Watchtower Keeps Changing Its Mind About The Resurrection

For 145 years, the Watchtower organization has been going back and forth on a single question: will God resurrect the people of Sodom and Gomorrah, or not? The May 2024 study edition of the Watchtower — the magazine every congregation on earth studies together — gave its newest answer, admitting in the process that it has changed course before:

We have said that for such individuals as those in Sodom and Gomorrah, there is no hope of a future resurrection. But further prayerful study has raised the question, can we really say that with certainty?

Note the first three words of that statement. We have said. The organization that calls itself God's only channel of truth is admitting, in its own pages, that it is changing its answer yet again about the eternal fate of an entire city of human beings. What that paragraph won't tell you is that this is, by my account, at least the fifth different position Watchtower has printed on this question. The Sodom flip-flop is something of a legend among former Jehovah's Witnesses, but for anyone newer to questioning, or anyone with family still in the religion, it's worth laying out the whole chain, with dates, straight from Watchtower's own publications.

Why This Question Exists At All

Jehovah's Witnesses teach that God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah with fire from heaven because of their wickedness, and that everybody in those cities died. They also teach that God will resurrect the dead into a paradise earth — billions of people, almost everyone who has ever lived, coming back at some point in the future. So does that include the people of Sodom, or not?

It's a genuine puzzle, because the Bible pulls in both directions. Jesus said in the Gospels that it would be more endurable for the land of Sodom on judgment day than for towns that rejected him. The book of Jude says Sodom underwent "the judicial punishment of everlasting fire." A reasonable person could honestly land on either side of that. If Watchtower had simply taught its members for decades that this one is genuinely unclear, there would be no story here. Instead, every position below was, at the moment it was printed, the official teaching — binding on every witness on earth, taught as the absolute truth from an unchanging God. And then it changed. And changed again. And again. And again.

The Five Reversals

In 1879, the very first year the Watchtower magazine was printed under founder Charles Taze Russell, the answer was yes — the people of Sodom will be restored. Russell leaned on the Hebrew prophets for this, and on his broader vision of a God who brings nearly everybody back.

By the 1950s — June 1952 and February 1954 — the answer flipped to no. And not a gentle no. The 1954 Watchtower stated that Sodom and Gomorrah were

irrevocably condemned and destroyed beyond any possible recovery.

No room for questions. No room for speculation.

Move forward to 1965, and they're back to being resurrected. The January 1st Watchtower, in an article titled "Worship the God of Resurrection," stated that when the resurrection takes place, the people of Tyre, Sidon, and Sodom "will repent and accept the provisions." In 1974, Awake magazine went further, saying that God's

undeserved kindness and care are so great that he will bring back the people of Sodom by a resurrection.

That's three positions so far: restored, no chance at all, and God's kindness will bring them back.

Then came June 1, 1988, in a Watchtower "Question from Readers" column — the entry in this chain that accidentally gives the whole game away. It admits the organization has been "conscientiously responding to this question over the years," acknowledges that before 1964 they taught one thing, that the 1964 and 1965 articles made clear the answer was yes, and that a recent review now suggests the relevant verses don't mean what they'd said they meant. The new verdict: the people of Sodom are once again judged and destroyed everlastingly. That's position four — from yes, to no, to yes again, to no again — a reversal that cites its own earlier reversal as though that settles the matter.

In that same year, 1988, Watchtower published its flagship Bible encyclopedia, Insight on the Scriptures. Its entry on "destruction" states that Jesus's words

show that at least some of the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah will receive a resurrection.

The magazine said no. The encyclopedia, published the same year by the same organization, said yes — at least for some of them. Both sat on the same Kingdom Hall library shelf for the next three decades.

And in 2024, the Watchtower Study Edition came back around to it being

possible that at least some of these people will be resurrected and we may have the opportunity to teach them.

That's position five, for now. Given the track record, it's reasonable to expect it will be revised again at some point.

What's Actually Going On

There's nothing inherently wrong with a religious organization changing its mind — a church that says "our understanding is developing" is at least being honest that it doesn't know everything. But that's not the situation here. Each of these positions was issued by an organization that claimed, at that exact moment, to be God's sole channel of truth on earth. Members are required to accept every teaching as a condition of baptism. And each reversal came with no new scripture attached — no scroll found in a cave, no new manuscript. The same roughly twelve verses were simply reread in 1952, 1965, 1988, and 2024, and somehow the verdict on millions of dead people flipped every time. Watchtower would describe this as things getting clarified, as the light getting brighter. But if the light is only ever getting brighter, it's worth asking why it keeps going from light to dark to light to dark.

Watchtower's own 1952 article actually states the real stakes plainly:

If those slain by the Lord at Sodom have no resurrection, then those slain by him at Armageddon will have none.

The article was never really just about Sodom. Sodom is the precedent — the case law on whether your own fate is sealed for not accepting their doctrine when the end comes. If God's judgment on Sodom wasn't final, then maybe God's judgment at Armageddon isn't final either, for anyone who leaves. That's a problem for an organization that relies on the threat of Armageddon to keep people in what it claims is God's only organization on earth. The same 1952 article states that Armageddon's dead "will litter the earth like dung and remain dead forever."

That explanation isn't perfectly consistent, though — the friendlier 1974 answer landed right in the middle of the organization's 1975 apocalypse expectations, so it isn't simply a matter of more fear meaning less mercy. What the record does show consistently is that Sodom's verdict has never moved on its own. Every flip is bolted onto a larger change in Watchtower's broader judgment doctrine. The 1988 article credits its "no" to an updated decision on who is and isn't in Hades. The 2024 article credits its "maybe" to what it calls further adjustments flowing from a 2022 change regarding judgment day. Nobody ever reread Sodom's story in isolation and changed their mind about Sodom alone — every so often the organization redraws its blueprint of God's judgment in general, and Sodom, as the case law, has to get redrawn to match, or it becomes a contradiction.

In my opinion, Watchtower is getting softer and more image-conscious as it loses members in Western countries who find its doom-and-destruction messaging off-putting, and that shift is part of why the 2024 article goes so far as to say that Jehovah "will be firm when necessary, but merciful whenever possible."

The Cost to Real People

One of the problems with all this is that it lands on real people. If you were raised a witness, you were taught one of these five positions as settled truth from God — which one depended entirely on when you were born and how long you'd been a member. A witness in 1954 and their own child in 1975 were taught opposite eternal destinies for the same people, from the pages of the same magazine, both presented as the truth at the time.

Here's the part that matters most: a witness who stood up in 1989 and suggested that Jehovah might resurrect the people of Sodom because he's a God who is "firm when necessary but merciful whenever possible" could have faced a judicial committee for disagreeing with the organization's position — and been disfellowshipped and shunned if they didn't recant — even though Watchtower would later adopt that exact position itself. When it did change its mind, it didn't reach out to apologize to the people it had punished for holding the same view early. The only party ever allowed to disagree with the Watchtower, it turns out, is the Watchtower. The person didn't change. The Bible didn't change. The organization changed its mind repeatedly, and it never goes back to the people who were right the first time and were punished for it. Real people calibrated their standing with their families, their congregation, and their own confidence in reading a Bible verse to whichever version happened to be in print at the time — and absorbed the whiplash when it changed, while the organization kept all the authority.

An organization that has printed five different answers about what God supposedly did to people who died thousands of years ago — a question with zero practical stakes today — is the same organization that demands total confidence when it tells its members what God is about to do to their neighbors, their unconverted family, and everyone who doesn't answer the door for a Jehovah's Witness. It can't settle its own account of the past, but it claims certainty about the future.