Watchtower Has JW Families Rehearse Going to Prison

Jehovah's Witnesses are bleeding members, and Watchtower, the religion's parent organization, has decided that the way to keep the ones it has left is to scare them — not with the truth, not with Jehovah's blessing, but with prison, with raids, with the end of the world being right around the corner again.

The latest example is the December 2026 Watchtower, in a study article called "Prepare Now for Tests of Your Neutrality." Millions of Jehovah's Witnesses will study it in February. It amounts to a manual for how ordinary members should prepare to go to prison — and it leaves out the one fact that explains why some of them actually are.

What the Article Actually Tells Families to Do

The article opens with the image of a hurricane. When you're notified that one is coming, it says, you get your supplies together and secure the house as best you can.

The storm of nationalism is spreading throughout the world, and we need to prepare for it.

Then the sentence that sets the tone for everything that follows:

We expect such tests of our neutrality to increase everywhere as we advance toward and into the great tribulation.

The article names two tests: military conscription and imprisonment. On conscription, it says the authorities might give a witness only a few minutes to explain himself, so he needs a short story and a long explanation ready. It tells readers to talk to brothers who've been through it, and to practice. A father is held up as the model:

A father devoted time during sessions of family worship to help his two sons defend their neutrality. He also held practice sessions with them. He played the role of a conscription officer and his sons practiced what they would say.

It goes further than that. It tells witnesses to build Bible-study habits now, in case they land in a prison where Bible reading isn't allowed. A footnote adds:

Some make it a point to memorize scriptures and songs in the event that they are refused access to a Bible.

It tells witnesses to "become a peacemaker now," because:

Some of our brothers in prison with other witnesses have found it challenging to get along with one another.

And it tells them to keep preaching while locked up, with another footnote:

In prisons where brothers had no means of preaching at all, some witness to imaginary householders.

Then comes a section on supporting family members facing this test, built around that same father role-playing a conscription officer with his two sons. Paragraph 19 asks:

What if someone in your family is likely to be sentenced to prison? The very possibility can make the entire family anxious.

Watchtower's answer isn't reassurance. It's logistics:

Together with him, plan now how the family will carry on in his absence. For example, what will the family spiritual routine be? Might there be financial challenges at home? And if so, how can these be dealt with?

The article talks about elders visiting, about the imprisoned brother possibly needing nutritious food, basic items, or money for expenses. None of that money comes from Watchtower.

Then there's the line that gives away what the article is really for, in paragraph 17:

Sadly, however, some who fail to maintain a strong relationship with Jehovah while in prison later stop serving him.

Watchtower loses people when they go to prison. To be fair, every religion with members in prison needs to prepare the rest of its members for that possibility, and there's nothing sinister, on its own, about telling people to memorize scripture and plan for a family member's absence — if going to prison for your beliefs is actually common where you live. Most Jehovah's Witnesses do not live in a country where that's true. I can't think of a single English-speaking country currently jailing witnesses for their beliefs, though plenty of elders and ministerial servants are being jailed for child sex abuse — a separate matter entirely.

Ten Years of Ramping Up the Fear

This didn't start in December. It started in a basement.

At the 2016 regional convention, "Remain Loyal to Jehovah," a series of eight videos ran across the program that ex-witnesses still call the bunker videos. A group of witnesses hides in a basement during the great tribulation. Each segment flashes back to a lesson — pride, entertainment, bad association, fear of man. The final segment ends with armed authorities searching for them, closing in on the door, and the screen fading to black. Millions of witnesses watched those videos, including children, and ex-witnesses have described kids having nightmares about them.

From there, watch the language escalate, year by year, in both print and video.

April 2016, the study article "Maintain Your Neutrality in a Divided World":

As Satan's system nears its end, we can expect the issue of neutrality to become more prominent.

Carefully qualified:

In some countries, our brothers have already faced unexpected challenges to their neutrality.

July 2019, "Prepare Now for Persecution," told readers to prepare, draw close to God, memorize scriptures and build courage — but also not to dwell on it:

We do not need to imagine all the things that could happen to us. If we did, we could be overwhelmed with fear and anxiety. We could allow imagined threats to defeat us even before any real test comes.

April 2022, a morning worship talk titled "Prepare for Persecution" walked through Revelation 13 — the wild beast, the mark — and said:

Some of us will go into captivity. Our brothers are already in captivity. And some of our brothers have lost their lives. This is our lot in life. It could mean this for any one of us.

October 2025, Watchtower published an entire book on the theme, "Walk Courageously with God" — 54 chapters, closing with the story of a young man who died in an Argentine prison for refusing military service, held up as the example to follow.

March 2026, two morning worship talks in the same month. One, by governing body member Stephen Lett, listed five forms of persecution — banning, imprisonment, children expelled from school, economic pressure, slander — and said:

Before Armageddon comes, who knows which of these we will personally experience or which our loved ones will experience... we might not be imprisoned right now ourselves, but it may happen in the future.

The other, by a helper to the governing body, opened by asking how likely persecution is, and answered:

It's not just likely to happen, it's bound to happen.

The same month brought a study article titled "Why You Can Be Happy When You Are Hated" — a title worth remembering, because it's the theology underneath all of this.

September 2026, the meeting workbook ran a segment called "Remaining Neutral in Our Hearts," opening:

As the world becomes increasingly divided, we expect to face growing tests of our neutrality.

December 2026: "We expect such tests of our neutrality to increase everywhere as we advance toward and into the great tribulation" — plus the conscription role-play and the prison budgeting, in the same magazine.

In 2016, it was a basement on a screen and "some countries." By 2022, "it could mean this for any one of us." By 2025, a whole book on courage under persecution. By March 2026, "it's bound to happen." By December, "everywhere" — so rehearse it with your kids and plan the family budget.

The Obedience Language Has Ramped Up Right Alongside It

Fear on its own doesn't keep people in a religion. Fear plus "only we can get you through it" does. Watchtower created the fear, and offers itself as the protection.

December 2007:

During the great tribulation, we may well receive some detailed instructions. Our safe journey through those troublesome days will depend on our keeping in step.

2012, the simplified edition:

We will be saved only if we obey the instructions we receive at that time.

November 2013, the well-known line:

All of us must be ready to obey any instructions we may receive, whether these appear sound from a strategic or human standpoint or not.

December 2022:

Do your best to obey the direction you receive, even if you do not fully understand why it is being given.

The same article added:

Never reveal information about our brothers and sisters or about congregation activities to those who are not entitled to it.

October 2023:

All of us are now better prepared to obey any instructions we receive during the great tribulation. Our lives may depend on it.

December 2025, Stephen Lett told witnesses that those taking the lead will be used by Jehovah "in the near future" to give "life or death instructions."

June 2026, a morning worship talk asked:

What if instructions from Jehovah's organization seem to put us in danger?

The answer: obey anyway. That word — danger — had never been used that way before.

Put the two ramps side by side. One says the storm is coming, prison is coming, it could be any one of us. The other says survival depends on obeying, even if it looks dangerous. First you scare people. Then you tell them the only protection from what you taught them to fear is doing what you're told.

Watching Your Own Thoughts

The December issue has a companion article with a box on page 18 called "Remain Neutral from the Heart." It has nothing to do with conscription and everything to do with what the organization believes it can demand of a member's inner life:

We too should not take sides in political matters even in the privacy of our own thoughts... We would not in our heart favor one candidate or political party over another, even if one seems to support our interests or those of God's people.

And the method for making sure you don't:

We can limit the time we spend reviewing news items about socially divisive issues.

The main article adds:

We must avoid getting involved in conversations about political issues.

I searched a database of more than 20,000 Watchtower publications for the phrase "privacy of our own thoughts." This is the first time those exact words have appeared. The idea isn't new — the 2016 article already said neutrality applies "not only in our words and actions, but also in our heart," and told members to limit their media intake from sources that promote a political agenda. The video that the September 2026 workbook replays features a finance professional describing how she cut back on news so far that "when workmates brought something up, I would say, 'No, I didn't see it.'" The October 2023 article held up a sister who stopped reading social media posts that "stirred up negative feelings in her toward the authorities."

That's the arc: in 1977, a Question From Readers said witnesses don't take part in flag ceremonies — about behavior. By 2016, it's about words and heart. By 2023, stop reading what makes you feel things. By 2026, not even in the privacy of your own thoughts, and cut the news to make sure. If you know Steven Hassan's BITE model of high-control groups — behavior, information, thought, emotion — Watchtower wrote the information-control instruction and the thought-control instruction into the same box in the same article.

An organization that tells members to narrow what they read, in the same issue that tells them a storm only headquarters can see is coming, isn't protecting their neutrality. It's protecting the fear from contact with the facts — including facts about Watchtower's own troubles with child sex abuse and its shunning policy.

Why Now

Because everything else Watchtower used to use to keep people has stopped working, and the numbers say so.

For a century, the pitch was growth as proof of God's blessing. Over the last five years, Watchtower reported half a million more publishers — but memorial attendance, the one night a year everyone is told to show up, dropped by 732,000. The publisher growth rate doubled in the same year Watchtower replaced reporting hours in the ministry with a simple checkbox for having done something, anything. The five biggest Western branches — the US, Britain, Germany, Japan and Australia — added a combined 1.4% over five years. It now takes over 7,000 hours of preaching to produce one baptism, double what it took in 1990. Pew found that two out of three people raised as Jehovah's Witnesses in the United States leave the religion as adults.

The blessing pitch is failing too, and Watchtower has had to fake it. In June, a governing body update credited Jehovah's blessing for the air raid siren staying quiet in Ukraine while governing body member Mark Sanderson visited — in the same breath admitting the real reason: the authorities had declared a truce.

The certainty is gone as well. The generation that would not pass away passed away. In May 2024 Watchtower admitted in print that it doesn't know what happens to people who never hear the message before the great tribulation, and in February 2026 it admitted it doesn't know when "peace and security" gets declared, once a very big deal. No date, no deadline, no scoreboard.

What's left to hold millions of people in the religion is fear — and the theology that makes fear the tool is right there in the March 2026 article, "Why You Can Be Happy When You Are Hated." Paragraph 11:

So when persecution arises, we are not shocked. Instead, we are happy that Bible prophecy is being fulfilled. This assures us that we are serving the true God.

A sister is quoted:

Persecution was prophesied, so I knew that it had to happen. Experiencing it convinced me that this was the true religion.

Paragraph 16 goes further:

Such mistreatment is proof that God's spirit is resting upon us.

In this theology, persecution isn't just the cost of faith — it's the credential that proves you're in the true religion. That creates a math problem. By Watchtower's own count, a little over 282 witnesses are in prison worldwide, out of roughly 9 million claimed members. The overwhelming majority have never experienced real persecution in their lives, so their faith rests on a proof they've never had. Watchtower has to make the proof feel imminent — not just in some lands, but everywhere. A 16-year-old who has rehearsed what he'll say to a conscription board has already decided it's going to happen to him. A family that has budgeted for a prison sentence has already agreed the sentence is worth it. A suspended statute in one country, with a fix stuck and unpassed, doesn't do that work — nobody rehearses for a stalled bill.

Where Witnesses Are Actually Going to Prison

JW.org runs a page titled "Where Jehovah's Witnesses Are in Prison for Their Faith." As of September 2026, it lists over 282 imprisoned worldwide, broken down by country: 161 in Russia (plus more for practicing the religion at all), 10 in Crimea (the same situation as Russia), 64 in Eritrea (under a dictatorship with no legal exemption, where the three longest-held men served 26 years without trial before being released in 2020), 11 in Singapore, and 36 in Ukraine — 19 serving sentences, 17 in pre-trial detention.

Watchtower's own Ukraine news page has run a steady series of headlines since spring 2025 — three imprisoned, two more sentenced, four more, five more, seven more — eleven articles in a year and a half, with the running total climbing from 24 in May 2026 to 37 by August. That's the storm this Watchtower article gestures at without naming: it says only "some lands" and points to the news page, never explaining what's actually happening in Ukraine.

Ukraine has had alternative civilian service available since 1991, and witnesses used it. One man jailed this past July, age 29, completed his civilian service from 2017 to 2020 under peacetime rules. Then Russia invaded, martial law came in, and the civilian option went away. Men who refused the call-up were charged under Article 336 of the criminal code and given three to five years. In spring 2025, Ukraine's Supreme Court settled the question:

Ukraine has introduced alternatives to mandatory military service in peace time and Ukrainian citizens can freely use them. However, in wartime, during mobilization and defense of war, the duty to defend Ukraine is imposed on all citizens of Ukraine regardless of their religion.

The same 29-year-old who did his civilian service in peacetime got three years in wartime for asking for the same accommodation. On JW.org, he describes it as a fulfillment of prophecy. Others echo the framing: a 54-year-old serving three years said, "I also regularly read the reports on JW.org about our brothers and sisters facing persecution today. Their examples help me to remain steadfast." A 34-year-old held without bail said, "My great-grandfather, grandfather, and father were all imprisoned for their faith. Now, it is my wonderful privilege to continue our family's legacy." A 42-year-old got six years, upheld on appeal in May, which Watchtower itself called "the longest prison sentence imposed on one of our brothers since the war in Ukraine began." When another case reached the Supreme Court in November 2025, one of three judges dissented and called the prosecution unnecessary — the witness still lost.

Forum 18, a religious freedom monitor that tracks these cases, counts more than a thousand criminal cases against conscientious objectors in Ukraine since the war began. Jehovah's Witnesses' own count of criminal cases against their members stands at 1,091, around 500 of which have reached the courts. There is a fix on the table: Ukraine's cabinet set a deadline of the end of June 2026 for a law providing alternative service during martial law. The deadline passed, and nothing reached parliament. The head of the state agency for religious affairs described the draft as "not even a draft, just a draft of a draft." A United Nations commission raised the issue again in March.

So the number of witnesses imprisoned in Ukraine is rising because there's a war, there's no civilian option in wartime, and the bill that would fix that hasn't passed. What the December Watchtower article does is take that one country's suspended civilian service and present it to witness families across the globe as a worldwide storm foretold by prophecy — without mentioning the war, the law, the ruling, or the stalled bill.

Compare that with the rest of Europe, where the hurricane imagery is actually landing for most readers. Croatia brought back the draft in October 2025, effective January 2026 — two months of basic training, or three to four months of civilian work for anyone with a religious objection. Latvia brought back a national defense service in 2023 with an alternative track for objectors; the debate there is about whether the placements are civilian enough, not whether the option exists. Germany's new military service law took effect January 1, 2026, and doesn't reinstate conscription — 18-year-old men fill out a questionnaire, and compulsory service would require another vote of parliament. In every one of those countries, a witness who refuses the army does civilian work and goes home. The draft is coming back in Europe. Going to prison isn't. The prison is in Ukraine, Eritrea, and Singapore, where it has been for decades.

The Line That Watchtower Moved Before

The civilian option is the reason a witness in Croatia gets to go home — and it's the exact thing this organization forbade for fifty years. From World War II through the mid-1990s, Watchtower treated accepting civilian service instead of military service as a violation of Christian neutrality. Accepting it meant being disfellowshipped and shunned. Thousands of witness men went to prison in Greece, Spain, and South Korea, turning down available civilian alternatives rather than compromise.

A clear example is West Germany, where witnesses refused civilian service too and were punished for both, until the Federal Constitutional Court ruled in 1968 that a witness couldn't be punished twice for it. Then, in May 1996, Watchtower announced that accepting civilian service was now a personal decision, and a brother who took it should be regarded as a Christian in good standing. There were no apologies, and no acknowledgment of the thousands of men who had already served years in prison under a rule the organization simply discarded.

The line between "neutral" and "compromised" was never fixed. It sat wherever the governing body put it in a given decade. When they moved it, witness men in countries with civilian service stopped going to prison for refusing it. So when the December article presents prison as a fixed test handed down by a hostile world, it leaves out that Watchtower has already changed, at least once, the exact rule that decided who went to prison and who went home.

Building for a Century While Preaching the End Is Near

Between 2004 and 2017, Watchtower sold off its Brooklyn real estate for at least $2.19 billion — a figure one reporter who tallied it called "the floor, not the ceiling." It built a new world headquarters in Warwick, New York, and its construction plans aren't finished. It is currently building a 249-acre audio and video production campus on Sterling Mine Road in Ramapo — about 1.7 million square feet of studios, offices, 645 residential units, a clinic, workshops, and a central energy plant. Site plans were approved in 2023, the building phase started in late 2025, and construction on the parking garage and residences is underway.

In 2014, Watchtower took financial control of every Kingdom Hall: no more congregation loans, every congregation told to send its surplus and pledge a fixed monthly amount to headquarters, with Watchtower taking ownership of the Kingdom Halls and charging rent to the congregations that use them. In 2024, it set up three companies in Ireland — asset management, treasury services, and payment solutions — staffed with a former UBS chief risk officer and the co-founder of a firm managing roughly $57 billion, and authorized and regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland. Its fund vehicle was approved in January 2026, with the first substantive filings expected next summer.

In 2000, Watchtower restructured its corporations and removed every governing body member from the board — in the words of former governing body member Raymond Franz, an effort to "find means to protect themselves legally." It retains outside counsel in every major jurisdiction and, by conservative calculation, is worth about $55 billion.

None of that is illegal. All of it is what an institution does when it expects to be around in a hundred years. Nobody pours concrete for a 645-unit campus because Armageddon is at the door, and nobody hires a UBS risk officer to manage funds that are going to be vaporized in the great tribulation. Meanwhile, rank-and-file witnesses are being told to rehearse a conscription interview with their sons because the end is at hand.

The Fair Points — and Why They Don't Change the Picture

Watchtower does have members in prison. It litigates for the civilian-service option, and the 2011 European Court of Human Rights decision that established a right to conscientious objection across Europe was a Jehovah's Witness case. Its newsroom is honest, on its own pages, about what's happening in Ukraine. The draft really is coming back across Europe. And every religion teaches inner conviction; Watchtower has preached that the end is near since 1879, so you could argue this article isn't saying anything new.

Except the article itself is new. Rehearsing a conscription interview with your children, budgeting for a prison sentence — that wording has never appeared before. The "privacy of our own thoughts" box is new. "Even if it seems to put you in danger" is new. A 54-chapter book on courage under persecution is new. Two persecution-prep talks in a single month is new. And every one of those escalations tracks the same years the growth numbers went south, the same years the courts and the press started catching up, the same years Watchtower replaced the scoreboard with a checkbox and lost the certainty that used to hold this generation in place.

And the audience for the article is the tell. The role-play father, the prison budget, the imaginary householders — none of it is addressed only to witnesses in places where imprisonment is a real risk. It's addressed to sons in Germany, where there's no draft at all. To sons in Croatia, where refusal now means three or four months of civilian work the organization permits. To sons in the United States, where there's been no draft since 1973. All of them are told to rehearse for what's currently happening to witnesses in one country, for a legal reason the article never mentions. And the box that asks for sincerity in "the privacy of our own thoughts" is a demand on belief; "limit the time we spend reviewing news items" is a demand on what members are allowed to know. An organization whose members are imprisoned because of a specific wartime law is telling those same members to read less about the world that passed it.

Watchtower is losing people, and its own numbers say so. The sales pitches that used to hold them — the growth, the blessing, the dates — have all quietly failed, in ways Watchtower has admitted to one degree or another. What's left is fear, and the theology makes fear the perfect tool, because persecution is treated as the proof that this is the true religion. Since almost nobody in it is actually being persecuted right now, the persecution has to be made to feel imminent for everyone, everywhere. That's why a basement on a screen in 2016 became a book in 2025 and a family rehearsal in 2026. That's why the obedience language climbed to "even if it seems dangerous" right alongside it. That's why the December article offers a hurricane instead of a war, a law, and a stalled bill. And it's why the same organization is pouring concrete in Ramapo and hiring bankers in Dublin while telling a sixteen-year-old to practice what he'll say to a conscription officer.

The men who wrote the article aren't packing for prison. They're planning for the world to stick around for a very long time. The rank and file are the ones being told to pack.