Crisis of Conscience (Raymond Franz, 1983)

Raymond Franz served on the Governing Body of Jehovah's Witnesses from 1971 until his removal in 1980 and was disfellowshipped in 1981. That places him, like M. James Penton (already cited elsewhere in this database), inside the institution his book argues against, with the same trade off stated plainly on Penton's own source row: it gave him direct, first hand access to internal Governing Body discussions and documents no outside historian could reach, and it also means he writes as a departed critic with a personal stake in the account, not a neutral bystander. The book was issued by his own small press rather than an academic or peer reviewed publisher, which is why this record does not rate it at the same tier as an academic monograph; it is nonetheless treated as a key primary source by Penton's Apocalypse Delayed, the standard academic history of the movement, and described by sociologist Andrew Holden as one of the most compelling insider accounts of defection from Jehovah's Witnesses. This record has not independently traced a documented history of scholarly rebuttal to his specific factual claims about internal Governing Body deliberations. No canonical online text is cited here: PDF copies circulate but none is the publisher's own, and this record names that absence rather than implying an authorised copy exists online. Use it for Franz's own documented account of the Governing Body's internal handling of the 1975 expectation, read alongside the Society's own publications rather than in place of them.