Unfollow

by Megan Phelps-Roper

  There was no sound among the congregation as our pastor spoke. Not a cough or a sneeze, not even from the babies—just a somber stillness as we contemplated the exhortations of this holy preacher, referred to as a star in the right hand of God in the book of Revelation. Regardless of how unpopular or unpalatable his message, we trusted him to preach it with complete faithfulness to the Scriptures, without ambiguity and without timidity, as he’d done for more than fifty years. He didn’t have the praise of the world, and he didn’t seek it. His work was unpaid as a matter of principle. My grandfather would have no financial conflicts of interest, no incentive to abridge the Bible the way he so frequently accused others of doing. That my grandfather kept himself from such sordid concerns was another layer of assurance of his dedication to preaching the unvarnished Word of God.

  I never saw the confidence we had in our pastor as being rooted in the familial relationship he shared with about eighty percent of us, though this was generally presumed by outsiders to be the case. It was a galling thought—as if we, unique among human beings, would be forever possessed of our childhood credulity. As if all our faculties of reason, perception, and will could be entirely overruled by blood relation. It seemed that the goal of this assertion was to render us blind followers of an angry patriarch—because if we could be dismissed as such, it meant that no one need fear the wrath of the God we preached. In truth, the familial nature of Westboro’s ministry tended to make us, his children and grandchildren, more skeptical of our pastor, not less. As hecklers and journalists so frequently pointed to it as evidence of the lemming-like nature of our following, his status as “Gramps” became a pit out of which my grandfather had to climb. The burden of proof weighed the more heavily on him as a result, and he delighted in meeting that burden, utilizing every tool at his disposal to demonstrate the errors of the masses, their failures of logic, law, history, Scripture, righteousness.

  My grandfather continued his sermon, which was—like all his sermons—laden with Bible quotes and references to expositors and theologians, evidence to support his frequent assertion that “I do not make this stuff up!” He never appealed to his own authority. Today’s sermon was a freewheeling condemnation of “fag America,” delivered in an old-time fire-and-brimstone polemic. But he wasn’t speaking only or even primarily to those of us seated in the austere sanctuary—1960s-era wood-veneer paneling, pews to seat about a hundred, devoid of iconography except a few new picket signs propped on easels flanking the pulpit (THANK GOD FOR SEPT. 11), and carpet a friend would later describe as “shockingly mauve.” This special sermon would be uploaded to GodHatesFags.com, an address to the nation intended to make the power brokers of the world stand up and take notice. He contrasted America’s maudlin response to the carnage of September 11 to England’s godly call for repentance in 1666, when the Great Fire blazed through London leaving immense destruction in its wake. He pointed to the old Puritan preachers who had seen the hand of God in that conflagration, proclaiming that the Almighty was punishing the inhabitants of London for their sins—and that England was doomed if they failed to heed God’s warning and repent.

  As a fifteen-year-old, I was familiar with some of the Scriptural support for this theology, but it had failed to crystallize in my mind the way it did sitting in my pew that day. My formative years were an endless stream of opportunities to learn the church’s culture emphasizing the celebration and mockery of tragedy and death, and I had fully assimilated into that culture by the time 9/11 rolled around. Any misgivings I might have had were long since snuffed out by the verses demonstrating the example of our God, who had declared, Because I have called, and ye refused; I have stretched out my hand, and no man regarded; I also will laugh at your calamity; I will mock when your fear cometh. And then there was the passage in the book of Psalms: The righteous shall rejoice when he seeth the vengeance: he shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked. By age eleven, I was standing on the picket line exultantly repeating the words I’d heard from Gramps: “Two whores in a week!” I fancied myself cutely counterculture to be reveling in the deaths of two widely beloved women, though I had little knowledge of either Mother Teresa or Diana, Princess of Wales. No matter. When their deaths came just a few days apart, I knew all I needed: that the one was Catholic, and the other an adulteress. Elton John rewrote his song “Candle in the Wind” in tribute to Lady Diana, and less than twenty-four hours after he performed it at her funeral service, I was singing along to a chilling parody written by my mom and my aunt:

  Goodbye, royal whore

  Though you never spoke the truth

  You know and hear it now

  As do all of this world’s youth

  You crashed into the stone wall

  As you played your whorish games

  They set you on a pedestal

  And bow down to your name

  But it seems to me you lived your life

  Like a harlot full of sin

  God cut you off

  Now the flames set in

  And you know we told you, though you’re

  A throne away

  Your name will die out long before

  The pain will ever sway

  Similar scenes played out following every death that caught my grandfather’s attention, everyone from Matthew Shepard (“His lying fag friends can’t help him now!”) to Mr. Rogers (“Sissy Pied Piper From Hell”). Day after day, month after month, year after year, I took in the gleeful reactions that Gramps modeled until they became mine. On the morning of 9/11, there was only a split second between a classmate’s frantic announcement of the attacks and my genuine excitement and glee at the demise of “those evil people.” I knew my lines. When the mayor of New York announced, “We will rebuild,” my memory called up the verse: We will return and build the desolate places; thus saith the Lord of hosts, They shall build, but I will throw down. When “United We Stand” became the national rallying cry, the simplest retort came from the book of Proverbs: Though hand join in hand, the wicked shall not be unpunished. And when other Christians insisted that God was not responsible for the calamity that had befallen the American people, many were the passages we would quote to confound their claims: shall there be evil in a city, and the Lord hath not done it? And again, God insists, See now that I, even I, am he, and there is no god with me: I kill, and I make alive; I wound, and I heal: neither is there any that can deliver out of my hand. And the Apostle Paul reminds the Ephesians, For this ye know, that no whoremonger, nor unclean person, nor covetous man, who is an idolater, hath any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God. Let no man deceive you with vain words: for because of these things cometh the wrath of God upon the children of disobedience. This last passage implies that some would deny a causal connection between the sins of men and the wrath of God—and declares that such denials are but vain words intended to deceive.

  Clearly, the whole world was deceived—but we weren’t. How lucky we were to have the favor of God.

  What stirred me most during my grandfather’s sermon that September day wasn’t just the oft-repeated refrains from the Bible; it was the historical context he had given these events. He had invoked “the Puritans of old England,” and the wheels turning in my mind almost audibly screeched to a halt. There had been people outside of the Bible who actually believed what we believed? It struck me as unlikely if not impossible, my surprise betraying how acutely myopic was my perspective at the time. As I experienced it, the modern world had always been deeply inhospitable to our beliefs, and it was easy to feel as if Westboro were an island existing outside of time, the one true connection to a righteous past—the lone bastion of truth in this “insane orgy of fag lies,” as Gramps was wont to say. He never needed to come right out and declare that our church was the only way to Heaven, not explicitly; that kind of sweeping assertion isn’t so easy to substantiate, and certainly would have invited much more suspicion and scrutiny from my highly analytical family.

  Instead, my grandf
ather studied other churches extensively, teaching us all the ways they were full of error and sin. Methodists? Works righteousness. Catholics? Idolaters. Lutherans? Lukewarm idolaters. He referred to them as “social clubs” with little interest in knowing or doing what God required of them. In the era of megachurches and multimillionaire preachers of the prosperity gospel like Joel Osteen, he found the perfect foil: perverse disputings of men of corrupt minds, and destitute of the truth, supposing that gain is godliness. To us, such pastors were motivated by money, smoothing away the hard corners and sharp edges of Bible truths, sculpting them into enticing figurines to package and sell to ever larger congregations that sought not truth but comfort: which say to the prophets, Prophesy not unto us right things, speak unto us smooth things, prophesy deceits.

  Divorce and remarriage had become a national pastime since the institution of no-fault divorce laws in the 1970s, and now “the pews of these churches—these whorehouses, these dog kennels!—are littered with divorced and remarried people! The Lord Jesus Christ calls them adulterers!” And indeed He had: Whosoever putteth away his wife, and marrieth another, committeth adultery: and whosoever marrieth her that is put away from her husband committeth adultery. Voice dripping with disdain, my grandfather railed against “Christians” so often in his weekly sermons that I spent my elementary school years believing the term to be synonymous with “evil” and denying that it applied to me. In the end, we drew the obvious conclusion from his attacks on other faiths—fortified by direct Bible quotes that we carefully memorized: that Westboro was the only safe haven from the wrath of God, both in this life and in the world to come.

  But the Puritans had believed—or so Gramps declared. When the special 9/11 sermon came to a close, I walked home across our common backyard, flipped open the lid of my laptop, and brought up Google, searching for evidence of Gramps’s assertion about the destruction of London. Had the Puritans really believed as we did? Did their contemporaries believe them to be the crazy, hateful zealots that ours considered us? It didn’t take long for me to light upon the words of James Janeway, a popular Puritan minister and writer. To a city ravaged first by the Great Plague and just after by the Great Fire, Janeway wrote:

  The Great and Dreadful God hath been pleading with poor England in these last Years […], and written Divine Displeasure in Letters of Blood. The Righteous Judge began his Circuit the last Year in London, and in that one City above one hundred thousand received the Sentence of Death from his just Tribunal. He hath not yet ended his dismal Circuit, but he rideth still […], pleading his Cause with us in a lamentable Fire, which in a few Days space, hath turned one of the most glorious Cities in the World to Ashes. The Voice of the Sword was not heard; the Language of the Plague was not understood; wherefore the dreadful Jehovah speaks louder and louder still […]. O stupid Creatures that we are, when shall we hear the Rod and him that appointed it!

  I read on, astounded. Here it was, yet more proof—objective proof—that Gramps wasn’t just a hateful man fabricating these doctrines to bolster his preexisting prejudices, as the case was often made. Janeway was even quoting the same verses that my grandfather had. I would soon come to learn that this wasn’t the only Westboro doctrine deeply rooted in major branches of Christian theological tradition. My mother had so carefully used Barbies and Bible verses to explain the concept of predestination to my sister Bekah and me, but centuries before Westboro existed, this view was espoused by Christians the world over. It was popularized by the reformed theologian John Calvin and summarized by the acronym TULIP, which my grandfather put on a sign that hung behind his pulpit for years:

  Total Depravity: All humans are, by nature, slaves to sin and incapable of choosing to follow God.

  Unconditional Election: God has chosen who will be saved based solely on His mercy, not their merit.

  Limited Atonement: God could have chosen to save all men, but sent Jesus to die only for His elect.

  Irresistible Grace: Those chosen by God have no power to resist His call to salvation.

  Perseverance of the Saints: God’s elect will persevere to the end and be saved.

  These beliefs had long since fallen out of favor with the wider Christian community, and we understood their “evolution”—belief in free will, in universal salvation, in the idea that God loves all of mankind—to be apostasy and betrayal of the plain words of Scripture. The foolish shall not stand in thy sight: thou hatest all workers of iniquity. But all of this history, the venerable past of so many of our core doctrines, lent our pastor a substantial new credibility to my mind—and at age fifteen, I found myself newly humbled by his knowledge and understanding. I had always believed him to be intelligent and guided by God, but youthful condescension had led me to underestimate him. He was an old man, had trouble understanding technology, frequently slept with the news blaring all night long, and generally smelled of a potent mix of tea tree oil and the cloves of raw garlic he began consuming in copious quantities after watching a segment about its health benefits on one of the television morning shows. Jesus said, No prophet is accepted in his own country, and that rang true to me; it’s easier to accept a human as divinely ordained when you’re not intimately familiar with the mundanity of their daily life and the eccentricities of their personality. Church members also actively denied that my grandfather’s history mattered at all, except insofar as it reflected the path on which God had led him; because God had predestinated all things, nothing about our pastor’s life or decisions could be attributed to him or his influence as an individual. For a long time, both this perspective and the quotidian realities I witnessed caused me to largely dismiss the complex history of a complicated man—a history that multiplied questions like a hydra, each answer producing twice as many curiosities as the one it sought to address.

  * * *

  Instead of replacing her surname with his, my mother combined the two when she married my father in 1983. It would be the name they gave to their eleven children: Phelps-Roper. “We wanted you kids to have the Phelps name. That name means something around here. It’s part of your legacy.” When my mother made this comment, I presumed she meant the legacy of the picketing; it’s what we were known for, and what was getting us ever more attention in the press. Later, though, when I heard her telling one of my siblings the same story, I realized the obvious: that if the picketing didn’t begin until after her sixth child was born, there must have been another part of this legacy. What had it been? “Oh, honey,” my mom said, “long before this city hated us for picketing, they hated us for defending the rights of black people.”

  As the stories were told to me, my grandparents moved to Topeka with their young son in the spring of 1954, when the city was at the heart of a nationwide civil rights battle. Their arrival coincided with the publication of the United States Supreme Court’s decision in the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. The Court had ruled against the city, overturning the previous “separate but equal” standard and banning racial segregation in state-run schools, which Topeka had fought all the way to the highest court in the land in order to maintain. Born in 1929, Gramps had grown up in Meridian, Mississippi, in the deep South—a place where first slavery and then segregation had had roots sunk deep. “He saw the way those black people were treated,” my mother told me, “and by the mercy of God, he knew it was wrong.” She quoted to me and my siblings the same verses that her father had quoted to her and her siblings: One law shall be to him that is homeborn, and unto the stranger that sojourneth among you, because God hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth. In the eyes of the law, all must be equal.

  But the ministry brought my family to Topeka, not the civil rights movement. In spite of his father’s best efforts to prepare him for a career in the military, my grandfather had become a preacher instead. He grew up a quiet, studious child in a highly respected family, and was a high achiever. He graduated high school at sixteen, sixth in his class, an E
agle Scout, Golden Gloves boxer, recipient of an American Legion Citizenship Award, class commencement speaker, and the best-drilled member of the Mississippi Junior State Guard. His father worked hard to help him secure a principal appointment to the United States Military Academy at West Point, but because candidates must be at least seventeen years old, my grandfather had to wait several months before he would be able to matriculate. During those months, he attended a tent revival meeting at a local Methodist church in Meridian and “got saved.” Gramps described that event as “a genuine religious experience” and “an unction or impulse on the heart,” referencing the verse that declares that ye have an unction from the Holy One, and ye know all things. The sermon my grandfather heard that day was the parable of the wedding feast, in which Jesus likens the kingdom of heaven to a certain king who makes a feast for the marriage of his son, and sends his servants to bid the invitees to come: But they made light of it, and went their ways, one to his farm, another to his merchandise: And the remnant took his servants, and entreated them spitefully, and slew them. But when the king heard thereof, he was wroth: and he sent forth his armies, and destroyed those murderers, and burned up their city. The parable continues, but this part was frightfully compelling to my grandfather, the fate of the men who were bidden to the feast and the pitiful excuses they gave for their refusal to come—their work. Their livelihood. He would not be one of those wretched men to spurn Heaven itself, but one of the servants who would call the world to the feast. All the dreams he and his father had shared, all the plans they’d made, all the work they’d done to get my grandfather into West Point became irrelevant in the face of God Himself calling my grandfather to become a preacher. His father was furious, but Gramps’s decision was made.