Paper short abstract:

This paper argues that despite both common and scholarly views that identify the Jehovah’s Witnesses with rationality and lack of emotions, congregational meetings provide them with a bodily experienced feeling of closeness to God and of joyful communion with co-brothers.

Paper long abstract:

In most scholarly writings on the Jehovah Witnesses, emotions seldom receive much attention. At best, they are mentioned in passing and contrasted with the rationality and reason that underpins the doctrine of the Watchtower Society. Scholarly findings may be partly responsible for a popular view of the Witnesses as unemotional or even "cold" people concerned with a rational way of finding truth. Yet, the Witnesses I got to know seem to be interested in passions and feelings as much as in truth and rationality. Drawing from an extensive ethnographical fieldwork among the Jehovah's Witnesses in Saxony, eastern Germany, I argue in this paper that despite both aforementioned views positive emotions required of and felt by members of this religious group nurture not only attachment to morality promoted by the organization, the Watchtower Society . Although congregational meetings are meant to provide Witnesses with "spiritual food", they were not described in cognitive terms, as moments of intellectual stimulation and education. What seemed really important to the eastern German Witnesses were both an immediate feeling of closeness to God and of joyful communion with co-brothers, as well as the fact that this family-like feeling continued after the meeting proper was over. Moreover it was the body that was the focus of my informants' attention: in the course of a meeting a body that during the day experienced stress, annoyance, tiredness and headache became one again: filled with joy, peace and a sense of wholeness.