When communications with Grace thawed again—always a mysterious but welcome process—she joined the discussion, as well. It would have been easy to spend all our days talking about theology, but Laura suggested we take our conversation on the road so that we wouldn’t sit at the inn and miss the beauty of the Hills. At Mount Rushmore National Memorial, Laura pointed out an old educational video featuring the fathers of both of our hosts—Dustin’s had been the first employee of the Mount Rushmore Society, and Laura’s had been the superintendent here for nearly two decades, later moving to Yellowstone National Park.
“I was born in Yellowstone when my dad was an employee there,” she said. “He’s the superintendent now. That’s where we went to visit my parents last week.”
Laura explained that her decision to become a Jehovah’s Witness in college had put a strain on her relationship with her parents and siblings. She’d been raised Presbyterian and was inspired to convert by Dustin, a longtime friend and love interest who had grown up in the faith. Like members of Westboro, Witnesses are instructed to date and marry only those who share their beliefs—but Laura hadn’t blindly converted for her future husband. Instead, she had carefully studied with Witnesses for four years before deciding to seek baptism and membership in the organization. Although her parents had responded in different ways, both were hurt by her decision. Her father was stoic, but her mother’s pain manifested in occasional angry lamentations about the things Laura would be missing: participating in non-Witness religious ceremonies like weddings and baptisms, and celebrations of holidays and birthdays—important milestones in the life of their family. Laura’s beliefs now spurned the traditions that brought her family together, and inherently judged non-Witnesses as wrongdoers.
“I became something ‘Outside’ in my family,” Laura told me later. “Being present at family gatherings that centered around holidays felt like being a vegan at a meat feast. No one can figure out exactly why this person is here, and are they really just going to stand over the meatballs and judge us?”
In the eyes of her family, Laura was behaving irrationally. Canvassing neighborhoods to knock on the doors of strangers to explain to them the importance of joining an organization whose members were convinced that Armageddon was imminent and that Satan had been loosed upon the earth in October of 1914, running amok throughout the world ever since? It made no sense. This was not the life her parents had wanted for her.
Laura’s predicament sounded uncannily like my father’s, and I was surprised by how many similarities there were between the doctrines of Westboro and the Witnesses—but right then, staring out the window at the sixty-foot-high carvings of George Washington and company, what held my attention were the differences between the two groups. In contrast to Westboro’s version of Hell—eternal torment, an idea that had become detestable to me—Witnesses believe that Hell is simply death. When I quoted Bible verses that seemed to contradict this, Dustin and Laura brought forth other verses to support their position. For the living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing at all … there is no work nor planning nor knowledge nor wisdom in the Grave, where you are going. Their understanding of the verses I presented was fundamentally different from the one I had been raised with, and I was slack-jawed to realize that there was more than one way to read the text—that from one passage, multiple meanings could be deduced without contradicting the language in the original.
That interpretation was a phenomenon with real implications for believers.
At Westboro, we had denied that interpretation allowed for any disagreements on doctrines. Knowing this first, that no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation. For any question or issue, there was a single correct understanding, and it was ours. Legitimate disagreement with Westboro’s theology could not exist within this framework, and though I had come to reject some of the church’s precepts, I immediately fell back into that paradigm—that there was only one way—because I hadn’t yet seen another that made sense to me. I was still assuming that anyone contradicting “the clear meaning of Scripture” was either deliberately mangling the truth or deluded by God into believing a lie.
And yet, here were two people whose kindness, intelligence, generosity, and good intentions were all self-evident. They weren’t evil, stupid, or delusional. They just saw things differently than I had been taught to, and they could articulate the logic and reasoning behind their thinking.
My head was spinning as the four of us fought the cold wind and made our way back to the Floyds’ car. Grace and I looked across the backseat at each other, amazement on both of our faces, my thoughts reflected in her features: How was this possible? If there truly was more than one legitimate way to understand the world, then there was nothing inherently wrong with people who believed differently than we did. We could cease presuming most people were evil and ill-intentioned.
The hope that sprang from this realization would become the new foundation of my life, but along with that hope came still more confusion:
If there was more than one possible answer, how did anyone manage to decide between them?
* * *
Dec. 30, 2012—Day 13
THE GOD DELUSION
The journalist Andrew Mueller is of the opinion that pledging yourself to any particular religion “is no more or less weird than choosing to believe that the world is rhombus-shaped, and borne through the cosmos in the pincers of two enormous green lobsters called Esmerelda and Keith.”
CHAD: I can tell you that I already know you’ll talk too fast. You did leave a pretty long YouTube fast-talking trail.
I did think the screen liked your face. That’s a fact.
The shit you said was crazy. You think I discount that because of the screen liking your face. I don’t.
I need to know that it wasn’t necessarily you. You know?
MEGAN: Where to begin?
CHAD: I don’t believe Obama is the literal antichrist.
I don’t believe gays marrying will trigger the end of days.
Etc. etc.
MEGAN: I don’t believe either of those things, either. I didn’t think there was even enough biblical evidence to support them.
Start with: I believed the Bible was It. That it was right no matter what I would have come up with myself, even if I thought something it said was Wrong, even if it made me Angry, even if it hurt other people.
CHAD: Okay. Not tonight. And know that I think in spite of all of that, your family has so many great qualities … and obviously did such a great job of raising, educating you, etc.
Learning about the Floyds’ belief system was eye-opening to me. In many ways, it seemed to be exactly what I had wanted from my family—an improvement on several of our most objectionable doctrines. Where we had been deliberately provocative and even cruel, for instance, Witnesses strove for gentleness: in contrast to our boisterous funeral pickets, they knocked on doors to preach their gospel, meekly walking away when requested. And yet, in spite of that fact, I still found myself unsatisfied. My questions had become deeper since I left Topeka. In all my conversations with Dustin and Laura, I had refrained from asking the question that now weighed so heavily on my mind: Why did they believe that the Bible was the capital-T Truth in the first place?
I wasn’t looking to be persuaded from the position I had held throughout my conscious life. I had dearly loved the Scriptures from the time I was a child listening to my mother read from them each night, her reverence clear in every word. When I quoted from the King James Version to journalists or curious passersby on the picket line, their eyes would often glaze over at the seventeenth-century prose—but the language and the imagery were as familiar and beautiful to me as my own mother’s voice, and comforting in their familiarity. How sweet are thy words unto my taste! yea, sweeter than honey to my mouth! The Bible’s words became mine, and at all hours and in all circumstances, my mind would call them forth for guidance, courage, inspiration. I read them, studied them, mem
orized them, recited them, and defended them daily.
Though I had turned away from it while we were still at Westboro, the question I had posed to Grace months earlier wouldn’t be denied any longer: “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?”
At home, my siblings and I had learned a principle: Even if God’s actions or instructions in the Bible seemed evil to our finite minds, all that He did was—by definition—perfect and just. For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts. God’s Word was the standard by which all men were measured, and His actions were righteous simply by virtue of the fact that He had taken them. All that was in the Bible was unquestionably Good.
For me, this belief was becoming more and more difficult to sustain.
Fortunately, the Bible’s truth and reliability was the subject of the first Sunday meeting I attended at Rapid City’s Kingdom Hall, as Jehovah’s Witnesses call their meeting places. I hadn’t been inside a place of worship in nearly two months, and in all my years, I had been inside non-Westboro churches on only the rarest of occasions. The foreignness of this place was both an intense curiosity and a physical revulsion, and I had to fight to suppress the latter. The thoughts that kept me from bolting from the building were becoming something of a mantra: What am I feeling? Why am I feeling it? Are my feelings justified by evidence, or a matter of instinct?
Laura guided us to sit in the middle section of the hall, and I looked around, trying to collect myself by focusing on specific details. The room had a capacity of about two hundred, though fewer than half the seats were filled. Rows of upholstered chairs instead of pews. Industrial beige carpet and a raised platform with a small lectern for the speaker. “You” and “your” instead of “thee” and “thou” to address God. During the prayer, husbands in suits wrapped their arms around wives in long skirts. The women left their hair uncovered, giving me a sense of our collective nakedness among the congregation. When I asked Laura later about the lack of head coverings, she directed me to the very same passage that Westboro used to require them—which, I was shocked to realize, was not in keeping with the plain language used there. But every woman that prayeth or prophesieth with her head uncovered dishonoureth her head, the passage read, and then clarified that her hair is given her for a covering. In spite of this language, Westboro required a second head covering—and took other churches’ refusal to do so as dispositive evidence that the whole congregation was rebellious and damned by God.
In Laura’s Bible, the text was even clearer: For her hair is given to her instead of a covering.
That Jehovah’s Witnesses used an entirely different version of the Scriptures—the New World Translation—brought up yet another layer of doubt. I knew that translations of the Bible often varied widely in their language—and thus their meaning—but Westboro had declared the King James to be the only acceptable text. All others were tainted by human hands and desires. The arbitrariness of this claim now seemed apparent to me—a judgment my grandfather had made long ago on the basis of his conscience, but then denied all others the right to do likewise. At Westboro, when outsiders reminded us of the many contradictions among the various versions of the Bible and questioned our use of the KJV, I instinctively avoided answering their positions directly. “Because Gramps said so” would seem not to be a very convincing argument.
No better than “The Bible is true because my wicked heart says so,” I thought, remembering the paradox that had caused me to doubt the Bible’s infallibility in the first place.
I had hoped that Brother Alt’s sermon would shed some light on this question, but the longer I listened, the more fragile his case seemed. Perhaps because the speaker was not my beloved mother or grandfather or relative, I listened to his sermon more critically than I ever had at Westboro.
He began with a quote wherein the Bible describes the Bible’s goodness. All Scripture is inspired of God and beneficial for teaching, for reproving, for setting things straight, for disciplining in righteousness, so that the man of God may be fully competent, completely equipped for every good work.
In my head echoed the dry words of the BBC’s Louis Theroux, who refuted this sort of circular logic in his second documentary about Westboro: “Well, the Bible would say that, wouldn’t it?”
Brother Alt continued. “Some people say, ‘Experience is the best teacher.’ No. The Bible is the best teacher.”
I surreptitiously glanced around at the faces scattered throughout the hall, rapt and nodding. His words rang hollow in my ears—as if simply asserting such a thing could make it true—but I knew that only months earlier, I would have accepted this idea without doubts, as this congregation now seemed to.
“Human advice leaves something to be desired, but not so with the Bible,” he said. “It provides the best guidance in the world.” I couldn’t dispute that the Scriptures were filled with practical advice, meditations on human nature, and beautiful sentiments that I could never imagine rejecting.
Love your enemies.
Better is a little with righteousness than great revenues without right.
He that answereth a matter before he heareth it, it is a folly and shame unto him.
Hatred stirreth up strifes: but love covereth all sins.
But what of the tale of the Levite and his dismembered concubine? And God’s commandment to put disobedient children to death? His threat to punish idolaters by causing them to eat the flesh of their sons, of their daughters, and of their friends? I listened to Brother Alt extol the virtues of the Scriptures without qualification, and I felt resistance growing inside me. As I had for weeks now, I kept coming back to the image of the Almighty that my mother had first explained to me as a child holding a Barbie in the backseat of our old Camry: the divine Potter of Romans 9, fashioning a tiny group to join Him in Heaven, while sentencing the teeming billions to pass the eons of eternity in exquisite, ever-increasing torment for sins He caused them to commit—simply because it pleased Him to torture them.
Could there be any clearer portrait of evil?
I simply could not believe that this was good in any sense of the word. More important, I simply did not believe it—however fearful I was to declare it plainly, even in my own mind.
Regardless of what the Bible said.
At the conclusion of the sermon, Laura introduced Grace and me to several cheerful women who welcomed us with warmth and genuine interest, and then she led us to the cabinets filled with Witness publications. There were dozens of stacks of books and Bible tracts, but she found what she was looking for—a small yellow book with “What Does the Bible Really Teach?” emblazoned on the cover—and offered to go through it with us back at the inn. I nodded. “Please.”
I didn’t want to offend my new friends by launching into a critique of Brother Alt’s talk, so I was vague and quiet on the forty-five-minute drive through the darkness back to Deadwood. With Grace sprawled across the backseat, her hair strewn across my lap as I scratched her head, I pondered my doubts and tried to make sense of what it all meant.
MEGAN: Chad. Is the Bible just another book? One with beautiful language and compelling stories—but not divine? Like reading David Foster Wallace’s speech at Kenyon College and being moved (to feeling, to action) via words like “on fire with the same force that lit the stars”—but not thinking he’s God or speaks for God or that every word he says has to be obeyed?
But as he’d done so many times since I left Westboro, Chad declined to share his thoughts on the question with me. We could speak of music and movies, tech and television, but when it came to matters of belief, he would change the subject instead of offering an opinion. I found it frustrating, but I understood why he did it. I hadn’t been so malleable since I was a child, and
he was taking great pains to avoid unduly influencing me. He wanted to know where my own heart and thoughts would lead me. If I was going to grow out of the mental and emotional boundaries that had so long characterized my existence—the bounds of my habitation—I would need to forge my own path.
* * *
I awoke before dawn one morning in early January, my left hand still protectively covering my phone beneath the pillow. Like most nights, I had fallen asleep texting Chad. And like most mornings, I would begin my day stalking my family on Twitter.
Within days of my departure from Westboro, several members of the church had proactively blocked me from viewing their posts on the platform. I had created a fake account in response, one whose sole use would be following—but never engaging—every account associated with the church. I recognized Twitter as the only real window into my family’s lives and daily activities. They might be holding signs in every photo, but where else could I see my parents and siblings? How else could I know what they were up to?
Not even I thought this was a particularly healthy habit for me to cultivate—like Emily in Our Town, reliving the days of her former existence—and in the beginning, I had tried to limit the time I spent staring into the past at my old life. Now, I didn’t even make the attempt. I understood that it would be pathetic and sad to spend my days watching other people live via social media, a waste of the new life and freedom I now had. Still, whenever I encountered resistance from Grace, Newbery, Libby, even Dustin and Laura, I justified the time I spent with a new hope taking root inside me:
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