Over the years, Penton served in various capacities in Jehovah's Witness congregations in the United States, Puerto Rico and Canada while pursuing an academic career, before moving to Alberta in 1965.
[4] While serving as an elder in his Lethbridge congregation in the late 1970s, he developed concerns over the Watch Tower Society’s emphasis on the requirement for Witnesses to engage in public preaching work and what he saw as a growing harshness and intolerance in the treatment of members of the religion by those in authority.
[3]Penton gave examples of what he claimed were distortions of New Testament texts to support Watch Tower Society teachings on house-to-house preaching, criticized the appointment of elders chiefly on the basis of field service records and described circuit overseer visits as "military inspections".
Despite his protests that he was the subject of a witch hunt and injustice[3] because of expressing his view about a religion he had once hailed as a "champion of free speech", Penton was disfellowshipped, or expelled, from Jehovah's Witnesses on the grounds of apostasy in February 1981.
[1][8] The events surrounding his expulsion gained widespread media attention including national television coverage,[9] and were the subject of a 1986 book, Crisis of Allegiance, by James A. Beverley, an assistant professor at Atlantic Baptist College in Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada.
"[11] From 1942 onwards, Jehovah's Witnesses "decreed that all the society’s books and articles were to be published anonymously",[12] according to them, "on the ground that only God should be given credit for religious truth, not individual human authors".
[13] Penton began work on Apocalypse Delayed: The Story of Jehovah's Witnesses soon afterwards, but halted his research and writing in 1979 after developing concerns over what he viewed as a growing punitive response of the religion's leadership to doctrinal dissent from within its ranks.
[15] Penton describes that the Witnesses have attempted to rewrite their previous history under the Nazi government by concealing early overtures to Adolf Hitler and sidelining the group's antisemitism.
[15] Historian Detlef Garbe, director at the Neuengamme (Hamburg) Memorial, criticized Penton's "new theory" that in the 1930s the Watch Tower Society had "adapted" to National Socialism's anti-semitic aggression.
[16] Scholar Kevin P. Spicer states that Penton considers statements by leader Joseph Rutherford and the Witnesses as important toward understanding their attempts at dealing with the Nazi government (early 1930s) by distancing the group from Jews and altering their pro-Jewish position.
[19] R. Singelenberg wrote that "to conclude from this and scattered anecdotal evidence, as Penton does, that both Rutherford and his following were anti-semitic, while virtually ignoring socio-historical context is demagogical rather than the result of solid analysis [...] the author commits the same fallacy as the object of his dislike which tends to view writers who express too much criticism as apostates of opponents.