This Proves the Governing Body Knows They're in Trouble

In Governing Body Update number three of 2026, Mark Sanderson told millions of Jehovah's Witness parents worldwide that they could preview upcoming convention dramas before letting their children watch them. In forty years as a Jehovah's Witness — sitting through well over a hundred conventions, watching my own kids watch the dramas — I never once heard a Governing Body member, or anyone else in that organization, tell parents to preview anything coming from Watch Tower. Not once. That break from a century of practice is the story. What forced it is more important than the announcement itself.

The coverage I've seen from others gets the what right: the hypocrisy, the inconsistency. But no one seems to be asking why. The answer to why tells you everything about what the Governing Body actually did here, and why almost no Jehovah's Witness parent is ever going to exercise the option they were just handed.

What Sanderson Actually Said

Here is the announcement verbatim:

We know you enjoyed watching episodes 1, 2, and 3 of the Good News According to Jesus video series when they were released at the 2024 and 2025 conventions. We're pleased to inform you that new episodes of the Good News According to Jesus will now be released prior to each convention series. Therefore, the episodes for this year's convention, episodes 4, 5, and 6 are now available to view on jw.org and in the JW Library app. Many of you may still choose to wait until the convention to watch these feature-length Bible dramas. We leave this up to each family to decide. This adjustment allows parents to preview the content first and then prepare their young children for what will be shown at the convention.

It's framed as pastoral care — a courtesy to families, a tool for parental headship. All the right words. Most active Witnesses watching the broadcast probably nodded and didn't think twice about it. But anyone who was in this religion and left recognizes immediately that something doesn't fit.

A Century of Content With No Preview Warning

To understand why the announcement is so striking, you have to look at what Watchtower has been putting in front of children for the better part of a century — without a content warning, without a parental review option, without a moment's hesitation.

In 1978, the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society published My Book of Bible Stories — yellow cover, large illustrations, written specifically for young children. Watchtower itself has said more than 25 million copies were printed in 70 languages. It's still on jw.org today. If you haven't seen it, pull up the PDF version, not just the website. The reason for that distinction will become clear.

Story six, "A Good Son and a Bad One," covers Cain murdering Abel. The illustration shows Abel lying on the ground dead with a pool of blood running from his head. This is a children's book that Witnesses placed in doctors' offices and hospital waiting rooms.

Story fourteen, "God Tests Abraham's Faith," shows Abraham holding a knife over his bound son Isaac. The text walks a child through the moment Abraham is about to bring the blade down.

Story fifty, "Two Brave Women," tells the story of Deborah and Jael. The centerpiece illustration shows a man in a tent with a tent peg through his skull and blood on the ground. On the jw.org webpage for this story, the image is cropped so the graphic portion is hidden. In the actual book or downloaded PDF, it's there in full. Watchtower knows non-Witness visitors see the website, so they sanitized it. Witnesses read the actual book to their children. They've been desensitized to this kind of imagery across a lifetime of magazines and meetings.

In the official study questions printed at the back of the book — questions Watchtower wrote and shipped into Witness homes for parents to discuss with small children — the question for the Sodom and Gomorrah story reads:

What does this Bible account show regarding God's view of homosexuality?

Set aside for now that the story's explicit purpose in Genesis has nothing to do with that. The point is that Watchtower wrote that question, printed it, and built it into a book designed for elementary-age children.

Beyond the book: every convention I attended growing up included dramatized scenes of biblical violence — Achan and his family stoned to death, the destruction of Sodom, Old Testament executions staged for general audiences where children were expected to sit in every session. There's no Sunday school to send younger children to during intense material. Kids are in the auditorium for all of it. There was never a content rating. There was never a "parents may want to review this first."

For nearly fifty years, Watchtower has shown children content that any pediatric psychologist would flag — and never once asked parents to preview it first. There's no opt-out, no preview. You don't turn down a meal offered by God's channel. You just eat it.

Watchtower's Own Rules on Demons and Spiritism in Entertainment

The timing problem runs deeper than the violence in My Book of Bible Stories, because Watchtower spent decades aggressively policing what adult Jehovah's Witnesses were permitted to watch in their own homes — specifically when that content involved demons or spiritism.

The 1988 Awake! article "What's So Horrible About Horror Movies?" warned readers about

the spiritistic and demonistic overtones of many horror films.

The same article asked:

Would a Christian youth be standing firm against the machinations of the devil if he fed himself on a diet of films that featured spiritism?

The 1990 Awake! article "Does It Matter Which Movies I See?" warned about horror films it characterized as

portraying satanic possession, rape, and bloodletting by the most diabolical of means.

A 2005 Awake! article warned that movies for children and teens may contain elements of witchcraft, spiritism, or other kinds of demonism. A 1995 Watchtower stated that

exposing yourself to spiritism that is present in much of this world's entertainment is highly unwise.

The current study book used in Witness Bible studies, Enjoy Life Forever, lesson 53, states:

A lot of popular entertainment features things that Jehovah hates, such as violence, sexual immorality, or spiritism.

The standard Watchtower applied to its membership was unambiguous: if entertainment contains demonic content — not if it glorifies it, just if it features it — you don't watch it. That's what I grew up with. That's the standard used to police Witness households for decades.

Now Watchtower is the studio. The Good News According to Jesus series covers the life of Christ across eighteen episodes, and in Watchtower's own published description of the series on their own website, Jesus

reveals his power to heal people and expel demons.

Watchtower is producing convention content that may include dramatized exorcism scenes — content shown at events where children are expected to sit through every presentation with nowhere else to go — and they have announced a parental preview option for content concerns they never acknowledged before, while simultaneously producing content that violates the entertainment standards they enforced on their members for four decades.

If Watchtower genuinely held the convictions it printed in those Awake! articles, it wouldn't have made these dramas. The fact that it made the content first and then announced the parental preview option tells you that something other than concern for children prompted the announcement.

The European Regulatory Pressure That Actually Forced This

Jehovah's Witnesses as an organization do not change procedure voluntarily. Doctrine, policy, language — none of it shifts unless something outside the building is pressing them with serious consequences for non-compliance. That pattern runs through everything Watchtower has done in recent years, and it applies directly here.

In the last two years, the legal landscape across Europe around what regulators are calling psychological subjection of religious group members — especially minors — has shifted significantly under Watchtower's feet.

May 10, 2024. France enacted an updated anti-cult law creating a criminal offense for psychological subjection. The base penalty is three years in prison and a fine of 375,000 euros — roughly $400,000. When the offense is committed against a minor, the penalty increases to five years and nearly $900,000. When committed in an organized group by members of an institution whose activities aim to create or maintain psychological subjection, it rises to seven years and over a million euros. The law also grants anti-cult associations the right to join cases as civil parties and allows prosecutors and judges to formally consult MIVILUDES — France's state anti-cult body, which has scrutinized Jehovah's Witnesses since the 1990s — when interpreting psychological subjection in court. That is a French magistrate with a new criminal statute, a five-year minimum prison exposure for psychological harm to a minor inside a religion, and a government body named as a formal advisor to the court.

October 24, 2025. Sweden's Agency for Support to Faith Communities denied Jehovah's Witnesses' application for state subsidies under new legislation. The agency's official written decision specifically stated that disfellowshipping

is especially harmful when applied to minors.

That is the formal conclusion of an active EU regulatory body in a published ruling about Watchtower and Jehovah's Witnesses. The head of the agency admitted on a Swedish podcast that the law was politically motivated — the government had been clear it didn't believe Jehovah's Witnesses should receive state subsidies. The Swedish Parliament passed the law specifically to block them. Then the regulatory body applied it, citing harm to children as justification. You think Watchtower and their lawyers aren't studying that document and brainstorming what to do about it? A $55 billion corporation being denied state funding by a government explicitly targeting it, with children as the stated reason. Of course they're studying it.

April 29, 2026. Days before this broadcast, the Norwegian Supreme Court handed down its judgment. Watchtower won — all five judges unanimously agreed the state hadn't presented sufficient evidence that Jehovah's Witnesses subject minors to psychological abuse or negative social control in a way that violates children's rights. That's the best legal outcome Watchtower has had in five years. But the court split three to two on whether shunning constitutes undue pressure that violates a member's right to leave. And the dissenting judges specifically referenced the impact of disfellowshipping on minors. Even Watchtower's biggest legal win in years produced a written dissent — now part of the European legal record — pointing directly at how their treatment of children functions in practice.

Days after that dissent was filed, Mark Sanderson announced that parents could preview convention content.

This exact sequence has appeared before. In 2024, when Jehovah's Witnesses were denied state registration and funding in Norway, Sanderson got on a broadcast eleven days later and announced changes to the shunning policy. The same move, triggered by the same kind of pressure. Here it is again.

This broadcast was not a pastoral statement. It was a legal statement — crafted, recorded, and broadcast so that when the next French magistrate, Swedish regulator, or European court asks Watchtower whether it took precautions to protect children from its own content, Watch Tower can play that recording in court. We told the parents. We made the content available in advance. Each family made their own decision. That is the point of the announcement.

The Pattern: Restructure the Blame, Not the System

What Watchtower consistently does when external pressure builds is restructure the assignment of responsibility without restructuring the underlying system. The content doesn't change. The mandate doesn't change. The control structure doesn't change. But on paper, someone else is now responsible.

With child abuse cases: the Governing Body passes liability to congregation elders. The elders' handbook makes it formally the elders' call. But what actually happens is that elders call the branch, and the branch tells them whether local law requires them to report. That's been documented. Watchtower adjusted the paper trail, not the practice.

With shunning: the policy language softened after Norway's 2024 registration denial. The practice didn't change.

With the deleted shunning videos: Watchtower quietly removed its own convention shunning videos from its website without acknowledgment or explanation, at exactly the time European regulators were citing those videos in court proceedings. No doctrinal change. Just the evidence made harder to find.

In the ex-JW community, we call it weasel words. The Governing Body prides itself on modeling the first-century Christians. But when the apostles were hauled before Jewish courts in the first century, they didn't use weasel words to dodge responsibility. They didn't point to others and pass the buck. They spoke plainly and faced the consequences — imprisonment, beatings, death. Meanwhile, Watch Tower's general counsel, Philip Brumley, was sanctioned for signing sworn affidavits he knew were false. The $150,000 fine was upheld on appeal. That is not how first-century Christians conducted themselves.

The four-step pattern runs the same way every time.

Watch Tower produces content, requires participation, and engineers the structure from the top down. The convention is mandatory in all practical terms. The dramas are central. Children are expected in their seats for every session. The Governing Body produces the content.

External pressure builds — courts, regulatory bodies, legislation, or litigation begin examining what Watch Tower does to children or to people who attempt to leave.

Watchtower restructures the blame without restructuring the system. The content stays. The expectations stay. The control remains. But in print or on camera, responsibility now belongs to someone else: elders, local congregations, parents.

That adjustment gets broadcast or published in an admissible form with a date attached — a Watchtower article, a letter to elders, a Governing Body update on video. Something with a quote goes on record that can be cited later under oath.

Governing Body Update number three of 2026 is step four.

The Opt-Out That Can't Actually Be Used

This is the part that turns the announcement from cynical into the most cynical move I've seen the Governing Body make in years.

Picture the moment a Witness parent tries to exercise the option Sanderson just gave them.

You are at a regional convention, Saturday afternoon session. The auditorium holds a few thousand people. You're seated with your family — spouse, three children in their convention clothes. The brother at the podium announces the next presentation: the new drama from Good News According to Jesus. The lights dim. The orchestra rises.

You previewed this content at home, as Sanderson suggested. You've decided that the exorcism scenes are too intense for your five-year-old. So you stand up, in front of thousands of people, with your spouse and three children, and you walk out of the auditorium and into the lobby while spiritual food produced by God's organization plays on the screen behind you, while every family in your row watches you leave.

With everything you know about Witness culture — with everything you lived through if you were ever in it — how many parents in the global Witness population are going to do that? Almost none. And the Governing Body knows it. They built the culture that makes it functionally impossible.

They wrote the Watchtower articles teaching that missing spiritual food is a sign of spiritual weakness. They delivered the talks framing full attendance at every part of every convention session as an expression of love for Jehovah. They built the social ecosystem in which walking your children out of an auditorium during a Governing Body-produced drama is a public statement of family-level rebellion — one that will bring an elder's phone call, a comment from a cousin at the next family gathering, and probably a grandmother in tears over the shame being brought on the family name.

That social cost is not incidental to the announcement. The Governing Body built it. They know what it costs a Witness family to use the option they just offered. They know almost no parent will pay that cost. That isn't a side effect of the announcement. It is the design of it.

The opt-out exists to be cited in court, not to be used at conventions.

What This Policy Doesn't Fix

For an organization presenting this as care for children, the comparison to its actual record on child welfare is worth setting out plainly.

My Book of Bible Stories, with its illustrated murders and the study question asking small children about God's view of homosexuality, is still on jw.org in 70 languages. This announcement doesn't touch it.

The Caleb and Sophia cartoon series — which a Danish child psychologist described in a published statement as indoctrination that creates anxiety, guilt, and shame in children — is still in production, still being translated into more languages, still being distributed to more children. That public criticism by a credentialed psychologist in a European country didn't prompt a review. That psychologist has no authority to penalize Watchtower financially, so Watchtower didn't respond to her findings.

The Shepherd the Flock of God elders' handbook still does not contain one sentence saying: always report child sexual abuse to civil authorities regardless of what local law requires. That sentence would contradict no doctrine, require no biblical reinterpretation. It would simply prioritize the child. Watchtower has had decades to write it. They haven't.

The two-witness rule for substantiating abuse allegations — the doctrinal position that a child's testimony alone is insufficient without a second witness to the act — has been documented for forty years. Children have been told their account of their own abuse doesn't meet the evidentiary threshold because Deuteronomy requires two witnesses. Their position is that a doctrinal reading of an ancient procedural rule outweighs the credibility of a child reporting their own abuse. That rule is unchanged, and it's not even biblically defensible.

The Australian Royal Commission, multiple US state attorney general investigations, ICANN, and a substantial body of civil litigation have all addressed Watchtower's handling of child sexual abuse. The most recent major US filing, the Souza case in 2025 in the Southern District of New York, names Watch Tower Pennsylvania, Watch Tower New York, and the Governing Body itself as defendants and seeks not less than one hundred million dollars in damages.

Governing Body Update number three of 2026 addresses none of that. Compare the scale of those problems to a parental preview option for a drama series and ask yourself what is actually being solved here.

The Denmark Expansion

The same broadcast that announced the parental preview policy also confirmed that Watchtower has purchased property in Denmark to serve as a second Watch Tower school facility — six classrooms, 134 rooms, capacity for over 800 students per year, with classes scheduled to begin later this year.

Denmark is a country where tabloid coverage triggered a Ministry of Church Affairs investigation, where a child psychologist publicly called Watchtower's content harmful indoctrination, and where legal scrutiny has been among the most intense in Europe over the past two years. The investigation closed in Watchtower's favor in late 2025. The press council issued a rebuke of the tabloid. And then Watchtower announced a major facility expansion in that same country.

That investment tells you how Watchtower is reading its own legal position right now. They believe they've weathered the Danish front, and they're moving in.

What Comes Next

The pressure is not receding. France upgraded its anti-cult statute. Sweden denied state funding. Norway put a formal dissent about the treatment of minors into the European legal record. Belgium, Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands — scrutiny of this organization is ongoing across the continent.

To date, Watchtower has responded with a broadcast, some quietly worded edits to an elders' handbook, and a liability shift to parents — and has not produced one substantive change in how it handles internal abuse cases or what it exposes children to at conventions. The kids will be in those auditorium seats. The dramas will play. Nothing functional will change about what hundreds of thousands of Witness children are shown in 2026.

The proof that the parental preview option is a performance rather than a policy lies in the evidence. An organization that genuinely cared about content appropriate for children would not have produced My Book of Bible Stories in its current form, would not have continued running Caleb and Sophia after a published critique from a credentialed psychologist, would not have preserved the two-witness rule for fifty documented years, and would have written that single sentence about mandatory reporting long ago. They know their content is a problem for outside observers — the sanitized images on jw.org versus the full print editions prove that. They simply don't change it unless someone with the authority to cost them money requires it.

When the next external pressure arrives — and the trajectory makes that certain — Watch Tower will need to put something new on the record. The announcement will sound pastoral. The reality will be defensive. And the system surrounding every believing Jehovah's Witness will make whatever option they're offered nearly impossible to actually exercise.

Now you know how to read it when it comes.