Jehovah's Witnesses Practices - Watch Tower Society Literature

Watch Tower Society Literature

See also: Jehovah's Witnesses publications and List of Watch Tower Society publications

Jehovah's Witnesses make extensive use of Watch Tower Society literature, including books, magazines, booklets and handbills, to spread their beliefs and to use as textbooks at their religious meetings. The publications are produced in many languages, with a small selection available in 500 languages. Their primary journal, The Watchtower is published simultaneously in nearly two hundred languages and, along with Awake!, available in audio and electronic formats. Issues of both publications are compiled annually into bound volumes, and are added yearly to the Watchtower Library CD-ROM, which contains many Witness publications from 1950 onward, and is officially available to baptized members only. New books, brochures, and other items are released at their annual conventions. Additionally, a number of audio cassettes, videocassettes, and DVDs have been produced explaining the group's beliefs, practices, organization and history. Some of these also provide dramas based on biblical accounts. Since 1942 all Watch Tower literature has been published anonymously.

Publications were sold to the public until the early 1990s, from which time they were offered gratis, with a request for donations. The change in policy was first announced in the United States in February 1990, following the loss of a US Supreme Court court case by Jimmy Swaggart Ministries on the issue of sales tax exemption for religious groups. The Watch Tower Society had joined the case as an Amicus curiae, or "friend of the court". The court ruling would have resulted in the Watch Tower Society having to pay millions of dollars in sales tax if sales of their literature had continued.

Witnesses are urged to prepare for congregation meetings by studying the assigned Watch Tower literature, and are expected to read all magazines and books published by the Society. One analysis noted that each year Witnesses are expected to read more than 3,000 pages of the Society's publications, according to its suggested program for personal study. In 1981 this would have included 1,536 pages from The Watchtower and Awake!, 48 pages from Our Kingdom Ministry, 384 pages of a book for the congregation book study, 384 pages from the Yearbook, 360 pages of the Theocratic Ministry School textbook and 258 pages of assembly releases in addition to scheduled weekly Bible reading. Much of the literature is illustrated extensively, with sociologist Andrew Holden observing utopian, post-Armageddon images of happy Witnesses in bright sunshine and pristine environments, often playing with formerly wild animals such as lions and tigers, in contrast to dark-colored images of unfavorable activities such as murders, burglaries and promiscuity that highlight the moral dangers outside the organization.