The Jehovah’s Witnesses

Abstract

We have seen how L. Ron Hubbard uses strategies of association to create a relationship with the audience. By telling his own life story, he indirectly illustrates the major underpinnings of the movement that he founded. In this chapter, we see a very different kind of persuasive strategy. Unlike Hubbard’s argument from ethos, the Jehovah’s Witnesses rely on an understanding of quasi-logical argument. Logos does not involve strict logic, as we have seen from work in rhetoric and argument theory. Rather, the reader is primed to accept arguments because of the appearance of logic. Discourse markers signal arguments here, rather than the chronology used in Hubbard’s speech. This persuasive technique is predictable from what we know about the movement as both ex-members and scholars describe the conversion to the Jehovah’s Witnesses as more rational than spritual.