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by Megan Phelps-Roper

  Not even Gramps was an appropriate audience for questions or doubts, as he was kept only minimally aware of all the maneuverings of the elders and the day-to-day happenings of the church. This had already been a trend for some time. My grandfather was getting older, and my family had taken an example from the book of Exodus, when Jethro, the father-in-law of Moses, saw that the job of leading the Israelites had become too much for Moses to do alone. Thou wilt surely wear away, both thou, and this people that is with thee: for this thing is too heavy for thee; thou art not able to perform it thyself alone. Jethro proposed that a system of lesser judges be instituted beneath Moses, and it shall be, that every great matter they shall bring unto thee, but every small matter they shall judge: so shall it be easier for thyself, and they shall bear the burden with thee. The new elders seemed to see themselves in this manner, relieving my grandfather of the burden of leading the church. To go over their heads and seek aid or comfort or understanding from our pastor directly—to call the elders’ judgment into question in any way—was not allowed. Even as the cruelty toward my mother continued and increased for months on end, and even though she and Gramps were close, she dared not be open with him about what was happening to her. If she had, her exclusion from the church would have been all but certain.

  I struggled to conform to our new paradigm, and I struggled to understand and articulate why I was struggling. Theoretically, it was possible to implement a change like this in a biblical way. There were plenty of verses in the New Testament about elders, and I realized for the first time that at least some of them were referring to a specific office in the church—not just to “older people.” And when they had ordained them elders in every church, they commended them to the Lord. Let the elders that rule well be counted worthy of double honour. But unlike in that passage, we hadn’t ordained these elders; they had ordained themselves—a fact that would have been easier to accept if I hadn’t felt conflicted about nearly every decision they issued.

  One of the first came just before the Royal Wedding, the marriage of Prince William to Kate Middleton. Per our usual practice, the church issued a news release and announced on Twitter that we would protest the affair: “Wedding vows mean nothing to these royal mutts!” We had no intention of actually traveling to London—not least because the United Kingdom had banned church members from entering the country—but even the announcement of a protest was enough to generate significant media coverage. We were engaging in what we called “virtual picketing”: protesting a faraway event in a local space, and reaching the target audience by publishing photos and messages on the Internet and through the media. There was nothing inherently dishonest about this tactic—injustice in one city often inspires public demonstrations in others—except, of course, that our intent was to deceive.

  We had employed this strategy before, choosing words that were technically true, but designed to leave an impression that was not: that we were actually present outside the event. I’d thought this was funny when I was younger, viewing it as a prank or a trick, rather than a lie. The behavior seemed questionable to me now, but all doubt left my mind as soon as I saw my cousin Jael abandoning the “technically true” for outright lies: she was posting tweets about being on a plane to London. My heart sank when I received a group text from Steve instructing everyone with a Twitter profile to republish a post from an account he had just created: @UGNewsWire. The account purported to be an “Int’l News Service,” complete with a fake logo to make it appear as if it were a legitimate media outlet. Its posts read:

  WBC members (of ‘God Hates Fags’ infamy) picket outside Westminster Abbey day before #RoyalWedding

  Westboro Baptist protesters outside Westminster Abbey - singing songs & chanting ‘God Hates the UK’

  The infamous Westboro Baptist Church is on the ground in the UK - protesting the Royal Wedding:

  Each of the posts included an image of Westminster Abbey that had been digitally altered to include picketers with signs. I saw that Steve had sent them to the BBC, the Associated Press, USA Today, and other news organizations.

  I was mortified. These lies were idiotic, not only violating the Scriptures but offering the hordes of people who hated us a legitimate reason to impugn the integrity of the church. It undermined our claim to being messengers of God, and it was the picture of a verse my mother quoted often: Give none occasion to the adversary to speak reproachfully. I had several thousand followers on Twitter, and though I angered them on a regular basis, I had a growing sense of community with the people I encountered there. I felt like I owed them the truth, and I didn’t want to be attacked for being dishonest. And on top of everything else, I didn’t want them to think I was the type of person who would tell ridiculous lies for the sake of publicity.

  In a pique, Grace found me at my desk not long after Steve’s message came through: “Did you see Steve’s text?!”

  “Yeah,” I sighed. “Yikes.” Grace and I talked it through and were in agreement that the whole situation was petty, wrong, and embarrassing. We also knew that we would hear from Steve if we didn’t retweet him, and that we couldn’t decline his order without support from our parents. If we refused to obey—even in the matter of a simple retweet—there would be trouble. I briefly considered pretending to have missed Steve’s message, but that also would’ve been a lie, and it wouldn’t have worked, anyway: I had at least a few thousand more Twitter followers than all other church members, and he would certainly check my account to see if I’d done his bidding.

  As if on cue, a follow-up text from Steve popped up on my screen.

  I went in search of my mother and asked if we had to follow Steve’s instruction, explaining the objection that Grace and I shared. This was just a week after my mother had sent her apology email to the church, and though she agreed with us, she had no standing to question or correct another church member on any matter—especially an elder—no matter how egregious. She contacted my father at work, and returned later to report that we just needed to do what Steve had directed.

  I picked up my phone and tapped the “retweet” button feeling utterly disgusted with Steve, with myself, and with the state of the church. What was the matter with these elders? Our integrity, our fidelity to the Scriptures—these were our foundation and our only defense against the accusations that the world was forever hurling in our direction. Our signs were plastered with the wrath of God, but here we were, hypocritically ignoring one of the clearest declarations of God’s hatred in the Scriptures:

  These six things doth the Lord hate: yea, seven are an abomination unto him: A proud look, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood, An heart that deviseth wicked imaginations, feet that be swift in running to mischief, A false witness that speaketh lies, and he that soweth discord among brethren.

  Not just one but two of these seven abominations addressed lying. A lying tongue. A false witness that speaketh lies.

  Just as I’d known they would, Twitter users quickly discovered the truth and began to call us out for the lies and manipulated photos. They quoted Bible verses to me, the same ones I had quoted to my mother. Ashamed and angry, I repeated the party line about “virtual picketing” and Steve’s ridiculous claim that the fake picket was never meant to be taken literally—that the photos were so poorly Photoshopped that no one could possibly have been taken in by them—but this, too, was demonstrably false. When someone on Twitter pointed out to @UGNewsWire that Westboro members were banned from the U.K., Steve had tweeted back, “it was reported that the ban was lifted, but authorities can’t confirm.” Of course he meant to deceive people, I thought, he just did a shitty job.

  Lying on my bed that night, Grace wasn’t spinning her absurd tales, and I wasn’t twisting her hair into French braids the way I’d done since she was a little girl. It felt foolish to be worked up over something as small as a retweet. Was our father right when he accused us of carping and self-righteousness? He had reminded us that we knew these people in the church
, that they were kind and thoughtful and trying to do right by the Lord. They were working hard to preach to this God-forsaken world, and the two of us were sitting on the sidelines looking down our noses and sniping at them. What was our problem?

  Grace and I stared at the ceiling for a time, talking quietly until we came to the answer:

  For the first time, we had been told to do something unscriptural by someone in a position of authority.

  For the first time, we had no way to make our objections heard by the church.

  And as always, we had no choice but to submit.

  * * *

  By July, three months after the initial disciplinary email, visible signs of the elders’ influence were multiplying. A new, stricter modesty standard for women and girls had come first, implemented within days of the elder takeover. Before that, the general rule had been to cover the “4 B’s”—“breasts, back, butt, and belly,” my mother recited—but its enforcement had never been draconian. Now, showing any hint of skin in these areas—as, when reaching into the truck bed to grab a picket sign, a girl’s shirt rose and briefly exposed an inch of her stomach—was cause for censure. Legs, too, had become a problem. My parents sent my sisters and me to the mall in search of longer shorts, and we found several pairs that reached below mid-thigh. Our father approved, but he had been given to understand that his judgment was suspect. The process became even more demeaning when he sent me down to model the new shorts for my eldest brother. I was twenty-five. Sam was thirty-two. He did not approve. Modesty required high-necked blouses, dresses or pants that covered our legs down to our knees, and covered feet—no sandals—during the Sunday church service.

  My mother’s disappearance from the media was another outward indication of the shift. She had represented the church in newspapers and radio interviews the world over on an almost-daily basis, but now Steve had taken charge. I was humiliated on her behalf as I watched her awkwardly turn away from a swarm of media that had surrounded us at a protest in Ohio. They were clamoring for interviews, baffled and trying to understand our message—but preaching the Gospel was clearly less important to the elders than bringing my mother to heel. Because she had been stripped of most of her other church-related duties, as well, the Phelps-Roper home grew eerily quiet as the constant flow of reporters, cousins, and other church members ebbed to a trickle.

  As sudden and jarring as these changes were, there is an image that stands out in my memory as most clearly signaling the distress of this transition period: a close-up of my littlest sister’s fingers. Grace and I paid close attention to the elders’ decisions, and the more we saw, the more troubled we became. I was practiced at justifying Westboro’s doctrines, but the cracks forming in our fortress of logic and Scripture were becoming ever more difficult to ignore. Why would we be punished for unintentionally flashing an inch of skin on our back or belly, while our brothers were permitted to swim shirtless, with all of theirs on full display? Why were girls in other Westboro families subject to more lenient rules of modesty? How could the standards of God differ from house to house? Let us walk by the same rule, let us mind the same thing. Sam dismissed our objections, seeming to believe that they originated from a desire to dress like sluts. Grace and I knew better. That the problem went far deeper: hypocrisy, and the dawning realization that the rules we had been taught—the divine rules of a sovereign God—were being systematically replaced by the caprices of fallible men. Church members had always denied that we were “interpreting” the Bible, insisting that we were only reading and obeying what was plainly written in the Scriptures. But once I was excluded from the discussions, it soon became obvious that interpretation was inescapable—that it was happening daily, hourly, and always in ways that protected and expanded the authority of these eight elders.

  Holding signs together at the pickets, sitting at our desks at home, lying side by side on my bed, Grace and I floundered, trying to make sense of it all and coming up empty. And all the while, she picked. The bits of skin around her fingernails were tiny at first, but she picked at them for weeks, tearing them off again and again until all of her fingers were scabbed and bleeding. “How did it go today?” Grace would ask in resignation when she returned home from school. I’d describe watching our mother stare unmoving at her ringing cell phone again, and then she’d answer it quietly, disappearing to the far corners of our empty house to have another conversation with my dad. Always more trouble, though she was trying to keep it from me. I’d tiptoe after her to eavesdrop on her side of the conversation—a habit I’d picked up from Sam growing up—to learn the source of the conflict. My mother was defensive, disbelieving the complaints my father was receiving: an aunt who disapproved of my mother’s tone, another vaguely unsatisfied that her mannerisms demonstrated sufficient repentance. It was as if they were actively looking for reasons to be offended. Despair was creeping toward the deepest parts of me, but I fought to keep it at bay and to comfort my sister. As I relayed the day’s events to Grace, she would pick. Pick. Pick. My reassurances about the necessity of submission—our own and our mother’s—began to sound hollow even to my own ears, and I could never say enough without resorting to lies. Instead, I bought her a box of hot-pink Hello Kitty Band-Aids and covered the tips of all ten of her mangled fingers.

  “The Megan Solution,” she called it. A tendency I’d developed without realizing it.

  Cover it up, and it will go away.

  * * *

  As it turned out, 2011 was conducive to cover-ups.

  June marked the beginning of the most ambitious construction project we had ever undertaken: an enormous house for my aunt and uncle and their seven children, to be built on a concrete foundation directly across the street from my front door. The entire frame of the house would go up in the first eleven days—“Push Week”—which were full of scorching sun and ninety-degree temperatures that had us all baking. Sweat and sunscreen soaked through our clothes, but the work site was alive with the high-pitched buzzing of table saws and the insistent instruction to “Measure twice, cut once!” from the men who’d taken vacation days from work to lead the project. By the time we installed the roof trusses, we were sunburned down to the last minion and an accident with a framing nailer had sent a cousin to the emergency room—but the frame was up. Push Week was a success.

  Amazingly, there were several unfamiliar faces around the construction site, too. In an unprecedented turn of events, new members were joining the church at an astonishing rate. Ten years had passed since Steve and his family had joined Westboro—the only outsiders who had come to stay in the quarter-century I’d been alive—but in the span of just a few months, a flood of new people arrived. A twenty-something man from the U.K. Another from a suburb of Chicago. A young woman my age, along with her three children. And an older couple from rural Kansas who had divorced before joining Westboro. It was the second marriage for both husband and wife, and—as our sign paraphrased Jesus—DIVORCE + REMARRIAGE = ADULTERY. Whosoever putteth away his wife, and marrieth another, committeth adultery: and whosoever marrieth her that is put away from her husband committeth adultery. It seemed impossible that anyone would make such a sacrifice—a happy marriage that had given them two sweet young boys—in order to join our church. After a lifetime of hostile rejection of our beliefs, we took this sudden profusion of converts as a clear sign that the Lord was with us, and that the end of all things was at hand. The fruit of the righteous is a tree of life; and he that winneth souls is wise.

  My work for the church also expanded during this period. Most of my mother’s tasks had been reassigned to other church members, and several of them had fallen to me. In addition to coordinating the creation and publication of our news releases, I was now the keeper of Westboro’s picket schedules, both local and national. If I had questions, I was to report to my father or Steve, rather than to my mother—still sitting at her desk five feet from mine. It was a relief to have a degree of freedom from her intense overmanagement, but I could ne
ver feel good about it. I had been taught all my days to honor and obey my mother. I felt a growing sense of disgust at her shaming, and I wanted desperately not to contribute to it. Whenever I made or received a call about church matters that my mother had once overseen, I walked out of our office in haste. I would not cause her more pain with pointed reminders of the position she had lost.

  Meanwhile, the unusual success I was finding on Twitter and in the media had caught the attention of the Kansas City Star. They sent a reporter to Topeka, and I spent many hours during that spring, summer, and fall giving interviews for a profile. The reporter shadowed me at work and at protests, and came to hear a sermon one Sunday. He even attended one of our summer birthday parties, watching me play volleyball and sit poolside with my cousins and nieces, happily fielding requests to tame their long hair with French braids. His questions were typical and without end, and I reflexively responded in the same way to the same pressure I had always felt when representing the church: to present a strong, united front. To show no weakness. To never admit—even to myself—that the church could be wrong. “There’s something wonderfully liberating in the notion that you’re one hundred percent right,” my grandfather often noted with calm and confidence. It was another conundrum—“mindfucks,” as Grace began to call them—that I wouldn’t see until much later: That we could experience such a deep sense of personal shame and humility, saying with the Apostle Paul that we were the chiefest of sinners, while simultaneously declaring that God had given us the most righteousness and insisting that the world obey our understanding. Our position was inherently arrogant and full of hubris, but we felt humble.

  Between my conversations with the reporter, with all of the new Westboro converts, with outsiders on Twitter, and with C.G. on the back side of the Words With Friends game board, my growing doubts were crowded out by eternal justification. My attempts to convince them of our piety served to focus my attention on the aspects of the church that made life there so large and extraordinary. The camaraderie. The sense of family and belonging. The wonderful and smart and kind and generous and supportive church members. And the incredible feeling of being in a large group of people functioning almost seamlessly, as one, doing meaningful work as the earthly representatives of the Creator of all mankind. We weren’t just holding signs on street corners. We were preaching the standards of God, “maintaining and defending pure Gospel truth,” as Gramps always said from the pulpit. The Wars of the Lord.