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

by Drain, Lauren; Pulitzer, Lisa (CON)

  I felt really confident on those midtown streets. I didn’t feel the need to hang close to my father that day. If there was something I needed, I’d ask him, but for the most part, he held the camera and recorded the protest, and I was on my own. He’d walk around filming one of the four of us or some of the people who were hurling insults at us. I felt proud of how he played such an important role and handled himself so calmly.

  About halfway through the three hours of our demonstration, Mom and Taylor came by to bring us something warm to drink. Mom was really nervous; I am not sure if it was because she was uncomfortable with the fact that people, many of them my age, were walking by and yelling violent things at us, or because of some of the messages on the signs. She still didn’t like the idea that anyone besides God knew who was in hell and who wasn’t. After just a few minutes, she took Taylor’s hand and quickly pulled her off to do something else.

  Taylor had wanted to picket. At ten years old, she probably didn’t understand what the protest was really about, but she wanted to be part of it. There was always a bit of competitiveness between my younger sister and me, but it didn’t usually get in the way of how much we cherished each other. I sometimes thought she was a little jealous of me because my father and I were a lot alike, both curious and outspoken. Before our crisis, I had liked grilling him with questions and getting his opinion on my school papers. We had fallen away, but thankfully, we were beginning to rebuild our close relationship. We’d had a lot in common before, like sports and music, and now we were sharing his church. Taylor was struggling to make sure Dad noticed her, too. But if Dad seemed to dote on me, my mother had a soft spot for Taylor. She had almost lost her to cancer, which no doubt made her hyperprotective. Plus, my sister was more soft-spoken and obedient than I was—of course, she was only ten.

  At three o’clock, we packed up our signs and headed for the hotel. It had only been my second picket, but I could tell already that the Westboro Baptist Church was a community that I wanted to be a part of. There was something to it. We moved people to ask us a lot of questions, even if they screamed those questions at us. This meant we had some access to knowledge that they didn’t. Just because picketing and provoking strangers was uncomfortable didn’t mean we shouldn’t do it. The whole three hours had been an intellectually stimulating experience for me. Whether or not I had it right, I hadn’t been afraid. The group’s seeming integrity was powerful, and they were really getting to the root of things, opening the eyes of their detractors to something profound, taking them to a new level of truth.

  I arrived at the hotel exhilarated. My stereotype of a protester had always been an angry person saying something over and over, chanting and shaking a sign in somebody’s face. In our group, we spoke calmly to people who were interested in engaging with us and asking questions. We had good points, substantive discussions, and strong arguments. I liked the high, happy energy on the picket line. None of the participants was mad or mean like I had thought they would be.

  I liked the change in my dad from being a part of this church, too. His affiliation with them seemed to have brought out his humility. He’d so often been a jerk, especially to my mom. He always had to be the funny guy at the party, no matter at whose expense. Now he was less pretentious and didn’t seem concerned with others’ opinions of him; instead, he wanted to investigate something spiritual and do so with integrity. Dad was going in a good direction, and I felt hope for our entire family. I couldn’t anticipate anything bad happening with this new religion guiding our lives.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Praising God, and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to the church daily such as should be saved.

  —Acts 2:47

  Back in Florida, my father and I were managing to hold the peace. Dad was really focusing on getting Hatemongers ready for submission to the festivals. He’d retained the original title, believing it was provocative and would stir interest, but he’d added the subtitle The True Story about Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church. He wrote his own sound track for the movie, but I helped him with editing after he trained me on the software and put me to work.

  I still wasn’t allowed to see any of my Bradenton friends at my house or any of theirs. Despite how empowered I had felt at the protests, I still really missed hanging out with them and getting to be a teenager. I was on my best behavior, trying to get ungrounded, but Dad was not budging. Instead, I had to resort to doing everything with my sister. Taylor was still in public school and often brought her friends home in the afternoons. I’d hang out with them just for the sake of having company, even though they were five years younger. On weekends, Dad let me go to the beach, as long as I was with Taylor. When I complained that I never got to see my friends, he’d encourage me to keep up my correspondence with Megan and the other girls in Topeka, anticipating we’d be moving there sometime soon. They were all I had for contemporaries, even if they lived far away, and when I wrote any of them a letter, I’d get one back about a week later. And of course, our pen-pal relationship earned me Dad’s approval, which was such a huge relief.

  One day in March, my father got off his daily phone call with Shirley with great news. A very small house was coming available on “the block,” the term church members used to refer to the homes surrounding the church building in Topeka. Shirley told him it was ours to rent if we wanted to move to Kansas.

  When Dad mentioned a potential move to me, I thought about it seriously for a couple of days before I decided that I loved the idea. I was sick and tired of living in isolation in Florida, and I really liked Megan and the other girls, so I knew I already had a built-in community of friends in Topeka. I had already decided that Dad’s new religion wasn’t bad at all, and I liked that it had a grand purpose. He and I could spread the church’s message together at pickets and finally be a team again.

  Mom was not nearly as enthusiastic. Dad was in their bedroom reading scripture when she went to talk to him about it. “If you think we are moving to Topeka, you are out of your f——ing mind,” she said, blocking the doorway. My mother was not one to swear. She used profanity only if she was really upset about something. We didn’t have the resources to keep moving, she argued. The student loan payments were dragging down everything, and we were relying solely on one income in the house.

  But this wasn’t the only issue. She still had lingering questions about the church and some of their platforms, especially their view on the “chosen ones.” Mom also didn’t agree with the hard-line nature of their messages. Even though she objected to the homosexual lifestyle, too, she found the church’s judgment overly harsh.

  But Dad seemed to be full of answers for her. I overheard him tell her he was pawning my baseball card collection to help pay for the move. I had a signed Babe Ruth card in there that was very valuable. Dad had wanted me to save it for my adulthood so that I would have something to fall back on in case of an emergency. He never even mentioned it to me before he pawned it and the rest of my collection. I knew he had no intention of buying it back, but I didn’t jump in and try to stop him. I was tired of fighting with him, and I knew that when he made up his mind about something, that was it.

  Mom eventually did whatever my father said, so the argument about moving didn’t last long. He’d been like this for so long that it was almost comical that she thought she had a vote. She would never entertain the idea of separating from him and splitting up our family. When he explained to her that this move was in my best interest, and would get me away from the heathen boys and bad influences all around me in Florida, Mom became much more amenable to the idea. She wasn’t as tight with her family as when we’d first moved back to Florida two years earlier. My father had slowly been isolating her from them after he hadn’t been able to convince them that his commitment to the church was serious.

  She started letting her family know that a move back to Kansas was imminent. They knew that it had to do with the church, but they were also aware that if
Dad had something in his head, my mother was going to go along with it. Uncle Mark was the only one who challenged them at all. “What the hell are you doing?” he asked my father. Dad tried to explain his theological reasons but quickly got angry and left.

  In July 2001, Dad announced that the house in Topeka was ready for us. We packed up virtually everything we owned. We packed Mom and Dad’s queen-size bed, Taylor’s and my bunk bed, the kitchen table and chairs, and our living room couch. Mom packed the linens and the dishes, and Dad packed up his camera, editing equipment, and all of our Bibles. The only things we didn’t pack were my photos and keepsakes, which Dad confiscated, saying he’d return them later. But he never did. It was as if he was trying to erase our memories of life before the church. He also confiscated any of my movies, books, and music that he deemed inappropriate. Our two-year-old calico cat, Jesse, had to be given away, because Dad said too many people in the church had cat allergies, but luckily our adored pug, Buddy, was going with us. Everything happened so fast. In less than a week, we rented a small trailer from Budget Rent A Car to hitch to the back of our Toyota Camry and filled it to capacity. We loaded anything that didn’t fit into the back of Dad’s Ford F-150 quad cab. Dad, with Taylor in the backseat keeping him company, was the lead car of the caravan.

  The trip to Topeka was almost fifteen hundred miles, twenty-four hours on the road. Dad decided to break it up into two days, with a one-night layover in a motel outside of Nashville. There, Dad smoked his last cigarette ever. Since his early teens, he had been a smoker, and I had been begging him for the last ten years to stop. He would strike deals with me—if I got straight As in school, he would quit. Over and over, I got the As and he still didn’t quit, although he kept making me the same promises. But that evening in Nashville, he stopped cold turkey, knowing that smoking was not allowed in the church. This was his first test of will, and he was going to prove he could do it. He was such a sycophant. As gratified as I was that he had finally given up his disgusting habit, I still felt disappointed that he hadn’t been able to do it for me, but rather for Shirley, someone he barely knew.

  I was the primary driver of the Camry, the second car in the caravan. Mom rode with me, since she didn’t really like long-distance driving. We filled the hours chatting, listening to Bible tapes, and discussing religion. The highway took us across Florida, through Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Illinois, and Missouri before we finally reached Topeka.

  We had been to Topeka quite a few times when we had lived in Lawrence, which was only thirty minutes east of there on I-70. For a city of only about 125,000 people, there were certainly a lot of places of worship, a church on seemingly every corner. The mainstream Christian religions, especially Baptist, Catholic, Lutheran, and Presbyterian, were very well represented, but there were a lot of Pentecostal and Eastern religious communities, too. Kansas’s oldest continuous Baha’i community was in Topeka, right up the road from the Christian Calvary Motorcycle Ministry’s house of worship. Of course, the one that interested us was the Westboro Baptist Church, with a membership of less than a hundred people.

  When we pulled up in front of our new house, it was even smaller than I had been prepared for. It was painted a light green color and partially hidden by a great big shade tree. I could hardly see it, though, because of the thirty or so church members standing in front of it waiting to greet us. Everybody was superaccommodating, bending over backward to lend a hand. They were the most welcoming, organized bunch of people I had ever met. They started helping us unload the trailer and the truck, and they had everything inside and unpacked in less than two hours. They had already stocked the refrigerator and the pantry with all kinds of dry goods and supplies. Our new house was only five hundred square feet; by all appearances, only one person should have been living there. It had two small bedrooms, each one big enough for a bed that could be placed only in a certain direction. The tiny walk-through kitchen was connected to a dining room so cramped that it could barely fit our small table and four chairs. One small bathroom was going to have to serve all four of us.

  The church, at 3701 SW 12th Street, was the centerpiece of the block. It was a big and very pretty building, typical of church architecture in the Midwest, with a kind of a faux-Tudor look of wood beams in the white plaster siding. Way up on one side of the oversize roof was a banner prominently advertising the WBC’s website, godhatesfags.com. An American flag hung on the flagpole in front of the church, but it was purposefully displayed upside down out of disrespect for a sinful, fag-enabling America.

  There were two entrances to the church, which was surrounded by a six-foot-tall, black wrought-iron security fence with spindles. Only visitors used the formal main entrance in the front, which was accessible from the street via a paved walkway. During Sunday services, two church members usually stood guard there to monitor the gate. There were times when members of the media who hadn’t secured permission, or other suspicious people, had tried to get in, maybe even vandals, and the guards kept that from happening. Outsiders were welcome to attend Sunday services, but they had to have prior approval from Shirley. Church members entered through an entrance around the back, which actually took us through the pastor’s kitchen into the sanctuary. Half the building was the church, and the other half was the pastor’s residence. Above the kitchen was the master bedroom for the pastor and his wife, Marge. An inside kitchen door led to the sanctuary.

  The sanctuary was large and simple. The walls were covered with fake wood paneling, the kind installed from four-by-eight-foot prefab sheets. Lighting came from ceiling panels, and standard wall-to-wall carpeting covered the floor. There were two rows of twenty or so five-person pews for the congregation. The pastor delivered his sermons from the unadorned pulpit in the front of the room, with a map of the Holy Land pinned to the wall behind him and a poster elaborating the five points of Calvinism on a stand next to him. There were no pious statues or crucifixes on display anywhere, strictly following the policy against idolatry. Around the room, signs with messages such as Fags Are Worthy of Death and You’re Going to Hell were displayed on easels. A few ceiling-to-floor drapes kept extra folding chairs or poster-size props out of sight. Above the sanctuary was the pastor’s office and library, where many of the adult Bible study classes took place.

  Back in the 1950s, Fred Phelps and his wife had bought a house there, and then had started buying up every house on the 3700 block of SW 12th Street for their children when they came up for sale. The street had slowly become the Phelps family compound. All of the members except Bill and Mary Hockenbarger lived on or near the block. Our house was technically across the street, but most people could walk from their houses to the church without having to use the street. The compound was set up so that all the backyards of our various houses adjoined the church property, creating a communal park, a gathering place for everybody of any age. Kids were always out there running around, while the teenagers hung out and kept an eye on them. The church had all the facilities of a park just for our use. There was a full-size basketball court, a 200-meter running track that bordered the inside edges of all the yards, a volleyball area, and a great big swimming pool surrounded by patios with outdoor furniture and picnic tables. We played football on a grassy knoll. A couple of trampolines, a big jungle gym with swings for kids of all ages, a few slides, and monkey bars had been installed for the kids. The churchyard and the ten private yards backing up to it were immaculate, always mowed and manicured.

  I soon found out the kids and teens did all the landscaping and garden work. In two hours, we could mow, blow, and bag the entire communal property and all the yards. No one complained. Kids were expected to help; it was part of the discipline the church instilled. The sense of community was really impressive. When someone needed something, everybody was always there at a minute’s notice. Each night of our first week in Topeka, someone either brought us a meal or invited us over for dinner.

  After that period of isolation in Florida, being with so
many people my own age was a huge blessing and a welcome relief. Megan, just as bubbly as she had been the first two times I had met her, gave me the warmest welcome, and her sister and teenage cousins were almost as effusive. Shirley had told Megan about all of Dad’s complaints and worries about me and my behavior, so she knew we had moved there in part to save me. Before we relocated, she had sent me a letter that said she was optimistic about my potential, even though she knew I was currently on the wrong path.

  One thing that surprised me was how modern and methodical the people in the congregation were. I had never seen a group of teenagers so keen on being current and informed. The Phelps girls knew the facts about everything going on in the news, so they always had something interesting to talk about. Next to the sanctuary, the church had an entire library of filing cabinets with neatly archived information about every organization the WBC had ever picketed. In each individual folder, marked with the time, date, and place of the picket, the pastor put the picket memo, the picket flyer, the reason for our picketing, and all the media we generated from the picket—the news articles, the video, and the e-mails we had received.

  Another thing that surprised me was how tech-savvy everybody in the church was. The pastor liked to say the Internet had been invented so that the church could spread God’s message. He also said that computers could be used for good purposes, although he believed most people used the Internet for bad and wasteful reasons. Ben Phelps, the pastor’s oldest grandchild, and Sam Phelps, Shirley’s oldest child, ran the church’s many websites. Godhatesfags.com was the primary site, but because hackers were constantly trying to shut it down, there were plenty of others, too—godhatestheworld.com, godhatesthemedia.com, americaisdoomed.com, and priestsrapeboys.com—to name a few. If there was a new technology, the church had it first. The office was equipped with computers and fax machines, which were programmed to blast out the church’s messages twenty-four hours a day. That way, even when members were sleeping they were doing a kind of picketing, spreading the Word of God.