I was expected to choose between my religion and my husband

Sherrie was born and raised in the Jehovah’s Witness community. Her world came crashing down when she found out her husband was leaving the religion.

Sherrie and her husband Sasha sitting at dinner.

I had always done what was expected of me. After all, I was born into the ‘only true religion’.

Everything I listened to, read and consumed was approved by the secretive organisation known as “The Truth”, the insider name for Jehovah’s Witnesses, or JW’s.

But in June 2015, my world fell apart. I was left with a gut-wrenching choice: my husband or my religion.

Sacha and I met when we were 19 and married five years later. Our marriage and our lives were built on our faith and revolved around the Jehovah’s Witness church.

Sherrie and Sacha on their wedding day.

All JW marriages are “threefold cords” comprising Jehovah (God), the husband and the wife. Our days and weeks revolved around church activities, including regular meetings and door-to-door preaching. We even employed a JW member to help with our business accounts.

Sacha came from three generations of JWs and was widely respected in the church. He had been appointed a Ministerial Servant, giving him ‘additional privileges of service’, and he would speak publicly from the church platform.

All the while, I had no idea that in 2012, my husband started questioning his faith.

I only found out three years later when the JW member we hired snooped on Sacha’s work computer and discovered he had been chatting with ex-Jehovah’s Witnesses in an online forum.

As any diligent JW would be expected to, she went to the congregation elders and told them of her discovery.

By questioning his faith on the online forum, my husband was branded an apostate – someone who has abandoned the true cause, worship, and service of God, and who is now a danger to the church and its congregation.

By June 2015, Sacha no longer believed in God at all. As for me, while the passion I had in my younger years was less intense, I still believed. It was unthinkable for me to consider any other life. It was the only life I knew.

Like Sacha, I had been raised a JW and I had devoted the first 41 years of my life to the religion. A religion in which critical thinking is disapproved of.

Sherrie and Sacha on a boat.

Growing up, school was a minefield of seemingly “normal” activities from which I was excluded.

The JW’s teachings meant I wasn’t allowed to celebrate birthdays, Easter, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Christmas, Valentine's Day, or even sing the anthem or school song. I lived in a world set uncomfortably apart from my schoolmates. Spending time with them outside of school was impossible as they were considered “worldly” and “bad associates”, resulting in a lonely and pressured life.

The doctrine, teachings and culture of the religion formed the basis of my every ‘decision’, and I was anxious to make a good name for myself in the eyes of other Jehovah’s Witnesses.

I was baptised when I was 14 and chose to leave school when I was 16 so that I could become a full-time volunteer. I would spend 90 unpaid hours a month knocking on doors and preaching about the Bible.

When I found out about Sacha’s deconversion, I was stunned and terrified. It felt as though the very earth had shifted under my feet and turned upside down.

I tried to understand what was happening and desperately tried to find some anchor to hang on to. If our marriage was not based on religion anymore, what was it based on? What did Sacha’s apostasy mean for our marriage?

Sherrie and Sasha at dinner

The conversation I had with Sacha the weekend I found out was the most difficult discussion of my life. I asked question after question, and to my shame, I even asked if he would now be swearing and getting a tattoo. I asked if he would now start celebrating birthdays and Christmas.

I was terrified of what I would learn. Sacha was terrified of my response. He was terrified I would leave him. Words fail to describe the distress that we were both suffering,

I knew what was expected of me. I knew that I was supposed to choose my faith over my husband.

I knew that if I had left and divorced him, it would be applauded, congratulated and celebrated by the church.

I would then become a “spiritual widow”, attending meetings on my own and I would have to endure the sympathy, pity and morbid curiosity of others in the congregation.

But ours had been a happy marriage. I couldn’t do what the church wanted me to do. I couldn’t leave my husband. I chose my husband over my faith.

Sacha and Sherrie holding a box of roses.

Sacha never pressured me into deconverting. We just relished our weekends together. It was liberating to no longer have the pressure of all of the various obligations and commitments expected of a Jehovah’s Witness.

As the months went by, I waited to see if anyone from the congregation would reach out to me to see how I was. No call or SMS came. The shunning had begun.

November 2016 was the turning point for me.

I had read the reports of the Australian Royal Commission (ARC) into Institutional Response to Child Sexual Abuse. The reports included the ARC’s investigation of the Jehovah’s Witness response to child sexual abuse.

I can’t begin to describe my horror at what I read. The Commission found that the religion I had been so much a part of was not an organisation which responds adequately to child sexual abuse and did not adequately protect children from the risk of sexual abuse. The ARC had discovered that the organisation had kept records of 1,006 alleged abusers, affecting over 1,800 children, and not one had been reported to the authorities by the organisation.

Reading the ARC report triggered the start of my deconversion process, not just from the Jehovah’s Witnesses, but from any religious belief.

My husband supported me throughout my deconversion process, but it was still an intensely lonely, harrowing and traumatic process. It is particularly difficult when the religion you leave does not give you any graceful or dignified path to leave. They control the narrative about you and mandate you be shunned by everyone that you ever knew, loved or thought were your family and friends.

But life now has the meaning I decide – my actions and purpose are no longer dictated by a coercive cult.

Sacha and I help others who are in the midst of questioning and leaving faith by providing a safe-landing space for them. Through our support group, ‘Recovering from Religion’, those dealing with religious trauma can come and share their experiences.

Volunteering in this way certainly helps make sense of the madness of my life and I pour my passions now into raising awareness of religious harm and in supporting others as they disentangle themselves from coercive control.

I’m happy and content, loving expressing myself freely as a woman and running towards life every day.

On Sex, Religion, Politics, Insight looks at the issues tearing relationships apart. Is it possible to work through opposing values and when do we know when to walk away? Hear from Sherrie and her husband Sacha on SBS On Demand.