The Watch Tower Society's 1975 Expectation

Raymond Franz, a member of Jehovah's Witnesses' Governing Body from 1971 until his removal in 1980, wrote in Crisis of Conscience an insider account of how the 1975 expectation was built and then addressed. He documents that the Watch Tower 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, actively promoted 1975 as the probable end of six thousand years of human history since Adam's creation, years before the date arrived, and that senior officers of the Society delivered public talks in similarly confident terms. On his account, once 1975 passed without the anticipated end, the organization's own subsequent publications placed responsibility for the disappointment on individual members who had drawn their own conclusions from what the Society had published, rather than acknowledging what the Society's own literature had promoted. Franz holds that the March 15, 1980 Watchtower's acknowledgment of the disappointment, though it went further than anything said before it, still did not take direct responsibility for the expectation the Society's own publications had built, and he names this gap, between what the organization published and what it was later willing to admit having published, as one of the disagreements that contributed to his removal from the Governing Body that same year.