But at the same time, we had been wholly dedicated to antagonizing the world. We mocked and delighted in their suffering. We demanded they repent, and then asked God to preserve them in their sin. We prayed for Him to destroy them.
Two diametrically opposed positions, held strongly and sincerely by the same mind at the same time—just never in the same moment.
A deceived heart hath turned him aside, that he cannot deliver his soul, nor say, Is there not a lie in my right hand?
I felt deranged.
I numbly moved the brush up and down the wall, hot tears still sliding down my cheeks. My mind was finally settling on its inevitable conclusion: There was something terribly wrong at Westboro. God was not in this place. We were not special. Not hand-selected by the Lord to do His divine work. We were a deluded people.
As my thoughts slowed, I came back to the present, the melody of a new song drifting into my awareness. It was gentle and somber and yearning, and it sounded like I would never be happy again.
Will I break and will I bow / if I cannot let it go?
At these lyrics, I began to sob in silence again. I glanced back to see if my sister had noticed, but she was still blissfully unaware of my state. Of the fact that we were living a delusion. Even knowing how difficult things had become at Westboro, how could I drag her with me into this waking nightmare?
“When will these things change?” Grace had asked me after the ultimatum. When would the grip of the elders slacken, their control over our every movement? When could she say a simple “Hello” to Justin without the suspicion and wrath of the church falling on her? When would our mother be treated with the compassion any church member deserved?
I’d told her what I always had: that the Lord was with us. That everything would doubtless improve. I composed long messages to encourage her to take heart and continue in Westboro’s way:
You must look on the great blessings you have been given, my sister. You must rejoice in those gifts and not continue to sorrow. You seemed to heartily agree with that recent line from Gramps’ sermon: “I think unthankfulness may be the most disgusting sin of all.” We don’t want to anger the Lord with unthankfulness—for gifts and for deliverance and for all we have.
Remember what the Lord said to Joshua. Israel had trespassed against God and He cursed them in battle and Joshua mourned and prayed to God. “And the Lord said unto Joshua, Get thee up: wherefore liest thou thus upon thy face?” Instead of mourning, we have to get after what the Lord has given us to do. “Be not weary in well doing,” dear girl, and “cast not away your confidence, which hath great recompense of reward.”
In due season we will reap, if we faint not.
But the hope that inspired me to write those messages was now gone. We couldn’t fix the problems in the church, because we no longer had a voice. When we objected, we weren’t viewed as church members with legitimate concerns. Instead, we were disobedient children. I thought about the future, and there was nothing left.
If I could’ve known then we were dying to get gone …
I can’t believe we get just one.
What if we did only have one life, and not eternity? How could we spend ours hurting people, picking fights with the entire world—not at the will of a Sovereign God, but for nothing?
How could I not talk to Grace?
I didn’t know what we would do with our lives instead, but I thought of my sister’s impossible dreams of exploring the world … and I suddenly realized that maybe the elders had been right about her. Maybe Grace didn’t belong here, either. Maybe she had already come to the same conclusion I just had, but was afraid to leave on her own. Maybe she was afraid to tell me, because I had been such a zealous defender of the church for so long. If so, her fear was not unfounded. Our mother had taught us the same verses:
If thy brother, or thy son, or thy daughter, or the wife of thy bosom, or thy friend, which is as thine own soul, entice thee secretly, saying, Let us go and serve other gods … Thou shalt not consent unto him, nor hearken unto him; neither shall thine eye pity him, neither shalt thou conceal him: But thou shalt surely kill him; thine hand shall be first upon him to put him to death.
Our church wouldn’t be executing anyone, but the standard was clear: if your closest friend or family member came to you suggesting defiance of Westboro’s God, that person deserved to die—and you were responsible for turning them in. Neither shalt thou conceal him.
But Grace hadn’t turned Justin in. Maybe she wouldn’t turn me in.
I needed to think before I spoke to Grace. Where would we go?
I forced myself to stop crying and let the logistical part of my brain kick in.
I immediately dismissed the idea of going to any ex-member of Westboro for help. We kept close tabs on the few who ever spoke up publicly about their time in the church, and it was clear that those people were awful. So many lies.
I thought a moment, and then went to pick up my phone. I switched the ringer to silent so that the telltale trill wouldn’t sound over the speaker as I re-installed Words With Friends.
* * *
Grace came home on her lunch break the following day, and as had become our habit, I followed her up the stairs, down the hall, and around to my room in the corner of the house. We hadn’t been eating much, and the heaviness of our silence had become habitual, too—particularly since the ultimatum. My sister had never been anywhere without permission, never been given any freedom or independence of any kind, and now she was on the cusp of being thrust into the world on her own at nineteen, with almost no practical life skills—for texting.
We sat side by side on the edge of my bed, staring at the wall in silence for a minute, and then I started to cry. I laid my head in her lap and sobbed for a few moments. She cradled my head and slowly dragged her fingers across my scalp, trying to comfort me.
“Grace…”
I tried to compose myself, but the longer I waited, the harder I wept. How was I even going to say this?
“… what if we weren’t here?”
I couldn’t bring myself to say What if we left? aloud. I couldn’t bring myself to make it real.
Her hand paused for a beat and then slowly continued its path through my curls.
“What do you mean?” she asked quietly.
What did I mean? My body was racked with sobs, and I tried to control them long enough to get the words out.
“What if we were somewhere else?” Slowly, slowly.
I don’t remember any words after that. Only an eruption of despair. I tried to explain what had happened the day before in the basement, my terrifying realizations about the church, but what came out was almost entirely incoherent. I couldn’t settle on any one idea long enough to articulate it, because I was overcome by a hysteria the likes of which I had never known. That familiar fear always just beneath the surface—the little voice accusing that in spite of everything, I really was a reprobate—had amplified a thousandfold. I knew logically that I couldn’t escape the wrath of an omnipresent God, but the sense of His imminent judgment had kindled a fire in me, a desperate urgency to get out. I wanted to jump out of my skin. There was no way to consider the magnitude of the devastation that I would soon be forever cut off from everyone I had ever loved: my faculties simply shut down before I could even approach that reality. I was betraying my beloved mother—treated unconscionably by the church body and then abandoned by her own daughter. How could I leave her? Monstrous.
And all the while, Grace held my head in her lap, running her nails through my hair, periodically asking questions in a low, cautious voice. Distrustful. Why now? What has changed? Where would we go?
I had no other ideas, so I mentioned C.G. Maybe he would help us.
I didn’t tell Grace that I’d spoken with him already, partly because both she and he were behaving as though they were afraid of me. As if they didn’t know me. Their reactions were crushing, because they confirmed what I already believed: that outside of Westboro, I was nothing. Within t
he church, I was a cherished daughter—I wielded no power, but my skills were many and useful and valued. I was dependable, and trustworthy, and called upon frequently. I had built my life and identity around the church, and I was well-beloved. Who was I on the outside? I was the perpetrator of untold amounts of harm in the world. I was a lover of tragedy, cruelly attacking the grieving at their most vulnerable. I was a willing participant in the most aggressive anti-gay picketing campaign the country had ever seen. What reason did anyone have to give me a second chance?
Grace and C.G. had seen some of the very best parts of me. If even they thought me unhinged, there was no hope for me on the outside.
No one would ever understand.
All was lost.
7. Ye Shall Be Judged
It wasn’t just in my mind. Grace was avoiding me.
Or at least, she was avoiding being alone with me. She was afraid. Each time it seemed we would have a chance to speak in private, she made other plans—heading off to read to our little brothers after Bible study in the evenings, or spending her lunch break in the kitchen instead of coming up to my bedroom. If I was going to the evening pickets, she would find a reason to stay home. If I was stuck working in the office, she’d grab a sign bag and volunteer to take the boys. I was in a constant state of attempting to mask my frantic anguish—so many people around, always; surely they could see the sedition in my thoughts?—and the panic was exacerbated by the knowledge that Grace could turn me in at any time. Only when we were together did I have any sense of relief that she wasn’t reporting me at that very moment.
Why hadn’t I left immediately?
It was C.G. who’d told me to slow down. When I re-installed Words With Friends and broached the subject of leaving the church, he warned me that this was not a decision I could make in an instant. If my existential crisis was just the result of a few squabbles with the new church leadership—if I still believed most of what I had been preaching for decades—then I would not find the world a hospitable place. Knowing how dedicated I’d been, he said I should think it through. That I needed to be certain. I saw the wisdom in C.G.’s advice and would wait to make my decision until I knew for sure.
Still, there were a few things I was certain about, even in those earliest days:
I would not be attending any more funeral protests.
When my family prostrated ourselves after evening Bible readings, my prayers would no longer include curses for our enemies.
I would not be talking to the media, if I could possibly avoid it—there were too many land mines now, and if a reporter stumbled upon one, I knew I wouldn’t be able to hide my misgivings.
And I would not hold any signs that I didn’t believe, or preach anything that I didn’t think was true.
The perpetual motion of the church never ceased, and outwardly I was still completely enmeshed in the flurry of activities that kept Westboro constantly in the news—but inwardly, my doubts were multiplying. For the first time in my life, I was allowing myself to ponder ideas that I had always instinctively shoved into the darkest corners of my mind. I felt like I was losing my grip on reality, my thoughts boomeranging back and forth between two extremes: (1) that Westboro was fundamentally right and that my mind was rebelling against God at Satan’s direction, and (2) that the truths we held to be self-evident were entirely questionable, odious, and destructive—both for us and for the people we’d been accosting on the streets for more than two decades. I became consumed with questions, assaulted by every passing doubt I’d ever had. It had only been a few days since I’d been painting with Grace in that basement, but troublesome memories now seemed to appear in every quiet moment. I couldn’t escape them.
Sitting at my grandfather’s computer in the church library—typing Bible verses for one of his sermons—I flashed back to a drive to school one afternoon when I was in college. It was one of the first warm days that spring, and the windows were down, breeze ruffling my hair as I mulled over a point of doctrine. I was taking a logic course that semester, and as I pondered the argument, I became vaguely unnerved. We believed all outsiders hated us. If they said they hated us, we believed them. If they said they loved us, we believed they were either lying or delusional, and nothing could persuade us otherwise. I began to see that for many of our beliefs, there was absolutely no evidence that could be introduced to us that would cause us to change our minds. Unfalsifiable. My brows stitched together as I stepped out of the car—and then I had grabbed my bag, never to return to the question again.
Folding laundry with my four youngest brothers outside the upstairs laundry room, I was abruptly transported back to my pew one Sunday morning a few years earlier. My grandfather was preaching about Hell again, expounding eloquently on what it entailed. The same shall drink of the wine of the wrath of God … and he shall be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels, and in the presence of the Lamb: And the smoke of their torment ascendeth up for ever and ever: and they have no rest day nor night. In Hell, my grandfather explained, the damned would each in turn be put on trial: every wrong thought and word and deed that they had ever committed would be adjudicated in exhaustive detail. And the adjudicators? The people in Heaven. Each one of the Saints of God would have a caseload, as it were, personally condemning the reprobates to an eternity of agony and rejoicing at their endless suffering. It was a very real and present fear that my grandfather elicited with his detailed descriptions of torment—but the idea had been abstract to me until that moment. As I listened to my grandfather’s words, it suddenly occurred to me to consider Heaven and Hell in practical terms: I would be condemning people to torture? And I would be happy about it? I couldn’t even watch a torture scene in a film without jumping out of my seat, overcome with outrage, disgust, and revulsion that anyone could be capable of visiting such horror on a living, breathing human being. I didn’t think I could condemn people to torture, and sitting in my pew that day, I’d wondered if there was something wrong with me. No, the thought resounded now. I picked up a stack of bath towels and handed them to my brother. If Hell is real, then God is evil. Terrified, I mentally backtracked. Maybe.
Walking with Grace and our nieces to the park that weekend, my thoughts veered to a letter to the editor published by the local newspaper when I was sixteen. It bore my signature, but my aunt Margie had written it. Though I had agreed with every word, there was one part that rang strongly discordant in my mind: “I’ve watched carefully and listened to my grandfather and those who oppose him. My grandfather’s Bible-preaching is more agreeable to my heart.” We never appealed to our own thoughts or feelings as reliable evidence of truth, and we routinely disparaged others for doing so. The Bible was true because it was true, regardless of how I—or anyone else—felt about it or any of its teachings. This had been a theme of my life, oft-repeated by my mother: The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it? There was always urgent warning in my mother’s voice when she quoted this passage: we could not trust our hearts. Our feelings would lead us astray. Why had Margie written that sentence? I’d been almost physically repulsed by it, and watching my nieces bound across the field as we arrived at the park, I was finally able to pinpoint why: my sixteen-year-old self had started to recognize the contradiction. We used our hearts to authenticate the moral truth of the Bible—the same Bible that told us our hearts were deceitful. I shook my head as I realized that all we had was our hearts. In writing that sentence, Margie had unwittingly betrayed that at bottom—resting beneath all the chapters and verses that we’d spent years quoting and memorizing—the foundation of it all was a belief that our hearts had led us true when they told us the Bible was the answer.
Our unreliable, desperately wicked, deceitful hearts.
* * *
The few weeks following that Fourth of July were the longest I’d ever lived. Whenever Grace couldn’t avoid being alone with me, our conversations followed a predictable pattern. I would attempt to di
ssect the problems at Westboro, and she would nod in agreement at my analysis—but then she would insist on addressing the consequences that I could not bear to consider. Our family. How worthless our lives would be without them. The pathetic emptiness of a life without this divine purpose. And eternity in Hell. These were unfathomably horrifying, but I could not let go of the failures of Scripture and logic that I now saw so clearly in the church. How could we go on living like this?
But how could we live outside of this?
Whether we stayed or left, our prospects were bleak.
There was no containing the despair and devastation that seized my body each time I imagined leaving, so Grace and I resolved not to think about it unless we had the space to mourn without an audience. She was still avoidant and seemed afraid of me, but we both knew that public displays of unhappiness would raise suspicion in a hurry—accusations of discontentment and murmuring against God—and there was still so much to think through. When Grace and I were apart, we discussed our doubts by text messages that we deleted shortly after sending. We agreed that I would keep screenshots of the conversations so that we could examine them later, but that I would transfer them to a hidden folder on my computer in case my parents came to examine my phone. I had never been subjected to such scrutiny, but others had—and if the request was made, it couldn’t be denied without major trouble. I hated the deception, but I knew that regardless of what we decided, we needed to be as sure about it as we could be.
For his part, C.G. was full of gentle, sometimes pointed questions. He was trying to discern what was happening in my mind, and since my thoughts were swinging back and forth like a pendulum, I was grateful for his calming influence. Explaining myself helped me to focus. It gave me something to hold on to.
C.G.: What do you believe?
MEGAN: I can’t call my whole life a waste. I’ve learned so very much. And I never would have met you if I weren’t me. I really believed those things, and there really is a lot of good in it—about caring and looking out for people. These are good people. I wonder if I’ll be able to stand without their support.
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