I think the most important contribution [Eddie Minnis] has made to culture in this country is in the way he has lived his life.
Stan Burnside
I was one of them.
I was a Jehovah’s Witness yes, but I was even more than that. I was what you would call a true true believer. To convert people to this religion I learned to speak fluent Haitian, I even did missionary work in the Abacos and Great Harbour Cay. Maybe I knocked on your door one Saturday morning with a broad smile holding a Watchtower magazine in my hand asking you about something deep, like ‘why do people die?’
Maybe you slammed the door in my face.
It’s not like I can blame you. I realize now that Saturday mornings are not the time and your front porch is not the place for those kinds of conversations. If that was me back then, I sincerely apologize. You have to understand that, at the time, that was all I knew. I was probably out there every week, barring sickness, since I could fit into a stroller.
I’m not the only one either. My whole family is so deeply steeped in this religion there isn’t a single part of us that isn’t stained.
As with most things in our family, it started with Dad. He’s the only one of us with a real conversion story. If you watched the “Ting an’ Ting” documentary about him, you heard him talk about how his yearning for God started. One day while he was out painting and listening to the radio it struck him that there was so much beauty in front of him and on his canvas but so much ugly on the news. His desire to reconcile the two realities led him to the Witnesses, and they helped him understand the Bible for the first time.
This answered his burning questions, something that he says he didn’t get from the Anglican Church that he grew up in. Everything began to fit for him. My Mom soon joined him in his Bible studies and they were baptized into the religion in 1974 and we, the children, naturally followed along.
1.
When he became a Witness, Eddie Minnis – my father, was already a Bahamian icon and fast approaching the apex of his powers. He was a firmly established artist, having painted all over Nassau in his trademarked cherry red Volkswagen van. The new Prime Minister, Lynden Pindling, was attending his exhibitions and even buying pieces.
The daily editorial cartoon was a concept that he imported from abroad and made wholly Bahamian. He called his creation “Pot Luck” and it ran in the Nassau Guardian newspaper. It had become so popular that, in a few short years, it was driving sales of the paper.
He was also playing the lead character in “The Fergusons of Farm Road” – only the most popular Bahamian soap opera ever – which at the time, was still on ZNS radio.
He used the popularity of the Fergusons to launch, what was to pretty much everyone, a very unlikely music career. His first hit “Miss Lye,” performed by Kenny and the Beach Boys, was a song about the villain and the most popular character from the show.
He parlayed that success into a working partnership with Ronnie Butler, the biggest, baddest musician in the country and they had just released the hit “Our Love Is Gonna Make It” – with Ronnie on vocals in 1973.
To an outside observer it appeared that my father had the Midas touch and he probably had more power and influence than anyone in the country save the new PM. But as someone described by those who knew him as neither religious nor spiritual, he seemed the person least likely to have a religious epiphany much less undergo a radical conversion.
But he did.
What did he see in the Jehovah’s Witnesses that would make him trade in his dashiki for a suit and tie and go out regularly in the hot sun hawking Watchtowers?
He thought that he had found the “truth”.
Now, Witness beliefs are their own separate rabbit hole, but to get a basic grasp of the religion, there are only a few things that you have to know.
- 1. Jehovah’s Witnesses really do call their religion the “truth” and believe that they are God’s chosen people. They believe that their interpretation of the Bible comes straight from God through the Witness higher-ups. While this isn’t that much different than what most religions say, Witnesses take it very seriously. They are the one true religion and everyone else is wrong.
- 2. The end of the world is always just around the corner and when all is said and done there will only be Jehovah’s Witnesses left. This is because on judgment day God is going to kill everyone who isn’t a Witness.
- 3. Witnesses knock on your door because they don’t want God to kill you. Your only chance to survive Armageddon is to become a Jehovah’s Witness. So every time you slam that door in their face remember that you are giving God one more reason to kill you.
- 4. The prize Witnesses promise for surviving Armageddon is life in a Paradise Earth.
Witness literature like the Watchtower and the Awake! and their countless books are jam-packed with pictures of Paradise. They show you little children playing with lions, lions playing with lambs, people of all stripes, colours and ethnicities mingling in peace and harmony.
Paradise would be a world with only Jehovah’s Witnesses, and as such it would also be a planet with no war, no sickness and even no death. Long dead loved ones who didn’t have a chance to be converted to the Witness faith would come back to life and then have the chance to learn their theology alongside Biblical legends like Moses and Enoch.
Make it there, and you would live forever.
2.
The early 1970s were no ordinary time in the history of the Witnesses. The organization was seeing huge year-over-year increases in membership as followers were putting in maximum effort to convert as many people as possible. There are stories from around the world of people putting off surgeries, dropping out of school, selling their homes and putting everything in their life on hold. This was because Jehovah’s Witnesses believed and actively taught people that the end of the world was coming in 1975.
So not only had my father found the “truth”, but he had found it just in the nick of time!
Jehovah’s Witnesses believed and taught that the end of the world was coming in 1975.
This truth did not come cheap though. He had to give up a lot to embrace this new faith. If you watched the documentary you might think that the only thing he had to do was cut off his beard. It was so much more than that.
He started knocking on doors, which must have been a humiliating process for him. He wasn’t an anonymous figure in Nassau anymore, he was a celebrity. He had overcome so much scorn for painting on the side of the road and now he had to do it all over again for passing out Watchtower literature. I can imagine people excited to find Eddie Minnis at their doorstep souring by the minute when they realized what he was really there for.
In addition to all the preaching, he had to go to 5 hour-long meetings a week at the Kingdom Hall. He tried to convert his friends and relatives to his new faith and pushed many of them away. He had to give up celebrating Christmas, Easter, birthdays, and even Mother’s Day. And this was only the beginning, because his painting and his art gradually transformed from his passion into a means to an end, as in his words, he spent “most of his time” in the Witness preaching work.
You may be thinking though that we’re now in the year two thousand and twenty-five. 1975 came and went and this wicked old world didn’t go nowhere. Armageddon didn’t happen, yet Eddie Minnis remained a Witness. For another 50 years.
To understand the reason he stayed in the religion long past that great disappointment brings me to the last thing that you have to know about Jehovah’s Witnesses:
- 5. They’re a cult.
Facebook conversation on this episode.
Coming up next: “Using the ‘C’ Word Responsibly” — Yeah, damn right I called them a cult. Next week, I'm going to unpack some deep personal trauma to show you why.
