For several reasons, I ultimately answered these questions with an emphatic no. First, when I stopped to consider the idea, I realized that I didn’t want to be free of them—and that it didn’t seem possible anyway, not without rewriting or erasing most of my history. Attempting to do so would have been inauthentic, the denial of a truth that David had been quick to recognize and point out: that the church had made me who I was, including many of the best parts of me. “You left out of principle,” David had told Grace and me, “pretty much the same principles you were raised with. And your departure was both a rejection and an affirmation of everything you were taught. You are your parents’ children.” Weeping, I had asked him how he could possibly say such a thing. We were betrayers. “In a way,” he said, “leaving Westboro Baptist Church was the most Westboro Baptist Church thing you could have done. They’re the ones who taught you to stand up for what you believe in, no matter what it cost you. They taught you that. They just never imagined you’d be standing up to them.”
I also fundamentally disagreed with the characterization that I was “focused on the past.” Though I occasionally found myself litigating old grievances, my examinations of the past felt urgent precisely because this was a present and future issue. My family remained stuck in a pattern of thinking and behavior that inflicted unnecessary harm on themselves and on the communities they continued to target every single day. As someone who had contributed to that harm for so long, I felt an obligation to those communities to work to dismantle it from the outside. As the longtime recipient of so much love, attention, and care from my family, for me to simply abandon them seemed like the height of ingratitude, a failure to reflect the kind of person my parents raised me to be: strong in the face of difficulties, willing to do hard things and make sacrifices for those I love. And as someone who had learned to see Westboro’s ideology from both sides of the divide, I couldn’t help feeling that it would be an abdication of responsibility and the waste of a gift to turn my back on a problem into which I may have some useful insight. I didn’t want to become the embodiment of the example from the book of James: For if any be a hearer of the word, and not a doer, he is like unto a man beholding his natural face in a glass: For he beholdeth himself, and goeth his way, and straightway forgetteth what manner of man he was. To have been transformed by the gentle, persistent entreaties of strangers—and then to walk away and forget that example, to refuse to extend that same courtesy and grace to others? Brutish.
But perhaps the most important reason I couldn’t just leave it all behind was the lesson that began to crystallize in my mind from my very first night in Deadwood, talking with Cora at the bar inside the Four Aces Casino:
Westboro is not unique.
The church’s garish signs lend themselves to this view of its members as crazed doomsayers, cartoonish villains who celebrate the calamities of others with fiendish glee. But the truth is that the church’s radical, recalcitrant position is the result of very common, very human forces—everything from fear, family, guilt, and shame, to cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias. These are forces whose power affects us all, consciously and subconsciously, to one degree or another at every stage of our lives. And when these forces are coupled with group dynamics and a belief system that caters to so many of our most basic needs as human beings—a sense of meaning, of identity, of purpose, of reward, of goodness, of community—they provide group members with an astonishing level of motivation to cohere and conform, no matter the cost.
Others with stories like mine have shown me repeatedly that the root of Westboro’s ideology—the idea that our beliefs were “the one true way”—is not by any means limited to Westboro members. In truth, that idea is common, widespread, and on display everywhere humans gather, from religious circles to political ones. It gives a comforting sense of certainty, freeing the believer from existential angst and providing a sense of stability—a foundation on which to build a life. But the costs of that certainty can be enormous and difficult to identify. Ultimately, the same quality that makes Westboro so easy to dismiss—its extremism—is also what helps highlight the destructive nature of viewing the world in black and white, the danger of becoming calcified in a position and impervious to change.
Though their ideologies manifested in vastly different ways, it was fundamentalist religious groups, from Jehovah’s Witnesses to members of the Islamic State, that first permitted me to recognize the patterns of my upbringing. But as I watch the human tribal instinct play out in the era of Donald Trump, the echoes of Westboro are undeniable: the division of the world into Us and Them; the vilification of compromise; the knee-jerk expulsion of insiders who violate group orthodoxy; and the demonization of outsiders and the inability to substantively engage with their ideas, because we simply cannot step outside of our own. In this environment, there is a growing insistence that opposing views must be silenced, whether by the powers of government, the self-regulation of social media companies, or the self-censorship of individuals. At the heart of this insistence lie several false assumptions, including a sentiment that Westboro members would readily recognize: We have nothing to learn from these people. This sentiment was troubling to witness even among our tiny fringe movement, and I was relieved to abandon it when I left the church—but watching it spread among a vast and growing populace has been altogether more alarming, filling me with a growing sense of unease.
Another assumption gaining particular traction is that refusing to grant mainstream platforms to hated ideas will halt their spread. While the desire to shield people from these ideas is well-intentioned and completely understandable, I can’t help but see it as a fundamentally flawed strategy, one that ignores the practicalities of human nature. The fact is that people come to embrace these ideas in a multitude of ways: some argue themselves into destructive beliefs; others come to them as I did, taught by parents and loved ones; still others find them in books, films, and the annals of history. Especially in the age of the Internet, it seems clear that we cannot reasonably expect to permanently halt the spread of an idea, whether good or bad. What we can do, however, is foster a culture in which we have the language to articulate and defend sound arguments as to why certain ideas are harmful, the precise ways in which they’re flawed, and the suffering they have caused in the past.
Although private companies like Twitter and Facebook are clearly free to set the terms of use for their platforms, the principles enshrined in the First Amendment are no less relevant to social media than they are in public spaces: that open discourse and dialectic is the most effective enabler of the evolution of individuals and societies. That the answer to bad ideas is to publicly reason against them, to advocate for and propagate better ones. And that it is dangerous to vest any central authority with broad powers to limit the bounds of acceptable discussion—because these powers lend themselves to authoritarian abuse, the creation of echo chambers, and the marginalization of ideas that are true but unpopular. In short, the principles underlying the freedom of speech recognize that all of us are susceptible to cognitive deficiencies and groupthink, and that an open marketplace of ideas is our best defense against them. And though my life’s trajectory has led me to strongly believe in these principles, I continue to actively seek out, examine, and seriously consider the arguments of those who oppose them. To my mind, this is the essence of epistemological humility—not a lack of belief or principle or faith, not the refusal to take a position or the abdication of responsibility to stand against injustice, but a constant examination of one’s worldview, a commitment to honestly grappling with criticisms of it.
Along with so many others, I now watch the increasing hostility and hysteria of our modern political discourse and wonder how we, as a society, might change course. I consider the impending arrival of the baby girl I will shortly bring into the world with Chad—now, impossibly, my husband—and wonder how we’ll teach her to avoid falling into these destructive patterns in her own life. And though my experiences at
Westboro would have been sufficient on their own to fix these questions in my mind, nothing has made me pursue them with greater urgency than witnessing the devastating end of my beloved Gramps.
* * *
One year after my appearance at the Jewlicious Festival, I was back with David in Los Angeles for another. My phone rang, and the voice on the other end of the line was my brother Zach, recently departed from Westboro. The tears running down my face were a mixture of happiness at having my brother back, and grief at the thought of my parents and siblings facing yet another void in the Phelps-Roper family. Another empty room in the home we’d shared for so long. I asked my brother the eternal question—Why?—and listened as he described a disillusionment that was achingly familiar to me.
But I had another question.
“Zach, what’s going on with Gramps? I’ve been checking the church website for months, and he hasn’t been giving any sermons. Is he okay?”
My brother’s voice dropped almost to a whisper. “Well … he … uh…” Zach stammered. “He’s in hospice.”
My heart stopped. My grandfather had believed that he was never going to die. That Jesus would return and bring him to Glory before that could ever happen. He’d said it so often that it seemed a foregone conclusion even then, even though I scarcely believed in God anymore.
“… and he was voted out of the church.”
Neither of us said anything for a few minutes as I sobbed at the image of my grandfather sick and dying and alone in a hospice bed. At the unparalleled cruelty of my family, which had somehow grown even worse since my departure, consuming even Gramps himself. But if ye bite and devour one another, take heed that ye be not consumed one of another. I had been pacing the sidewalk in front of the Booksteins’ home, walking across the elaborate chalk paintings that Grace and I had done with their children. The same sorts of drawings we’d done with my siblings, cousins, nieces, and nephew back in Topeka. I sank to the ground, pants covered in chalk, face covered with tears, ignoring the stares from groups of twelve-year-old Jewish girls walking by in their long skirts and opaque tights. And again, I put the question to my brother. Why?
I disconnected the call a few minutes later and returned to the Booksteins’ Shabbat table, sitting across from David.
“What’s wrong?” he asked immediately. I shook my head, unable to speak.
“Would it make you happy if something bad happened to my Gramps?” I finally managed to choke out. I hoped the answer was no. I thought it would be. I knew that my Gramps had taught us to celebrate the tragedies of our enemies—that many would see this outcome as his just comeuppance—but that very idea was one of the reasons I had left Westboro. I couldn’t bear the thought of anyone celebrating this. Especially a good friend.
“Of course not!” David insisted. “Why would I be happy?” When I told him what had happened, he said he would pray for my Gramps. And when he returned home to Jerusalem the following week, he would go to the Wailing Wall and put a note in it asking God to help my Gramps. “I hope and pray he gets well.”
Instead of returning to my new home with Chad in South Dakota, I flew to Kansas with Grace, terrified that Gramps would pass before we had a chance to see him. Zach had given us the name of the hospice, and I knew that our best chance at seeing our grandfather would be to show up unannounced. As in the months before I left Westboro, I hated the sneaking around. The church would not want us to see him, and my fear of defying them was still almost paralyzing—but we were his grandchildren. We were his family, too. The miles from Kansas City to Topeka passed in the snowy darkness of midnight, Grace sleeping in the passenger seat as I made my case, my inner monologue growing more outraged by the second. The people charged with my grandfather’s care had cast him out of their family—out of his own church—after all these years. They had isolated him in his most vulnerable hours after a lifetime surrounded by his wife, children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. They were using his last days to punish and cajole him into “repentance.” And after all of that, they would surely prevent us from seeing him—the only people willing to sit by his side, to offer a comforting presence to a dying man, largely abandoned by those he had loved and trusted—all so that they could maintain control of a narrative in their minds and in the media. I could already hear them talking dismissively among themselves: We don’t owe these people anything. They didn’t answer to anyone, least of all us.
Pulsing through me was an unmitigated disgust for my family, frightening in its intensity. Had Gramps still been a member of the church, there would have been another member keeping vigil at his bedside at all hours of the day and night—talking with him, reading with him, singing with him. I gripped the steering wheel so hard my nails bit into my palms, weeping bitterly at the thought of the church sentencing him to live out his final days alone, confused, and afraid. Not even I would have envisioned them sinking to such depths of cruelty.
I found Zach the following afternoon and spent an hour reading text messages on his phone, following the progression of my grandfather’s illness—and his status within the church—from day to day. In the beginning, my family’s words were full of tenderness and praise. “We should all be very thankful,” my uncle wrote, “that we have a faithful pastor who genuinely cares for our souls and has—at great personal lifelong sacrifice—fed us with the manna of God’s word without dilution.” I read on through the weeks and months as the tenderness disappeared, replaced by a cold and clinical distance. After my grandfather was stripped of his role as pastor and of church membership, most other members ended all contact with him, as required. And when his health deteriorated further, one of his daughters was designated to handle his care and send daily updates to a select group of trusted church members—my brother Zach among them—while the rest were kept largely in the dark. They couldn’t desert him entirely to Topeka’s medical establishment, lest word of his illness and abandonment find its way into the newspapers that had been closely watching for signs of his demise for at least a dozen years.
My aunt’s messages stopped the day that Zach left, of course, but they were enough. More than a month of daily reports while Gramps had been in professional care. In addition to his many physical problems, the messages spoke of “cognitive decline,” “dementia,” and failing organs that sometimes led to a state of “delirium.” When his body began to improve, a doctor warned that my grandfather would likely not show improvement in his cognition unless he was motivated to, suggesting that the presence of more familiar and comforting voices would help—but Westboro continued its campaign of isolation. My grandfather’s mental condition would be on his death certificate two weeks later, as well, not the cause of death—respiratory failure, pneumonia—but a “significant condition contributing to death”: encephalopathy. Disease of the brain, as Google explained, manifested by an altered mental state. Zach described some of the symptoms that ultimately contributed to my grandfather’s exclusion from the church, and it was abundantly clear that some of his actions were so strange and out of character that he could not possibly have been in his right mind in those moments.
With other symptoms, though, it seemed that his actions weren’t ravings but genuine changes in his perspective, particularly as it related to the church. According to Zach, my grandfather had come to see his congregation as cruel and unmerciful. I remembered my despair at coming to the same conclusion when I was painting in that dank basement: as if we were finally doing to ourselves what we had been doing to others. I believed Zach’s assessment, because in the months before I left Westboro, my grandfather had been one of the few men in the church who was encouraging more kindness, gentleness, and compassion. Only by pride cometh contention, the verse said, and after the new elders took over, Gramps had quoted and paraphrased it often. “If there is no pride, there will be no contention,” he intoned. “Where there is great humility, there will be no contention.” As if he were trying to reform the beast he had created.
But it was
too late. He had spent decades inculcating us with an ideology that valued fear and control over mercy and grace. He was the one who had taught church members to have unshakable faith in their own perspective, to believe their judgment was as God’s judgment, with de facto status as infallible. Not even my grandfather could stop the course he had set in motion. Though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed. Gramps was the heretic now. His illness was proof not of his age, but that God had condemned him. To church members, dementia was the result of my grandfather’s strange behavior, rather than its cause. If he were a man of God, the argument went, then he wouldn’t have this illness.
I thought of the blind man of John 9. And his disciples asked him, saying, Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind? Jesus answered, Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him. The story—along with the entire book of Job—showed clearly that not all illness was punishment for sin.
Westboro knew better, though.
Shortly before he was removed from church membership, as Zach told me, our grandfather had stepped out the front door of the church to address the young people running the Equality House across the street. A nonprofit called Planting Peace had bought the house in 2012 and painted it in the colors of the rainbow, the global symbol of the LGBT rights movement. It was a perpetual monument standing in opposition to the church and its message of judgment and damnation. “You’re good people,” Gramps called out to them from across the street, before he was hustled back inside by Westboro members. At the church meeting where he was excommunicated, the elders gave this incident as the clearest evidence of my grandfather’s heresy—casting his lot in with the Sodomites—and judged that he was lucid when it occurred.
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