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In modern parlance, Paul’s response to this question amounts to something like “Who the Hell are you, a wretched human being, to ask such a question?” That’s an answer I would have understood, but my mother quoted the apostle’s reply as given in the King James Version: Nay but, O man, who art thou that repliest against God? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why hast thou made me thus? Mom’s eyes met mine in the rearview mirror and I stared blankly. Searching for a way to help Bekah and me make sense of this conundrum, her eyes lit up as they fell to the dolls in our laps. “It would be like if those Barbies in your lap stood up and said, ‘Why did you dress me this way?!’” Mom would always laugh heartily when she described our reactions later: “Your eyes were as big as saucers, you two girls starin’ down at those Barbies like you were afraid they might actually get up and start talkin’ at you!” For decades, this would be my mother’s go-to illustration for those who dared question why God would design most of humanity for the express purpose of tormenting them in Hell for eternity. Our dolls demonstrated how patently ridiculous it was to presume to ask such a question.
Although I took my mother’s point about the Barbies’ insolence, a more pressing question had presented itself as she laughed at our bug-eyed response to her hypothetical: What about me? Was I a Jacob or an Esau? What about Bekah? What about Sam and Josh? How could we know? From the driver’s seat, Mom somberly explained that we couldn’t. That we wouldn’t know for sure until we all stood before God at the Judgment. Her words filled me with dread, calling forth a mental image of the whole world awaiting judgment at the feet of God, standing at rapt attention like an army of the damned—and me, standing among them. What could I do to avoid a ruinous outcome? Predestination, clearly, had not yet sunk into my little skull—of course, I could do nothing to change my fate if God had chosen me for Hell—but my mother understood my need for comfort. “It’s a good sign that you’re afraid,” she said. “It means that you care what God requires of you.” Come, ye children, hearken unto me: I will teach you the fear of the Lord.
Many more years and innumerable Bible studies would pass before I fully and practically appreciated the meaning of this doctrine—that a person’s goodness was a symptom of God’s love, the effect of it, and not the cause—but I soon found predestination an immediate and compelling motivator. Its power came from beauty and from terror, a confluence of two desires. There was the desire to be like Jacob, to be one of God’s jewels, with all the rarity, purity, and virtue that signified. And they shall be mine, saith the Lord of hosts, in that day when I make up my jewels; and I will spare them, as a man spareth his own son that serveth him. And then there was the abject fear of being like the despised Esau, before of old ordained to this condemnation. We were powerless to alter our destiny, but the surest sign we could have that we were one of God’s elect? Our obedience.
I came to love the clarity and simplicity of this idea, how directly the Scriptures connected obedience to goodness. It was even implicated in God’s commandment to “love thy neighbor.” Thou shalt not hate thy brother in thine heart: thou shalt in any wise rebuke thy neighbour, and not suffer sin upon him. Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. The context made it abundantly clear to us that to love our neighbor was to rebuke him, to warn him away from the sins that would result in punishment from God. If we failed to do so, the blood of the wicked would be on our hands. When I say unto the wicked, Thou shalt surely die; and thou givest him not warning, nor speakest to warn the wicked from his wicked way, to save his life; the same wicked man shall die in his iniquity; but his blood will I require at thine hand.
We had taken to the streets because we had a solemn duty to obey God and to plead with our neighbors to do the same. It didn’t matter that the world hated the message. It didn’t matter that it required vast amounts of our time, money, energy, resources. This was what God required of His elect.
Whatever it cost us, we would pay.
* * *
While our daily protests were an explosion of overt hostility between my family and the city, school was a subtler matter. The decision to send us to public school was due primarily to practical considerations: the adults needed to work in order to support their growing families and the church, which refused all (exceedingly rare) donations from nonmembers. But once it became clear that our protests would continue for years and decades to come, the elders came to a few additional conclusions. First, that our presence in public school classrooms was a testimony against the people of Topeka: though they accused us of being hateful, we were polite, friendly, well-behaved, and accomplished students. Having your conversation honest among the Gentiles: that, whereas they speak against you as evildoers, they may by your good works, which they shall behold, glorify God in the day of visitation. Our parents described us as “walking picket signs.” They also weren’t especially afraid that we would be unduly influenced by our peers or teachers, that we might be persuaded to doubt or question Westboro’s teachings. The intensity of our daily religious education at home was a bulwark against such heresies.
Plus, they were in possession of divine truth. They weren’t afraid of questions, because they had all the answers.
For my part, school seemed to be an elaborate play where each of the actors—teachers, classmates, parents—pretended not to notice that we were on opposite sides of an epic, spiritual battle between good and evil. It was a tenuous truce that relied heavily on the First Amendment: no matter how much they disagreed with us or how often we picketed their churches, teachers were agents of government and barred from punishing us for our religious activities. But more, it relied on mutual consent to keep up the pretense—our shared willingness not to speak, for instance, of the nine-foot-tall picket sign that called out the citizenry as TOPEKA: A CITY OF WHORES at pickets after school.
It wasn’t easy for me to separate my life at the elementary school from the rest of my existence, and I had to learn that skill the hard way. One day in first grade, I tried to deepen my friendship with a classmate, Megan G., by taking her into my confidence during recess. Cupping my hands around my mouth and leaning in close, I whispered into her ear that our music teacher was “a fag” and not to be trusted. When I’d heard this warning from my mother at home, I’d thought of Mrs. Epoch’s dark hair and dark eyes and plump figure and began imagining her as the menacing witch from one of the fairy tales Dad sometimes performed for us before bed, Hansel and Gretel. Plus, she was Jewish! I thought Megan G. should know to be careful, but she, duly horrified, tattled immediately, and I was hauled into the principal’s office, sobbing in shame. My mom took me aside that night to help me understand, and I knew that she was right when she told me about these people. “Every single thing you do reflects on this church. These people don’t care about you! They wouldn’t think twice about hurting you in order to hurt the church! More than anyone else, our behavior has to be above reproach. School is not the time or the place for this discussion. You’re there to learn.” Thenceforth, I kept my standard postscript (“PS: God hates fags!”) out of notes passed to my cousins and confined to the diary I locked with a tiny metal key.
Despite the knowledge that I couldn’t trust my teachers or classmates with anything but pleasantries, I adored school. My sister Bekah could be relied upon to regularly chase the van down Arnold Street after our mom dropped us off in the morning, begging Mom to take her home, but I could never understand why. There were no chores at school, no crying babies, no laundry, no vacuuming. We only had to learn. It was the freest time we had, and became the portal to my favorite place: books. Once I mastered reading, my nose was always stuck in one: under the table at dinner, pushing kids on the swing set out back, or hiding in the stairwell (close at hand but out of sight, so I was less likely to be called on for errands). Mom or Dad or Sam would take us to the Topeka Public Library, and Josh and I would load ourselves down with armfuls. And when t
he library began a new service that let us request books to be sent to us by mail—for free? “Katie, bar the door,” Mom said.
My literary choices were heavily influenced by Josh’s penchant for science fiction—R. L. Stine’s Goosebumps and Fear Street series, Christopher Pike’s The Last Vampire, the Animorphs books by K. A. Applegate, and once I hit third grade, anything written by Stephen King. We had wide latitude in our consumption of books, television, film, and music, and for much the same reason that we attended public schools: our parents weren’t particularly worried about negative influences slipping into our minds undetected. They’d prepared us too well for that, and our response to depictions of sinful behavior was instinctive. Whore. Criminal. Adulterer. When fundamentalists would approach us and tout their decision to rid their homes of television and secular music, our response was chastisement. “How can you preach against the abominable teachings that litter the landscape of this nation if you don’t even know what they are?” my mom would admonish. I cherished the time I spent peering into alternate realities, and each day I’d race through my schoolwork so that I could escape into them: worlds where I had no responsibilities and lives that bore no resemblance whatsoever to my own.
In truth, school itself became an escape for me—an escape from Mom and the frequent eruptions of her caustic temper. This was a fact that I acknowledged to myself uneasily, with a deep awareness of how foolish, how melodramatic I was being. I had a good life, I was always told. The best life, one filled with people who loved God and hated evil and would teach me the truth about the world, unlike my misfortunate classmates. Still, I couldn’t deny the relief I felt when we’d finally pile into the van at the end of the often-nightmarish period between waking and school. It was nearly impossible to get through those two hours without a meltdown of some kind, without at least one of us at the other end of Mom’s razor tongue or even the big paddle—a three-foot-long, one-and-a-half-inch dowel rod she’d started using on me in second grade, when I’d spent fifteen seconds admiring a cousin’s gingerbread house after school instead of coming straight to the van (my delay forced her to hold up traffic on the narrow street in front of the school). The expectation of total obedience may have been the same in every Westboro family, but no one exacted it as vigorously, tenaciously, or continuously as my mother. I harbored few desires stronger than the one for her approval, but her standards seemed always to be shifting, tightening like a noose until I felt choked with the futility of my own rage.
I wasn’t the only one. Just sixteen months apart, little Bekah and I were sworn enemies all through grade school, engaging in sisterly combat at every opportunity. On one particularly explosive morning when I was eight or nine, she and I got two beatings each—for fighting, and for insufficient progress on our piano lessons—and they were bad. They were the sort that left big red welts, the kind that would bloom into bruises of blue and purple and black and finally yellow as I examined them before my bath each night. The blueness of a wound cleanseth away evil. Chasten thy son while there is hope, and let not thy soul spare for his crying. After the beatings that morning, I was the first to make my way to the van for school, relieved to be getting out of the house and away from the immediate danger, but my sister was furious. Bekah was a matchstick of a girl, yet what she lacked in size she made up for in the force of her temper—and that day it was directed at our mom.
When Bekah slammed the van door behind her, waiting for Mom to climb in and take us to school, her pixie face was a bright red splotch. She clenched her jaw, teeth grinding, and erupted: “I’m going to tell my teacher about this! FUCK. HER!” She let out a wild, wordless scream with all the rage her runty self could muster. Mom came out the door and down the steps a moment later.
I wanted Bekah to tell. I was petrified Bekah would tell. I envisioned a black and white police car pulling up to our driveway to take us away from Mom and Dad, and my heart surged, clutching for them. No one made hot chocolate like Mom, who was always standing over the stove singing and stirring a pot full of it when we came back from sledding the big hill at Quinton Heights. And no one could do bedtime like Dad, pretending to be a helicopter as he cradled us in his arms, vroom-vrooming us one at a time from the living room, up the stairs, around the big banister, and down the hall to our rooms for bedtime stories that always ended in tickle fests.
And then I imagined the cops themselves in our driveway—the same cops we serenaded with accusations of “corpulent coward!,” the same cops who let those big oafs punch and choke us on the picket line. I knew what I had to do. We only made it a few blocks on the way to school before I told Mom of Bekah’s threat, even though I was terrified of what Mom would do to her for it.
“DO YOU REALLY THINK THE LORD IS GOING TO LET YOU SABOTAGE US?”
My face flushed hot and I felt sick as I watched the van pull away from the school with Bekah still in it. I wouldn’t have wished Mom’s unbridled fury on anyone, not even my sister-nemesis—but I had to protect us. These people were evil. No one outside of Westboro cared about us. They were always and only after the church. Everything always came back to that.
* * *
Westboro Baptist Church sat on a quiet street lined with trees and ranch-style homes, many of which belonged to my aunts, uncles, and cousins. An eight-foot-tall stockade fence ran around the block’s perimeter, enclosing our common backyard and cutting inward to exclude the two houses that didn’t belong to church members. The whole setup had led many a contemptuous reporter to call our block a “compound”—implying some sort of spooky, David Koresh–style cult scenario—but my mother always cut them off when they spoke in such terms. The fence was originally built when the pool was put in, she’d tell them, back in the seventies. “You’re talkin’ to a bunch of lawyers,” she would chide, “and that pool is called an ‘attractive nuisance’ in the law. If that fence weren’t there, and some child wandered over off the street and fell in, we would be liable for that. It’s that simple.” People were always acting like we were crazy, like there must be some sort of nefarious scheme being hatched and meticulously cultivated behind our fences at every moment, but “we’re just people!” Mom would insist.
Unless you counted the various plots hatched by quarreling children, the block had never been a place for nefarious schemes. It was a place for us—for pool parties and trampoline jumping and tennis playing in the summer, and for football and snowball fights and sledding down the little hill behind our garage in the winter. It’s where I’d sit on the white porch swing with the big canopy, rocking gently with a paperback and a baby sibling propped in the crook of my left arm, the perfect excuse to sit and read for as long as it took Mom to realize that the baby had fallen asleep and tell me to come inside and put him down so I could help clean the kitchen or do the laundry, of which there was no end. It’s where Dad had taught us how to ride bikes and play croquet when we were kids. He and the uncles had even built us a BigToy when I was about three, with a rope bridge, scratchy wooden monkey bars that always gave me splinters, and, at the end of the big blue slide, a sandbox we’d once forgotten Isaiah in when he was a toddler. Mom had driven a van full of us noisy kids all the way to the family law office before we realized he wasn’t in his car seat—and then sped home only to find him busily digging away with his plastic shovel, safe and blessedly unaware of any drama.
More and more as the years had passed, I’d come to see our block in just that way: safe, secure, shielded from anything bad that could possibly happen. A refuge. Here there were no counterprotesters to steal our picket signs, no angry passersby to drive their cars at us, no jackboot cops to threaten arrest, and no one around to yell at us except our relatives. Here there was just same: heat and sticky humidity, the scent of newly mown grass, the insistent buzzing of cicadas, and kids biking around the track I’d been walking laps on since my legs were too stubby to keep up with Mom and her power-walking sisters. The familiarity of the scene could be like a sedative, and there were times when I’d
be hurrying out our back door and just stop in my tracks, staring out into that wide-open space, stalled by the sense of comfort and calm that washed over me.
I felt that calm on the Sunday of my baptism, too.
Among the many mainstream religious traditions condemned by Westboro Baptist Church, infant baptism was a particular iniquity. Without any hint of hyperbole my grandfather likened it to burning the child alive in sacrifice to a pagan god. Only believers could be baptized in our church, following the examples of the adults baptized in the New Testament. The Ethiopian eunuch professed his belief before he was baptized, as infants cannot. The masses baptized by John the Baptist confessed their sins, as infants cannot. Even Jesus Christ Himself was baptized as an adult. Baptism, then, was not a rite of passage at Westboro. It would only take place if a believer felt called to ask for it, if they believed that they were one of God’s elect—a Jacob, and not an Esau. They would have to show evidence of an “orderly walk,” obedience to the standards held by the church, and active, eager participation in the work of the church. A candidate for baptism must speak with every member of the church, and may only be baptized if all members respond with silence when the question is posed: Can any forbid water?
When I turned thirteen and asked to be baptized, no one forbade me. My mother would be the first to tell you that I could be as willful and goofy as any thirteen-year-old girl, but she kept me on a tight leash, and I was learning. Earnest and enthusiastic about our beliefs, I zealously pursued the Bible knowledge needed to “defend them against all comers,” as Gramps instructed. Eight years on the picket line had convinced me that there was nothing in the world of greater significance than this battle for the cause of God and truth, and I was ready to dedicate the rest of my life in service of it. I’d had a brief crisis of conscience that spring, when I’d been involved in the seventh-grade musical, and when I came out of it, I knew it was time to seek baptism. School had become a parallel culture to the one I inhabited at home, one that I had long since adapted to. I knew my classmates saw me as some sort of weird hybrid of a person: a friendly girl who enjoyed helping others with homework on the one hand, but a hateful religious fanatic who believed everyone was going to Hell on the other. I had friendly acquaintances, and, for the most part, we all compartmentalized my conduct during class from my existence outside of it. I rarely saw my peers outside of school, but in spending extracurricular time with them each day—sitting around joking about mean teachers, listening to music, doing homework together—I began to wonder: Were my classmates really as bad as I’d been taught?