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by Megan Phelps-Roper

  Hello little Megan whom I love.

  You have been near and dear to me since you were born, and you are one of my most favorite people in all the world. More important, I am convinced God has done a work on your heart, and you desire to serve Him.

  Like all of us, you have specific struggles in the flesh. It is a piece of rebellion, and it comes out the most with your mother. I know you know this, and you work at it. But you hang on to a piece of pride that is a danger spot for you. You wrap around the axle about how she says it or when she says it or what she says it about, and rationalize that you don’t understand why.

  I know you know that your mother loves you dearly and watches for your soul. I am so thankful that you are comfortable speaking your mind and heart to me, and never want that to go away. But it would be such a disservice to you if I didn’t tell you from a few steps back that your ever-so-intense God-given-talented sweet self, you kick against the prick of your mother’s words of instruction and direction. She is the boss of you, Megan, and always will be. If you can’t submit yourself to her, you can’t submit yourself to this body, plain and simple. Sometimes some humble, quiet submission is the order of the hour. And you must work at seeing that and getting to that spot.

  You have such a spirit of joy and rejoicing and exuberance about serving God, but when you get in that little corner of rebellion with your mom, you are like a completely different person. You are tense, tight, hard, and preoccupied. It’s Satan messing with you, little love. And you must resist him, and you have the promise of your Creator that he will flee.

  Obedience and submission are such sweet comfort to our soul, and such a strong antidote against the enemy we face daily called our flesh. I love you, Megan, and I hope most fervently that these words are right and help your soul.

  A soft answer turneth away wrath: but grievous words stir up anger.

  * * *

  In the middle of our second decade of daily protests, change came to Westboro. To say that we had already cultivated an atmosphere of unbelievable hostility would be an understatement of epic proportions—and yet I was blind to it for many years, rationalizing it for many more. Whether it came to me from Margie or my mother, my uncle Tim at a picket or Gramps from the pulpit, there was always a well-articulated justification for each extreme measure we took. By my late teens, I had begun to describe Westboro as “aggressively defensive”: we were only responding to the malice that had been unfairly heaped upon us. We had not started this fight, but America, “Land of the Sodomite Damned.” Steeped in a church culture that demanded we disregard, dismiss, and disdain “unacceptable” feelings of every kind—both within the church itself and among the community without—we became desensitized to the reality of the havoc we were wreaking on the lives of our targets. The only pain that mattered was ours.

  Fourteen years after we began at Gage Park, this injurious spirit prompted an expansion of our preaching. Our country had declared war on God by granting its imprimatur to the sins of fornication, divorce, remarriage, homosexuality, and the “God loves everyone” lie—and in punishment for those sins, God had dragged America into two wars, the casualties of which were being mourned and their lives celebrated on the news almost daily. In response, we would develop a new campaign that would bring the masses face-to-face with an aspect of our ministry that had previously been reserved for well-known figures and locals who had wronged us: our sinister celebrations of death via protests at funerals. The impact of this shift was seismic, culminating in a five-year battle that would land Westboro before the nine justices of the nation’s highest court—and in the beginning, I was filled with consternation.

  “Mom!” I urged, “Can you please slow down a little?”

  It was the summer of 2005, and the War Room was overrun by children of all ages. Westboro kids from around the neighborhood had gathered here the way they did most mornings when school was out, waiting to collect their assignments. The older ones of us would stain the fences or mow the lawns or fill up holes in the yard with topsoil, while the younger ones might pick up trash, pull weeds, or chop vegetables from the garden. When my mom’s almost-celestial salsa was ready, the kids would take the fruits of their labor home with them in mason jars. My mother coordinated the program like a day camp for the righteous, another task she had assumed when she realized how pointless and unedifying it was for children to be idle at home, watching television and playing video games while their parents were off at work. Instead she would lead us in an hour or two of maintenance work in the morning, pickets before lunch, and then we’d regroup in the Phelps-Roper basement. The big room was mostly used for church gatherings, like the parties we’d throw to celebrate all the birthdays that fell during that month. In the summer, we would rearrange the tables for a group Bible study my mother would lead, with Margie and other Westboro members pinch-hitting on occasion.

  But on this July morning, I needed my mother’s attention. She had just announced that our family would travel to Omaha, Nebraska, in the next day or two: we were going to protest the funeral of a soldier who had been killed in Iraq. At my grandfather’s behest, Westboro had begun this crusade just a few weeks before, and I had struggled to make sense of the logic behind it.

  “What is it, hon?” my mother pulled in close to hear me over the chattering kids.

  “I’ve been listening to Gramps and everyone, but I just don’t get it. I need to understand why we’re doing this. If someone comes up to me and asks me why we’re picketing soldiers’ funerals, I’m not going to have an answer!” At nineteen, I was disturbed by the fact that I couldn’t articulate the Scriptural support for our new position. I’d been picketing for fourteen years by that point. I had memorized countless Bible verses and was always working on more. One of my grandfather’s favorite refrains was that “The key to memorization is attention; and the key to attention is interest.” His implication was that the only cause of a failure to memorize was a failure to care—and I cared. I could answer the toughest questions slung at me whether they came from a gentle stranger or an angry reporter with a microphone and a huge camera stuck in my face. Be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear.

  “Well, we better go talk about it. This is an important subject, and it’s gonna keep coming up. And if you’ve got this question, I’m sure these other kids do, too.”

  A while later, my siblings and I were seated in our usual places around the living room, Bibles open and ready to listen. “Okay, children,” our mother began, “we are going to connect the dots here!” And that’s what she proceeded to do for the next half hour.

  The dots, my mother explained, were (A) sin, and (B) punishment. These two were inextricably connected, and the former was the proximate cause of the latter. (This was the actual vocabulary my mother used when she spoke to us; as an admirer of beautiful words, I found it a sincere joy.) Moses had once given the children of Israel an ultimatum: Behold, I set before you this day a blessing and a curse; A blessing, if ye obey the commandments of the Lord your God … And a curse, if ye will not obey the commandments of the Lord your God.

  So far, so good. This had been part of our reasoning for protesting all along: warning the world that their sin would bring the curses of God upon them.

  “I think we understand that part,” I told my mother. “But why soldiers’ funerals specifically?”

  “Well, can we all agree that a dead child is a curse from God, and not a blessing?” she asked. We all nodded. She’d begun to use the word “child” to describe the dying soldiers, because a significant portion of them were exceedingly young. Many were around my age and even younger.

  “Okay, now flip over to Hosea chapter nine,” my mother instructed. I read along with her and began to memorize: They have deeply corrupted themselves … therefore [God] will remember their iniquity, he will visit their sins. Though they bring up their children, yet will [he] bereave them, that there shall n
ot be a man left.

  “America has deeply corrupted themselves! Adultery, fornication, fags, and so forth. They worship those sins, and now the Lord is visiting them for it—and one of the weapons in His arsenal is killing their soldiers in battle!”

  They chose new gods; then was war in the gates.

  For there fell down many slain, because the war was of God.

  If thou wilt not hearken unto the voice of the Lord, he shall cause thee to be smitten before thine enemies.

  I wrote the verses down. I would repeat them again and again until they stuck.

  “And there is one more piece to this picture, children,” my mother continued. “Most of these military deaths are being executed by I-E-Ds. ‘Improvised—explosive—devices.’ It means homemade bombs. Do you remember that this evil nation bombed this church with an IED ten years ago? Back then, people didn’t even know what an IED was. And now everyone knows! That, children, is the vengeance of God. It is the picture of that verse that talks about their violence coming back on their own heads. Can somebody look that up?” It only took me a few seconds to find it.

  His mischief shall return upon his own head, and his violent dealing shall come down upon his own pate.

  Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.

  The righteous shall rejoice when he seeth the vengeance: he shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked.

  This last piece of the puzzle was not so compelling to me. Although I understood and believed the verses about God’s avenging of His people, my mother and grandfather seemed to vastly overstate the magnitude of the bomb incident each time it came up. I was nine years old when a few college students set off a pipe bomb in our driveway, blowing small holes in the fence and in our van. The blast was strong enough to shake off heavy wall hangings just over the bassinet of my new brother, Gabe, four days old and sleeping in my parents’ bedroom just over the driveway. It had been unnerving to be sure, and perhaps I’d just grown accustomed to glossing over such incidents—but to claim that this was the cause of the suffering of the entire United States military felt exaggerated and uncomfortably arrogant. I thought it was better to focus on the main cause—that protesting soldiers’ funerals was about America’s disobedience to God, showing the causal connection between the nation’s sins and its military deaths. I suspected others felt the same, because Mom and Gramps were the only ones I ever heard making the argument about the pipe bomb.

  “I understand now,” I told my mother. “What time do we leave for Omaha on Saturday?”

  * * *

  The military pickets quickly took over our schedule. Within ten weeks of the first funeral, Westboro had dispatched nearly two dozen groups of protesters, everywhere from Caldwell, Idaho, to Marblehead, Massachusetts. Hundreds more would come in the years that followed. We gathered a team of aunts and cousins, designing an entire apparatus whereby we could keep abreast of the protest opportunities. Given the last-minute, fast-unfolding nature of the events—the bodies would need to be buried quickly—we would have to be prepared to act in an instant. We decided that one of my aunts would monitor the deaths announced on the Department of Defense website, and assign individual soldiers to church volunteers on a rotating basis. These volunteers would then search the media for information about the soldiers as well as their funeral announcements. As soon as they had the time and place of a funeral in hand, they would call my mother or me and we’d swiftly resolve the question: Would we be able to make the trip to picket this funeral?

  The result depended almost entirely on logistics. Was the funeral occurring in a place we could reach by car in ten hours or less? If so, the answer was generally yes. Were the tickets to fly there prohibitively expensive? If so, the answer was usually no. Was the funeral yesterday? Clearly, this picket was not meant to be—but we would need to be more vigilant if we didn’t want these opportunities to elude us. If a given trip seemed possible, my mother would send a message to church members and ask who, if anyone, could go. Our decisions were based on the same constraints that govern the lives of every other red-blooded American: work and school obligations, the availability of vacation time, how much travel we had already scheduled ourselves for, and money. Other than parents for their minor children, we each paid our own way. (Although on one occasion, an older cousin of mine used his work bonus to distribute birthday gift certificates granting the recipient up to $200 toward a picketing plane ticket. Elation!) If at least three people could attend, my mother and I would immediately begin assembling the necessary elements for the trip: plane tickets, hotel and rental car reservations, driving directions, and all of the biographical information published about the soldier in the media. The travelers would need to know just what sort of sinfulness the deceased had been up to in the event that anyone were to ask why we were picketing this soldier specifically. If Mom wasn’t sure, she tended to go with the catchall: “You mean it isn’t enough that he was fighting for a nation that has institutionalized sin and made God their number one enemy?”

  The outpouring of fury and grief at these protests startled me in the beginning. We stood near the church in Omaha and lifted up our new signs—THANK GOD FOR IEDS, THANK GOD FOR DEAD SOLDIERS—but the scene was devoid of our usual protest antics. We did not sing parodies. We did not dance atop the American flag. We did not call across the narrow street to the soldiers standing just outside the church’s entrance. They watched us with bitter contempt, and I couldn’t recall seeing anything quite like it in all my years on the picket line. The family arrived in a limousine, stepped out, turned. Though there were police officers stationed between us and them, the close quarters felt like a tinderbox. Both sides afraid to speak, both sides afraid to make any quick movements lest the precarious peace erupt into all-out war.

  It was only a matter of time before it did.

  As a result of our new campaign and the attention and hostility it generated, violence against Westboro spiked again—including arson this time, the most aggressive act perpetrated against the church. Investigators never found whoever was responsible for setting the church garage on fire in the wee hours one August morning, but the fire department arrived to put out the flames within minutes—tipped off by a woman in a nearby drive-through. An electrician arrived the next morning to get the power running again, but as he surveyed the damage, he seemed disturbed. When my mother asked why, he pointed to the narrow space—just four feet—between the charred edge of the damage and the electrical wiring. “If that fire had lasted any longer, the whole block would have gone up.” I’d been shaken watching the blaze and billowing smoke in my pajamas at 1 A.M., but my feelings turned to outrage and defiance with the electrician’s words. Anyone who thought they could scare us out of serving the Lord didn’t know Westboro or God.

  Although the arsonists had failed in their attempt to destroy the church with fire, a team of attorneys were determined to use the courts to do the same. Less than a year after our first military funeral protest, a twenty-year-old Marine was killed in a Humvee accident in Iraq. His name appeared on the DoD website, instantly becoming grist for the Westboro funeral mill. The query seeking picketers went forth, the plane tickets were purchased, and the news releases were faxed to media outlets all over the state of Maryland. My grandfather had a way of distilling a message down to its essence, and thus he did in the news release announcing our protest at the funeral of Lance Corporal Matthew Snyder: “They turned America over to fags; they’re coming home in body bags.”

  Late on the evening that my mother returned from that funeral picket in Maryland, we sat at our adjacent desks in the still house. My siblings had gone off to their rooms to settle into bed, and Mom and I were winding down, as well. I got up and walked a few paces to stand behind her chair, put my hands on her shoulders, and squeezed gently. She was exhausted. Her head slumped forward while I worked on her neck and shoulders, and after a moment, she spoke softly. She had wept in the car on the way to the funeral, she told me. As she drove, one
of her travel mates had read aloud the news stories published about the young soldier. “The father called his son ‘the love of my life.’” My mother’s voice took on that quality of desperate urgency again, of lamentation. “I am a mother. I have eleven children. I get that.” She shook her head. “It is just so sorrowful what these people have done to their children. Does he not understand that his sins have brought the wrath of God down upon his head? Upon his son’s head? Somebody has to tell them!”

  I was taken aback to hear that she had cried. This was not the sort of spirit we displayed at funeral pickets. After Omaha, they had gotten progressively more antagonistic, and we now exultantly sang parodies of military anthems in those tense, close quarters: “Then it’s IEDs / Your army’s on its knees / Count off the body parts all gone, two! three!” I had begun to feel hesitant in those circumstances. Family and friends of the fallen were passing by a hundred feet away, and it was impossible not to see their heaviness. Breaching that grief-stricken silence so that we could bellow our defiance made me feel—unwillingly, involuntarily—like a terrible person. I would talk myself out of it, buttressing our position with Bible verses to justify the behavior—but my mother’s tears gave me permission to feel the empathy I’d been afraid to acknowledge. I was relieved to know that it wasn’t wrong to do so.

  Less than three months later, my mother got a phone call from a reporter. Our whole family was returning from another funeral picket in Illinois, and we were on the final stretch of the seven-hour drive home. “Lawsuit?” my mother asked. The reporter wanted to know if we had a response to the civil lawsuit that was being filed against us for protesting the funeral of a Marine in Maryland—the allegations were defamation, invasion of privacy, and intentional infliction of emotional distress. It was after hours on Friday evening, but the woman had seen a copy of the complaint that would be filed in federal court come Monday morning. My mother first pressed for details, and then answered with characteristic brazenness: we had the protection of the First Amendment and the foundation of Jesus Christ. No one was going to stop us.