I’ve thought before, “Who cares?” re: whether someone is gay. It was a knee-jerk response, and I’d put the kibosh on it. I’m not sure what all I believe. I’m working on it.
C.G.: This doesn’t seem real. You must understand that.
MEGAN: Which part? I know, though.
C.G.: All of it. I’m watching True Blood right now, and, as you know, “God Hates Fangs.” That’s you. That’s crazy.
I know you from YouTube and your voice there is different from the one I hear when I read your words. It’s all crazy. You aren’t real to people. You’re an idea.
And what about Bekah? She just stays there and lives happily ever after?
Lying in the dark late at night, tucked away with phone in hand, I pondered C.G.’s questions and tried to make sense of them. I thought about Bekah. I had always seen myself as much more like her than like Grace—far more willing to yield than to challenge—and I wondered again how I had become so unruly. The elders weren’t the first major transition in the church, nor were my mother and sister the first close loved ones targeted for church discipline. In the past, no matter how much I initially doubted a position taken by the church, their justifications always made sense eventually. Could I even recall the last time Bekah and I were completely in sync in this shared tendency? Certainly before Twitter, I knew.
MEGAN: Bekah is just like I was not so very long ago. It will be horrible, and she will take it so hard, and she will blame herself. She is so tender-hearted. I love her so.
C.G.: Why can’t you get her out, too?
I clicked my screen off and squeezed my eyes shut, willing myself not to cry. Exhausted of tears. My bedroom suddenly felt stifling, and I opened the window in search of a breeze. How to explain to him? I lay back down and stared at the ceiling, now bathed in the orange light of the streetlamp outside.
MEGAN: She wouldn’t come. She just wouldn’t. As ardently as I fought you, she would fight any notion that this isn’t the way. She would be scared of me and for me and would enlist the aid of the whole church to recover me (before I left, I mean). She is exactly where I was—but she is less confident in herself and therefore even more willing to distrust her own thoughts and judgments. I wish she would leave—and maybe she will one day. But I don’t think it will be soon.
Life is short. And getting shorter all the time.
C.G.: Then show empathy for people rather than mocking them.
This isn’t my place. At least not tonight. Good night, sweet, confused girl.
MEGAN: I’d be offended, except I know: you only know I want to leave, but not all the reasons. One reason: it does not make me happy to see people killed or starving or maimed. I don’t want to mock them; I want to help them.
It is your place. You’re a friend. Sleep well.
* * *
Between Grace, C.G., and the news, I was presented with fresh opportunities to stew in my confusion and despair daily. Grace was stewing, too, sending me text messages fretting about Hell as she sat at her desk doing data entry work downtown. As I struggled to answer my sister’s pressing questions about our eternal fate, my thoughts returned to Margie’s letter to the editor—that contradiction of relying on our hearts when our hearts were evil. It had not occurred to me to see that paradox to its logical conclusion, but now a new question dawned on me:
What if the Bible wasn’t the literal and infallible word of God?
At home in my bedroom, I froze. This was the sine qua non of our belief system, the foundational truth of the life I had led since I was capable of conscious thought. I was surprised at how noiselessly it shattered.
Not a single breath passed before my mind pulled forth a Bible story that had rankled me since the first time my mother read it to my siblings and me when I was a little girl.
In the book of Judges, the final three chapters tell the tale of a Levite and his concubine. We are not told their names—only that she played the whore against him, and retreated to her father’s house in the city of Bethlehem. There she remained for four months, until her husband went after her, to speak friendly unto her, and to bring her home again. By the repeated entreaties of his father-in-law, the man was convinced to stay and eat and make merry for several days. The fifth day arrived, and as they prepared to leave that afternoon, the woman’s father pressed him again: Behold, now the day draweth toward evening, I pray you tarry all night. But the man would not. He and his concubine and his servant departed, though it was too late in the day to make it home by nightfall.
That evening, rather than spend the night in a city of strangers, the Levite decided their group would press on to the city of Gibeah, of the tribe of Benjamin. They arrived just after sunset. When an old man saw them preparing to sleep in a street of the city, he drew near. “Let all thy wants lie upon me; only lodge not in the street,” he warned them. The old man brought them into his house to care for them and their animals.
As they were making their hearts merry, the men of the city surrounded the house, beating at the door and calling out to the old man: they wanted to rape the Levite. “Bring forth the man that came into thine house, that we may know him.”
The old man begged them not to do such a thing: “Behold, here is my daughter a maiden, and his concubine; them will I bring out now, and humble ye them, and do what seemeth good unto you: but unto this man do not so vile a thing.”
But the men of Gibeah wouldn’t listen to the old man. The Levite took matters into his own hands, delivering his concubine to the men beating at the door.
And they knew her, and abused her all the night until the morning: and when the day began to spring, they let her go.
As the day dawned, the woman collapsed outside the door of the old man’s house. Her husband arose and opened the door to leave, only to find her there. Her hands were on the threshold.
And he said unto her, Up, and let us be going.
But none answered.
The Levite picked up the body of his concubine, carried her back home, and hacked her into twelve pieces. He sent one to each of the twelve tribes of Israel. Consider of it, take advice, and speak your minds. The tribes gathered and sent messengers to Benjamin: turn over those men of Gibeah so that we can put them to death.
The children of Benjamin refused, and civil war ensued—the eleven tribes against the one. Benjamin dominated the first two skirmishes, annihilating forty thousand men. The Israelites wept and fasted and made offerings to God. Should they go to battle a third time? And the Lord said, Go up; for to morrow I will deliver them into thine hand.
The next day, the children of Israel killed twenty-five thousand men of Benjamin, and their animals, and their women, and set their cities on fire. Six hundred men fled into the wilderness, and they were all that remained of the tribe of Benjamin.
Having prevailed, the Israelites faced a new problem. They could not allow an entire tribe to perish, but there were no women left to repopulate Benjamin: all their women had been killed, and all the men of Israel had sworn an oath to God not to marry their daughters to the sons of Benjamin. Cursed be he that giveth a wife to Benjamin. Instead they found one city in Israel that had sent no men to battle—and thus, had made no oath. Twelve thousand valiant men were dispatched to the city to kill every man, woman, and child, except the young women. They found four hundred young virgins in the city, brought them to the camp, and gave them as wives to the surviving men of Benjamin.
Still, two hundred men remained without wives.
Therefore they commanded the children of Benjamin, saying, Go and lie in wait in the vineyards; And see, and behold, if the daughters of Shiloh come out to dance in dances, then come ye out of the vineyards, and catch you every man his wife.
And thus they did.
This story flashed through my mind in a moment, and I thought—like exhaling a breath I’d been holding my whole life—That is bullshit. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe it. It was that every part of the story disgusted me, from God all the way down. I ha
d forever repressed the outrage and disgust I felt at reading it, and though questioning the Bible like this shook me to my core, I also felt a glimmer of relief. Of liberation. I didn’t have to believe that this story was anything but awful—and not just the senseless carnage that left tens of thousands dead. Every woman in this story had been treated unconscionably: Men snatching unsuspecting women to force them into marriage. Other women given as gifts, having just witnessed all of their loved ones slain and their city destroyed. The old man offering his virgin daughter, and the woman sacrificed by her husband to a feral mob, raped to death. The husband then—finding her fallen with her hands on the threshold of the door—responding with “Up, and let us be going.” I’d wanted to punch him or vomit every time I’d read the words. Others might place the blame upon the men in the story, but as a predestinarian, I was most repulsed by the God who had instigated and orchestrated the whole thing.
Disgusting.
What if the God presented in this story—in this Bible—was not the real God?
I sat down on my bed, reeling. How could I suggest this possibility to Grace? If it frightened me so, there was no question it would scare her, too—especially coming from me. She might wonder whether I was being influenced by Satan. It would sound like every argument we’d spent our lives learning to dismiss out of hand. People who discounted the Bible were angry, just trying to evade the truth of the Scriptures because they were convicted by them. Of all the questions and doubts I raised, doubting the Bible itself would surely be the most preposterous to my sister.
GRACE: Eternity scares me.
MEGAN: Me, too, sometimes. I think there must be God because of existence (“science” doesn’t have answers about Creation). Then I think, what if the God of the Bible isn’t the God of creation? We don’t believe that the Koran has the truth about God. Is it just because we were told forever that this is How Things Are?
It’s comforting to think we have all the answers.
Does it really make you happy when you hear about people dying or starving or being maimed? Do you really want to ask God to hurt people?
I ask myself these questions. I think the answer is no.
When I’m not scared of the answer, I know the answer is no.
GRACE: What does that last text mean?
MEGAN: It means: I know that saying that (that it doesn’t make me happy when people die) is against what this church believes. To go against that scares me (sometimes, but not always anymore). But I know it’s the truth to say that it doesn’t make me happy.
GRACE: I just don’t know anything.
But what if we are wrong and we go to hell?
MEGAN: Why do we think it’s real? It’s starting to seem made up to scare people into doing what they say.
GRACE: But what if?
MEGAN: Then it would be horrible.
If someone told us we had to obey Artemis or we’d be tormented by Hades when we die, we’d laugh at them. I think we worry now because we’ve believed it was real forever.
I didn’t want to tell her these things, but getting these ideas out of my head—giving them form—was the only thing keeping me sane.
Grace refused to let me off the hook: How would we know any God besides the one of the Bible? If “decency” is the standard, how could we say what violates it if there are no Scriptures? Is homosexuality wrong? And adultery? And abortion? Without the Bible, how do we know when we make mistakes? What made you change on July 4? All these questions you ask me, wondering how we know the God of the Bible is the right one—did they come from C.G.?
I had never felt so ignorant, but I was glad she was forcing me to think on these questions. I answered, trying to deduce principles of morality as best I could. I knew that Grace was suspicious of C.G., that she hadn’t approved of the closeness she’d sensed between us the year before—but when she asked about him, I told her the truth: that he’d never said anything of the kind. That he’d been shocked when I messaged him that day. That it was reason that brought me here.
My sister was unconvinced.
Meanwhile, C.G. had questions of his own. Two weeks had passed since I first spoke to him of leaving, and on the news that day, a tragedy: twelve people had been murdered—a shooting at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. One of the victims had been an active Twitter user named Jessica Redfield. The words of her friends and colleagues were circulating on the platform, and like so many others, I found her profile and read. It shook me to see the words of a woman who had been alive not twenty-four hours before, to know that she had no idea what was about to befall her. Even more chilling was the fact that just the month before, she had escaped another shooting at a mall in Toronto: she’d gotten a strange feeling and walked out just seconds before someone opened fire in the food court. My heart ached for her and her family.
MEGAN: I just starred a tweet about @JessicaRedfield. Had you seen that? Look at her timeline. She had no warning. Scary and sad.
C.G.: I heard about her. I will.
I still don’t know if I know you. 30 days ago, you’d have been saying “God sent the shooter” today. Today: I just sense that you have empathy and that’s it.
Which?
MEGAN: The latter. I just feel disconnected from all that. It was kind of happening a little at a time (e.g., on issues like tragedies; I told you it didn’t make me happy). As soon as I started to actually let myself second-guess it, it’s just drifted so far away …
I don’t know that I could get it back even if I really wanted to.
* * *
Grace and I had been close for years, but after those few weeks of avoidance, this period brought us physically closer than ever before. When we weren’t arm in arm, we walked close enough to stumble over each other’s feet. At pickets, we stood inches apart, holding two signs each in the outside hand—as if they were a buffer to keep anyone from penetrating the protective cocoon we were building around ourselves. She had slept in my bed on occasion, but now it was almost every night. Always trying to discern which way was up. I even took to carrying her on my back, like I’d done when we were kids. It was comforting to think that among all the casualties we were about to sustain, at least we would get to keep each other.
Neither our closeness, our sadness, nor our joy was acceptable to the elders. My father got wind that Grace had sat in my lap at our hymn-singing one evening, and instructed us not to do it again. He did the same when he found out she was sleeping in my bed. When an uncle of ours caught us jumping on the trampoline one evening at dusk—a momentary release of pent-up anguish, frustration, confusion, and fear—he stared us down as he made his way from the church to his home across the yard. Grace was “in trouble.” Everything she did was suspect—and the fact that I was comforting rather than ostracizing her made me suspect, too.
As much as I tried not to imagine the actual act of leaving, Grace seemed determined to make me face what it would mean. She would text me from work, detailing all that we would lose if we walked away from the church. What comfort would there be in a world without the prospect of eternal bliss alongside our loved ones? How could we depend on mere humans for anything? And in the event that we somehow managed to withstand the storms of life—death, illness, injury—and make it to old age, how meaningless would our lives have been? If we missed all those years watching our little brothers grow up and our parents’ hair turn gray, what would we have to look forward to at the end of our lives? “I weep,” she wrote.
Running errands for my mother, I pulled my car into the nearest parking lot and wept, too.
* * *
We decided to stay.
Ultimately, Grace and I could entertain the possibility of leaving for only a few weeks before it became too much. We were each inhabiting two minds: the one that was trying to make things work within Westboro’s framework, and the one that was preparing for the worst. It made me question my sanity, unsure of every thought that crossed my mind. A double minded man is unstable in all his ways. Grac
e pointed out that although leaving was unthinkable, despair awaited us no matter which option we chose. “How can we be happy?” she asked me.
MEGAN: For now, we can try to avoid situations where those problems come up. Keep a low profile. Stay close to home. That kind of thing. And for the future … we don’t know for sure what’s going to happen. I have a feeling it’s going to get worse re: Steve, et al, but maybe it won’t. We could deal with that when we come to it. We can also do what you said—organize our rooms/things. Save money. Make and keep memories. All those things are good no matter if we left or stayed. We’re just going to keep trying.
GRACE: Thank you.
MEGAN: I love you, G. I’m sorry I put this burden on you.
GRACE: I love you, double. No apology necessary.
MEGAN: Had you thought about it at all—even as a vague, remote possibility—before we talked in my room that day?
GRACE: Not really. Maybe because I thought if I ever did, I’d be alone.
MEGAN: Me, too.
“If we go, we’ll go together.”
If something happens with me and they make me go, I would understand if you wanted to stay.
GRACE: Quidem. Together.
This was the plan we came up with: Stay. Attempt to convince the rest of the church to hear our objections. Pray for the best.
And only if our best efforts failed would we again consider leaving.
I also had to stop pursuing my questions about the Bible and where it stood on the spectrum of truth. Permanently dethroning the Scriptures I had so revered was inconceivable. They contained too much good to come down definitively against them, and Hell was a looming possibility that felt far too real. Know thou the God of thy father, and serve him with a perfect heart and with a willing mind: for the Lord searcheth all hearts, and understandeth all the imaginations of the thoughts: if thou seek him, he will be found of thee; but if thou forsake him, he will cast thee off for ever.
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