Jehovah Witnesses misidentify ExJW activists as apostates. They’re really not.

No Jehovah Witnesses (JW’s), not everybody who leaves and publicly speaks out against your religion is an apostate. At least according to the Bible. JW’s have a cultural belief(whether they know it or not) that identifies apostates to be, “one’s who leave the religion and publicly speak out against it.” I want to make it clear that this cultural belief is never directly stated by Jehovah Witnesses, rather I’ve directly deduced it by which type of people they commonly refer to as apostates. However, this culturally rampant belief isn’t Biblical. According to the Bible, an apostate is a Christian who later denounces the faith. In short, apostasy is the rejection of Christ by one who was been a Christian. That’s it. It’s as simple as that. So if a person still believes in Christ, no amount of public ridicule they do of their former religion could ever consider them to be an apostate.

I would argue that many Ex-Jehovah Witnesses (ExJW’s) are miscategorized as apostates because at least according to my experience, many ExJW’s don’t deny Christ. I find that they take primary concern with real issues in the organization such as its mishandling of child sexual abuse, its faulty blood doctrine, unscrupulous history, or arbitrary dates like 1914 set as doctrine. Notice that these are all disagreements with an organization’s policies or interpretation of the Bible. Nothing to do with the denial of Christ.

Since Jehovah Witnesses claim for the Bible’s directions to be their primary authority, they shouldn’t consider many ExJW’s as apostates because of this. Like I said before, they’re only speaking against man-made policies, management, and possible inaccurate interpretations of scripture. Many ExJW’s still identify as Christians. It naturally follows that since JW’s shouldn’t consider many ExJW’s as apostates, then they shouldn’t be treated as such. Instead, according to the Bible’s worldview, JW’s should view fellow ExJW’s who believe in Christ as their brothers and sisters in the faith.