Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | T | The Register-Guard (Eugene, OR)

Cast out.

Article Excerpt
Byline: Karen McCowan The Register-Guard

SHUNNING. In the eyes of most Oregonians, it's an unfamiliar, even archaic, practice - a throwback to the era of "The Scarlet Letter." Yet it provided a bizarre backdrop for two recent familicides that occurred here just two months and 75 miles apart.

Shunning is not a topic that typically arises when detectives interview a murder suspect.

But Christian Longo, accused in the December 2001 killings of his wife, MaryJane, and their three children, raised shunning as the reason they moved to Oregon, so far from friends and family in Michigan.

After McMinnville resident Robert Bryant killed his wife, Janet, their four children and himself in February 2002, Janet's sister also cited the practice, saying it helped create the isolation and despair that drove Robert - "a loving and dedicated husband" - to snap.

Both families were members of the Jehovah's Witnesses, who say shunning is an act of love intended to inspire repentence and a return to right living.

Officially, the practice is known as "disfellowshipping." The word may sound less drastic than the "excommunication" of the Roman Catholic Church, but the practice goes far beyond denying sacraments to those cast out.

J.R. Brown, national spokesman for the Jehovah's Witnesses and Watchtower Society, explained it in straightforward fashion:

"Basically, it is a discipline that is applied by the congregation," he said in a recent interview. `Its purpose is to correct what is wrong or at variance with the scriptures ... We base it on what is in the Bible, I Corinthians 5 and 6: `Neither receive him into your home, or say a greeting to him or share a meal with him.' All spiritual relations and all social relationships are severed - and, by extension, business relationships."

Defense attorney Ken Hadley said he expected "more to come" out on Christian Longo's disfellowshipping when Longo's murder trial begins this month, and prospective jurors were quizzed about their knowledge of the practice.

Scholars who've studied the Jehovah's Witnesses use terms such as "psychologically devastating" to describe the impact of shunning - particularly on those who've known only the Jehovah's Witness faith.

None of the researchers interviewed for this story suggested the experience was a rationale for murder.

"I'm not familiar with any case when it was shown scientifically or social scientifically to be a cause of homicide" said Denver University religious studies professor Carl Raschke. "People are shunned, ostracized all the time without doing this."

In fact, one sociologist who has studied the Witnesses suggested that the disfellowshippings preceding the Longo and Bryant familicides were simply signs of coming trouble.

"People don't get disfellowshipped for nothing," said University of Washington sociology professor Rodney Stark. "It seems far more likely that, rather than disfellowshipping being a cause, it was just one more symptom of someone...