Raymond Franz

Raymond Franz was born on 8 May 1922 in Cincinnati, Ohio, the third generation of his family to belong to Jehovah's Witnesses; his father had been baptized into the Bible Student movement, the religion's earlier name, in 1913, and his uncle, Frederick William Franz, went on to become the Watch Tower Society's fourth president. Raymond Franz graduated from Gilead, the Society's missionary training school, in 1944 and spent the next two decades in missionary and traveling assignments, first across the continental United States and then in Puerto Rico beginning in 1946, later extending his work through the Virgin Islands and the Dominican Republic, where he returned for a further term from 1961 to 1965. In 1965 he was reassigned to the Watch Tower Society's Brooklyn headquarters, where he worked in the writing department, including on the Society's first religious encyclopedia, Aid to Bible Understanding. He remained at Brooklyn for fifteen years, until 1980.

On 20 October 1971 Franz became a member of the Governing Body of Jehovah's Witnesses, the small body that sets doctrine and policy for the denomination worldwide, and he served on it for close to nine years. On 22 May 1980, following internal allegations of apostasy, the Governing Body asked for and received his resignation from the Governing Body and from the Brooklyn headquarters staff. He was disfellowshipped, the denomination's formal term for expulsion, on 25 November 1981, after he was found to have shared a meal with a former Bethel employer who had disassociated from the religion. Franz went on to write two books documenting his experience, Crisis of Conscience in 1983 and In Search of Christian Freedom in 1991. He died on 2 June 2010 in Winston, Georgia, after a fall and a brain hemorrhage.

Crisis of Conscience is Raymond Franz's own account of his fifteen years at Jehovah's Witnesses' Brooklyn headquarters and his nine years on its Governing Body, published in 1983 through Commentary Press, a small press of his own rather than an academic or denominational publisher; the book was later revised, most recently in 2004. Its central documentary claim concerns the expectation that 1975 would mark six thousand years of human history since Adam's creation and might bring Armageddon. Franz documents that the Society's own publications, among them the 1966 book Life Everlasting in Freedom of the Sons of God and Awake! magazine issues running through 1968, promoted that expectation years before the date arrived, and that senior officers of the Society gave public talks in similarly confident terms. He documents that once 1975 passed, the Society's later publications placed responsibility for the disappointment on individual members' own conclusions rather than on what its literature had promoted, and he argues the doctrinal handling of the date was driven by a need to preserve organizational unity rather than by clear biblical grounds.

The book holds a debated place in the scholarship on Jehovah's Witnesses. Historian M. James Penton, whose Apocalypse Delayed is the standard academic history of the movement's dated expectations, treats it as a key primary source and calls it remarkably informative and thoroughly documented, written more in sadness than in anger. Sociologist Andrew Holden calls it one of the most compelling biographical works on defection from Jehovah's Witnesses. Franz wrote as a departed critic of the organization that had expelled him, not as a neutral bystander, a trade off the scholarship weighs alongside its documentary detail.