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by Megan Phelps-Roper

  * * *

  I can’t remember exactly when or how I learned what sex was, but I was still six when I discovered that it was how babies were made. My mom was pregnant with her seventh child, my baby sister Grace, and I gasped vociferously, with stark realization and something akin to horror. “So you have had sex with Dad!” I accused her. “Seven times!” I knew sex to be acceptable within the context of marriage, but only just; the practice was still highly questionable and suspect to my mind, and I couldn’t understand why anyone would risk it—especially my smart and pious parents.

  I soon learned that sex wasn’t the only thing that could get you into trouble, though. “Lust,” too, was dangerous and forbidden. My mom explained it carefully to my siblings and me sitting around the living room during one of our daily Bible readings. “Lust is a strong desire for something you’re not entitled to. You cannot be said to ‘lust’ after your spouse, for instance, because that’s something you are entitled to. The word doesn’t apply!” I vaguely understood that the context here was boys and girls, but my mind went straight to my little sister’s Barbies. Bekah refused to let me play with them, but I’d always dreamed of combining our dolls into one giant collection, which I would then apportion between us as I deemed appropriate (the naked ones with the ratty hair and missing limbs would be hers, obviously). I strongly desired to take control of her toys; was this lust? I wasn’t positive, but Mom had already moved on, so it didn’t seem like the perfect time to ask.

  “Then when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin: and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death.” She was quoting James 1:15. “You need to understand this, children. Lust is the beginning of every sin, and death and Hell are the end of every sin. Every evil thing arises from lust. We have to be vigilant about it. Don’t think that you’re special or strong, that you can just go down a lustful path in your mind and not have it affect your actions and behavior. This is a truism: Then when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin: and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death. Make no mistake: lust will bring sin, and sin will bring death. You have to cut it off, and not let it take root in your heart.”

  She paired this verse with another, and they will be forever linked in my mind: Can a man take fire in his bosom, and his clothes not be burned? It’s one of the Proverbs, captivating in its simplicity. The imagery clearly hearkens back to Hell again, where most of our conversations eventually led.

  The discussion continued one day when my mother came to my kindergarten class to have lunch with me. On our way to the cafeteria, she spotted my first-grade cousin walking down the far end of the nearly empty hallway. Mom suddenly seemed disturbed and disgusted. “The way she walks is so inappropriate!”

  “What do you mean, Mama?”

  “She swishes her butt when she walks. Do you see that? She does it on purpose. No one walks like that.”

  I watched my cousin as she disappeared into the lunchroom, trying to see what my mother saw. As far as I could tell it was the way she’d always walked, and I said so, confused.

  “No. She walks like that to get attention from boys.”

  Ah, it dawned on me.

  Lust.

  Suddenly very aware of my gait, I began to walk stiffly, keeping my little hips as still as I could make them. I asked my mom if I did that sort of thing when I walked, too. She shook her head. “No. I’ll have to talk to her mom about it. I’m worried about that girl.”

  * * *

  As my childhood years passed, and then my teenage ones, ever more praise was heaped on virgin marriages, and ever more vilification on any relationship outside of that. There was no such thing as “dating” in this context. God hated fornication, and having dinner alone with an unrelated member of the opposite sex would inexorably lead to fornication—or at the very least, it had the appearance of evil, which we were strictly instructed to avoid. Even if a couple was engaged, there would be no kissing, and certainly no time to themselves, until after the vows. If they didn’t have a chaperone at all times, there was the appearance of evil: the presumption would be that the betrothed had been in flagrante, their undefiled status would be called into question, and the church would have to suss out exactly what had happened during the time in question.

  And although marriages weren’t terribly frequent at Westboro, it seemed like there was never any shortage of such matters for the church to suss out. Before I was born and as I was growing up, several women in the church had relationships and children outside of marriage. These affairs were calamitous and fearsome to behold, their devastating consequences seared into my young psyche like a white-hot brand. I listened to the hushed conversations of the adults one evening, learning they centered around an aunt of mine who’d been wonderful and close with me since I was a babe; she’d take my siblings and me on drives to the park, recounting stories that sounded fascinating even though they were several levels above anything we could really grasp while our ages numbered in the single digits. I didn’t understand all that had gone on with her, but words like “shameful,” “deliberate,” “willful,” “… with him?” and “I can’t think of anything worse” were thrown around, and I knew they meant sex.

  For if we sin wilfully after that we have received the knowledge of the truth, there remaineth no more sacrifice for sins, But a certain fearful looking for of judgment and fiery indignation, which shall devour the adversaries. The ominous warning, terror, and despair of this passage were all over my aunt’s face when it came time for the church to sit in judgment of her for the intolerable sin and havoc she’d wrought among the congregation. We filed into the church sanctuary and took our places in our usual pews, the atmosphere filled with a dreadful heaviness. For what seemed an excruciatingly long period, the adults soberly and dispassionately discussed the fate of this woman, whether she should be stripped of church membership in order to keep the church pure and to drive out the evil inside her. Concerning him that hath so done this deed … deliver such an one unto Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus. To be excluded from the church was a terrifying proposition, the worst fate imaginable for a member of Westboro—a sure sign that you weren’t one of God’s elect but a reprobate destined for Hell. If an excluded person found a way to convince the church that he’d truly repented, he could be granted membership again, but there were no guarantees. As it became clear that the church was leaning toward excluding her from membership—unless and until she found a way to sufficiently demonstrate her repentance to them—anguished sobs racked her, contorting her face with shame and desperation as she begged for mercy and forgiveness. Her young son, also, not yet a teenager, pleaded through tears that they not do this terrible thing to his mother. But the church body, undeterred by their supplications, voted her out with no further discussion.

  In the wake of this trauma, the behavior of my cousin became petrifying to me. Jael, my dear friend the butt-swishing first-grader, grew into a coquettish middle-schooler, and the shenanigans that resulted were cause for great concern. Abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul. She seemed to be constantly in trouble because of boys she was “messing around with.” In our lingo, this could mean just about anything from simple flirting to sex. I always figured it couldn’t have been more than a kiss in Jael’s case, though that was still a sin egregious and inexcusable, a flagrant display of lust and the appearance of evil. We saw these “innocent” flirtations as the beginnings of real danger that would end with the shame of being an unwed mother and the desolation of being voted out of the church. When Jael got detention for a silly incident that involved hurling a spit wad at a boy, we were all deeply worried for her soul. Her classmates from the church—my older brother and a few other cousins—were charged with keeping an eye on her at school and reporting any suspicious behavior.

  The following year, I joined the middle school crowd and that responsibility fell to me, as well. A few weeks before I was set to start at my
new school, I walked across our backyard and into the church. My siblings and I would take turns having sleepovers there with Gran and Gramps, often several times a week during the summer months. Gramps’s room was the master bedroom upstairs, but Gran usually slept in a recliner in the downstairs room with the fireplace. We would always join Gran and watch marathons of I Love Lucy, Bewitched, or, if we were unlucky, Bonanza. On this night, Gran and I stayed up late watching Lucy, and when the time came, she turned off the TV, I flipped off the light, and we each settled under our covers. To lie in the dark and talk with Gran—wise and soft-spoken, keeper of stories and resolver of spats—was a privilege. That night it was a quiet, considered admonition she had for me. “You’re such a good girl, Meg,” she half whispered across the room. “You’re a good friend. You’re such a blessing to your parents. You help your mom so much.” She was silent for a moment. “Please promise me you won’t ever change. A lot of people, when they get to be your age, start to change. They start getting into a lot of trouble.” I thought of Jael and felt myself beginning to panic. She was warning me, I realized, because I was on the cusp of dangerous territory. I felt the force and weight of her charge, assuring her over and over again that I would not change. That I would not be a burden to my parents. That I would watch out for myself and my loved ones. That I would be good.

  Despite my fears, I settled into the rhythms of sixth grade without so very much trouble. Middle school made me feel official and grown up, but the very best part was getting to spend time with my older cousins. I cherished our newfound closeness, and so was completely thrown when, months into the school year, a mutual friend accidentally made reference to “Jael’s boyfriend” in my presence. How could I have missed this? The girl immediately tried to backtrack—it was widely known among our classmates that the Phelpses weren’t allowed to date—but it was too late. I was sick with worry and fear, but also pleased to have discovered valuable information that could help save my cousin from the clutches of this vicious sin. I colluded with other church members to surreptitiously question classmates about the dalliance, and then reported back to my mother that afternoon after school.

  I don’t recall the consequences of this incident except as they related to me. There was joy at being the object of my mother’s pride; instead of following my cousin’s bad example or trying to hide her wrongdoing, I’d been responsible and cautious and was looking out for the soul of my friend. There was hope against hope that sweet Jael would be saved from her concupiscence. And there was determination to never allow myself to be in her position, to never repeat the mistakes of the dearly beloved women in our family. I never felt superior to them, no—on the contrary, the moral missteps of such strong, godly women made me fear all the more for the safety of my own soul. I was female, and therefore easily deceived, and I prayed that God would deliver me from such sinful thoughts and desires. My mom, my aunts, and my Gran warned me in mostly vague terms about the sensual sins that had befallen the most devout of women. And as with Gran, I heard such expectation and hope in their voices as they spoke to me: that I wouldn’t fall to the obstacles that had caused so many before me to stumble; that the standard was higher for me and my generation. With the Lord’s help, I would make absolutely certain that my own thoughts and behavior were above reproach.

  * * *

  As it turned out, I didn’t have much to worry about. From middle school through college, there was really no one in the church whom I could conceivably marry—it was still almost entirely my relatives—so I didn’t entertain any serious thoughts of relationships. I had hormones as a teenager, of course, and a couple of boys at school caught my eye—but in addition to being terrified of lust and of falling out of favor with God, I was a realist. We protested every single day in our hometown and across the country, and our church was universally hated for it. I understood that the likelihood of any of my classmates being interested in me was essentially nil—especially after we started protesting outside our high school during lunch period—and I also knew that the odds of any of them joining the church were even lower. I knew a hopeless situation when I saw one. I also knew that I was far too young to be thinking about boys anyway, so the whole idea was mostly off my radar.

  I got older. A crew from the BBC came to Topeka to film their documentary about Westboro in 2006, the year I turned twenty. Louis Theroux, the wily but affable presenter, spent a great deal of time talking to me and the other young adult women in my family. He and the rest of the crew seemed fascinated by the fact that our church was populated almost entirely by the children and grandchildren of the only pastor it had ever had—an especially salient consideration given the dearth of potential spouses for us, the grandchildren. We would likely never marry or have children of our own, which Louis saw as a huge problem for us, both personally and as a church. To him, the desire for companionship was in the essential nature of humanity, and without it we young, vivacious women would grow to be bitter spinsters, old and alone. He pointed out that our doctrines and strict policy of marriage only to church members were against our interests as a church body, too; they effectively cut off new blood that the church would need to grow. We would all eventually die off without it, and then Westboro would be no more.

  We dismissed Louis’s arguments as utter poppycock. First of all, we told him, only the basest of humanity is ruled by carnal lust. There is no true member of God’s church who is so lascivious as to need marriage, and certainly not one who would be willing to defy God and marry an unbeliever. Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers: for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness? or what part hath he that believeth with an infidel? Wherefore come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing. The Apostle Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians is infinitely clear: no matter the circumstances, a desire to marry outside the church is dispositive evidence of one’s lack of salvation.

  Second, we argued that God is entirely sovereign and controls the minds of all humankind. Of course, He’d chosen to harden the hearts of the vast majority of them—that’s why our church was so small—but with God, all things are possible. If He so chose, he could easily bring any or all of us a husband or wife. They would become believers and join the church, and then they would be suitable spouses for a servant of the Lord.

  Finally and most important, we were living in the last of the Last Days, and Jesus would soon return through the clouds and save His people and dismantle the foundations of the earth. Who cares about marriage when the world will imminently be destroyed by God?

  But when Louis approached Jael with questions of marriage and the future, she didn’t respond with a Bible verse—just a gentle laugh at his ignorance and a rhetorical question or two of her own: “Are you kidding? Who is gonna marry us?!”

  After so many years, Jael had become a realist, too.

  * * *

  At twenty-four, I had a major stumble. It was a short-lived infatuation with a young, foreign salesman who approached my seventeen-year-old sister, Grace, and me while we were walking through the mall (in a hurry, as always, because we couldn’t be out by ourselves for too long). He convinced us to let him do a demonstration on Grace’s hair of the curling iron he was selling, and we phoned home to get permission. The only reason we could even hope for a green light was that the salesman was Israeli. At that time, our church was exploring the book of Revelation, and many church members believed that we would be the instruments used by God to save 144,000 Jews. The whole doctrine was incredibly strange to me—it certainly wasn’t theology that I’d grown up with—but I wanted to understand it. I’d also never met an Israeli Jew, and he seemed different from the American Jews I’d met at pickets (which may have had something to do with the fact that I wasn’t holding a GOD HATES JEWS sign and singing an anti-Semitic parody of “Hatikvah,” but I digress). My mom was curious, too; it seemed like both of us were thinking something alo
ng the lines of “Maybe we’ll meet a saved Jew right here in Topeka!” So Grace and I got the go-ahead. Mom even told me to invite him and his colleague, also Israeli, to church on Sunday.

  We sat there talking for about an hour while he worked through my sister’s impossibly long locks—a woman’s uncut hair being a sign of her obedience and subjection to God and to her father or husband. Looking back, there isn’t anything about this guy that I can point to as having been especially appealing. I could tell that he was interested in me, but more to the point, there was a slim chance that he could be saved—a hope I hadn’t dared to have for any guy outside the church in all my years. More than anything, the feeling I had sitting in that chair was simple possibility, and it was electrifying—like nothing I’d ever felt before.

  The Israelis couldn’t make it to church two days later because of work, but they did come to Sunday dinner at my house. When they walked in with homemade falafel, the sweet, spicy scent of barbecue already permeated the kitchen. After dinner, we sat around the living room all evening—the salesmen and my parents and siblings—talking about God and Judaism and Israel and the Bible. Hebrew was their first language, which made Google Translate a necessity and deep discussion well-nigh impossible. Neither side walked away convinced by the other’s beliefs, but it was a noteworthy conversation—less because of its substance and more because of its tone. It was contemplative rather than contentious, which wasn’t generally the norm when it came to Westboro members and theological debates.

  A few weeks later, I was out for a solo bike ride around the campus of my alma mater, when suddenly the Israeli pulled up next to me in an old car and said I should come see him. I told him I couldn’t, but he pointed toward a nearby apartment building and said I’d only be there for just a minute. The tiny spark of excitement that shot through me was more than dwarfed by an overwhelming sense of foreboding and dread; I felt physically ill. I pedaled on for a moment, then turned around and headed toward his building. I tried to maintain some sense of propriety by resolving that I wouldn’t go into his apartment. This was already the appearance of evil, but I felt that going inside would be unforgivable, my chastity essentially assumed to be forfeit.