Hope is a group project

shamelessly stolen from Salena Godden

Maybe it was in the depths of the pandemic, maybe in the jaws of the Tory regime (are we calling it a regime yet?) when I first saw Salena Godden tweet that hope was a group project. It stuck with me, maybe because any group I’d been part of had never felt very hopeful to me. That’s the problem with growing up in a cult, you become suspicious of groups, and of hope. For a long time, I was bad at faith, hope’s blinder cousin. I am still bad at faith, I find it a difficult thing to keep; in anything, in anyone, in short, I am not a faithful person, I am not a hopeful person either. Or so I thought.

Hope can seem glib, like the ‘be kind’ maxim that’s thrown around mainly by loud white feminists hoping to avoid any kind of scrutiny, be kind they shout, down from their perches, until it becomes a tyrannical, largely meaningless statement to add to live love laugh. Hope felt a bit like that. After all, I’d hoped God would do something for the better part of 30 years, and look where that had got me. But, here the coupling is interesting, hope is a group project. Hope isn’t something you do alone, hope requires mass, momentum, gathering to create form of force; hope doesn’t exist in isolation, hope needs numbers; hope is a verb.

That’s what I’d been doing wrong; I’d been hoping for the wrong things, with the wrong people, and when I left the religion I was part of, I was too alone to hope in much. For a long time, things felt bleak. I lost my friends, my mother, my faith, my certain future; I lost my sense of self, I quite literally lost the plot of my life. I’d been told all hope for the future lay with God, the world outside was hopeless; absent of hope, devoid of it, that’s how I saw the world when I joined, that’s the baseline I started from. Writing especially felt futile, it wasn’t doing anything quantifiable. But somewhere, things began to change.

I’ve been thinking about this today, partly because I recorded a podcast this morning with someone else who grew up as a Jehovah’s Witness, and also because tonight a Channel Four documentary with Rebekah Vardy airs. Rebekah grew up as a Jehovah’s Witness, and last year, Hardcash, the production team behind the documentary contacted me asking if I’d like to appear in it. I said yes, and just before Christmas, Rebekah and I spent a couple of hours talking, swamping stories and filming. What happened that day, and is reflected in the final film, is that the little girl she described being, the fears and limits placed on her life, were the same as I described in The Last Days; these two little girls, living with the same fears and constraints. Earlier last year, a similar thing happened when I was interviewed in The Sunday Times, and an extract from the book was shared there, in the weeks that followed I had messages from people all over the world telling me the story I shared was so similar to their lived experience it was uncanny. When I wrote The Last Days, I wrote my story, but my story matches other people’s because Jehovah’s Witnesses are a cult, and so uniform stories of control, coercion and various abuses begin to emerge. Tonight’s documentary features stories from many others, some about CSA, one from a woman whose son who died by suicide after he was left vulnerable, alone, judged and shunned by the community who should have supported him; the same community who proudly call themselves the most loving organisation on earth. These stories don’t exist in isolation, just as mine didn’t; and now people are sharing them publicly, these stories are beginning to gain their own momentum, this is a group of survivors, not an organised group, and this is important because the lack of organisation gives credibility to the same stories, repeating over and over; these stories show exactly the kind of organisation behind the Jehovah’s Witnesses, a leadership who, at every press opportunity they have, actively work to discredit survivors’ testimony instead of simply saying sorry. Last week, in Canada, Daniel Allen Cox released his memoir in essays, I Felt the End Before it Came, about growing up as a queer Jehovah’s Witness; Amber Scorah’s Leaving the Witness, bears testimony to her life as a Jehovah’s Witness, in Without Warning and Only Sometimes Kit De Waal vividly brings the fear experienced by Witness children to life, Daniel Kokotajlo’s film Apostasy brought the realities of Witness life to film; this is a group project, this is hope in action. This is how I can begin to believe again, in art and its power, because eventually, there will be too many voices to ignore, too many people saying the same thing, there will, I say, tentatively hopefully, be no way leaders can continue to squirm their way out of every piece of scrutiny; one voice is a whisper, but many, that’s a different thing entirely.

Emily Dickinson knew too, hope isn’t just the thing with feathers, even as it takes flight, hope is also the thing that never stops at all.