Former Lithuanian Jehovah’s Witness opens up about stolen childhood
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Raised in a Jehovah’s Witness family, the photographer and stylist Deimantė Rudžinskaitė-Ivanauskė spent her childhood in a radically religious environment which held that a secular lifestyle was a sin.
Now she published a book titled Secular (Pasaulietė). “Driven by […] anger and the desire to help others, I decided to talk about it – sometimes we need to intervene in other people’s families, no matter how much we are used to keeping our distance,” she tells LRT RADIO.
She shares what it means to belong to an extremely insular religious community against one’s will and why she decided to speak out about it.
Jehovah’s Witnesses are an offshoot of Christianity. They believe that we are living in the final days and that Armageddon [Jesus Christ’s battle against the forces of Satan] is about to begin, during which God will choose the righteous and the unrighteous. The righteous will live forever in an earthly paradise, while the unrighteous will be killed by angels. The goal of Jehovah’s Witnesses is to save as many people as possible. They believe in it very fervently.
Not very compatible. The way I was taught, I am currently chasing vanity. My career is about beauty and aesthetics, which has nothing to do with spirituality.
Your book is full of stories from your childhood, some of the episodes you relate hint at psychological traumatisation. Do you get resentful messages about the negative image you paint of the religious community?
I have received several messages. When I started talking about it a few years ago and was interviewed, people wrote to me saying that I must have believed in the wrong God, that I hadn’t found the real God.
My message is that introducing any kind of religion into childrearing is detrimental to their development – religion is not an issue for a child, it has nothing to do with childhood.
Content retrieved from: https://www.lrt.lt/en/news-in-english/19/2429948/former-lithuanian-jehovah-s-witness-opens-up-about-stolen-childhood.
