Paper short abstract:

Jehovah's Witnesses understand the end of the world to be imminent, motivating them to teach with "zeal." With the introduction of mobile devices, new pedagogies are possible for Witness teachers. This paper explores these changes, while showing how the ethics of teaching still center around zeal.

Paper long abstract:

While Jehovah's Witnesses understand Armageddon to be a certain event that must absolutely come about, the timing of this event is a matter of great uncertainty for the religious organization. The imminent end of the world motivates a particular ethics of value transmission centering around notions of "zeal," which play out in the ways Witnesses proselytize and teach students. In 2013 the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society went through a digital transformation, including the introduction of updated websites, the JW Library mobile app, and the encouragement of using electronic publications on and content when in the "field ministry," necessitating the use of smartphones and tablets. Now JW Library and mobile digital content is ubiquitous in the way Witnesses do their street evangelism, preach door-to-door, and teach students, making new pedagogies possible for the ways that "Jehovah's moral standards" are taught. In this paper I explore the ways that new pedagogies unfold and the new ethics they evoke in the face of the imminent uncertainty surrounding the end of the world. I argue that while the "digital interventions" of technological change create new pedagogical ethics, these changes are not discordant with and are instead subsumed by the ways Jehovah's Witnesses "engage" zealous work in the field ministry, creating continuities between past and future ethics in the Society.