美国国家公共电台 NPR Lack Of Education Leads To Lost Dreams And Low Income For Many Jehovah's Witnesses

MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:

Of all major U.S. religious groups, members of the Jehovah's Witnesses have the lowest rate of formal education - that according to a Pew study. And as Luke Vander Ploeg reports, that can have a real impact on people who choose to leave the religion.

LUKE VANDER PLOEG, BYLINE 1: Cracked leather couches and pictures from mission trips line the walls of a borrowed room at a church in Long Beach, Calif.

DEAN: My name is Dean. I was baptized in '93, left '95.

BECKY ALVAREZ: Becky Alvarez. I left in '94.

DAVE HAMPTON: My name's Dave Hampton. I'm married to an ex-Witness which is always fun.

VANDER PLOEG: This is a meeting of the ex-Jehovah's Witnesses of Los Angeles, a support group that gets together once a month. Today it's about 12 people strong. Zachary Linderer left the Witnesses about five months ago. He's new to the meetings.

ZACHARY LINDERER: Actually this one today was my first time.

VANDER PLOEG: How did you feel about it?

LINDERER: It was a little funny, a little uncomfortable, but I don't know. I still relate to them very strongly because of my background. So it's kind of a mixed feelings.

VANDER PLOEG: A main function of the support group is talking about that shared background. This week, the topic of discussion is how Witnesses treat higher education. It's something that's played a major role in Zachary's life.

LINDERER: I wanted to be a physicist 2 or an oceanographer or something having to do with the sciences, but it was very clear that I wasn't going to be able to do that.

VANDER PLOEG: Zachary's dad had heard stories about college.

LINDERER: He told me that he knew people who were into science, and it drug them right out of the truth.

VANDER PLOEG: There was some secret dangerous piece of knowledge that universities taught.

LINDERER: I didn't know what that was, but it was just like a bogeyman. It's just there, and it's going to get you. And if you do it, it's going to ruin you.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

ANTHONY MORRIS III: I have long said the better the university, the greater the danger.

VANDER PLOEG: That's Anthony Morris III, a member of the governing body of Jehovah's Witnesses. Witness leadership declined to speak to NPR for this story. This is Morris in an online video.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

MORRIS: One brother likened his experience in a university setting to being in a house that is on fire. Spiritually speaking, he said, even if you escape alive, your clothes still smell like smoke. It has an effect on you.

VANDER PLOEG: Corrupting 3 influence is just one of the reasons Witnesses frown on higher education. They also believe the end of the world is imminent 4 and time in college would be better spent going door to door winning converts. Zachary Linderer's family discouraged education so strongly that he never even finished high school. He did end up going back to get his GED and becoming an electrician, but he says that longing 5 to study science never left him.

LINDERER: I think I had that feeling, that sense at 17 years old or so that that was like - that's what I wanted it to be. That's what I needed to be, and there's been this hole ever since then.

VANDER PLOEG: That's a sentiment I heard from nearly all of the 100 plus ex-Witnesses I talked to, that feeling of being robbed of something. It's not unheard of for Witnesses to graduate college, but it's very unlikely. Pew Research shows that only 9 percent of Jehovah's Witnesses get a bachelor's degree. That's well below the national average and the lowest of any faith group. The same study also shows that Witnesses have some of the lowest income of any major religion. Amber 6 McGee falls in that category. She grew up a Witness in rural Texas. Her parents pulled her and her siblings 7 out of school at a young age.

AMBER MCGEE: My mom herself who was supposed to be our homeschool teacher was not capable of doing it emotionally, mentally.

VANDER PLOEG: Amber's mother never finished high school.

MCGEE: She had three young children. She was by herself very far from family and even just grocery stores and that sort of thing.

VANDER PLOEG: Eventually, Amber's mother gave up teaching them. The girls had to do it themselves using workbooks.

MCGEE: I would do all the multiple choice and true and false, and they would write all the essays for all the subjects. So it was really bad. I literally 8 barely graduated.

VANDER PLOEG: That's made life difficult for Amber. She's 34 years old and the most she's made in a year is about $14,000. Amber and her husband left the Witnesses a year ago. They're doing better now financially, but it's still far from what Amber had hoped for her life.

MCGEE: I was taught very, very young to stop dreaming, to not have dreams, that you'll never ever be a famous person or a doctor or nurse. It's not possible. So now as an adult, I'm learning to start dreaming again.

VANDER PLOEG: If not for her own future, then definitely for the futures 9 of her kids. For NPR News, I'm Luke Vander Ploeg in Los Angeles.