by Libby Phelps
Since the service would often take two hours, toward the end we tried not to fidget and looked forward to when Gramps would pick up his tall glass of water to take a drink, indicating the sermon was finished. At the end of the service, Uncle Tim would go back up and everyone would stand and sing another hymn. Then Gramps would say, “And when they had sung a hymn, they went out,” per a Biblical verse. We’d file out.
Every so often, we would have a baptism, when someone wanted to officially become a member of the church. Unlike many Christian religions, our baptism wasn’t performed when we were a baby; it was when we were old enough to make the decision for ourselves that we wanted to be a member. After all, Gramps said, Jesus was an adult when he was baptized.
My own decision to join the church came, as did many events in my life, with a mixture of laughter and terror. My brother Ben and I shared the trait of reacting to uncomfortable situations with giggles. I had mentioned joining the church to Gramps, and one day when Ben and I were driving in his blue Geo Metro to a picket, he asked me, “Why do you want to be a member of the church?”
“Because I don’t want to go to hell!” I blurted out in a rush. He laughed at me, which made me laugh at myself.
BAPTISMS COULD TAKE PLACE INDOORS OR OUTDOORS, depending on the weather; inside the chapel, there was a curtained mahogany baptismal pool up front, near where my dad played the piano. When I was baptized at sixteen, it was summer, so we used the swimming pool.
Gramps had a specific sermon he used just for baptisms, when he reminded us that we were committing our lives to Jesus and the church and to serving God. Following his sermon, he announced, “Libby has expressed that she wants to be a member of the church. She has a good heart.”
Everyone went out to the pool, and Gramps took his place at the side, holding a sweatband in his hand. He waded into the water with his black water socks, dark blue shorts, and black T-shirt, and beckoned me to follow in my black and pink athletic shorts and T-shirt. As we stood waist-deep in the turquoise water, he put an arm around my back, putting the sweatband over my face and dipping me back into the water, so I was completely immersed in it. Bringing me back up, he said, “I baptize you my daughter in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit into newness of life.”
After every baptism came the Lord’s Supper, where everybody would drink from one wine cup and eat unleavened bread, both of which had been blessed by Gramps. “Anyone who eats or drinks unworthily is going to hell,” he would remind us. I was always a little afraid I would choke on the bread or the wine and start coughing, but thankfully I never did.
Our everyday behavior outside the church was almost as important as what went on inside every Sunday. We were charged to always be thankful that we had been chosen as the Lord’s elect. As such, bad moods were not allowed. Period. If we woke up on the wrong side of the bed, we just had to act like we hadn’t, and put a smile on our face. If my mom could sense that I was cranky, she would give me space, telling my siblings and father, “Don’t disrupt Libby, she’s in a bad mood today.” They would all make a really big deal out of it; if we weren’t being cheerful, we weren’t being helpful to the church. “If you’re in a bad mood,” they would say, “your heart is in the wrong place.” And if we ever acted cranky before going to a picket, watch out. “Shape up!” Shirl would be quick to snap. “You can’t go out there looking like that.” We always had to be cheery. If you look at any of the videos of our pickets, you’ll notice that all of us are always smiling and singing and happy. This was no accident. Even if we weren’t delighted to be out there—and how could we be, when we were doing it every day of our lives?—we had to look like we were.
But the good-mood mandate worked. Unfailingly, journalists and media people who came regularly to gawk at us would write with surprise about what nice, nice people we were, how friendly and considerate and polite when we weren’t holding signs and yelling slogans. Of course, this was partially true: As Midwesterners, we were brought up to be nice. But we always had an underlying fear of getting a talking-to if we were caught scowling or shirking our duties or in any way suggesting that our lifestyle was anything but joyous, 24/7.
Even though Shirl always spouted that everyone should act the same no matter what—i.e., we hold the world to the Bible’s standards (WBC standards) so we have to hold ourselves to it—she in particular acted differently around the media. When British investigative journalist Louis Theroux came to do his documentary on us, she said something like, “We have to be nice to them because they’re gonna get all of our words and put it on display for the whole world to see” in a sing-song voice, with a crazy smile on her face and clapping her hands to the rhythm of the words.
If you follow the WBC’s pickets, it may strike you that they can always find someone or something to accuse of ungodliness—there’s a never-ending list of offenders for them to protest. The inner workings of the church were very similar. The elders will find fault with a person, and when that situation is resolved to their satisfaction, they’ll scan the rest of the group in search of another insignificant issue to find fault with and “correct.” They rebuke one another—I was told sometimes that to “rebuke” means to show honor. It also means to bring something to light and expose it, and shame the person into doing right. Rebuking our own family members was a regular practice among the WBC, as a means of keeping the group on the path of righteousness.
CHORES WERE ONE WAY WE WERE SUPPOSED TO SERVE THE church—the servants of God—in order to serve God. At least my generation didn’t have to go door to door selling candy, like the kids in my dad’s generation did. While Gramps was still working as a layman to earn a living—he even sold vacuum cleaners door to door at one point—he decided that the kids should help support the church by selling candy. Gramps would buy it wholesale from a distributor and assign the kids to different areas to knock on doors and sell it. Recently, I met a woman from Topeka who remembered that time. She said she’d been a child then, and her mother had gotten mad at the Phelps children who’d rung their doorbell. She threatened to call the police. I guess they’d just constantly been returning to the houses nearest to them, trying again and again to sell candy. She remembered feeling sorry for them because she could see the fear and disappointment in their eyes.
When I was younger, starting around the age of eight, my chores consisted mostly of babysitting or helping my mom with her day-care business. As I got older, they expanded to gardening on the block, picking up sticks and any trash, making our block look respectable. When I got my driver’s license, I would be put in charge of transporting some of the younger kids to pickets. I was a good swimmer, so I was also charged with giving swimming lessons to the other kids. Anyone who was having trouble with reading or math in school could arrange to be tutored by an older kid; we used the nursery room, which the very little kids stayed in if their fussiness couldn’t be controlled during church services, as a tutoring center during the week.
Early on, I noticed there was a difference in the distribution of chores. Shirley’s kids never seemed to have to do quite as much as everyone else, getting preferential treatment in terms of the cushiest jobs. I never resented Megan too much because she was my best friend, but I knew that Shirley didn’t like me and I felt like she enjoyed assigning me harder tasks. I am sure, if you asked her, she would say she always knew I was going to leave the church, and that she had no room in her heart for reprobate sinners like me who were masquerading as true believers. Maybe she would even be right.
IN THE EARLY 2000S, AS I GOT INTO MY LATE TEENS, THE church’s rules regarding women began to change and increase in severity, echoing the edicts of Islam and orthodox Judaism in their insistence on women’s subservience to men. For many years, there were certain rules we had to follow as women, though none of them seemed especially onerous. We had to wear head coverings in church out of humility before God. And women were never allowed to give sermons or to speak in church. That was just the way it had al
ways been. Besides, it was usually only Gramps—and sometimes my uncle Tim and in later years the other married men of the church—who ever did any talking in church, anyway. We didn’t think too much about it.
Around the same time, Gramps had started making changes in the church rules as well. I got the feeling he was pushed into it by Steve Drain, who with his family had joined the church and was always trying to impress the church elders with his devotion to piety. He had been instrumental in kicking his own daughter out for sneaking around and messing with boys, and now he seemed to want to push the church in a more extreme direction. Gramps, who was slowing down a bit in his old age, was happy to let him and some of the other men make some more of the decisions.
Soon afterward, power began to be taken away from Shirl and Marge, who for years had been instrumental in organizing church life and maintaining its public image. It didn’t surprise me, nor did the news that Gramps himself was being pushed aside by more radical members. In 2007, WBC members started actively saying that Gramps had lost faith; sweet, humble Gran got on the wrong side of the elders for standing by her husband; she was deemed by Shirl, Steve, and their adherents to be in the wrong for submitting to and supporting her husband. We were told not to talk to Gramps, as we had been forced to do so often in the past when the more outspoken elders deemed other church members’ behavior wrong. Gramps wrote a letter to his congregation, which I never read for myself, but I was told it contained words denouncing Shirl, blaming her for what he thought was the church’s imminent demise. Shortly afterward, I heard Gramps was excommunicated from the church. He died on March 19, 2014, separated from nearly all of his family.
As for me, people I know today wonder how I could have said and done the things I did, but I was living in an entirely different world with entirely different concepts. I know many people have called it a cult, but even after all these years, and all the changes I’ve made in myself and my views, I can’t bring myself to think that it was. It was just the family I was born into.
CHAPTER TWO
FORMATIVE YEARS
“WATCH YOUR KIDS! GAYS IN RESTROOMS.”
That was the sign that started it all. Hand-lettered by Gramps, the sixteen by twenty-inch Styrofoam placard was handed around to all the grownups for inspection. They held it along with other signs at our first picket, which became the event that would forever define Gramps and the church. And it was all in response to a mysterious incident that had taken place one week earlier.
On that day, a warm May afternoon, I had been playing with my cousins on the playground at the family block, as we nearly always did after being dismissed from church. While we raced around the lawn playing tag, the grownups huddled at the stone picnic table, having an intense discussion. We all noticed what was happening, but there was an ironclad rule that we didn’t interrupt the adults when they were meeting. We were expected to be respectful and obedient of our elders, and to be as little trouble as possible. One of the advantages of having so many cousins was that we were able to amuse and govern ourselves; there was always at least one kid old enough to supervise the group.
Today, though, I was keeping more of an eye on the adults than I was on the younger children. All of our parents gathered around the table while Gramps and Gran squeezed onto the wooden benches; it was a bigger gathering than usual for a non-Sunday. As usual, though, Gramps looked like he was leading the discussion; Shirl was chiming in and gesticulating energetically.
At eight years old, I could tell a serious discussion when I saw one. The adults’ conversation was hushed; they didn’t want us to hear exactly what was going on. They rubbed their brows and looked upset, occasionally glancing over at us; we didn’t need to hear the words to know something was up.
I looked at my cousins, wide-eyed, afraid to actually say anything about the situation for fear of being reprimanded. By tacit agreement, we all ran across the lawn and resumed playing tag, far enough away that the adults wouldn’t be bothered by it.
That night, my parents told us what they had found out from Gramps. He had been biking through nearby Gage Park with six-year-old Josh that day when something bad had happened. A man in the park had done something that had apparently made Gramps mad.
“What did he do?” I asked repeatedly. My parents wouldn’t tell me the specifics. They would only say that the man had been a homosexual, and that he had wanted to lure my cousin away, and that the park was filled with like-minded evil men who were engaged in depraved acts and were dangerous around kids. I was shocked, though I didn’t really know what “homosexual” meant. I assumed it was simply a scary man who wanted to hurt children. To think that something so awful was happening so near to our house! And how lucky it was that Gramps had been there to protect my little cousin!
It was only later that I found out the whole story. Josh and Gramps had been riding together in the park—Josh, on training wheels, trailing behind Gramps, who would ride ahead on his bicycle and then circle back around Josh. They had biked down a path that bordered a wooded area in the park, Gramps in the lead, when Josh spotted a man walking out of the woods in their direction. When Gramps circled back to Josh, the man turned around and retreated back into the trees.
That was the extent of it.
Mundane as it was, the incident brought the fire out in Gramps, charging him with a newfound energy and purpose. He’d thought before that the area was a congregating area for gay men, but now he’d seen what he believed was proof—with his grandson in tow, no less. It didn’t matter that nothing predatory had actually happened. The incident clarified for Gramps that homosexuality was taking root in Topeka, and he meant to do something about it. Meanwhile, much as in the game of telephone, the more the story got told in our family, the more predatory the man in it became. Soon, they were outright lurking in the bushes, waiting to capture my cousin and drag him away.
After that meeting in the backyard, Gramps decided to let the town officials in Topeka know about the situation and ask them what they planned to do. He wrote a letter to the mayor, in his typical no-holds-barred style.
“Dear Friends,” it read. “A malodorous sore with the scab off is open and running at the extreme southwest corner of Gage Park. It is a wooded area with footpaths and bush-shrouded coverts affording privacy for indecent conduct. ‘At any hour of the day or night,’ a park official told me, ‘male couples may be seen entering and exiting the area.’ My children, grandchildren, and I are offended and embarrassed by this flagrant situation as we bike and jog in the park…. My question: Do you think Gage Park’s running sore could be permanently fixed?”
Meanwhile, he enlisted all of us to help make small signs to hold up around Gage Park. He and my aunts and uncles figured all the Topeka residents, especially the local church officials, would realize what was going on in the park and join in the fight. The exact opposite happened. The majority of Topekans ridiculed, marginalized, and demonized us; church officials were the most outspoken. Mayor Butch Felker wrote a letter in response to Gramps, agreeing there was a problem, but failing to propose any solutions or take any actions.
Outraged, Gramps started to attend and speak at city council meetings regularly, sometimes bringing us grandchildren with him. I was very excited to be included in these important missions, helping my grandfather fight the injustice of a situation about which he was so obviously right. (Plus, he would give us change to buy candy in the vending machines.) He also wrote letters to the city asking them to cleanse the park of homosexuals. No one heeded them, adding fuel to the fire of his campaign.
It was here that Gramps’s righteous cause really began to take shape. People always ask me why Westboro focused so exclusively on gay people. I genuinely think it was mostly because Gramps spied a niche for his church, an evangelical crusade that could only be made better the angrier people got about it. It was also a Biblical sin that had clearly been outlined in the Leviticus story of Sodom and Gomorrah. When someone would point out the many other laughable �
��sins” in the Bible designated for drastic punishment, like wearing clothing woven from two kinds of cloth, we would always tell them that those things fell under ceremonial law, which the New Testament did away with, while sodomy fell under moral law, which it hadn’t. (The fact that we weren’t picketing about many other now-accepted “sins” on the list of moral laws—like working on the Sabbath, or rebellion against one’s parents—was irrelevant, Gramps would say; he maintained that homosexuality was the one sin that American culture was most aggressively and dangerously trying to promote.)
The pickets started in 1991, once a week at Gage Park. The very first time we picketed, we were a group of about twenty gathered by the park’s main 10th Street entrance, on a nice day with a warm, gentle summer breeze. Gramps stood in the middle of our group, clad in his KU windbreaker and running shorts; he hadn’t yet started to wear the cowboy hat that would become one of his most recognizable accessories. Only the adults held the GAYS IN RESTROOMS signs, along with GAY PARK and others; we stood alongside them, trying not to fidget. Gramps rationalized that it only made sense to have the kids along at the pickets, given that they were at the center of his campaign to purge the homosexual menace from the park. And, as in church, he believed children were never too young to start learning about what made God angry. You never knew when a child would begin understanding what they were being told, so they needed to be told early and often about wrong and right—and what we should be fighting for.
The Topeka cops, whom Shirl had notified in advance of our presence, instructed us to keep on the move; local law dictated that we could only hold a protest if we didn’t stay in one place. So we walked around in a big circle until the grass wilted, before moving on to another circle. At first it was just us, standing by the side of the road, but within half an hour, as people began to pay attention to our signs as they drove by, we got our first reactions. Someone flipped their middle finger up at us and honked angrily. I raised my eyebrows in disbelief and looked over at Josh and Jacob, wide-eyed. How rude! Nobody in our family ever made that gesture, though I’d learned what it meant, as most kids did, from conversations at school. “Fuck you,” someone else yelled out of a car window. Gramps stood firm, smiling ferociously out at the world from behind his sign, assured of the rightness of his cause. It was contagious; we began to enjoy the backlash we got, confident that it was coming from people who didn’t know the first thing about being godly.