The Book That Documents 1975 From Inside

Crisis of Conscience is Raymond Franz's own account of his fifteen years at Jehovah's Witnesses' Brooklyn headquarters and his nine years on its Governing Body, published in 1983 through Commentary Press, a small press of his own rather than an academic or denominational publisher; the book was later revised, most recently in 2004. Its central documentary claim concerns the expectation that 1975 would mark six thousand years of human history since Adam's creation and might bring Armageddon. Franz documents that the Society's own publications, among them the 1966 book Life Everlasting in Freedom of the Sons of God and Awake! magazine issues running through 1968, promoted that expectation years before the date arrived, and that senior officers of the Society gave public talks in similarly confident terms. He documents that once 1975 passed, the Society's later publications placed responsibility for the disappointment on individual members' own conclusions rather than on what its literature had promoted, and he argues the doctrinal handling of the date was driven by a need to preserve organizational unity rather than by clear biblical grounds.

The book holds a debated place in the scholarship on Jehovah's Witnesses. Historian M. James Penton, whose Apocalypse Delayed is the standard academic history of the movement's dated expectations, treats it as a key primary source and calls it remarkably informative and thoroughly documented, written more in sadness than in anger. Sociologist Andrew Holden calls it one of the most compelling biographical works on defection from Jehovah's Witnesses. Franz wrote as a departed critic of the organization that had expelled him, not as a neutral bystander, a trade off the scholarship weighs alongside its documentary detail.