How the Jehovah’s Witnesses paved the road to Deaf inclusion

A woman uses sign language to communicate with Deaf Jehovah’s Witnesses. Photo courtesy of JW.org.

NEW YORK — In 1967, Howard Mallory opened his front door in Danbury, Connecticut to an unexpected visitor. A young woman with long hair smiled as the door cracked open. She began delivering the script designed for door-to-door-ministry, only to be met with a confused look from the householder. 

She quickly realized the man before her was Deaf.* She ripped out a piece of notebook paper and scribbled a message: “Do you know the name of God?” 

With his interest piqued, Mallory returned to his Catholic priest with questions, but they were dismissed without much explanation, he said. Mallory had been attending Catholic Mass for years, “standing and kneeling without having any idea what was going on,” he said. 

This was a different experience. The woman on his doorstep wanted him to understand and seemed to think he could.  

The Jehovah’s Witnesses push toward Deaf inclusion began with elementary attempts at scribbled notes, and only recently culminated in the publication of the first complete ASL (or American Sign Language) Bible, passing their 1,000th language mark for Bible translations. The Jehovah’s Witnesses have their own translation of the Bible and believe that Jesus is inferior to God the Father and created by him, in contrast from mainline and orthodox Christian traditions, whose Bible exists in 698 languages, according to the Bible translation society Wycliffe Global Alliance. 

Since the project began in 2005 with the book of Matthew, over 60 Million chapters of the ASL Bible have been downloaded globally, according to the Jehovah’s Witnesses. This would equate to more than 50,000 downloads of the complete Bible. There are only 2,300 Deaf Jehovah’s Witnesses in the U.S. 

Since the first Deaf congregation formed in 1989 on 83rd Street in Manhattan, several have followed. “The second was L.A, the third was Boston, the fourth was Atlanta. I used to remember them all in order until it got to 200,” Mallory said. 

Today in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, a vibrant community is the fruit from those early days.

A Jehovah’s Witness shows the digital ASL Bible on his phone in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. Photo by Liza Vandenboom.

A mixed crowd of teenagers, elderly couples, and young children meets in the lobby of the fellowship hall, and the smell of hot dogs cooking wafts in from the corner.  Fluorescent lights highlight the changing facial expressions of an elderly man wearing a yellow suit, as he retells his journey on the disrupted R train to today’s meeting. One sign after another comes in a syncopated rhythm, as he shifts his body weight from left to right to indicate a conversation he had with an unsavory transit employee. The group gathered around him laughs as he puffs out his cheeks and dramatizes an explanation of the crowded train. 

As soon as the clock ticks from 6:59 to 7:00, the whole crowd wordlessly marches into the auditorium, taking their self-assigned seats. Two TV’s flanking the stage flick on and a man in a suit and tie begins signing a list of announcements on the screen. He reminds congregants to wash their hands and stay home if they’re sick. and to not forget about the coming American Sign Language (ASL) Memorial of Jesus Christ’s Death service.

As the service progresses, the same screens host two men signing a hymn about Jehovah’s ordination of marriage against a changing green screen. Church members popcorn up from their seats and join in on the song, each one slightly out of sync but equally enthralled. “As we have vowed, so may it be. Seasons of joy, may we come to see. Oh, may we honor Jehovah, and may you always be my love,” they sign. 

The road to this level of inclusion was long and winding. 

The silent road to Jehovah: early days of Deaf ministry

The Mallory family had several more meetings throughout the year with their impromptu visitor. She would return to the Mallory house and sit in the living room with them, passing notes back and forth describing the scriptures and readings from the Watchtower publication, a prominent Jehovah’s Witness commentary. 

Mallory was baptized as a Witness in 1970. 

But his limited reading level and understanding of English remained a difficult hurdle. “He didn’t know much, but he knew God’s name was Jehovah, and that was enough for him,” his son Tim said. 

Throughout the seventies, the father and son would travel door-to-door, replicating the ministry that had impacted them. 

“I was 10 years old and I didn’t always want to interpret,” Tim, who is Hearing, said. He would sometimes pretend to ring the bell without pushing it down, tricking his father into thinking no one was home despite the cars in the driveway. 

Mallory, with the help of his son, would scribble notes to pass to the householder: “Hello, my name is Howard. I am a Deaf person. Would you like a magazine?” 

The Mallory family had been attending meetings in the Danbury area for seven years, receiving only fragments of teaching passed on notes by congregants sitting next to them. But, in 1975, things started to change for the Deaf community. Some Witnesses in their congregation began learning sign from books. 

“Those early interpreters were really bad,” Mallory said. “Their heart was in the right place, but they didn’t know the language. Their signing was very English, not ASL.” 

English signing transliterates spoken sentences to sign in exact English grammar, word for word. But ASL requires interpreting. There is not a 1:1 ratio between word and sign in the translation process, and English grammar and idiosyncrasies remain foreign to those who have never heard them.

 “ASL has its own grammatical structure and its own language. It’s just so different from English,” Mallory said. “Nobody in the church was doing the real-deal, and Deaf people, who don’t know English, suffered because they didn’t understand.” 

As more Deaf people joined the faith and found each other, they formed their own study groups. “We would spend hours looking at a single text, trying to read it and figure out what it meant,” Arthur Castello, a Deaf Jehovah's witness, said. “But none of us read very well, and we would sign back and forth, and were never really sure if we had the meaning right.” 

Realizing ASL is a language 

In the late 1980’s the Jehovah’s Witnesses began “to get their act together,” according to Mallory. “They started to realize that ASL was a language and that things needed to change.” 

Every year Witnesses have a three to four day convention. Previously, Deaf people always attended whichever one was closest to their homes, but in the late eighties the organization began funneling the Deaf community to designated conventions where they would have trained ASL interpreters. 

The momentum behind Deaf inclusion began to build. 

“My parents once a month would drive from New Hampshire to Boston, or Danbury to Mt. Vernon, for Deaf meetings,” Tim Mallory said. 

The Deaf Witnesses in the area would congregate for their services. “We wouldn’t join the Hearing hall. We would do it ourselves.” Mallory said. These unofficial Deaf groups continued to grow. “Finally, in New York, there were so many Deaf people that they felt they could have their own congregation, and they broke off from the Hearing.” 

In 1989, the first ASL Jehovah's Witness meeting was established on 83rd St. in Manhattan. 

The need for ASL publications was greater than ever.

In the early nineties the first ASL VCR tapes hit the streets. “Look I Am Making All Things New,” a witnessing tool highlighting basic Bible teachings, was translated into ASL. 

The Jehovah’s Witnesses began carrying TV sets door-to-door to share their message, which included sign language if needed. Photo courtesy of JW.org.

Witnesses, Deaf and Hearing alike, would wheel TV/VCR sets on stands through neighborhoods, armed with new tools beyond scribbled messages. 

“We lugged them around and asked people if we could come plug them in. That was how we got into the house,” Mallory said. 

In 2002, the Watchtower series began publishing its weekly lessons in ASL, and in 2005, the Book of Matthew came out in Sign Language. An ambitious project was born.

Closer to the holy book 

While typically unknown to the Hearing community, the challenges Deaf people often face with a textual reading are profound. 

“Reading and writing English is just a herculean task for a Deaf person. Reading is linked with hearing,” Mallory said. “Imagine you’re in a glass dome and someone on the other side starts speaking Russian to you. Well, you can’t lip-read the Russian, because you don’t know Russian. And if they say okay, hold on, let me write it down for you, and they write it down in Russian and put it on the glass, you’re looking at it going ‘that doesn’t help.’” 

One thing became undeniably clear for the Jehovah’s Witnesses: in order for the Deaf community to flourish in their faith, they needed texts in their own language.

Tim Mallory recounted a story about his Deaf parents-in-law. 

“One time, they were reading through a paragraph that discussed why everyone should go to Kingdom Meetings at the Kingdom Hall, for this reason, that reason, etc. At the very end, the last sentence said, ‘Should we not go to meetings?’” he said. “In English, the meaning there is ‘You should go,’ but my father-in-law read that as, ‘Why does it say we shouldn’t go to meetings?’  The tone wasn’t there for him.”

The differences between English and ASL required a dynamic and collaborative approach. “The goal is that the text is understood, and that takes more than an academic approach,” said Robert Hendriks, a spokesperson for the Jehovah’s Witnesses.  

The methodology involved several review panels and researchers, and the bulk of the translating took place within a Deaf community in Florida. The immersive, culturally-aware method proved necessary for the project’s success. 

“I’ve always known what I was learning was the truth, but at the same time, I didn’t understand a lot of things.” Castello said. “When the ASL publications came out, I felt like I could go out and preach. I could go out and show a Deaf person our language, and he also would understand.”

*The Deaf community identifies themselves with capitalization.

Liza is a student at The King’s College, an editorial intern with Religion Unplugged, and a religion columnist for The Empire State Tribune. She has a background in Deaf and ASL education, leading ASL classes for Hearing children and conducting tutoring in ASL for Deaf children.