Banished : Surviving My Years in the Westboro Baptist Church (9781455518470)

by Drain, Lauren; Pulitzer, Lisa (CON)

  I was so ashamed by what Libby had said I found it hard to discuss, even with my father. But I needed to confide in him, since I wasn’t sure I trusted anyone else. When I finally worked up the courage to tell him what she had said about me, he was nonplussed.

  “You need to try to have a better relationship with her,” he instructed me. “You need to work harder.” He was suggesting the problem was with me, not her. That wasn’t the kind of support I was looking for. He always seemed to be putting the onus on me these days. I knew my getting along with these girls was critical to Dad and to all the Drains, if we were going to be accepted, but I was doing my best.

  I went to Shirley next. She recognized that there was competition among the teens, and that they might not trust me right away because I was so new. She told me I should take advice only from the elders. “Young people say and do stupid things,” she said with a smile. “Don’t listen to what Libby says.” Shirley always had a way of making me feel better.

  Because Dad was an elder, he was under the impression that he was in a position of authority over Shirley’s children, too. Once in a while, he would admonish one of them, if he thought the child was acting inappropriately. For example, he would tell Megan if he thought she was speaking vainly or being a tiny bit arrogant when in fact she was. “Stop talking that way around the younger children,” he would tell her. “They will pick up on that easily and think it is acceptable.” He thought this was expected of him as an elder. However, the next thing he knew, Shirley was admonishing him in a church-wide e-mail, telling him he was trying to usurp her authority. She also denied that her children would ever behave in a way that needed correcting. So, after that he had to rethink his perception of his authority.

  If he was being difficult, Shirley thought he was trying to assert too much power and control too quickly. That first summer, he wasn’t permitted to have much say in terms of big ideas, like whom to picket, what signs we were going to use, or what slogans we were going to chant. He also wasn’t allowed to approach the pastor when he was frustrated by a situation. But he was really trying. I could see that he was willing to do whatever it took to earn acceptance.

  My father thought that going to law school might be the best path to gaining the Phelpses’ respect and, from there, status in the church. Pastor Phelps and eleven of his thirteen children, including Shirley, had law degrees. Their law firm, Phelps Chartered, had been founded by the pastor in the 1960s. He had earned his law degree in 1964 from Washburn University School of Law in Topeka, but his reputation for being volatile and confrontational on a weekly radio show made it hard to find a judge to vouch for his good character, which was a prerequisite for admission to the Kansas state bar. The pastor supported his own case by presenting evidence that he had been an Eagle Scout in Mississippi, earned an American Legion honor, and received a letter from President Harry S. Truman. The proof was sufficient to allow him into the bar, and he was admitted that year.

  Interestingly enough, the pastor said he had originally become a lawyer because he wanted to represent the disenfranchised, particularly the black population. He had been born and raised in Mississippi, and he believed it violated the Word of God to treat black people as poorly as he had seen them treated in the South. During his first years as a lawyer in Kansas, he took on mostly civil rights cases and won nice settlements for his clients. He liked to boast that he himself had systematically taken down the rigid Jim Crow discrimination laws in Topeka, winning discrimination cases against school districts and police forces.

  In 1977, though, his right to practice law in Kansas was revoked. He had been preparing a case for trial and requested a transcript from a court reporter, Carolene Brady, which she delivered a day later, but a day late. Even though the transcript did not play a part in the outcome of the case, he sued the woman for $22,000 in damages. He called her to the stand as a hostile witness during her jury trial, where he badgered and bullied her for a week, leaving her distraught. During the cross-​​​​​​examination, he challenged her about her income tax returns, her reputation, her competency, and her morality or lack thereof. He alleged to the court that she was a slut, and to prove his point, he subpoenaed ex-boyfriends of hers whom he wanted to testify about their deviant sexual practices. Eventually, the pastor’s case was thrown out. He immediately filed an appeal, claiming under oath to be in possession of eight affidavits from supporting witnesses, but when Brady’s lawyer contacted those witnesses, he learned none of them had provided the pastor with an affidavit. On the basis of that perjury, the pastor was disbarred in the state of Kansas, although he could still practice on the federal level.

  Eight years later, nine federal judges filed a complaint against the pastor, five of his children, and a daughter-in-law, alleging the family had made false accusations against all nine of them. It took four years for a settlement to be reached. The pastor agreed to surrender his law license permanently in exchange for leniency for his children, so he could no longer take on any cases. Charges were thrown out against three of the children and the daughter-in-law, but his daughter Margie was suspended from practicing in federal and state courts for one year, and Fred Jr. lost his right to practice in both courts for six months.

  Nevertheless, the Phelps Chartered law firm was highly regarded and was always very busy with clients from all over northeast Kansas. The clients knew about the Phelpses’ religious convictions, but they also recognized them as some of the best lawyers in town with a winning record. The firm also rarely turned down clients, even those who might have trouble paying. To collect their fees, the firm might work out a deal with a client to garnish his paycheck. There were clients they did refuse to represent, such as any couple seeking a first divorce, because the church believed that a couple should be together for life. Phelps Chartered would, however, represent a client getting a second divorce, saying that perhaps by divorcing, the client would reunite with his or her first spouse.

  My father was under the impression that Shirley would be delighted to hear he was interested in being a lawyer, too, so he took it upon himself to apply to Washburn University School of Law, the pastor’s alma mater, without consulting her first. He was accepted and offered a full scholarship. Even though he had never studied anything related to law, his LSAT scores were near perfect. When he got his acceptance letter, he proudly took it to Shirley, and was totally taken aback when she told him she forbade it.

  “We don’t need anyone else to be a lawyer,” Shirley told him. She made it clear that if he went against her and decided to go to law school anyway, she wouldn’t hire him at Phelps Chartered, because his work there wouldn’t help the firm’s bottom line; instead, they would just end up having to pay him for work they were doing themselves. She told my father to stop copying what her family was doing and find a career path more suitable to his talents. “Stop wasting your time in school. Your family needs you,” she told him, referring to the fact that Dad had moved the family to Kansas to keep me from taking the wrong path, and he had to keep up his vigilance.

  My father was really disappointed and upset. But, after some thought, he told the family that Shirley was right. Her guidance wasn’t to be scorned or taken lightly; it was a gift. If Shirley told you anything, it was as good as hearing it from God. In this case, God was telling Dad how to help his family. “I need to stop being so arrogant,” he said, and dropped the idea of law school altogether.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Lift ye up a banner upon the high mountain, exalt the voice unto them, shake the hand, that they may go into the gates of the nobles.

  —Isaiah 13:2

  People called us haters because the word hate was so prevalent in our protests. The rejoinders we heard most often from people trying to refute our message were: “God loves everybody” and “God is a loving, tolerant God.” But as the pastor told us, these were perhaps the biggest lies of all. In truth, it was God who hated, not us. The pastor was God’s mouthpiece on earth, and we were only the mess
engers. Most of our detractors thought that we went around spewing the same handful of lines from scripture and hiding behind a distortion and perversion of the Baptist faith. This couldn’t be less accurate. The pastor might have called himself an “old school” or “primitive” Baptist, but the theology he preached was fundamental Calvinism.

  Calvinism was not the least bit new in America. It had been the religion of the Pilgrims, the Puritans, and many of the Founding Fathers, and in one sense the reason why the Pilgrims left for the Promised Land in the first place.

  Before John Calvin and Martin Luther, there really were no Protestant faiths. They were two spiritual leaders who dared to challenge the status quo, Roman Catholicism, and they were the leading forces in the Protestant Reformation in Europe.

  In the early years of their ministries, they were considered as radical as our pastor was now. Martin Luther had dared to challenge the Catholic hierarchy with his Ninety-Five Theses. For that, he was excommunicated by Pope Leo X, and condemned as an outlaw by the Holy Roman Emperor. John Calvin was only eight at that time, but later made his own break from the Catholic Church in France when he published his Institutes for the Christian Religion in 1536. He, too, made lots of enemies, and many men in power condemned him. He eventually fled from France to Geneva, where his teachings became the foundation of Calvinism. He was basically a Christian apologist, with an excellent grasp of argument and logic. I could see this same trait in the pastor. There was no argument involving the logic of scripture he could not win.

  Luther’s and Calvin’s biggest grievance against Catholicism was the hierarchical organization of the Catholic Church. They both thought every man had equal access to God through the scriptures. They were also opposed to the sacraments the Catholics insisted were required for salvation, especially since priests had become so corrupted, they were willing to sell indulgences to wealthy people to put them on the path to heaven. But for Calvin, the corruption was only part of the problem. He had the conviction that decisions about eternal life had been predestined by God, who had identified the people who would be saved before they were even born.

  According to Calvin, no one could know if he was heaven-bound, because nobody understood God well enough, or was even capable of knowing God that well. However, there was the built-in presumption that if you lived your life like you had been chosen, with day-to-day, hard, honest work and rigorous moral standards, the chances were better that you lived that way because you were chosen. The assumption was that God wasn’t going to bother creating people like that just to send them to hell. God’s reward for the people he had prechosen was salvation and eternal life. But since there was still lingering doubt and no absolute certainty who was chosen, everyone still had to be decent and upright throughout his or her life.

  The majority of the early settlers in New England had been either Calvinists or strongly influenced by the religion, and they didn’t believe in God’s overwhelming goodness and affection. The pastor preached about it in “1,001 Reasons Why ‘God Loves Everybody’ is the Single Greatest Lie Ever Told,” available on the church’s website. He said, “Before the 20th Century ‘God loves everyone’ was largely a foreign theology to the United States.…The Puritans that stepped off the Mayflower at Plymouth in 1620, and their progeny that inhabited the United States for nearly 300 years, largely did not believe that ‘God loves everyone.’…They read the Bible daily and believed in the wrath of God and they feared Him greatly.”

  A hundred and fifty years later, many of the men who signed the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution were members of those churches. But during the 1800s, Calvinism was on the wane, and by the twentieth century, most people in our country had rejected the fundamentals of the faith outright. A lot of sincere Christians just couldn’t accept that they were most likely going to hell despite the lives they led, so they threw out the rest of the Calvinist concepts at the same time.

  The pastor was determined to keep the model going, even if he was only preaching it to a handful of us. On the easel beside his pulpit, he had letters from the word TULIP stacked along the left margin of his poster, which was the acronym for the five points of Calvinism. T stood for “total depravity,” U stood for “unconditional election,” L was “limited atonement,” I was for “irresistible grace,” and P stood for “perseverance of the saints.”

  “Total depravity” was an easy concept—every single person was born a sinner. Sometimes, it was referred to by the grimmer phrase “infant damnation.” The idea was that after Adam and Eve’s fall from grace, the rest of us were born innately evil. By no means did it imply we were pathological murderers or criminals, but because of original sin, we were all sinners. In fact, this was why men could not save themselves.

  “Unconditional election” was the concept that seemed to rile people up the most. It was hard to buy into the idea that there was no chance you could earn your way into heaven, that you had to be chosen by God before you were even born. No amount of faith or repentance or righteousness would change your destiny. To me, the biggest misapprehension about Westboro was that we picketed to try to convince people to come to our side before it was too late, telling them “repent while you can.” This couldn’t have been further from the truth; we were just spreading the word that sinners were going to hell, because God wanted it that way.

  “Limited atonement,” or partial redemption, also caused a lot of consternation from other Christians. They were under the impression that a true, selfless faith in Christ would secure them a place in heaven. But limited atonement meant only the elect would be so graced. If you weren’t a chosen one, you weren’t destined for God’s kingdom of heaven no matter how sincerely and how often you repented. There was no salvation for you. On the other hand, if you were one of God’s elect, then atonement for transgressions was possible, because the error of your ways had really been part of God’s master plan for you.

  “Irresistible grace” was pretty straightforward. God’s call was invincible, infinitely more powerful than hatred and hating hearts. Nothing could change the predestiny of the chosen ones, who were guided by God’s grace alone. God would not forsake anyone he had chosen.

  “Perseverance of the saints” was also known as “eternal security.” Again, it didn’t really have anything to do with man’s life on earth but referred instead to God, who, having predestined people to His kingdom, would sustain them with faith until they got there.

  It came down to this: Salvation was conditional, and election was unconditional. Salvation had to do with time, and election was God’s decree, plain and simple, predestined without time or place. God’s election was a mystery known only to Him. Every single person was guilty before God, and therefore deserving of His wrath. Certain sinners were chosen to be saved, but they were not saved yet. Without the elective intervention of God, salvation would be impossible. All sinners but the chosen few were justly and eternally condemned. The proof of everything the pastor said was written in the scriptures, but I was quickly learning that the ignorant were not aware of the message. The WBC was only spreading the Word of God.

  On Sundays, the sanctuary would be pretty much filled to capacity. The atmosphere was always festive and energized. We weren’t required to dress up for the service, although a few people liked to come in dresses or suit jackets and ties. Anybody who was just arriving from a local picket was usually dressed for comfort rather than ceremony. If it was cold, we’d be in sweat suits and layers, all of which were acceptable. The women had to have their heads covered, so most of us wore scarves, but a few opted for hats or bonnets.

  We’d all take our seats in the pews. By habit, families sat together and in the same place each week. The Drain family pew we’d been assigned was the last one in the back on the right-hand side. Like all the families, we had a cardboard carton at our pew holding all the things we needed on a regular basis: pencils and notepads to take notes, extra scarves and head coverings, and our Bibles.

  We all had
the regular King James Bibles, each encrusted in gold leaf. The cool teenagers brought their electronic Bibles and their laptops with them, as well. That way we could look up passages from the Bible when we needed to or refer to any of the current events that the pastor would be talking about. The service always started with a song or two, straight from the traditional Christian hymnbook. Fred Jr., who sat at the upright piano in the front left of the church for the entire service, accompanied us while his wife, Betty, led the singing. The whole congregation, men, women, and children, were allowed to sing. Marge Phelps, the pastor’s wife, dutifully sat directly in front of the pulpit to listen to her husband.

  When we were on the final verse of the opening hymn, the pastor would enter through a door close to his pulpit. He usually wore a rumpled sports jacket and slacks. His long, wiry gray hair was hack-combed, giving him the look of someone who had just gotten out of a convertible. He was in his early seventies when we first got there and very fit. He loved to bike and run daily. Members of the congregation, even the ones not related to him, called him Gramps.

  The pastor’s first action after he took the floor each Sunday was to distribute a newsletter that he had written covering current events of the week. Then, he would begin his sermon in his distinctive Southern drawl. These sermons were the best opportunity for me to get up to speed on the opinions of the church. The first few weeks, I thought they were a little difficult to understand. The pastor presented them as if everyone knew every reference he was using. I understood them, but on a rather rudimentary level. I soon discovered they could be appreciated on many levels. They were layered. The more seasoned a Christian you were, the more you would understand.