Not long after we made our decision, C.G. disappeared without warning. I hadn’t told him we were planning to stay, and he gave no explanation for his sudden withdrawal. He simply stopped answering my messages. My sister did not delight to see my despair compounded, but I knew she was glad it was over. She wanted me to be committed to our life at Westboro, and she perceived that I would be distracted so long as I had even a shadow of hope about C.G. Grace’s intuition was correct, but the ache in my chest was as deep as it had been when he and I had said goodbye the year before—and that told me all I needed to know. In spite of my hurt and anger at his sudden dismissal, I understood that the end result for me—that I would be forced to come to grips with the church and my beliefs without outside influence—was the best possible outcome. My decision had to be untainted. If we did eventually leave, it could only be because it was the right choice to make—because the church had replaced the Scriptures with the word of these fallible men—and not because I wanted something to which I wasn’t entitled. But every man is tempted, when he is drawn away of his own lust, and enticed. Do not err, my beloved brethren.
And—I thought bitterly—whatever else C.G. intended, he was teaching me a valuable lesson: on the outside, Grace and I could count on no one but ourselves.
* * *
Having established our intention to stay, Grace and I found ourselves right back where we began: in an intolerable situation that had to be confronted. But how? We decided to start slowly at first. Rather, we decided that I would start slowly. My sister was still the subject of ongoing church discipline, and like our mother, had no space at all to object. No matter how legitimate the complaint, she would be seen as recalcitrant and almost certainly excluded from the church without delay. I had only marginally more leeway, and I was well on my way to losing even that. Grace and I had refrained from using Twitter almost entirely since July 4, though she had a good excuse: as part of her punishment, the elders had forbidden her from doing so. But given my generally prolific use of the platform, my sudden lack of Twitter activity—combined with an inability to hide my heavy heart—had almost immediately become cause for worry. I began to receive concerned text messages, phone calls, and visits from other church members, with Steve at the head of the pack.
He called me up one day in late July. I was out at the noontime pickets with two of my cousins when my phone rang—and though I wanted badly to decline the call, I picked up. Delaying the discussion would only make things worse. I could never stay still when stressed, so as soon as I answered, “Hello, Steve?,” I began dragging myself up and down the sidewalk in the heavy humidity, pacing in front of a church we’d protested every single day since I was about six. Steve said I seemed down. No shit, I thought, but held my tongue. He said he was worried because I didn’t seem as unguarded as I’d always been. I didn’t attempt to deny it, but I focused on the safer sources of my despondency: the difficulty of watching my mother go through this long period of transition and general fatigue from all the work on my plate.
“You didn’t mention Grace,” Steve said flatly.
Suspicious.
I mumbled for a moment, unsure of how to proceed except to say that I was weary and wary, and then he jumped in again.
“It’s not a doctrinal thing, is it?” He was incredulous at the thought, but before he could make me answer, he launched into a diatribe about the importance of regularly engaging other members of the church. I wanted to shoot back that he and the other elders had made that impossible. That they had created such a sense of fear within the body that there was no way to speak openly about any objection to their actions. An Orwellian level of control over our every word, our every movement.
But I kept quiet. When he finished, I thanked him kindly, hung up the phone, and made a decision. I had already suspected that doctrinal errors would be the most difficult to change, because they were seen as coming directly from the Word of God: “Death Penalty for Fags,” “Fags Can’t Repent,” “Pray for More Dead Soldiers,” “Pray for More Dead Kids.” What if I focused instead on the application of doctrine? Not theology. Not major foundational principles or anything that required extensive exegesis. Just kindness within the church—the lack of which seemed to me the clearest and the simplest example that Westboro had veered far off track. This was the place to start.
Grace and I also decided that our mother seemed the safest person to approach first. Although she, too, had been deprived of her voice in church matters, she was the one who had helped convince our father to hear us out about the Photoshopping incidents. I had to believe that she knew her treatment to be unscriptural, no matter how often the elders made her profess otherwise. I was cautious at first, asking more questions about the details of the incidents that continued to occur almost daily, just interminable pettiness. I knew she was trying to hide her sorrow from me and my siblings, but she was no more successful than I was—especially since I was paying closer attention than ever. What did my mother really think?
As the weeks passed, I expanded the scope of these discussions to include the treatment of Justin and Lindsey, as well. And then Grace. Even the cousin who had been voted out a few months earlier. I started with my mother, and then continued with my Gran, both of whom were sympathetic. Neither of them disagreed with my analysis and both understood my despair—but whereas Gran would shake her head and agree that things looked very bad indeed, my mom would mostly listen. The rest of the church—including her own husband—presented a united front as to my mother’s grave sins. They made her believe that if she felt any offense or sense of unfairness with respect to their treatment of her, then it was completely a result of her pride, not because there was anything unjustified about their cruelty. They ascribed ill motives to many of her actions—even positive actions—and then they retaliated against her on that basis. And if my mother tried to dispute their analysis, there would be even more trouble. As I came to appreciate these dynamics, my outrage increased and I grew bolder. They were making her believe that she was literally insane. That is—as I would later learn—they were “gaslighting” her. I became the only person in her life willing to confirm, directly and unequivocally, that the accusations against her were unwarranted, off base, and often utterly deranged.
Although my mom avoided saying so directly, I eventually came to believe that she and I were on the same page about the unscriptural nature of so many of the actions and decisions implemented by the elders. We would talk, and then we would pray together that the Lord would fix everything. The only difference between us, I realized, was that she had no doubt that God was with Westboro. It never seemed to occur to my mother that all of this misconduct might be evidence that we were wrong—that there was something rotten at the core of our beliefs.
With my brother Sam, I presented my disputes as hypotheticals or general curiosities. I led with few specifics, lest he end the conversation and send me back to our dad—but he sensed there was more to my questions than I was letting on and pressed me to come out with it. Standing outside a Topeka church during our Sunday morning pickets, I nearly broke down in tears of desperate frustration as I spoke of the cousin who’d been kicked out. I made my case, citing verse after verse that showed how we had done her wrong. I tried and failed to be calm, and he erupted in response, justifying it all: the church had made a decision, and God was with us, and that was that. He was angry, but he also seemed genuinely perplexed that I had a problem with what had been done. I knew I was getting into dangerous territory and backed off again.
At first, I steered clear of mentioning anything to Bekah, because I was afraid of what she would do. With every good intention, she would surely have turned me over to the elders for what I now saw as “re-education,” putting me solidly on their radar as a troublemaker. But if Grace and I decided to leave, I knew that I would then regret it forever if I didn’t try to talk to Bekah about what was happening. Driving around Topeka with her, running errands after church, I poured my heart out. I
was cautious at first, restrained, describing everything as clinically as possible, the whole litany of misconduct going all the way back to the Photoshopping—but the longer I spoke, the more desperate I became. As I parked the car in the Office Max parking lot, my words came faster and faster, rising to a fevered pitch until I was sobbing hysterically. She reached over to hug me as I finished my jeremiad. “… and I just don’t have any hope that it’ll ever be fixed!” She started crying then, too, and we stretched across the front seat in an awkward embrace. I knew I was scaring her, but I had to lay it all on the line. “I’m so sorry,” I whispered.
“It’s okay,” she said, weeping. “It’s okay if you break my heart.” I had said all I could say. She walked into the store while I tried to compose myself, and on our drive back to the house, her focus was on encouraging me to speak to the elders. If I could just tell them these things, surely there would be a good answer. I told her I would keep trying, and she seemed relieved—not particularly worried about the troublesome case I had made against the elders themselves. So confident that all was well in the Lord’s church. Trust and obey was second nature.
Finally, after several weeks, I went to my father. Again, I tried to be calm and reasonable. I limited myself to subtle questions and gentle pushback—possible only thanks to Herculean efforts to swallow the panic rising in my chest—but at every turn, I was shut down. As day after day, week after week passed with no improvement and no obvious way forward, I began to despair again.
* * *
As September rolled in, my mantra changed. Gone were the days of Grace … I don’t think I can do this forever.
“Grace. I can’t do this forever.”
We sat together in Grace’s bedroom, she at the foot of her bed and me on the floor staring up at her. This room still felt very much like a child’s—white curtains with little blue stars printed all over them, her walls and ceiling painted in bright, primary colors. It had been such a happy time when we’d repainted it two years before. All of the siblings had been obsessed with a bizarre YouTube cartoon called Charlie the Unicorn, and in one corner of the room, I’d used a tiny brush to paint cheery polka dots and quotes from the show: “It’s a land of sweets, and joy, and … joyness.” It hit me again how very young she was. I couldn’t ask her to leave. I wouldn’t pressure her.
But I also couldn’t keep walking this fine line. How long would I be able to avoid media and funeral pickets without detection? How long until someone handed me a sign I believed unscriptural? How long could I continue to choose my words ever so carefully—like some dishonest politician? I largely escaped explicit lies, but I grew ever more uneasy as I faced the fact that I was deceiving everyone both within the church and without. I might be limiting my own behavior, but with my presence and assistance, I was endorsing the rest of Westboro’s behavior, too. The church had always been all or nothing—in or out—and this was no-man’s-land. I could not survive here.
Grace and I eventually decided that unless something major changed, and soon, we would have to leave. We would begin to prepare in earnest, and in the meantime I would also take greater risks in raising these objections with others. The closer we came to walking out the door, the less I had to lose by sticking my neck out to petition the others. And what if Grace somehow managed to get kicked out before we could actually leave? We started a new game of Words With Friends, and Grace changed her username so that it was unidentifiable. No matter what happened, we could always communicate privately there.
As soon as the decision was made, my first course of action became immediately clear: apologize to Justin and Lindsey. Mindful that I was now in the territory of direct rebellion against my father’s instructions, I drafted a text message to Justin explaining why we had suddenly disappeared from his and Lindsey’s life. Even as fearful as I was, I knew that reaching out to our erstwhile friends was the right thing to do. I should have done it months ago.
That I had to rebel in order to apologize struck me as hopelessly corrupt.
I thought my heart would stop while waiting for Justin to respond. Again, the prospect of imminent doom hung over my head—whether destruction from God or discovery by my family—and I tried to still my shaking hands as I unloaded the dishwasher. Perhaps Justin had learned his lesson last time, and was already turning me in. Perhaps the elders were launching an investigation this very second. My fear got the better of me, and I texted again to beg for a response—ironic, considering that I had left them hanging for over three months.
When Justin finally returned my text, it was everything I had been trying to tell my parents for months: That he and Lindsey had had no idea why they were being treated this way. That the last time he had tried to reconcile, it had gone horribly awry. That it had been painful to be left in the dark, “tossed off and forgotten,” and that his wife was angry about the way the church had managed things. Justin was afraid of getting into trouble for this text exchange, too, and promised not to tell anyone but Lindsey.
At least we had that assurance.
But from what Justin said, Lindsey seemed done with the drama. She saw no hope for change. Justin told me that the elders had even forbidden sewing lessons with some of the younger girls that Lindsey had planned with their parents. She and Justin had planned a “double date” with another young couple, and that, too, had been disallowed. I was baffled. Having meals together was a regular part of our fellowship, and had been for as long as I had been alive. To my mind, it was now undeniable that the elders’ decisions were primarily driven not by Scripture, but by a need to keep church members in our place. To make us understand that bending to their will was the only option. Nothing else mattered.
Justin and I tried to orchestrate the circumstances of a church-sanctioned apology from Grace to Lindsey: we would each separately and cautiously reach out to my parents. We were still trying to make it fit. Still hoping we could make it work.
But it wasn’t to be. When I gently approached my father that evening, he blew up. He had heard enough from me about the issue. I retreated with the same feeling I’d gotten almost every time I’d challenged his decisions over the previous year: that hardliners like Steve and Sam were behind this new authoritarianism. When I disputed elder edicts, my father’s choices were limited to either shutting me down or resisting the militant faction among the elders—and we both knew how the latter would go. He also just seemed convinced that their collective wisdom had to be correct. After all, this was the Lord’s church.
And on top of everything else, he was surely as exhausted with the whole mess as my mother, Grace, and I all were.
“Time to despair,” I wrote to Justin that night. “There was a blowup (no one knows about any of our discussions, though). Abort mission. I’m so sorry, friend.” Justin responded that he was at a loss. Miserable. Hopeless. We’d reached the end of the line, but he thanked me for even making the effort.
“Take care,” he said.
I told Grace everything just before bed, breaking down when I got to the part about our father. In our estimation, he was one of only two or three elders who took to heart that verse about humility—in lowliness of mind let each esteem other better than themselves—and it contributed to his unwillingness to challenge the others. “They should have been learning his compassion!” I wept bitterly. Instead, they had insisted he take on their severity.
I slumped onto the bed beside my sister and pressed my face into a pillow. She reached over to stroke my back, and as we lay there in silence for a moment, I realized it wasn’t just the change in my father that I was mourning. It was the final crumbling of an image I had held so long in mind. Westboro Baptist Church. Special interest of the Almighty. Uniquely guided to eternal triumph by God Himself.
Sordid. Base. Banal.
Human.
* * *
Making the decision to leave gave me greater boldness in my futile attempts at reform, but it also introduced yet another impossible question:
When?
Neither Grace nor I had an answer—just a growing list of reasons that it couldn’t be now. We couldn’t leave before Mom’s birthday, surely. And what about our parents’ anniversary? How cruel it would be to ruin everything right at this moment. And then there were the things we couldn’t bear to leave without, all that we would forever lose access to once we left. What about family recipes? And home movies? And old photos? We should wait just a little while longer …
There was no denying that this was partly a stalling tactic, based on a dwindling hope that drastic change would occur and save us from our plans.
At the first prospect of losing everyone back in July, Grace and I had become painfully aware that there was so much we didn’t know about our parents’ lives, and our grandmother’s. What did we know about our Gran’s life before Westboro? My sisters and I had begun interviewing her almost immediately after I spoke my treason to Grace. We’d file across the backyard in the evening, past the yellow slide and the pool filled with splashing cousins, and into the church. We’d find Gran upstairs in her bedroom next to the church library where Gramps held a Bible study at 7:30 each morning. At eighty-six, our grandmother was so quiet and gentle. Smaller than I’d ever seen her because of the deep curve in her spine. Stooped with age. She’d lie on her bed, and Grace would lie next to her, Bekah on the floor at the foot of the bed and me at its head. I’d switch on my iPhone’s recorder, and we’d take turns asking questions, and I’d try not to choke at the thought of losing my Gran, at the tsunami of guilt washing over me for even thinking of betraying her.
Unfollow Page 22