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by Megan Phelps-Roper

  I felt strongly that the case against my mother was overstated, and I was upset that these two men had chosen to stir things up while she was still recovering from surgery. It was a cowardly assault at a time when she was most vulnerable. My father seemed to agree. I could see that he and my mother were gearing up for a fight, preparing her rebuttal—which was also disheartening. I didn’t want my parents to completely discount what this email was saying, because there was some truth to the criticism. I wanted my mother to hear the legitimate critique at the heart of this email, but in overplaying their hand, Sam and Steve had offered distraction that allowed for easy dismissal. Was someone finally going to address this issue that had been a grief of mind to so many of us at various points, only to blow it with narrow-minded and overblown contentions?

  It took time for me to recognize this disciplinary message for what it was: the cynical use of a genuine problem—my mother’s abrasiveness—to upend the existing structure of the church. From the moment he’d joined Westboro, it had been apparent to me that Steve wanted to take over. He’d stated his desire for leadership plainly, but was thwarted by the biblical requirements of a church leader—that he could not be a novice, lest being lifted up with pride he fall into the condemnation of the devil. I’d viewed this naked ambition as an awkward fact of church life. Now that he was not a novice, however, he appeared to be shifting focus to the other obstacle to his rise to power: the longstanding influence of my mother. For Steve, it seemed to me, her sidelining was a stepping stone.

  I’ll never know exactly what occurred in the conversations that followed this email, because a fundamental transformation took hold of the church almost instantly. Throughout my life, constant, unguarded communication had been all but an object of worship at Westboro. Dozens of emails and text messages flowed through the church’s distribution lists each day, covering everything from media and lawsuits, to childcare and lawn maintenance. Members saw one another at protests, hymn-singing gatherings, the family law office, and in our common backyard. We ate dinner together, read the Bible together, exercised together. We congregated frequently for “work crews,” where teams of us would put up drywall, paint fences, make signs, mow lawns, and have “cleaning parties” at construction sites to build additions onto members’ houses. At 6 A.M. on snowy winter mornings, roving bands of young men and women would wander the neighborhood with our shovels to clear sidewalks and driveways so the mothers wouldn’t have to work so hard to get their children to school on time. And throughout it all, we spoke openly of our struggles and triumphs, the state of our souls, the focus of our recent Bible studies and how these ancient lessons applied to current events and our own lives. “Communication is the key!” wasn’t just an incidental part of our culture—it was how a group of eighty people managed to maintain such remarkable unity in executing both the endless logistics of communal living and an astonishingly effective worldwide preaching campaign. Then they that feared the Lord spake often one to another: and the Lord hearkened, and heard it, and a book of remembrance was written before him for them that feared the Lord, and that thought upon his name.

  This email marked the end of an era, though I couldn’t know it at the time. Since I wasn’t privy to the discussions about my mother’s behavior, all I could do was watch with trepidation as events unfolded in front of me. First there were the apology emails from my parents to the church: “Beloved of God—I have offended people over the years with a hard, undisciplined tongue. It is so very wrong and shameful. Please accept my apology and please forgive me. Self-justification is an amazing thing. Please pray for me that the Lord would take away the blinders and heal me of this most important of all illnesses. I love you. I’m so very sorry for the offense I have caused.” Then there was the response from an aunt: “We will do better to help you both because we love you dearly.” And then came the punishments.

  My mother would no longer arrange the pickets in Topeka. She would not prepare the monthly events calendar. She would not orchestrate our cross-country protests. She would not coordinate childcare or media schedules. For the foreseeable future, my mother would not be allowed to give interviews at all. My father tried to defend her against the onslaught, to push back against the extreme penalties, but this only resulted in threats of further punishment: if my parents failed to submit to the judgment of the church, anyone over eighteen who was living in their home would move out and live with other church members. My parents would be shamed and ostracized by their own children.

  That final threat was reported to me via a phone call from an aunt who spoke in a reassuring voice. I stood in the dark in the office I shared with my mother, staring out the window into the spring afternoon as my aunt explained that my parents were “in a very bad way.” That I shouldn’t worry, because the church was not going to let anything bad happen to my siblings and me. As if our parents were a threat to us. I was stunned listening to the sudden shift in how the elders spoke, their tender and heartfelt praise for my parents’ boundless dedication and sacrifice abruptly decaying into a noxious contempt. The rot had set in almost overnight. I’d kept quiet for days as I tried to understand what was happening, but when my aunt explained that they’d threatened my parents with removing us from our home, my response was visceral. I felt my lip curl as I nearly erupted in a menacing “Just you fucking try.” The thought shocked me into keeping my silence—had I ever in my life felt such a thing against the Lord’s church?—and a moment later my aunt ended the call.

  * * *

  We may have reached the age of majority, but I couldn’t bring myself to employ the term “adult” in reference to myself or any of the siblings now staring at me expectantly. I’d called them together as soon as they arrived home, two brothers and two sisters, all between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four: Bekah, Isaiah, Zach, and Grace. We stood in the back living room, and I closed the door so as not to alert our four youngest brothers, who were doing homework and playing video games in the next rooms. I looked around before opening our meeting: Isaiah and Zach wore stoic expressions, Bekah’s brow was deeply furrowed, and Grace—the only one already aware of our purpose here—was unsuccessfully attempting to mask her outrage. I tried to be neutral, but I couldn’t keep the edge out of my voice as I recounted the day’s events.

  During the discussions among the elders, it had apparently occurred to someone that my siblings and I might have an opinion about being forced out of our parents’ house. The home we had shared every day of each of our lives. I’d received a follow-up call asking that I speak with my siblings so that we could come to a decision—which was yet another bizarre development. Children were never asked to make independent decisions. As baptized members of the church, the five of us had a duty to shun those who walk among you disorderly. The question for us seemed to be: Did the Phelps-Roper children feel we could live with our quarrelsome parents and still serve the Lord as we ought?

  I posed the question to my siblings, concluding with a firm “I see no reason to do this, and I have absolutely no interest in leaving.”

  “Me, neither,” Grace piped up. Isaiah and Zach agreed.

  Jaw set and brow still furrowed, Bekah looked perturbed but nodded slowly. The pressure to punish our parents was evident, and we all felt it. I was proud of my siblings for resisting.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll let them know.”

  Grace trailed me out the door and up the back steps to my bedroom. My parents had renovated it for my birthday several years before, replacing the carpet with a serene shade of lilac that complemented the beige drapes. I loved this space. At the southwest corner of the second floor, it was far from the common areas where my family spent most of our time, a calm among the chaos. I’d lie in bed on warm nights with both windows thrown open to the epic storms of my Kansas summers. Just before a downpour the air would be suffocating, so heavy I could hardly breathe … and then the sky would open and the lightning would flash and the peals of thunder that had spooked me awake as
a kid would lull me to sleep.

  “What the fuck is going on?”

  The “f” word was not really an acceptable use of language in our house, but Grace dearly loved it anyway. It was a pantomime of mischief and defiance; the accompanying wink was always implied. Not today, though. My sister sat down on the bed next to me and held out her hand for my phone. I gave it over, and she began squirreling through my emails and text messages to question me about what she found there. Grace was curious and engaged, and since I was so heavily involved in the central work our mother had always done, there was always more detail about church activities in my messages than there was in hers. She’d been reviewing my phone regularly for a couple of years now, ever since we’d become close—but this would be the last time I gave her free rein. I had grown possessive of my communication with C.G., and though I cherished having no barriers between my sister and me, I did not want to share him. This should have been a neon warning sign to me, but the roiling turmoil in the church was a distraction from my growing feelings for him and enabled my denial.

  Grace and I were in a state of disbelief at what was happening to our parents, convinced that it was undeserved and unduly harsh—but there was something else, too. It picked at me the longer we spoke, my apprehension mounting until I finally identified its source:

  “Wait a second. Who exactly is making these decisions about Mom and Dad?”

  My grandfather had long preached that Westboro was the quintessential New Testament church: “local, visible, autonomous, self-governing, exercising discipline over her members.” The verses addressing church decision-making were myriad, and they made it clear that consensus was required. When church matters came up—especially disciplinary matters—active participation was the duty of every member. Everyone had to vote. Everyone had to agree. Without exception. If even a single member disagreed, no action would be taken. This had been the standard all my life. Fulfil ye my joy, that ye be likeminded, having the same love, being of one accord, of one mind.

  The need for church unity was one of our animating principles, the reason we were in constant communion and communication with one another. It’s why we often answered questions from journalists and passersby using the same words in the same order with the same tone. To some, this phenomenon was evidence of indoctrination and coercion, but I never saw it that way. We were of one mind as the Lord required us to be, and these verses showed that each of us had a voice that was integral to the church’s success.

  So why were the meetings about my parents taking place behind closed doors?

  Grace shook her head, looking as disconcerted as I felt.

  * * *

  In spite of our refusal to leave our home, the threat had its desired effect on our mom and dad: the willingness to distance my siblings and me from our parents sent a clear signal that their exclusion from the church was an imminent possibility. Faced with the apparent fact that the congregation was in full agreement as to the enormity of my parents’ sin and the righteousness of their punishment, my mother and father could reach only one conclusion: that God had blinded and deluded them as to their grievous faults. That their judgment was impaired, their thoughts fatally compromised, and that the only way forward was to trust and submit to the collective wisdom of the church without question. My parents seemed lost and dejected that night when they pitifully thanked my siblings and me for choosing not to leave them. My heart ached for them. They seemed broken—and that was exactly the point. The fight had gone out of them.

  Inexplicably, it had not gone out of me.

  On an evening walk with my sister-in-law Jennifer, I raged. Working myself into a frenzy, I argued that no part of this process was being done in a Scriptural fashion. Jen kept saying, “You need to talk to the elders.”

  “I have! I’ve talked with Margie and Lizz and—”

  “No,” she insisted, “the elders.”

  I paused, confused. Jen held forth for a few minutes, and it soon became clear that she was not referring to “the elders” as the term had always been used at Westboro: an informal descriptor of all of the older people in the church, men and women of wisdom and experience. Instead she was referring to “the elders” as if they were the holders of a formal position in the church. What…? I thought, surprised and shocked into silence yet again.

  At the next break in Jen’s diatribe on submission, I asked, “And who are the elders?”

  Fred Jr. Jon. Tim. Charles. Ben. Sam. Steve.

  “Your dad is, too,” Jen said, “but he needs to get his house in order.”

  All of the older, married men.

  I felt sure that my father could not have been involved in this decision, but I was aghast at the rest of them—both the ones who had orchestrated it and those who had acquiesced. It occurred to me that over the course of just a few days, these men had managed to overturn the democratic system, gleaned from Scripture, that had ruled Westboro all my life. Only then did I understand that this had been the ultimate purpose of that email. No doubt they believed they were assuming their rightful place at the head of the church, and Sam and Steve must have seen that my mother had been the only member of the church with enough influence to take a stand against such a hostile takeover, so there were no two ways about it: if these men were going to supplant the church’s long-standing decision-making practices, she had to be neutered.

  The new hierarchy they had instituted made it instantly apparent where the rest of us now stood.

  They hadn’t even bothered to let us know.

  * * *

  My mother had always laughed at the remarkable resemblance between her sense of humor and Grace’s. Whereas Bekah and I tended to view life through rose-colored lenses, wanting our stories tied up with big red bows and happily-ever-afters, the thought patterns shared by Grace and our mother were often morbid, endlessly playful, and frequently resulted in a group of siblings laughing ourselves to tears. Grace was forever plotting, her mind spinning tales for us at every moment. One day I returned to my desk and found money she owed me for a pair of jeans she’d bought on my credit card. Attached was a note, typical of her mischievous machinations, written as if to a loan shark with a plea not to “hurt my family.”

  Sisterhood had not always been so agreeable to me. I could never identify precisely when it happened, but somewhere along the line, my eight younger siblings had—mercifully—ceased devoting their every waking hour to fighting and fits. I had always felt protective of these adorable nuisances, but now they had grown into clever and creative human beings whose minds I’d want to know even in the absence of our genetic connection. I’d spent my early years seizing upon every opportunity to spend time away from them, desperate to be free of responsibility for them and to be a Big Kid. Now we sought each other out whenever we had free time. We’d walk to the bakery for cake pops and frosting shots while Noah pontificated on Captain Underpants and The Hunger Games. We made time for family movie night most weekends, parsing scenes from films like Inception and Never Let Me Go for weeks afterward. On more than one occasion, I reached my arms out to my sides to stretch only to have Luke mistake it as an invitation for a hug. The nine of us were easily a self-sufficient picketing team, a formidable crew of laborers, people who could work together mostly drama-free to get things done, with good-natured teasing and banter all along the way.

  Sunday afternoons would see us hiking together with our parents along the trails by the Kansas Governor’s Mansion, chatting and laughing and tripping over each other in the waning sun, throwing ourselves onto the train tracks and feigning looks of abject terror for an impromptu photo shoot. Our parents would hold hands, contentedly watching over the whole brood of us and laughing at our shenanigans. The lessons that brought us to this place hadn’t come easily, but they were among my most treasured. Being part of a family this size—especially with our imaginative and ever-attentive parents at the helm—had helped to teach us humility and patience. We had each come into the world with a strong pe
rsonality and an outsize sense of justice, but as we grew, we learned to pick our battles, not to throw down at the slightest provocation. We learned to yield to each other. But the wisdom that is from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, and easy to be intreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality, and without hypocrisy.

  In the months that followed the installation of the self-appointed elders, I dedicated myself to employing these lessons in the face of escalating confusion and frustration. The elders issued new edicts on an ad hoc basis, and always via direct, in-person communication; gone were the days of church-wide emails and meetings where important matters were hashed out for all members to hear and weigh in on. Instead, members would learn of decisions from an assigned elder: one’s husband, if married, or father, if not. For the few members who had neither husband nor father as a church elder, an elder was appointed to disseminate information to them. Questions and concerns, once freely discussed with all other church members, were now confined to our assigned elder or parents only. My brother Sam had been my friend and counselor for many years, but when I asked him about a new decision in the early stages of this process, he shut me down: “You need to talk to Dad about that. He’s the one you should be addressing such things with.” Joy, contentedness, submission—these were the only acceptable communications among the church body as a whole.