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by Megan Phelps-Roper

  “I’m here because I want to be here,” I told the Star reporter. “Because I believe these things. Because I love these words.”

  My regular conversations with C.G. had ended two months earlier, but he sent me a message the day that the profile was published.

  “She has no real friends,” the article read. “Few acquaintances. The majority of her outside interactions comes with the people—journalists, mostly—who stop by to profile the family.”

  With characteristic brevity, C.G.’s response was a link to a video clip on YouTube. The farewell scene of Dances with Wolves. Sitting horseback atop a snowy cliff is a Native American called Wind In His Hair. He had initially been hostile to the man leaving the tribe via a trail far below the cliff—a white soldier who became known as Dances With Wolves—but now yells out to him in the Lakota language: “Dances With Wolves! I am Wind In His Hair. Do you see that I am your friend? Can you see that you will always be my friend?” Shouting it from the mountaintop, as it were.

  My heart soared, and it made me ashamed. I stifled the feeling as soon as I could, steeling myself with the words that concluded the profile:

  “I’m all in.”

  * * *

  In C.G.’s absence, I threw myself back into the work of the church and found an even greater sense of my place within the body. By visceral instinct more than conscious deliberation, I understood that no force silences doubt as effectively as zeal—a passionate clinging to familiar and reliable truths that quiets dissonance and snuffs out uncertainty in an avalanche of action. I was eager to be useful to fellow church members in every way that I could, and my obedience was rewarded with a deluge of tenderness from my loved ones. My twenty-sixth birthday arrived in January with a “text bomb”—the coordinated arrival of dozens of messages from church members, all popping up on my screen at once. My mother had implemented the practice for Westboro birthdays a few years earlier, but the outpouring of love was overwhelming this time.

  The message from my dear friend and cousin Jael began: “Dear MegHeart, I have never known a better friend than you.”

  From my beloved Gran: “Dear little Meg, you have always been a sweet, precious child; & for many years, a faithful & loving servant to our Lord! Gramps & I love you very much! Happy Birthday! You are GREATLY blessed!” She was eighty-six, but had learned to use emojis on her iPhone, her message sprinkled with happy faces and flowers and musical notes.

  My mother wrote the story of my life in a series of tweets, which I copied into a Field Notes, fixing her typos as I always did:

  Twenty-six years ago, God loaned us a baby girl. She’s comforted us always. We had great hopes for her and called upon the Lord for wisdom to teach her.

  Her dad and I had only ONE hope for her: That she would have a tender heart from God, toward Him and His word, and that she would serve His people!

  God moved us to sanctify her in her comings and goings, and to teach her line upon line and precept upon precept all of His counsel and ways.

  Our little @MeganPhelps has evidence of grace from God and loving kindness, showing a work of God upon her heart, causing obedience to God.

  One more tweet on the early days of @MeganPhelps on her God-appointed path: The HUGE happy personality is still with us!

  And Grace:

  26 years ago, @MeganPhelps was born. I am above all blessed to have her as my sister, friend, counselor, teacher, +, +, +.

  Boaz said to Ruth, “… for all the city of my people doth know that thou art a virtuous woman…” The same can be said of @MeganPhelps.

  Accompanying Grace’s tweet was a birthday gift on the same theme: a painting based on an album cover I loved, from a band called “Sons of an Illustrious Father.” Grace had replaced the name of the band with a new one: “Daughters of a Virtuous Mother,” in the radiant colors of sunset. It was beautiful, but I sensed in this gift a small act of defiance, too: unqualified praise of our mother, who was still an object of scrutiny and judgment by church members. Though I felt confident in condemning the whole world, the pronouncements of the church were sacrosanct and I had always been terrified of contradicting them in any way. For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness is as iniquity and idolatry. But in that moment, my sister’s subversion lit me from within. She was defending our mother.

  And she was not afraid.

  * * *

  As the months ticked by, my vague hope that life would eventually return to some sense of normalcy began to dissolve. The shaming of my mother continued into the spring and summer of 2012, more than a year after it had begun. The church was caught in another incident of lies and Photoshop, and it became an international news story that we had pretended to protest Whitney Houston’s funeral. After this fiasco, and at the risk of getting ourselves into more trouble with our father, Grace and I were finally able to convince him to represent our concern to the rest of the elders. They agreed to end the public lies and manipulated photos, but only because they were deadlocked about the issue: four of them were against it, but four had no qualms. I was relieved that they had decided against continuing the practice, but I simply could not fathom that half of the elders saw nothing wrong with it.

  Somehow, the situation deteriorated further still. A cousin of mine, then a woman in her early thirties, admitted to committing fornication and other sins, and she was ostracized and isolated by the church for months. The elders deemed her unrepentant. Just before the church-wide meeting that was to be her final warning from the congregation, I spoke with my brother Sam. I explained to him that I hadn’t been allowed to speak with our cousin for nearly half a year, and that I had no way of knowing the state of her heart and mind. She and I were both members of the church, and didn’t I have a duty to love one another with a pure heart fervently? But on the elders’ command, I hadn’t even spoken to her. I told Sam that I needed to actually interact with her to know how she was.

  “You mean, ‘trust, but verify’?” Sam scoffed. He shook his head dismissively. “Nah.” He made it clear that I just had to take the elders’ word for it and accept their judgment that she was unrepentant. This was the clearest repudiation yet of the unanimity called for in Scripture. I was stunned.

  We walked across the backyard in the cool air of late April—almost a year exactly after that email to my parents—and joined the meeting in the church sanctuary. My cousin pleaded sorrow and repentance for her misdeeds, and I heard true shame and sincerity in her voice. The elders were unmoved. The meeting quickly became a campaign to exclude her that very night, in spite of the fact that three church members spoke up in her defense. I was grateful when one elder voiced the same objection that I had: that my cousin had not been given the biblically required third and final warning from the church body—her last opportunity to demonstrate repentance.

  All of her defenders were overruled.

  “You need to be instructed in this matter,” one of my uncles said with stomach-turning condescension.

  After thirty-odd years at Westboro, my cousin was kicked out of the church, her home, her family, and her life—all in violation of the very Scriptures we claimed to champion.

  My sisters’ responses to these events reflected the internal struggle I was experiencing. For many years, my perspective had been much aligned with Bekah’s. We both felt a deep sense of inferiority when it came to matters of Scripture, and we were willing to yield to the judgment of older church members—even in cases where we at first felt discomfort or disagreement. The church had taught us to distrust our own judgment from the time we were children, and we had taken the verses to heart. The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it? When I spoke with Bekah about the doubts I was having, she responded in the same way that I always had: to see herself as insufficiently spiritual to question the wisdom of the elders. “We must be missing something,” she would say. “The elders must know something we don’t.” She trusted them, but little by little, my trust was eroding and
withering. I wanted to believe Bekah, but for the first time in my life, I couldn’t shut off the questions running through my mind. I couldn’t identify the source of my new willingness to challenge the church, but I wanted it to go away. I wanted the simplicity of my old position—“trust and obey”—but it was proving elusive no matter how many times Bekah inspired me to reach for it.

  Grace was another matter entirely. She had always had a unique role in the Phelps-Roper family, and I’d watched her grow into it with joy. As the seventh child of eleven, Grace tended to have fewer of the more mundane household responsibilities, because those generally fell to the older ones of us. Instead she had more free time and fun projects: arranging creative portrait sessions for other families in the church, painting street addresses onto the curb outside each Westboro home, and entertaining our little brothers. She was full of mischief and dubbed the “Pied Piper” by our mother, because the four youngest boys would follow her anywhere—including into the girls’ bathroom on one memorable occasion. Whereas Bekah and I were regarded as submissive and obedient, Grace’s free spirit and apparent lack of discipline earned her a reputation in the church as willful and coddled. It was a branding I considered undeserved: though it appeared that Grace’s daily tasks were more distraction than discipline, she was doing all that our parents required of her.

  I felt motherly toward all my youngest siblings, each of whom I had read to and sung to and rocked to sleep when they were small, but Grace would always be special to me. She was the youngest of us three sisters in a family full of boys, and her name suited her well: she was graceful both in features and manner. My sister’s beauty and charm could be almost unnerving at times, though we never spoke of such things in our home. Any discussion of beauty was limited to an oft-quoted admonition about its emptiness. Favour is deceitful, and beauty is vain: but a woman that feareth the Lord, she shall be praised.

  It was hard for me to hear the way our aunts and uncles impugned Grace’s obedience, and I became her champion of sorts, subtly pushing back against their disparaging words. I wouldn’t realize until much later that the protectiveness I felt for Grace wasn’t just because she was following the rules. It was because she was managing to do so without losing herself. I adored Grace’s creativity and free spirit and the dreams she would so casually mention—of traveling to Paris or Rome to see the sculptures she was studying in art history, or off to Russia, home of Pushkin and Tolstoy. I loved her dreams even though I knew them to be impossible. We could never leave the United States and the broad protection of the First Amendment, and the church’s ban on international travel was just one of the innumerable limitations on our lives that I had long ago assimilated. But because “Grace flies under the radar,” as my parents often noted, she was somewhat insulated from our mother’s watchful gaze and need for submission. She hadn’t yet been broken. She’d made it to age nineteen with her will intact, and she was the only person with whom I could speak openly about my concerns—the only one willing to express disagreement with the elders’ positions without including the standard caveat: “The elders know better. We must be missing something.”

  Neither of us was prepared when Grace became their next target.

  * * *

  “Megan!”

  Grace urgently called me to her room early one morning in late May, and I found her on her bed looking panic-stricken and ready to vomit. She was hysterical, telling me she had just received a call from the wife of one of the new Westboro converts. Justin and Lindsey [names changed] were about my age. We saw their conversion as a testimony to the power and sovereignty of God: He had turned their hearts to His truth.

  The couple and their baby boy had rented a house from my parents located just a few doors down from ours, and Bekah, Grace, and I visited often. We liked them immediately and were in awe of their lives and talents. In contrast to the lives we had led at the church—structured, protected, controlled—theirs had been full of exotic places and experiences. Their transition in forsaking that worldly life to stand with us on the picket line was mind-blowing to my sisters and me, and we wanted to understand their conversion in every minute detail. In Lindsey we recognized the same creative energy that animated Grace, and the two bonded over their mutual love of style and art. Lindsey’s repertoire of skills was broader than my sister’s, and they made plans for Grace to take lessons from her—drawing, painting, sewing. We would have dinner together, watch movies at their house, and stand together on the picket line in Topeka, Grace and I quizzing them endlessly about their life before Westboro.

  The alacrity with which we took to this new family was remarkable, but not unusual. I wasn’t aware of the pattern at the time, but Grace and I often bonded with outsiders in this way. We harbored a deep curiosity about the world outside, and we indulged it as much as the constraints of our lives would allow. She and I would sit on the floor of my room or hers and read books and stories aloud to each other for hours, not just the Bible but everything from Anna Karenina to the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen. When it was Grace’s turn to read, I’d pull my hands through her long, dark waves to detangle and braid them, or massage her scalp in slow, methodical motions, or paint her nails in one of the colors approved by our father—light pink, nude, or clear—while we contemplated the curious lives and ideas of these characters. Whenever journalists and filmmakers came around for interviews, Grace and I would ask almost as many questions about their lives as they asked about ours, and we grew attached if they spent more than a few hours with us. On the day that Louis Theroux and the BBC crew departed after three weeks of filming, we exchanged gifts—including baby clothes and blankets for the sound engineer, soon to be a father—and then I retreated into my house to cry in my bedroom. The four of them had been so kind to us. I believed their choices would lead them to Hell, but I cared about them. I didn’t want to say goodbye forever, and it frightened me that I regarded them with such affection. Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him.

  But now with Justin and Lindsey, we didn’t have to say goodbye. They had had as many fascinating experiences as the journalists we encountered, but here there were no limits or constraints. We didn’t have to keep them at arm’s length, because we were allowed to cultivate friendship with them. They were part of our community. They were safe.

  All of that ended on the morning of the phone call. Lindsey had discovered that Grace and Justin had been texting extensively and was convinced that my little sister had designs on her husband. The two had class together at the university and had grown closer over the course of the semester, conversing often about everything and nothing. I’d had no idea how frequently they’d been texting, but when I listened to Grace describe the messages, I instantly thought of C.G.: The discussions never touched on “inappropriate” topics, but the closeness itself felt improper to me. The fear on my sister’s face twisted my insides, especially since I knew what was coming. I wanted to defend Grace to our parents and to the elders—“She didn’t know what she was doing!”—but an angry call from a jealous wife was a scandal that couldn’t be smoothed over by a plea of ignorance, no matter how genuine. It wouldn’t matter to the elders that Grace had seen no distinction between a friendship with an unrelated man and a friendship with one of our cousins. Why would she? We had been told all our lives that church members were our family, and that’s how we had always seen them—related or not. For whosoever shall do the will of my Father which is in heaven, the same is my brother, and sister, and mother. The same verse that justified cutting our brother Josh out of our family was the one that instructed us to bring these strangers into it. And more, the fact that Justin was married gave Grace an even greater sense of safety in their closeness. It was unthinkable that anything improper could happen with him, because he was married. The line was so bright and crossing it was so far outside the realm of possibility that she simply didn’t believe it could be improper.
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  Punishment was swift. Grace was forbidden from having any contact at all with either Justin or Lindsey, not even to apologize. Instead of chasing after children as she did every summer, Grace would be required to take a temp job at the Kansas Department of Revenue, sitting at a desk doing data entry work for eight hours each day. My siblings and I would no longer be permitted to spend time with Justin and Lindsey, but instead would avoid them—except that we could say hello if we happened to pass them at church on Sundays. Because Lindsey had not asked to be baptized since she’d arrived six months earlier, the elders decided that it was time to isolate her from the rest of the church. She was a negative influence. “What makes her any different than the rest of these heathen, except that she’s related to a member of the church? That doesn’t confer any special benefits to her.”

  New restrictions kept coming, growing increasingly draconian all the time. Sam and Steve had never approved of Grace’s freewheeling spirit, and they encouraged my father to rein her in. It seemed to anger both men that Grace had opinions and that she was willing to ignore their advice—even when the smallest issues were implicated. Two years earlier, Grace and I had decided to switch to Apple computers. Steve advised against it, and I yielded to his recommendation immediately and without complaint. Grace, on the other hand, thanked him for his input and explained that she would be getting a Mac. Steve pestered my parents for weeks afterward, strenuously arguing that his reasons for remaining with the status quo were worth following. It had seemed embarrassing at the time, because it was clear that Steve only cared about the issue because he wanted to be obeyed. My mother eventually came up with an excuse for why it had to be a Mac (“It will help Isaiah learn another operating system for his job!”), and though I didn’t care about the computer either way, I was glad that my parents had pushed back against Steve’s bullying.