Books like Apocalypse delayed by M. James Penton

The idea that Christianity started as a clandestine movement among the poor is a widely accepted notion. Yet it is one of many myths that must be discarded if we are to understand just how a tiny messianic movement on the edge of the Roman Empire became the dominant faith of Western civilization. In a fast-paced, highly readable book that addresses beliefs as well as historical facts, Rodney Stark brings a sociologist's perspective to bear on the puzzle behind the success of early Christianity. He comes equipped not only with the logic and methods of social science but also with insights gathered firsthand into why people convert and how new religious groups recruit members. He digs deep into the historical evidence on many issues - such as the social background of converts, the mission to the Jews, the status of women in the church, the role of martyrdom - to provide a vivid and unconventional picture of early Christianity.

This is the memoirs of a young girl in Nazi Germany and the trials she faces. First her mother is taken to a concentration, then her father is taken to a different camp. She is then taken to what is supposed to be a girls' school. She is faced with the choice of giving up her religion or facing the consequences. She faces many horrible results, but still clings to faith. However, she was not Jewish. She was Jehovah's Witness. It's a little known fact that many Jehovah's Witnesses were also imprisoned along with the Jews. A very worthwhile book to read if you want to see what it is like to be willing to face anything for your love of God. Miraculously, she and her parents were eventually reunited after the war and came to the US. She is still alive and much info about her can be found online.

Jehovah's Witnesses: Portrait of a Contemporary Religious Movement is the first major ethnographic study of this enigmatic religious society. Through rigorously investigated case histories based upon the real-life experiences of converts, believers and defectors, it describes how the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society seek to achieve conformity in devotees, and to construct meaningful religious identities in a world whose excesses it vehemently reviles.Examining the Jehovah's Witnesses' dramatic expansion over the last 130 years, Andrew Holden reveals the dependency of this quasi-totalitarian movement on the very physical and cultural resources which have brought about the privatisation of religion, the erosion of community and the separation of 'fact' from supernatural faith. Asking vital questions about the ambivalent relationship of spiritual meaning to modern secular materialism, Jehova's Witnesses reconsiders the Witnesses' ascetic faith at once as an inverted form of pseudo-corporate 'branding', and as an anti-modern quest for certainty in a hostile world of relativism and risk.