Yes. For most of Jehovah's Witness history, the conviction that they were living in the final generation before Armageddon was not a peripheral doctrine—it was the organizing framework through which almost everything else was interpreted.
The movement emerged from the same 19th-century American prophetic ferment that produced Adventism. Charles Taze Russell and his associates calculated prophetic timelines and expected Christ's invisible presence and the imminent end of the present world order. Later Witnesses fixed on dates such as 1914, 1925, and—less explicitly but very powerfully in members' minds—1975.
What made Witnesses somewhat unusual was not merely believing in an eventual apocalypse. Most Christians have some version of that. Rather, it was the sense of immediacy. The end was not merely certain; it was expected very soon, often within the lifetime of people currently alive.
Your comment about self-importance is interesting. Historians of religion often notice that apocalyptic movements arise during periods of uncertainty or rapid change, but there is also a human tendency to see one's own generation as pivotal. Every age can find evidence that its crises are uniquely significant. The Black Death, the fall of Rome, the year 1000, the Reformation, the Napoleonic Wars, World Wars I and II, the Cold War, nuclear weapons, climate change, AI—each generation has had reasons to think, "Surely this is it."
The Witnesses gave that intuition a detailed chronology.
One thing I found fascinating in your earlier observation is that Paul himself appears genuinely to have expected the culmination of history relatively soon. In 1 Thessalonians, for example, he speaks of "we who are alive" being caught up at Christ's return, which many scholars take as evidence that he expected the event within the horizon of living believers. Later Christian history can almost be read as a long process of adapting to the fact that the expected end kept not arriving.
The Witnesses are actually a modern example of a very old pattern. A predicted end approaches, passes, and the movement reinterprets. Sociologists call this "cognitive dissonance reduction." The classic study is Leon Festinger's When Prophecy Fails. Often the movement survives because the prophecy is re-explained rather than abandoned.
In that sense, Jehovah's Witnesses are less an anomaly than a continuation of a recurring thread that runs from the earliest Christians through medieval millennialists, radical Reformers, Adventists, and many modern evangelical groups.
And as someone who studied a Witness congregation anthropologically, you've probably seen something else: for believers, the expectation of an imminent end is not primarily an intellectual prediction. It provides meaning, urgency, identity, and an explanation for why the world seems unjust. Those functions can persist even when specific timetables are revised.
That's a fair observation.
The leadership was often much more careful in print than many members later remembered. By the early 1970s there was tremendous excitement around 1975 because of calculations tied to 6,000 years of human history. Many Witnesses concluded that Armageddon would arrive in or very near that year.
But if you go back and read the publications, the wording was usually more along the lines of "it appears," "it would seem," "could coincide," and similar language. There was a great deal of encouragement to increase preaching, simplify one's life, and expect the end soon, but there was usually a legalistic escape hatch if the prediction failed.
The interesting sociological point is that the hedging did not prevent many rank-and-file Witnesses from hearing a much stronger message. When a trusted authority repeatedly says that all the signs point in one direction, people often absorb the implication even if the authority never quite states it outright.
After 1975 passed, the organization was able to say, with some justification, "We never explicitly predicted Armageddon for that year." At the same time, many members felt that the atmosphere and messaging had strongly encouraged exactly that expectation.
That tension between what was literally printed and what was broadly understood by the membership is one of the reasons the episode remains controversial among former Witnesses.
From an anthropological perspective, it is also a classic example of how movements manage failed expectations. Explicit date-setting is dangerous because it can be checked. Suggestive certainty combined with technical deniability is much safer. If events cooperate, the prediction looks prophetic; if they do not, leaders can point to the qualifying language that was there all along.
As someone who observed Witnesses firsthand, you may recall another layer: many members weren't studying every sentence like lawyers. They were listening to talks, talking with friends, hearing convention enthusiasm, and absorbing a community mood. The mood could be considerably more confident than the footnotes.
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