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by Megan Phelps-Roper

  “At home,” I continued, “we always equated love with rebuke, because of that passage. As long as we believed our words to be truthful, we were free to rebuke the rest of the world at any time, in any place, and in any way that we wanted. We could be harsh, and crude, and insulting, and it didn’t matter, because everyone else was Hell-bound anyway. Those verses justified almost everything we did—including picketing funerals. But David told us about that passage from a Jewish perspective.”

  “From our view,” David said, “a rebuke is supposed to happen privately, kindly, and with people you have reason to believe will hear you. If you’re attacking someone you know won’t listen—if you’re trying to correct them harshly, in a way that will provoke them to anger instead of encouraging them to change their ways—then you’re the one who is committing a sin.”

  “I feel so stupid saying this,” I said, “but we really believed that it was irrelevant how we spoke to people. ‘Gospel preaching is not hateful!’ we always said. ‘Truth equals love!’ But now it seems so painfully obvious: of course it matters how we talk to people. Truth and love are not synonyms. The New Testament even says it plainly. Speak the truth in love. The Apostle Paul said, To the weak became I as weak and that we should weep with them that weep. I don’t know how we missed that for so long.”

  “Your other question about what we hope will happen to the church…” Grace paused. “We want them all to leave. People have been speculating for a long time about what would happen if Gramps dies–”

  “You mean when Gramps dies?” David asked.

  “He doesn’t believe he’s going to die,” Grace said. “He thinks Jesus will return while he’s still alive. People think the church will fall apart if Gramps dies … but if the church ever did fall apart and our family still believed the church’s doctrines—that would be awful. We’re not sure how the church could come to an end without destroying the lives of everyone inside.”

  “We’re still hopeful, though,” I said. “We think our best chance is that someone will be able to get through to the people in the church. What we really hope is that we can find a way to do for our family what David helped do for me.”

  * * *

  Two days later, having been unofficially adopted by both David and the Bookstein family, I returned to Deadwood alone. I loved the new members of our southern California family, but part of me was wounded that Grace had chosen to stay in Los Angeles with Rabbi Yonah and Rachel and the kids. I remembered that Libby had felt the same way when I’d chosen to stay in Deadwood. “I feel like you’re choosing strangers over family,” she had accused me during a phone call, her voice breaking. Don’t you understand? I’d thought. It’s not a decision meant to hurt you. I just can’t be there. When it came to Grace, I wouldn’t keep repeating the pattern we’d learned at Westboro—the tendency to moralize every decision as good or evil, the wielding of guilt and the withholding of affection to control the people I loved. Sometimes, a person just needed to do what was right for them.

  I tried to focus on the good that might come of my sister’s absence. Maybe it would lift some of the pressure off our relationship. Maybe we needed a little space to grow on our own, rather than trying to live as a unit. Because we shared a bank account and the car I’d bought a few years earlier, our sisterhood sometimes felt more like a marriage, and the confusion was a source of strife between us. Sometimes it seemed that Grace wanted me to be a big sister, sometimes a substitute parent. She resented needing me for anything and was desperate for independence, but she relied on me for practical skills she hadn’t yet developed. My need to take care of and protect her was so strong that I was having a hard time distinguishing between us, always speaking in terms of “we” and “us” and “ours.” Sometimes it felt like we were the same person.

  “No,” Laura said emphatically when I told her this, “the two of you are so different.” I was bewildered by this declaration, honestly believing the exact reverse. “I think this will be good for both of you.”

  And it was. Even though I felt awkward and anxious without Grace by my side, even though I would never have chosen to be apart from her, I realized that it was nice to have some space to myself. I started spending time with my coworkers at TDG—long conversations about politics and human nature with Jack, fierce games of volleyball with Brittany and Amanda and the boys. I was heartened when a man claiming to be a member of Anonymous called the office to threaten me, and one of my coworkers responded by lambasting him, standing up for me and telling the man that I was a good person. I also became closer with Dustin and Laura, who would remain two of my closest friends long after I left Deadwood, long after they left the Jehovah’s Witnesses and joined me in the wandering path of doubt and skepticism and confusion and wonder and awe at how different the world was than we had believed. When we compared stories of our unraveling faith, I was struck by the similarities. In the same way I had been perplexed by the arbitrariness of the different modesty standards among Westboro families—How could the standards of God differ from house to house?—Dustin had been confounded by the Witness prohibition on movies with an “R” rating. In the United States, that meant The Matrix was forbidden—but when he saw the film on the shelf of a Witness in the U.K., an elder explained that the rating system in that country was different. For both Dustin and me, one of the earliest sources of doubt had been incredibly trivial matters that highlighted internal inconsistency and a deeper issue—a dawning awareness of human perception coloring and altering apparently divine laws. In the stories of others departing similar high-control groups, I would notice this pattern again and again: an “unshakable faith” first called into question by the group’s failure to live up to its own standards.

  And then I finally—finally—met Chad.

  He had declared he’d come to the play and then failed to show, and I had nearly decided that he was a lost cause. That he didn’t really want to meet me. That it was all just some sort of imaginary friendship for him. That this whole thing really was an episode of Catfish. Three times in as many months he had told me he’d be in Deadwood and would see me, and three times he had failed to appear. I’d spent those months making excuses for his behavior, rationalizing and justifying his neglect: “What respectable person would want anything to do with someone with a past like mine? Whatever the reason, a girl who’d tormented grieving families at funerals and liberally tossed around epithets like ‘fag’ isn’t the one to bring home to Mom.”

  Still, I was wholly unable to grasp why he refused to just tell me that. I must have seemed insane to him, expressing my undying love in one breath and begging him to please just let me off the hook in the next, to just admit that this wasn’t going anywhere so that I could move on with my miserable life. I was in the throes of obsession and despair that I suppose is typical of an unrequited first love, so I certainly wasn’t going to act the part of the sane, rational, self-respecting one. After the third misfire, though, I could not ignore what was painfully, devastatingly apparent: his dereliction was no accident.

  MEGAN: Chad? Tell me sometime. I can be patient. I just don’t want to chase something that doesn’t want to be caught. I’m almost convinced that’s what I’m doing.

  To my great amazement and relief, he finally materialized the weekend after the Jewlicious Festival. I had been cut off from my family for more than four months by then, and had been slammed repeatedly into the outermost threshold of my capacity for heartbreak and rejection. Just at the point when I thought I would lose my mind from hurt, shame, and rage—at myself, mostly, for having believed his sweet words when I knew in the smallest parts of myself that I didn’t deserve to have someone care about me like that, that I didn’t deserve any good thing in this life—Chad texted from a casino in town and said that I should come meet him there.

  It was 10:30 P.M., and I was livid. In the back of my mind was a niggling worry about what he’d think of me, whether he’d be disappointed, but I had no mental energy to process it. I
nstead, my circuits were overloaded with humiliation and anger: we had obviously arrived at the portion of the program where the catfisher pretends to finally follow through with a meeting and then stands up his foolish victim for the last time. I was incensed at the thought, and I absolutely was not going to take another moment of this sham if it turned out to be another evasion. I had every intention of following through with the threat I issued in response to Chad’s invitation.

  MEGAN: If I leave my comfy bed and come there and don’t see you, I’m so never talking to either one of us again!

  I changed out of my pajamas and made my way through the crowds dressed for St. Patrick’s Day—it was March 16, the night Deadwood was having its holiday pub crawl. The casino was packed with people alive with alcohol, roaring with laughter in outlandish green costumes, and I had no idea how to find him. He must have been watching the door, because after a few moments, he stood up at one of the blackjack tables with a sheepish look, almost apologetic. I recognized him instantly from across the room—too tall, too blond, and too like his photo to be anyone else—and my anger evaporated. I slipped through the throng, following him to a less populated corner of the room where we sat down at adjacent slot machines and began to talk.

  The chaos surrounding us dissolved as I watched him in the garish lights of the casino floor. I couldn’t take in anything but him. Some remote corner of my mind noted that his gray pullover and lean, muscular frame made him look like a college frat boy, but it was his face that held my gaze: the blue eyes, the half smile, the blond curls that fell over his forehead. I noticed these things, but most of my attention was spent in a struggle to assimilate the reality of his existence. That he was, in fact, corporeal. He didn’t say it, but I surmised that he was still afraid of me—of our age difference, afraid I’d meet him just this once and then bail, afraid that I would reject him. Preposterous. For two hours we tried to feel each other out, both of us quiet and cautious, laughing and talking about everything except what we really wanted to. Just like our days of Words With Friends chats, our conversation was entirely chaste, decorous—“appropriate,” as my family would say. I did manage to ask for a hug at one point. It was clear from his body language that he thought this a strange request—he kept glancing anxiously over his shoulder to the table where his friends were still playing blackjack—but he got up to oblige me. He stood nearly a foot taller than me and he didn’t bend down, so my face was pressed awkwardly into his chest. I didn’t mind. I inhaled slowly and closed my eyes.

  It wasn’t the embrace I’d dreamed about back in Topeka so many hopeless months before—the city was wrong, and the season, his hands weren’t in my hair and it was midnight instead of noontime—but it was a damn good start. I said a simple goodbye, left him to his cards, and headed back out into the night.

  * * *

  The rest of the year felt like sprinting in slow motion, urgent and constant movement that made the hours pass like deep breaths. The odometer hadn’t quite reached five thousand miles the day my Pontiac pulled out of its spot on the Phelps-Roper driveway for the last time, and by the time November 11 rolled around again, more than forty thousand miles of cornfields, mountains, Midwestern thunderstorms, and Canadian countryside had raced past my windows. Grace rejoined me in Deadwood after five weeks in Los Angeles, only to leave again a few weeks later, our orbits converging and diverging as we tried to understand who we were and what it might mean to live a good life outside of Westboro’s paradigm. Every tenuous connection we’d made to the world while at the church suddenly became a lifeline, pulling us along from place to place, and into communities of people we’d learned to despise—from Bible studies with Christians in icy Des Moines, to Yiddish classes and volunteer work at the Jewish Federation in Montreal; from walking a former Westboro member down the aisle at her wedding in Connecticut, to supporting my former Twitter enemy Chad Darnell at the screening of his new film at the Kansas City LGBT Film Festival.

  Month after month, my sister and I continued to drift around the country, never spending more than a few days or a few weeks at a time in any one place. We supported ourselves on the money we’d saved at Westboro, with Grace’s excess scholarship funds from her university, with an insurance settlement for damage done to my car by a wicked hailstorm in the Black Hills, and with part-time jobs we found—Grace working as an assistant at a daycare center, while I worked remotely for TDG and did freelance administrative work I found online. But more than anything, the sustaining force behind this period of wandering was our family and friends, friends of friends, even friends of friends of friends, people who opened their homes to us and helped us learn to see the world from many perspectives.

  In the midst of my travels and several weeks after our St. Patrick’s Day adventure in Deadwood, Chad called to ask me out on my first date ever. We met for dinner in Omaha the following week, and caught an opening-weekend showing of—what else?—The Great Gatsby. It was a cool evening and everything was foreign to me, each sensation making it difficult for me to find my breath: the warmth of his big hand as it enveloped mine; the drumbeat of my pulse when he wrapped his arm around my waist; the way my whole body seemed to melt at being kissed for the first time. I knew I never wanted to say goodbye, but we did, and I cried after he left. He went home to South Dakota, and I returned to California to visit the Booksteins.

  Two weeks later, I drove twenty-two hours straight from Los Angeles to Deadwood to see him. He made the six-hour drive to meet me that weekend, and we met up nearly every weekend of my first summer away from home. We explored the wild of the Black Hills all season long, my elation tempered only by the knowledge that my parents would be dismayed by the path I had chosen. Instead of becoming habituated to Chad’s visits, I found each one more improbable than the last. As I came to know him, it became clear that just about every part of his existence made our relationship so unlikely that it should have been impossible. He had painstakingly built for himself a successful life and career, arranging it all to be as simple and quiet and predictable as possible. Understanding how intensely he valued privacy, the lengths to which he went to eschew attention, how little of himself he tended to reveal to others, I couldn’t help but marvel that he had ever shared anything with me while I was still at Westboro. He marveled, too, with that particular smile he’d get—awe mixed with disbelief—when he couldn’t seem to grasp the reality of us. “Why are you here?” he’d balk, searching my face as if an answer might be discovered in the blue of an iris or the curve of a cheekbone. “How?”

  That question became my obsession, too, and the further I ventured from the constraints of Westboro’s belief system, the more I found myself looking back across what seemed to be an ever-widening gulf, wondering how others might be able to traverse it. I remembered how much sense the church’s beliefs had made to me while I was a member, and became fixated on trying to pinpoint exactly where Westboro’s error lay—and most important, how to communicate my changing perspective to my family in a way that they could hear, and wouldn’t just dismiss out of hand. I read through their tweets and sermons compulsively, challenging myself to articulate both sides of the argument: why Westboro held each of their positions, and why I no longer did. In some cases, the distance between us felt too vast to even make an attempt at persuasion—rushing directly into casting doubt on a literal interpretation of the Bible, for instance, would certainly go nowhere. Instead, I let my arguments be guided by the pattern that had worked with me, with Dustin and Laura, and with others whose stories I was coming to learn: the discovery of internal inconsistency and hypocrisy as an important first step in seeing outside of group dogma.

  Though my arguments largely went unanswered, I made them to Westboro members via interviews, on Twitter, and through private messages. Coming up against their wall of certainty was often a frustrating and painful exercise, and not just because of the callousness and condescension that so often filled their rhetoric. At Westboro, any admission that we might be wrong abou
t any doctrine was accompanied by intense shame and fear. If we reversed course on any issue, we did so quietly, never admitting publicly to our mistakes. From our point of view, acknowledging error and ignorance was anathema, because doing so would cast doubt on our message. While I engaged church members as an outsider, I started to understand that doubt was the point—that it was the most basic shift in how I experienced the world. Doubt was nothing more than epistemological humility: a deep and practical awareness that outside our sphere of knowledge there existed information and experiences that might show our position to be in error. Doubt causes us to hold a strong position a bit more loosely, such that an acknowledgment of ignorance or error doesn’t crush our sense of self or leave us totally unmoored if our position proves untenable. Certainty is the opposite: it hampers inquiry and hinders growth. It teaches us to ignore evidence that contradicts our ideas, and encourages us to defend our position at all costs, even as it reveals itself as indefensible. Certainty sees compromise as weak, hypocritical, evil, suppressing empathy and allowing us to justify inflicting horrible pain on others.

  Doubt wasn’t the sin, I came to believe. It was the arrogance of certainty that poisoned Westboro at its foundations.

  Whenever friends and family expressed concern about my continued focus on the church and the past, I would gently dismiss them—but inwardly, I began to wonder if my identity would be forever tied to Westboro. Would I ever be truly free of it? Should I be doing more to try to extract myself from anything related to them?