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by Megan Phelps-Roper

  In those moments of sorrowful prayer in my bedroom—despite all my efforts, why could I not just do things right? What was wrong with me?—I was consumed by terror, frantic at the thought that I had been like Esau all along. The man who found no place of repentance, though he sought it carefully with tears. At each of my mother’s censures I stood on the edge of a precipice, feeling as if I were only a light breeze away from being pitched headlong into the waste howling wilderness of the world, forever cut off from God and His people—and then, finally, awakening to the torments of Hell. Among Westboro members, such was the power of my mother’s judgment. The loyal servant had assumed the role of the new taskmaster.

  Margie was often the counterpoint to my mother’s abrasiveness. Her finesse was evidence that she understood people in a way that my mother never seemed to. One afternoon when Margie was picking me up from middle school, she told me a story that I would remember and attempt to emulate for years. At a meeting with her team at the state Department of Corrections, there’d been a discussion surrounding a thorny question. Margie had figured out the answer, but instead of saying so directly, she alluded to ideas that would lead the others in the right direction, giving them the space to work it out and come to a conclusion for themselves. She described her decision to hold back as having two effects: her colleagues had the satisfaction of learning and meaningful accomplishment, and they were more invested in implementing the solution because they had come to it for themselves.

  Had Margie’s coworkers been under Westboro’s authority, I knew my mother would have seen them as prideful for being at all swayed by their feelings; after all, they should be invested in the right answer for its own sake, not because they found it. What vainglorious fools they must be! She would have done her best to stamp out that pride forthwith: “You think you’ve got somethin’ goin’ on? You think you know somethin’? This is not about you!” Pride was a destructive force in any human being, and it needed to be eradicated at all costs. Every one that is proud in heart is an abomination to the Lord. But Margie had taken her employees into account—their personalities, how her conduct would affect them—and in her consideration I saw true humility, rather than just the absence of pride. There was a peace in my aunt’s manner that appeared so much more desirable to my eye than the hard lines and harsh tones my mother so often took. I aspired to many of my mother’s qualities—strength, diligence, zeal—but my aunt was a powerful introduction to the idea that these features did not require militancy to survive. That strength abides as fully in restraint as it does in aggression. That the tongue, that world of iniquity of which my mother had so strenuously warned me, could be used in altogether better ways.

  By long forbearing is a prince persuaded, and a soft tongue breaketh the bone.

  * * *

  Although the idea of taking a gentler approach resonated with me relatively young, many years would pass before it had opportunity to bloom. “Mildly” was not the way I had learned to speak to outsiders. There would be no mincing of words on the picket line, no euphemisms, no delicacy, no circumlocution. Westboro’s provocations would land us in litigation more than once—including, ultimately, a federal case that reached the United States Supreme Court and had the potential to bankrupt the church many times over—but not even this could convince us to change our ways. Even as the church became more radical and adopted ever-harsher prayers wishing death upon a growing list of enemies, I understood the refusal to recalibrate. One of the first verses I memorized was a command from God to the prophet Isaiah: Cry aloud, spare not, lift up thy voice like a trumpet, and shew my people their transgression, and the house of Jacob their sins. This had been the charge at my grandfather’s ordination at seventeen, and he quoted it ceaselessly—often in conjunction with another phrase he would bellow from the pulpit on Sunday mornings: “WE WERE NOT SENT HERE TO PARLEY!” Ours was a position of strength, our foundation Jesus Christ Himself. Compromise was betrayal. The thoughts of mere humans were irrelevant. In this battle, we would not be the ones to yield.

  For all her sophistication and emotional intelligence, not even Margie was above conforming to our antagonism on the picket line and was often cruder than most. When I was nineteen, I stood with my aunt and my Gran on a street corner outside a Seattle hotel hosting an international gay and lesbian leadership conference. With her then-eighty-one-year-old mother standing a few feet away, my aunt waxed vulgar, applying the knowledge Gramps had imparted to us about “scat”—the consumption of feces for sexual pleasure—to an anecdote about an imaginary new drink at Starbucks. “Just go and get yourself a Fececcino!” she brayed, mocking the conference-goers in a tone of prissy faux-refinement. “Add a dollop of feces into your coffee, and then prance in here to discuss your leadership!” The stark contrast between the way Margie behaved on and off the picket line was jarring even to me, but I was of the mind that the obscene nature of my aunt’s words said nothing about her and everything about gays: that they were disgusting and abominable whether she kept quiet about their manifestly abhorrent sex acts or not. I supposed she felt the same.

  Our antics at Westboro protests were vulnerable to criticism for any number of reasons, but their remarkable efficacy at garnering attention could never be gainsaid. This was by design, of course; a major piece of the attraction of our un-church-like methods was the thunderous voice it gave us on the streets and in the media. Both our picketing and the media coverage were finite and local in the very beginning, but my grandfather swiftly found ways to colonize the burgeoning power of the twenty-four-hour news cycle for his own purposes. Westboro members began traveling across the country, from gay pride marches in D.C. to the Castro district in San Francisco. Our vehement attacks on public and private figures nationwide were carried by fax machines, and later the Internet, to newsrooms across the country and around the world. Westboro’s relationship with the media became symbiotic almost instantly: they gave attention to our message, and we helped them sell newspapers and generate clicks.

  In our estimation, Westboro’s chief objective by far was fidelity to the Scriptures. Apart from that, however, we gauged success primarily by the amount of media attention we received—a fact which garnered no shortage of accusations that we were feigning our faith for the sake of notoriety. People often took our constant employment of shock tactics as cynical and purely attention-seeking behavior, but this was a fundamental misunderstanding of our purpose and the dynamics of the picket line. “Some say you’re just doing this for attention,” one television reporter accused Gramps during an interview I sat in on. My grandfather looked at her like she was uncommonly dense and said slowly, “Well, you’re doggone right. How can I preach to ’em if I don’t have their attention?”

  Not only did we firmly believe in the truth and goodness of all our message and methods—including what others wrote off as “shock tactics”—we also recognized that we were living in a sound-bite generation with endless demands on its attention. “You’ve got to speak to people where they are!” my mother insisted. We had a message to preach, and we were going to use every tool in our arsenal to get the job done: sexually explicit signs and insults, parodies and pop culture references, sarcasm and sass. Margie was especially good at writing clever lyrics for our parodies of pop songs, which inspired me to try my hand at them, as well. When we published the recordings of my Lady Gaga parodies on Twitter—Russian roulette is what you’re playin’, silly clod / But every chamber’s loaded when you’re playin’ with your God—her devoted and active fan base whipped themselves into a frenzy, turning our songs into an international news story. No matter how fierce the hostility to our message became, we delivered it with a Cheshire grin: “You’re going to Hell. Have a nice day!” It was important that people understood that our protests were not done in service of any personal hatred, but of the truth of God.

  Our belief in predestination prevented us from using conversion numbers as a measure of our success—fortuitous, considering how paltry they wer
e—because whether a person had the faith to believe the truth of our doctrines was in God’s hands alone. In light of this, our goal was not to convert, but rather to preach to as many people as possible using all the means that God had put at our disposal. He would take care of the rest. And he said unto them, Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature. He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned. On the cusp of the twenty-first century, at the dawn of the Internet age, we saw ourselves as the recipients of a divine gift unlike any given to the faithful preachers of yore: a global communications system which we would swarm like a conquering army to spread the Word of God unchecked. Selah.

  “You think the Internet was created by God for these pornographers?” Gramps snorted. “The heck you say. He created it for us. For our preaching.”

  * * *

  At first it was a trickle, but then they came in droves. Small-town papers and local TV news segments gave way to Michael Moore’s The Awful Truth and ABC’s 20/20—the former featuring an enormous pink motor home announcing BUGGERY ON BOARD! that Moore had dubbed the Sodomobile. CNN. Fox News. MSNBC. The BBC produced two hour-long documentaries about Westboro that identified us as “The Most Hated Family in America.” We were thrilled to see that our message was beginning to seep into the international conscience, our neon signs and provocative slogans becoming iconic and instantly recognizable. HBO’s award-winning television drama True Blood was a pop-culture phenomenon from its inception through its conclusion in 2014, and for seven seasons, “God Hates Fangs” flashed through its opening credits—a play on Westboro’s infamous rallying cry, “God Hates Fags.” As Westboro’s profile continued to rise, the Phelps-Roper home became a revolving door of journalists and documentary filmmakers from across the United States, the U.K., Australia, Japan, Italy, France, Germany, and more. A few weeks after my grandfather attacked the Swedish royal family following the sentencing of an anti-gay preacher there (“The King looks like an anal-copulator, and his grinning kids look slutty & gay!”), two journalists from Stockholm knocked on our kitchen door unannounced. “Hello!” I smiled at the two gentlemen unfazed. “Can I help you?”

  Our campaign against Sweden only intensified when we discovered that the royal court was looking into possible legal action against us under their hate crimes law. With this sort of attention, how could we let go? We added GodHatesSweden.com to our growing list of Internet domains and attacked the country’s leader, Carl XVI Gustaf: “The popinjay King of Sweden—a moral titmouse in the plumage of a peacock, who lives lavishly with his kids on Sweden’s largest social security check—is King of Fags.” My grandfather spun out news releases, and we unleashed the power of our fax machines, sending the missives to every government-related number we could unearth. “The Swedish Royal Court has confirmed that it has been receiving abusive faxes from the fanatical Westboro Baptist Church sect.” (#LedesFrom1991) The technology was antiquated even in 2007, and we found it hysterical that our ol’ Gramps could literally cut and paste together the elements of a press release, “send it out on that little machine,” and stir up the highest levels of the Swedish government.

  The campaign wouldn’t be complete without protests, of course. Our policy was not to leave the country and the protection of the First Amendment, but we were undeterred by our inability to travel to picket in Sweden. Instead, we targeted the country through its D.C. embassy and consulates in Chicago, Omaha, Minneapolis, and Portland; the local performance of a Swedish chamber orchestra; a Kansas alcohol distributor whose wares included Absolut Vodka; and a Topeka hardware store that sold Swedish vacuum cleaners. Even we laughed at the dubious connection between the vacuum retailer and a man sentenced to jail for an anti-gay sermon preached halfway around the world, but we were determined to make those Swedes hear the truth about their Sodomite sin—and just as important, to make them feel their impotence, the futility of their resistance to our message. This was God’s Word, and we were His servants. They had no power to stop us. No weapon that is formed against thee shall prosper; and every tongue that shall rise against thee in judgment thou shalt condemn. This is the heritage of the servants of the Lord.

  Thanks to my mother’s position in the church, our family was right in the middle of the torrent of activity surrounding Westboro. A few years after the start of our picketing ministry, my grandparents had grown tired of answering the phone calls they received on the church line. Prank calls and death threats came in all day long, but it was just as likely to be a journalist or live radio show. My mother did her best to be good to her parents, visiting often, sending one of us kids down to the church with dinner most nights, and executing the plans that she, my grandfather, and the other elders cooked up. So when my grandparents complained to her about their weariness of the phones, my mother wasn’t going to let her aging parents linger under that burden for a moment longer than necessary. Although she already worked what were effectively three full-time jobs, she was willing to take on another without objection. She had the church phone line forwarded to our home, and suddenly we were the ones on the receiving end of the abuse and media requests. The battle lines had been redrawn, and the picket line had come into our house.

  “Hello?” I picked up the phone just after 8 A.M. one day in sixth grade.

  “Hey, is there an adult we can talk to?” I told the man there was not; my mother was taking my siblings to school and I was home sick. He asked my age, and I told him eleven. “Okay, let’s talk to you, you’re on the air! What do you think about Ellen DeGeneres?” He snickered to his cohost like he’d told a clever joke. I rolled my eyes. Ellen had recently come out, and Gramps had put her photo on a sign after blackening out one of her teeth and drawing pockmarks all over her face.

  “She’s a filthy dyke, and she’s going to Hell for eternity,” I said calmly, and then quoted the best clobber verse against gays from Leviticus: Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination. I thought for a second, and then added, “Plus, she’s not funny at all.” I hadn’t seen any of Ellen’s comedy or television, but it never hurt to toss in an insult like that for good measure. Margie, Gramps, and my mom gave the most articulate, powerful interviews, and I’d been listening to them long enough to know that switching things up to amp up the shock value was good strategy. I reported the call to my mom when she returned home, basking in her laugh as I recounted my repartee with the radio hosts. Cleverly articulating Westboro’s message would become one of the most reliable ways to earn affirmation from my mother and grandfather, and I cherished every opportunity to do so. Plus, it was fun!

  All Westboro members had to be prepared to engage reporters and passersby on the picket line, but with the forwarding of the calls, my mother became the church’s de facto spokesperson. That she worked from home gave her the flexibility to field calls during the workday when almost no one else was consistently and readily available, and her willingness to take on that job meant that Westboro was in the news more than ever before. One-sided conversations with members of the media would ring through our house at all hours of the day and night, our mother celebrating the hundreds of thousands of fatalities in the 2004 tsunami—the Swedish ones in particular—and cataloguing for an Australian radio station all the reasons that Heath Ledger deserved eternal torment. More than one host referred to my mother’s sassy, funny, take-no-prisoners attitude as “radio gold.” Margie was the go-to backup when my mother simply couldn’t spare the time, and they would even tag-team occasionally—one of my favorite things to watch. Each of the women was formidable in her own right, but together, they were indomitable.

  I’d begun to formally work for my mother at fourteen—the same age at which she had begun to work for her father—and I both loved and resented that my place was ever at her elbow. I followed her example, finding great joy in cultivating skills for the purpose of “being a good soldier in this man’s army,” as she put it. I memorized phone and credit card numbers
so I could rattle them off for my mom at a moment’s notice. I managed the contacts on her phone and the music on her iPod. I designed and maintained spreadsheets to track litigation and tax expenses, and wrote and edited Westboro press releases. I learned accounting to audit the law firm accounts, and Spanish to give interviews to Univision and translate the FAQ on our church website—all before the end of my first year of college. And yet, it often seemed that none of that mattered. My mother could be just impossible to please, and at times I worried that I could never actually grow up under her constant gaze and micromanagement of every detail of my existence.

  But when it worked, and all the more as I grew older and learned to accept these constraints, I would cry in gratitude to God for designing this little piece of the world for me, and me for it. My heart swelled when I heard what my mother had begun to call me. “Megan is my right hand,” she would say. Each day I had the privilege of being saturated in our doctrines and these questions of eternal significance. I often likened my mother to the hub of a wheel: all roads led to her as she went about orchestrating the day-to-day operations of the church. It became my greatest treasure to support the work of this virtuous woman, to be given a front-row seat for the drama that was forever unfolding before the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ. These were the wars of the Lord, and they would be remembered from everlasting to everlasting.

  The peace I felt in my role was thanks in no small measure to Margie. Given our similar personalities, she sympathized with how difficult it could get for me at home. She, too, was put off by my mother’s particular, carping nature—and so when things went south with Mom, it was Margie to whom I turned for succor. Nothing ever got me back on track faster than the gentle entreaties of my beloved aunt. She sent me a message one day just before my twenty-fourth birthday, and I printed it out and kept it in the top drawer of my desk as a daily reminder. I could hardly read my mother’s emails of correction for the dreadful cacophony they sounded in my mind, full of misplaced accusations of deliberate sabotage and the rage of ALL CAPS. Margie was the epitome of kindness. Of reasonableness. Her email read in part: