pain. But from time to time, the pain would abate. And when it did, she took advantage of the opportunity to go out and get some groceries. She lived alone. She didn't have any help. When the pain came back, she was almost in bed all the time. Well, it would have been better to offer a little help rather than to criticize, wouldn't it?

His refrain throughout was that you're only seeing the little things that annoy you—you're not seeing the whole picture. Only Jehovah sees the whole picture. Strip the names off it, remove it from the Watchtower organization, and it's genuinely good moral instruction. Don't judge by appearances. Assume the best about your fellow believers. Leave room for what you can't see.

That's the official story: a loving reminder to be generous with each other.

The Machine Running Underneath

Here's the one detail that doesn't fit. The organization David Splain helps lead runs one of the most aggressive systems of judgment and exclusion in modern religion. And he knows it, because he helps run it.

When a Jehovah's Witness is accused of what the organization calls serious wrongdoing, three elders—local congregation leaders, unpaid laymen—are convened into what was called a judicial committee, now rebranded as a "committee of elders." The committee meets in private. The accused faces it alone. No lawyer, no family in the room, no advocate, and no recording allowed. That committee decides whether the person is repentant. If it decides they're not—which in practice is most of the time—the person is disfellowshipped, the organization's term for formal expulsion, now also rebranded as "removal from the congregation."

Disfellowshipping triggers shunning. Other Witnesses, including the person's own parents, children, and lifelong friends, are instructed to cut them off. No calls, no visits. In the strictest application, not even a greeting—unless the person comes back to the Kingdom Hall, in which case a brief warm greeting is permitted if a fellow Witness's conscience allows. How nice.

People are disfellowshipped and shunned for things the organization considers serious that much of the outside world would consider private, minor, or simply nobody else's business: smoking a cigarette, sex outside marriage, or—the one that matters most for where this is going—apostasy, which in practice can mean nothing more than expressing doubt about what the organization teaches.

Hold those two things side by side. On the broadcast, a governing body member preaches that you can't judge, you don't have all the facts, only God knows the heart—give the benefit of the doubt. Underneath him runs a machine that judges constantly, decides who's repentant, and strips people of their entire family over offenses as small as a cigarette or a doctrinal question. If you've been through it, you've felt that gap for a long time. What follows is an attempt to measure it—and to show that it's not an accident or a failure of follow-through. It's built that way on purpose.

The Smallest, Cleanest Version of the Contradiction

Splain's talk leans hard on one idea: the annoying brother, the difficult sister, the person who looks flawed from the outside might secretly be righteous the way Lot was secretly righteous—and you just don't have all the information. Give them the benefit of the doubt.

Now apply that to the single most common reason people quietly leave the religion: they start to doubt.

Raymond Franz, who sat on the governing body himself before he was expelled and wrote about it in his book Crisis of Conscience, documented a letter sent from Watchtower headquarters in 1980 to the organization's traveling overseers—the men who supervise the congregations. The position laid out in that letter was that a Witness who merely disagrees in thought with the organization's teachings can be treated as an apostate. And apostasy is a disfellowshipping and shunning offense. You don't have to start a rival group. You don't have to recruit anybody. The doubt itself, held and expressed, is enough.

Think about what that means against Splain's own framework. A person sitting in your congregation who has questions, who's struggling, who can't reconcile something they've been taught with something they've seen—by Splain's logic, that is exactly the person you're supposed to extend grace to. Maybe there's more to the story. Maybe they're in pain you can't see. Maybe, like Lot, they look flawed from the outside and God sees something you don't.

But the organization doesn't run a doubter through Splain's framework. It runs them through a judicial committee. And the committee's job isn't to wonder what it can't see. It's to decide whether the doubter is repentant—and if not, to remove them.

The benefit of the doubt in Splain's talk is something you owe to a fellow member at the coffee table. The moment that same member's struggle points at the organization, the benefit of the doubt evaporates and the machinery of judgment switches on. Same person, same incomplete picture, opposite response—depending entirely on whether their flaw threatens the institution or not.

The Best Argument in the Organization's Defense

Before going further, it's worth making the strongest counterargument as fairly as a loyal Witness would—because if it holds, this whole case falls apart.

The argument goes like this: Splain's talk was about personal relationships. How I, as an individual, treat the brother who annoys me at the Kingdom Hall. That's about charity—about not gossiping, about not assuming the worst in daily life. The judicial committee is something else entirely. That's process. That's the congregation protecting itself, following a scriptural procedure for handling serious sin. One is about personal attitude. The other is about institutional discipline. You can absolutely believe in extending grace and believe that a congregation needs a formal way to deal with wrongdoing. There's no contradiction—you're mixing up two categories that were never the same thing.

That is a real argument. It's not unreasonable on its face. Every institution has rules and needs a way to enforce them. A church that could never remove anyone for anything would be a free-for-all. "Give people the benefit of the doubt" cannot literally mean no accountability ever exists. If you were never in the organization, that probably sounds like a clean defense.

Here is exactly what's wrong with it.

Why the Defense Collapses on the Organization's Own Theology

A judicial process is only legitimate if it can actually determine the thing it claims to determine. So what does a Witness judicial committee claim to determine? Not just what happened. It claims to determine whether the wrongdoer is repentant. That is the hinge the entire outcome turns on.

Watchtower said it plainly in the Watchtower, April 15, 2015 study edition—the one used in congregation meetings:

If genuine repentance is not manifest to the elders who serve on a judicial committee, they must disfellowship the person.

Not the act. The repentance. Whether the person is truly sorry. Whether their heart has changed.

Repentance isn't a fact you can photograph. It's not in the act. It's a condition of the heart. And here is what this organization has taught for decades, from the same Bible it hands every member: no human being can read the heart. That is God's exclusive ability. The verse they cite is 1 Samuel 16:7:

Mere man sees what appears to the eyes. But as for Jehovah, he sees what the heart is.

There are two halves to that verse. The first is about human limitation—only the surface, what appears to the eyes. The second is about what only God can see: the heart. Watchtower has built articles around that verse, calling Jehovah the examiner of hearts and contrasting that explicitly with what humans can see. A 1996 article directed elders to imitate God's impartiality precisely because it is so easy for a human to judge by his own standards and get it wrong.

Now here is the part that should stop you in your tracks. That same verse—1 Samuel 16:7—is the one David Splain reached for in his broadcast talk. But listen to which half he quoted:

Mere man sees what appears to the eyes. We can't possibly have all the information that we would need in order to render a final judgment on someone.

He used the first half. The half about human limitation—the half that supports "give people the benefit of the doubt." He left out the second half. But Jehovah sees what the heart is. That is the half that, when placed alongside the judicial committee's mandate, takes the entire system down with it. He quoted the half that served the talk and dropped the half that indicts the organization.

Put it together, because this is the crux of the argument in four sentences. The judicial committee exists to judge repentance. Repentance is a condition of the heart. Watchtower's own theology—including Splain's own talk—holds that no human can read the heart; only God can. Therefore, by the organization's own teaching, the judicial committee is asked to render a verdict on the one thing it has openly confessed no human being is equipped to see.

The "it's just process, not personal charity" defense dies on that, because the process is built on a judgment their own theology reserves for God alone. You cannot hide behind due process when your due process is asked to do the exact thing your theology says is impossible for any human to do.

How the Benefit of the Doubt Becomes a One-Way Valve

The benefit of the doubt inside this organization isn't absent. That's the mistake people make when they describe the organization as simply hypocritical. It is that—but the benefit of the doubt is also very much present. It's just installed as a one-way valve. And the valve has a direction: it always flows toward whatever protects the institution.

When the uncertainty is about a member's minor friction with another member—that cold brother, the absent sister—the benefit of the doubt flows freely. Splain spends a whole talk opening that valve. The cost to the institution is zero. In fact, it's a benefit: it keeps a congregation peaceful and cohesive.

When the uncertainty is about a member's loyalty to the organization—the doubter, the questioner—that valve slams shut. Uncertainty now resolves toward suspicion, toward a committee, toward removal. The cost of extending grace is high here: a tolerated doubter is a risk to the control structure.

And when the uncertainty involves protecting the institution from outside scrutiny or legal liability—that's where we go next—the valve doesn't just point toward the institution. It points there so hard that it runs straight over the most vulnerable person in the room.

The benefit of the doubt isn't a principle the organization holds. It's a resource it allocates, and it allocates it in exactly one direction.

The Hardest Layer: What Happened to the Children

Everything so far has been about logic and doctrine—words against words. This section is where the words meet a child.

There is one place where this organization's policy doesn't just fail to give the benefit of the doubt to the vulnerable. It formally hands the benefit of the doubt to the person accused of harming them. And they wrote it down.

Australia. From 2013 to 2017, the Australian government ran a Royal Commission—a national inquiry with the power to compel testimony and documents—into how institutions responded to child sexual abuse. Jehovah's Witnesses were among the institutions examined, and the commission obtained access to the organization's own internal case files. Those files showed that the Australian branch had recorded allegations against more than a thousand alleged perpetrators of child sexual abuse since 1950. Every single one had not been reported to police. The commission's finding was direct: the organization's reliance on its own internal rules—including something called the two-witness rule—showed a serious lack of understanding of the nature of child sexual abuse, and that children were not adequately protected.

Pennsylvania. In 2019, the Pennsylvania Attorney General's Office opened a statewide grand jury investigation into the handling of child sexual abuse within the Jehovah's Witness institution—an investigation prompted in part by reporting on how Witness leaders had treated survivors who came forward. As of the most recent count from the Attorney General's own office, 17 members of Jehovah's Witnesses have been charged following grand jury presentments since 2022, with multiple convictions and serious prison sentences. One man in Reading received 14 to 46 years. A former elder in Lancaster County was convicted on a dozen charges and sentenced to over 11 years. Some of the men charged were elders themselves—the same role that sits on those judicial committees. A broader grand jury report on the organization's systemic handling of these cases has been reported as expected but had not been released at the time of writing.

The rule book. Jehovah's Witnesses have an internal manual for elders called Shepherd the Flock of God. It is confidential—members cannot see it—but copies have leaked and it was tendered in evidence to the Australian Royal Commission and in other court cases around the world. Here is what the 2025 update, the most recent version, says about establishing wrongdoing:

There must be two or three eyewitnesses to the wrongdoing. Suspicions and hearsay are not sufficient evidence. A committee should not be formed if there is only one eyewitness.

That is the two-witness rule, drawn from a verse in Deuteronomy about requiring multiple witnesses. And the manual directs elders to apply that same procedure to allegations of child abuse.

Now think about what child sexual abuse actually is. It happens in private, behind closed doors. There is almost never a second witness. There is the child, and there is the abuser. Here is what the manual says happens when there is only one witness and the accused denies it:

If the accuser or the accused is unwilling to meet with the elders or if the accused continues to deny the allegation of a single eyewitness and the wrongdoing is not established, the matter cannot be handled by a committee.

The child accuses. The adult denies. There is no second witness because there almost never is. And the organization's own written rule says the wrongdoing is not established—no committee, no action.

In the exact situation where the central fact cannot be proven—one person's word against another's—the organization's written policy resolves the uncertainty in one direction: toward the accused. The benefit of the doubt that Splain preached from a stage is handed in writing to the adult accused of harming a child.

To be scrupulously fair: the manual does include some protections for the victim. A child is no longer required to make the accusation in the presence of the abuser—the organization changed that after getting hammered by the Australian Royal Commission over it. The accusation can now be submitted in writing, and a trusted person can accompany the child. Those provisions are real. But look at what they actually do: they make the experience gentler. They do not change the outcome. You don't have to face him in the room, but it is still your word against his denial with no second witness, and the rule still lands on not established, no committee. The child is spared confrontation but still denied justice—because the organization does not report the alleged crime to the authorities unless required to do so by law. In many jurisdictions, it is not required. Elders tell parents they are allowed to report, but unless forced to do so, the elders will not. The benefit of the doubt flows to the accused—not because anyone proved his innocence, but because the structure treats an unprovable accusation as a finding that nothing happened, and then adds a guess about his spiritual heart that 1 Samuel 16:7 says no human is equipped to make.

What Watchtower Did With Its Own Records

The organization didn't just write these rules. It has gone to court to keep what those rules produced out of sight.

Watchtower maintains internal records of abuse allegations. A 1997 letter to congregations across the United States asked elders to report known molesters back to headquarters. That correspondence became a database. When survivors' attorneys have gone to court and sought access to it, Watchtower has declined to produce it even in the face of court orders. In one California case—brought by a woman abused as a child by an elder—Watchtower's refusal to hand over those documents led the court to impose what are called terminating sanctions: you forfeit the case for refusing to produce the evidence. The result was a judgment of just over $4 million, upheld on appeal.

An organization genuinely confident it had handled these cases properly could open its files and prove it. Watchtower chose instead to accept terminating sanctions and a multi-million dollar judgment rather than produce the records. That is not the behavior of an institution that believes its own judgment was sound. It is the behavior of an institution protecting itself—which, as we've seen at every layer of this, is the one direction the benefit of the doubt always flows.

Four Angles, One Structure

Line it all up.

Splain on a stage: give the benefit of the doubt, because you can't see the whole picture and only God can.

The doubter, denied that grace, run through a committee and removed for the crime of having questions.

The judicial committee itself—built to judge repentance, a condition of the heart that their own theology reserves for God alone.

And the abused child, handed the cruelest version: the benefit of the doubt taken away from them and given in writing to the adult they accused.

Individually, each of those might be arguable. Together, they are not four separate problems. They are one structure seen from four different angles. The benefit of the doubt is real inside the organization—engineered into a one-way valve that opens toward whatever protects the institution and slams shut on whoever threatens it: the doubter who threatens its control, the child whose protection would threaten its reputation and legal exposure.

What the Lot Coda Gives Away

There is one more detail that almost didn't make it in, but belongs here.

Remember that Splain built his entire talk defending Lot—arguing that maybe Lot was older than Abraham, maybe he had reasons, you can't prove he didn't. At one point he says it plainly:

"Well, I hear someone say that's all very well, but you can't prove that Lot was older than Abraham because the Bible doesn't say he was." You're making my point because you can't prove that he wasn't.

That is the benefit of the doubt at its most generous: extended to a man on the strength of evidence that doesn't even exist. Look at how much imagination Splain is willing to spend inventing innocent explanations for a Bible character. And then remember how little the organization is willing to spend on a child harmed by someone in the congregation.

The same organization that will conjure a backstory to clear Lot will tell a real child there is nothing it can do because guilt was not established. That gap—between the grace the organization will imagine for the people it is safe to forgive and the grace it will deny the people it costs to protect—is the whole institution in miniature.

David Splain wasn't lying when he said:

The goal is to remind us that Jehovah is the only one who has the facts. He loves our brothers and sisters, and he wants us to love them, too. And he'll be pleased when we give them the benefit of the doubt.

He probably even believes it—as a thing members owe to each other, and above all as a thing members owe to the organization. What the entire structure is built to prevent is the reverse: the organization owing that same benefit of the doubt back to the individual, to the doubter, to the accused who poses no threat, to the child.

The benefit of the doubt in this religion is a gift you are commanded to give. It is never a gift you can expect to receive from the institution. And the talk Splain gave to that graduating class wasn't a description of the organization's character. It was a description of the single quadrant where being merciful happens to cost them nothing.