A religious movement, founded in the 1870s by Bible Students led by Charles Taze Russell, directed today from Warwick, New York
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Jehovah's Witnesses are a religious movement, describing itself as Christian, that grew out of Bible study groups led by Charles Taze Russell in Pennsylvania in the 1870s and is known for its public preaching, rejection of the Trinity and refusal of whole-blood transfusions.
Via Wikimedia Commons: Kingdom Hall of Jehovah's Witnesses in Karlsruhe-Mühlburg in Baden-Wür by Ikar.us, CC BY 3.0 de.
The movement is directed from a world headquarters in Warwick, New York, and, by its own count, had an average of just over 9 million active members worldwide in the year to August 2025. Its history includes revised expectations about the end of the present world, landmark court cases on religious freedom, persecution under Nazi Germany and in modern Russia, and continuing public dispute over how it handles child sexual abuse and treats people who leave.
According to the Witnesses' own account, Charles Taze Russell was "the prime mover" of a Bible study group that began in the early 1870s in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, now part of Pittsburgh. In July 1879 Russell began publishing the magazine Zion's Watch Tower and Herald of Christ's Presence. Zion's Watch Tower Tract Society was formed in 1881 and incorporated in 1884 with Russell as president; it was later renamed the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society. The headquarters moved to Brooklyn, New York, in 1909.
Russell taught that 1914 would mark the end of the "gentile times" and that Christ had begun to rule from heaven. The year remains central to Witness teaching: the movement states that Jesus has ruled as King of God's Kingdom since 1914.
Russell died in 1916. In January 1917 Joseph Franklin Rutherford, previously the society's chief legal counsel, was elected its president. According to David L. DeHart's account for EBSCO Research Starters, challenges to his election and his moves against opponents on the board produced a bitter schism and a significant drop in membership. In 1918 Rutherford and several associates were convicted of sedition and served about nine months in prison.
At a convention in Columbus, Ohio, held from 24 to 30 July 1931, Rutherford presented a resolution on 26 July adopting the name Jehovah's Witnesses. The movement's own literature says the name was taken to distinguish its members from the denominations of Christendom. DeHart's account adds other purposes: to separate Rutherford's followers from the Bible Students who had left the society, to serve as a rallying point for preaching, and to centralise his authority as the organisation moved from a somewhat democratic structure towards an increasingly theocratic one.
Rutherford died in 1942 and Nathan Homer Knorr became the third president. Under Knorr the organisation expanded internationally, set up ministry training schools and the Gilead missionary school, and in 1961 published the New World Translation, the Bible translation the Witnesses use. Growth was rapid: a 1958 convention in New York recorded, by the movement's count, a peak attendance of 253,922 and 7,136 baptisms. In 1969 Time magazine reported a worldwide membership of 1,155,826, of whom 323,688 were in the United States.
In the late 1960s many Witnesses came to expect that the end of the present world might come in or around 1975. Time reported in July 1969 that the movement's calculations dated the end of the world to the autumn of 1975, while noting that Witnesses "cautiously avoid a flat prediction." The movement later addressed the episode in The Watchtower of 15 March 1980. That article said that after one of its books suggested Christ's thousand-year reign might begin at the start of humanity's seventh millennium, considerable expectation was aroused regarding the year 1975. It said cautionary statements had presented this as only a possibility, but other statements had implied it was more likely, and that "it is to be regretted" those statements overshadowed the cautions. It applied an earlier warning against fixing hopes on a date to those who had published the material as well as to its readers.
The movement summarises its beliefs on its official website, jw.org. Among them:
The Witnesses hold that the only commemoration Christians are told to keep is "not a birth, but a death". They do not celebrate birthdays. They also do not observe Christmas, Easter and other holidays they regard as having pagan roots, nor national days such as Independence Day, because they consider them to honour other gods, nations or humans. For some other occasions the movement leaves the decision to each member's conscience.
Worldwide direction comes from the Governing Body, described by the movement as a small group of mature Christians who oversee its publications, meetings, schools and preaching work and the use of donated funds. It serves at the world headquarters in Warwick, New York, and the movement says it follows the pattern of the apostles and elders in first-century Jerusalem. The headquarters moved from Brooklyn to Warwick in the 2010s; the Warwick site opened for tours on 3 April 2017 as the Brooklyn staff were moving out of New York City.
Local congregations are overseen by elders who, according to the movement, are unpaid and do not form a clergy class. No collections are taken at meetings and members do not tithe.
The movement counts members as "publishers," meaning people who take part in its preaching. Its report for the year from September 2024 to August 2025 gives:
In the United States, the Pew Research Center reported in 2016, from its Religious Landscape Study, that Jehovah's Witnesses made up just under 1% of adults. It found them to be one of the country's most racially diverse religious groups (36% white, 32% Hispanic, 27% Black and 6% another or mixed race). Pew also found that about 65% of adult Witnesses were converts, and that two-thirds of Americans raised as Witnesses no longer identified with the group.
Jehovah's Witnesses are widely known for refusing blood transfusions, a stance the movement bases on the command to "abstain from blood" (Acts 15:20). The policy changed substantially in 2026:
As of November 2026, the refusal of whole-blood transfusion remains in place: the September 2026 statement calls it a core teaching. The movement also states that Witnesses do not practise faith healing and seek medical care consistent with their beliefs.
According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, of the 25,000 to 30,000 Germans who were Jehovah's Witnesses in 1933, an estimated 20,000 remained active through the Nazi period. The regime regarded them as unwilling to accept the authority of the state, and their refusal of military service sharpened the conflict after conscription was reintroduced in 1935. On 1 April 1935 the Reich and Prussian Minister of the Interior ordered local officials to dissolve the Watchtower Society.
The museum estimates that by 1939 about 6,000 Witnesses were held in prisons or camps, and that at least 3,000 were sent to concentration camps, where they were marked with purple triangular patches. Some were tortured in attempts to make them sign declarations renouncing their faith; few did. An estimated 1,000 German Witnesses and 400 from other countries died or were murdered in camps and prisons, and at least 273 were sentenced to death by military courts and executed for refusing military service.
The Witnesses' preaching and their refusal of patriotic rituals have produced many court cases. In the United States, the best known is West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, decided on 14 June 1943, in which the Supreme Court held that Witness children could not be compelled to salute the flag. It overruled Minersville School District v. Gobitis, decided only three years earlier. Justice Robert Jackson wrote for the majority that "If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty," "can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein."
In April 2017 Russia's Supreme Court declared the Witnesses' organisation extremist. As reported by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the ruling required the closure of the St Petersburg headquarters and about 395 local chapters, with Kingdom Halls handed to the state; the movement said it had about 170,000 adherents in Russia. The court rejected the appeal on 17 July 2017. The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom condemned the decision, its chairman stating that "The Witnesses are not an extremist group."
On 7 June 2022 the European Court of Human Rights ruled in Taganrog LRO and Others v. Russia, which combined 20 applications, that Russia had committed multiple violations of the European Convention on Human Rights, including of freedom of religion (Article 9) in the dissolution of Witness organisations and the criminal prosecution of members, of freedom of expression (Article 10) in the banning of their publications, and of property rights in the confiscation of their property.
Baptised members who commit serious sins and do not repent are removed from the congregation, and the congregation is told that the person is no longer a Witness. The movement formerly called this "disfellowshipping" and now uses the word "removed." Members do not socialise with a removed person, though the movement says they do not ignore him completely: he may attend meetings, and family relations within the household continue. People who simply stop taking part are, according to the movement, approached with encouragement rather than shunned. A removed person may be reinstated.
Critics and some governments argue that this practice, often called shunning, puts unfair pressure on members not to leave. In Norway the state refused the Witnesses state funding and deregistered them as a religious community on that ground, arguing that shunning former members violated children's rights and members' right to leave freely. On 29 April 2026 Norway's Supreme Court held those decisions invalid. It found unanimously that the state had not shown that minors were subjected to psychological violence or negative social control. By three justices to two, it found that shunning did not amount to undue pressure against leaving, citing its basis in doctrine, its disclosure to members when they join, and the fact that family ties are not severed. The two dissenting justices concluded that the practice does exert undue pressure, noting that it can cost members contact with family and is meant to deter leaving.
Australia's Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse examined the Witnesses in its Case Study 29. Its report, released on 28 November 2016, noted that the organisation's case files recorded allegations of child sexual abuse by 1,006 members of the organisation in Australia. The Commission found that children were not adequately protected, that the organisation's general practice of not reporting serious cases to police was a serious failure, and that its inflexible application of the "two-witness rule", a requirement for corroboration before the congregation acts, showed a serious lack of understanding of the nature of child sexual abuse.
The movement's own published position, set out in The Watchtower of May 2019, is that elders endeavor to comply with secular laws about reporting allegations of abuse, that victims and their parents are free to report to the authorities, and that the two-witness requirement does not apply to whether elders or others report allegations of a crime, only to congregation discipline. It states that its congregations do not shield perpetrators from the consequences of their sins.
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