‘I Couldn’t Continue On’: A Former Jehovah’s Witness On Leaving The Faith

As she grew up as a third-generation Jehovah’s Witness, there were certain things Amber Scorah did not question.

When, as a teenager, the community shunned her and prevented her from participating in her father’s funeral, she accepted it as appropriate punishment for having sex with her boyfriend. Rather than pulling away at that time, Scorah doubled down.

“When my father died, it just gave me more impetus to want to go back to the faith,” Scorah says, “because I knew that the only way I would see him again was if I were a Jehovah’s Witness who survived Armageddon, because after Armageddon, the faithful would be resurrected to Earth, in our beliefs.”

Scorah went on to marry an elder in the church, and she and her husband traveled to China as missionaries. But gradually, doubt set in.

“The more I got to know and learn about Chinese culture … the more I realized their culture had thousands of years of rich wisdom and cultural tradition and history,” she says. “And here I was, across the table, coming here, this person from the West telling them to throw all that away in favor of this a-hundred-or-so-year-old new American religion.”

In her new memoir, Leaving the Witness, Scorah reflects on her decision to leave her faith and her marriage. She eventually moved to New York and had children with a new partner, but the transition wasn’t easy.

“It was very disorienting,” she says. “I felt like everything that had mattered to me was gone. And the weirdest part of it all was that it was my own doing. Nobody did it to me. I chose it, because I couldn’t continue on in something I didn’t believe in anymore.”

Photo: Lee Towndrow/Viking