Former Lithuanian Jehovah’s Witness opens up about stolen childhood

LRT Radio, Lithuania/December 26, 2024

Raised in a Jehovah’s Witness family, the photographer and stylist Deimantė Rudžinskaitė-Ivanauskė spent her childhood in a radically religious environment which held that a secular lifestyle was a sin.

Now she published a book titled Secular (Pasaulietė). “Driven by [...] anger and the desire to help others, I decided to talk about it – sometimes we need to intervene in other people’s families, no matter how much we are used to keeping our distance,” she tells LRT RADIO.

She shares what it means to belong to an extremely insular religious community against one’s will and why she decided to speak out about it.

What are Jehovah’s Witnesses? What do they believe?

Jehovah’s Witnesses are an offshoot of Christianity. They believe that we are living in the final days and that Armageddon [Jesus Christ’s battle against the forces of Satan] is about to begin, during which God will choose the righteous and the unrighteous. The righteous will live forever in an earthly paradise, while the unrighteous will be killed by angels. The goal of Jehovah’s Witnesses is to save as many people as possible. They believe in it very fervently.

Is what you are doing now compatible with Jehovah’s Witness values?

Not very compatible. The way I was taught, I am currently chasing vanity. My career is about beauty and aesthetics, which has nothing to do with spirituality.

Your book is full of stories from your childhood, some of the episodes you relate hint at psychological traumatisation. Do you get resentful messages about the negative image you paint of the religious community?

I have received several messages. When I started talking about it a few years ago and was interviewed, people wrote to me saying that I must have believed in the wrong God, that I hadn’t found the real God.

My message is that introducing any kind of religion into childrearing is detrimental to their development – religion is not an issue for a child, it has nothing to do with childhood.

People have often found reasons to justify their opinions on why they are teaching religious dogma to their children [...]. We are baptised and we no longer have a choice. As someone who knows the Bible well, both the Old and the New Testament, I wonder if people have really read the Bible [...].

I received messages from several members of my former congregation when they found out I was going to write a book. The message was: “Maybe you’ll write it out and calm down.”

Your parents play an important role in your book and your story. Was their sternness a result of their religious beliefs?

It is a set of problems. Everything my parents did was certainly not determined only by religion and what they learned from it. But many things, like social exclusion, deprivation of childhood, separation from friends, are down to religion.

But there were other things in my family: violence, alcoholism, strict upbringing, physical and psychological abuse – these are not necessarily the trains inherent in the Jehovah's Witnesses community.

But I have been thinking about one thing recently. The people who join such small religious communities are often lonely, spiritually broken, and deeply troubled. My mother was one of these people. When I was a little girl, I reflected on this, and my community seemed to me like the most wonderful people. But now I can see it differently. Instead of pursuing education, my mother chose an obscure religious community, unknown in Lithuania at the time, and gave birth to me.

One reason is utterly selfish. Ten years ago, at a party, I noticed that everyone was listening to my stories intently, I realised that I had something interesting to tell, I saw that people didn’t judge me, even though I had been ashamed of it and hadn’t wanted to talk about it before [...].

Later on, there were changes in my life and society, stories about abusive parents and their child-rearing methods started coming out. So I decided to start writing publicly about violence, about how I would have liked to be taken away from my parents, but I didn’t dare to talk about it.

Driven by this thought, anger and the desire to help others, I decided to talk about it – sometimes we need to intervene in other people’s families, no matter how much we are used to keeping our distance. I wish it were not so.

Was it strange for you to adapt to secular life?

I was ashamed that I had to live differently from other children. If there’s a birthday party in class, my mother won’t let me be there. I didn’t dare to go out, I was torn apart – I wanted to be with the children of the world, but I was also scared of not getting into heaven. When I’d come home, I’d pray to God and ask for forgiveness [...].

In my teenage years, I realised that I was a laywoman, I managed to get away from my parents, but I had to make a sacrifice – it was physical violence, but I wanted to be emotionally free.

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