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Is It Safe to Be Different?

DURING recent decades totalitarian powers have regimented vast numbers of earth’s population. Under their harsh rule freedom to speak what one thinks and to worship in the way one wants has been forbidden. These governments have sought to control their people as completely as an operator of a machine controls what that machine does. Everyone has to think as the State wants him to think, to talk as the State wants him to talk and to act as the State wants him to act. To be different is tantamount to treason. It can land a person in prison or in some remote concentration camp.

People in democratic lands express abhorrence of such regimentation, yet they practice it to an extent themselves. They are not pleased with people who differ with popular political and religious beliefs. Some would like to see such unorthodox persons shipped away somewhere. When criticism is not welcomed and when everyone is expected to conform to what is popular, can there be real freedom?

Justice William O. Douglas of the United States Supreme Court commented on this dangerous trend. Here is how the New York Times reported what he said:

“Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas said last night that the country had tended to become insensitive to inroads against basic liberties. He said there was a demand for conformity to general patterns of thought. Justice Douglas said that the inclination now was ‘to look for a teacher who is so-called “safe,” a minister who is “safe.’” The Justice defined as a ‘safe’ person one who did not have unorthodox ideas and was ‘not a contentious character.’ . . . He said that after World War II it became the practice to have ‘public trials’ ferreting out subversives. As a result, he said, ‘people became more and more frightened and, to get a job or to keep a job, wanted to be safe.’ Consequently, he declared, there has been ‘a general contraction of the feeling of ability to speak freely and a general lowering of the standards of free expression that we have enjoyed in early days.’ . . . The great abuses in history, he said, occurred when the Government intruded into the privacy of a man’s thinking, ‘when a Government lays its hand on his shoulder and says you shall not worship this way, you shall not think this thought, you shall not read this book.’”

This is a trend toward suppression of individual freedom, the very thing democratic peoples say they hate most about totalitarian states. While they rightly condemn the totalitarians for regimenting thought, many of them turn right around and make it unsafe for anyone among them to be a nonconformist. From bitter experience Jehovah’s witnesses have found this to be so.

Because Jehovah’s witnesses do not conform to orthodox methods of worship and beliefs and do not act as the majority do they have been discriminated against, cursed, mobbed and imprisoned. In the United States alone they have had to fight hundreds of court cases in order to exercise constitutionally guaranteed freedoms of worship and speech.

A surprisingly large number of people in democratic lands seem to think that freedom should be only for those who go along with popular thought and action. But how is this view any different from the totalitarian view?

Because the Witnesses refuse to violate their Scripturally trained conscience by conforming to the thought, speech and form of worship approved by political states they are persecuted throughout the world, and in totalitarian lands are imprisoned and often severely beaten. They have found that it is not safe to be different, but that does not mean they will submit to the world-wide trend toward regimentation.

When a person dedicates his life to the service of God he can neither think as the world does nor act as it does. He has to be different because the world rejects Jehovah God’s sovereignty and his laws. It is impossible to serve God and at the same time conform to the world. This was forcefully pointed out by the Bible writer James. “Do you not know that the friendship with the world is enmity with God? Whoever, therefore, wants to be a friend of the world is constituting himself an enemy of God.”—Jas. 4:4.

A person cannot serve two masters who have different objectives and different principles. He must serve either God or the world. If he wants to serve God he cannot think like the world or act like it, no matter how unsafe such nonconformity may be for him.

For the remaining time that this world or system of things exists it will continue to have no love for anyone who serves Jehovah God as his master. It loves only those who are its own, those who conform to it. It will act toward Christ’s followers as he foretold: “Because you are no part of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, on this account the world hates you.”—John 15:19.

A truly free world where tyranny and intolerance will not exist will be realized when God’s kingdom will exert its authority over the earth in the near future. Under its righteous rule obedient mankind will have freedom in the fullest sense of the word.