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

by Drain, Lauren; Pulitzer, Lisa (CON)

  Margie, who had never liked me much, wanted to instill guilt about what had happened with Brian. “This is never going to happen again,” she admonished. “If you can’t stop thinking about being in a relationship, you are a weakling. Grow up and get over it.” She wasn’t done with me. Next, she took me with her on an out-of-town business trip about a legal matter. The most embarrassing part was that she brought her son Jacob along, too. He was close to me in age, making it all the more awkward and embarrassing. “We are not going to tolerate this,” she said, as we drove along through the cornfields of central Kansas, a pair of eyeglasses perched at the end of her nose. “Next time, you are out. I hope you realize the seriousness of what you have done.” For the next two days, she chastised me in front of Jacob, telling me that it was not right to lust after boys.

  I wished I hadn’t gone to Brian’s house, only because it wasn’t worth the humiliation. I felt embarrassed and really insignificant, and I thought that if I died, nobody would even care. When Margie and I got back, people in the church gave me horrible looks. They talked about me behind my back, saying I didn’t belong, warning one another that being with me would cause you to sin and have sex, and that wanting a boyfriend was evil, worthy of hell. Members would call me over at a picket to talk to me about what I had done. “Do you realize you are tempting God and tempting hell? God can kill you any day for doing things like this,” some of them told me. I found it hard to believe that I was the only girl who had ever felt this way about boys, but that was the way it seemed. I hadn’t known I was going to be stranded by a flat tire and get caught. Now, I knew my car crisis had been a message from God expressing his disappointment in me.

  My parents said they were done with me and sick of answering my questions, which they thought were just attempts of mine to find a loophole and do as I pleased. They grounded me and didn’t let me out of the house for anything other than pickets, chores, and school. I had to check in constantly if I was out of the house. Mom monitored everything I did at home. Anything involving trust, even driving unsupervised, wasn’t allowed. There was little chance I’d be earning the trust back any time soon.

  I was still allowed to go to Topeka West, but my father pulled me out of the technical school one month before I was supposed to get my nurse’s aide certificate, which meant I couldn’t be certified and had to wait until the second semester of nursing school to get it. This was the second time my father had withdrawn me from school over a boy. I was really upset about it. I told him I hadn’t done anything, but he said I had been tempted by evil, and therefore I was a sinner in his eyes. No matter what I did, there was bound to be humiliation, phone calls, people having me to dinner to tell me what I had done wrong, all the adults, all my peers, all criticizing me relentlessly, but out of love. As for Brian, I never saw him again.

  That was a turning point in the way I was accepted and viewed in the eyes of the church and my family. In the WBC, you got only three chances for everything. After three strikes on the same issue, you were done, thrown out. I was now in a probationary situation. After this incident, I was still a member, but they had me on watch. I was caught between two incredible extremes, the natural hormonal curiosity about the other sex and then this guilty, nasty feeling for being curious, so I tried to suppress any kind of impulses I had.

  For a long time, I didn’t have any more incidents with boys. Jael was always with me, having been told to make sure I didn’t do anything wrong. She had to carpool with me to keep an eye on me for the rest of high school. Jael wasn’t sanctimonious toward me, which I really appreciated. She understood that people made mistakes. She gave me advice, but she wasn’t judgmental or ruthless. She was one of the only people who tried to cheer me up, suggesting we play volleyball or do something fun in the yard if I was really down. If we talked to a boy at school, she wouldn’t say, “Are you thinking about sex?” She relieved some of my anxiety by making me feel I was worth something.

  She didn’t feel like a chaperone. We’d cry in front of each other and share our fears. She would open up to me about when her parents argued, or when she caught her brother watching porn. I had every reason to believe that we were good, loyal friends. I didn’t dare step out of line, so Jael really didn’t have any dirt on me to report back to anyone. Besides, I didn’t want to put her in the middle, knowing that she had a duty to tell on anyone who broke the rules. I didn’t entertain escaping the church, either. I would never have wanted to live without my family, and there were too many things I didn’t like about life on the outside. I didn’t have much self-esteem anymore. My hair was ratty, my clothes were wrinkled, and I wasn’t taking good care of myself. I felt insecure and ugly. Maybe I was subconsciously making sure I wasn’t attractive. But whatever the reason, I didn’t want to get in trouble.

  I still talked to boys, but only when it was about church business and therefore sanctioned by Shirley. We were interviewed all the time by college students, some studying religion and some in filmmaking classes looking at us as a good subject. Lots of the film students were interested in making documentaries for their classes, and of course the church was very eager for its members to be interviewed. Shirley liked us to be the representatives of the church for these projects, because we were the “young faces” of the WBC. We were the same age as these guys, so we couldn’t be written off as old-fashioned, out of touch, or dark-age dinosaurs.

  I still had a natural inclination to look attractive for the interviews, so I still tended to get a little dressed up when I knew cameras would be present, but I now took extra care to look conservative and appropriate and act the same way. My girlfriends liked flirting with the college guys who were interviewing us. I thought Megan and Jael sometimes teased boys too much, using big, coy smiles to punctuate their arguments. “You are going to hell because you didn’t obey the Lord your God,” they’d say, batting their eyelashes and smiling their dimpled smiles. In the girls’ thinking, it was all innocent, because anyone with a brain in his head had to know they were unavailable. I found this a little hypocritical: flirting while talking about church activities. They claimed they were doing what they were supposed to be doing. They loved the media and being in the spotlight, and they were getting attention nonstop, like celebrities. I was not as high-profile as the Phelps granddaughters, so luckily I wasn’t as sought after. There was too much risk in having anyone think I was taking my flirting too far.

  The girls definitely weren’t crazy mean to me about boys. They tried to be really good influences, letting me know that boys were my biggest threat. “That’s your weakness, that has always been your weakness,” they’d warn me. The church commonly identified members by what that person’s weakness was, and mine was vanity, which was paired with being a whore. Margie’s weakness was wanting babies, so she was deemed “selfish” and “fleshy,” as opposed to spiritual. My father’s weakness was arrogance. Taylor’s weakness was laziness—she never wanted to move an inch. I’d get annoyed with her, but I personally thought that was how she kept out of the crosshairs. As long as none of us acted on our weaknesses, though, we were okay. “Some people here don’t have that problem of being attracted to boys, but you do, it is obvious,” the girls would insist. I’d get shot down if I hinted that they flirted, too. “Some of these girls are stronger than you and don’t go off and do this,” they’d say back to me.

  They didn’t shy away from using the whore word against me. “You can go be a whore if you want. That’s what you are if you don’t stop thinking about boys. You’re a whore.” That word was used so much around me and in that culture that I almost got desensitized. My father had started calling me that systematically when I was trying to flirt with the motocross boy in Florida. Back then, I would fight back, saying, “No, I am not.” But now, I’d become so desensitized to it that it was like saying someone was an “idiot.” I wasn’t particularly caught off guard or superoffended anymore. I knew that if someone so much as wanted to kiss a boy, that made her a “whore.”<
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  The church had the logic that once you were Christian, everything about your life changed, and you couldn’t go back. Dad was not a Christian until he was baptized into the church at age thirty-five, so he had gotten to experience a wild side in his adolescence and young adulthood. I became a Christian when I was fifteen, and now I was trying to lead the righteous life expected of me. Slowly, I began to stop being so hard on myself and did some harmless flirting on the level the Phelps girls were doing—smiling and laughing with boys, but nothing more. After all, they weren’t classifying their behavior as whorish, and they had to know the standard. For their entire lives, they had seen their older siblings and cousins manage these delicate matters.

  Because there was no dating in the church, flirting was technically harmless. We didn’t use the word dating, because to us it was a term loaded with implications of fornication and sexuality. Instead, when two people were interested in marrying each other, they “courted.”

  The system of courtship was based on a set of unwritten rules. Only when we were through with college could we be in a courtship. It was acceptable to court someone only when both people had an established career and the male had set himself up with a home, so that both parties were mature and fiscally responsible. Young women in the church, though, lived at home until they were married. There was no possibility of women going away and living on their own when they graduated from college; only those who had reached their thirties without marrying could live on their own.

  The opportunity for the members of my age group to marry, however, was becoming scarce to nil, especially as the rigid marriage rules changed frequently on the whim of the pastor or Margie. At first, members could marry anyone, as long as the mate was willing to be baptized in our church and become a committed member. Of the pastor’s nine children who were still in the church, four of them—Fred Jr., Shirley, Jonathan, and Tim—​​​​had married outsiders who were now members. Two—​​​​Becky and Rachel—​​​had married members. Three—​​​Margie, Liz, and Abigail—​​​​remained unmarried and lived in their own households.

  Ben Phelps, the oldest of the pastor’s grandchildren, was supposed to be the last person allowed to marry someone who was not already a member of the church. He had met his wife, Mara Jones, at the University of Kansas, where he taught courses in information technology. She had been one of his students and had expressed interest in his religion. Mara cared enough about Ben to get baptized into the church before the two started courting. They had been married by the pastor nine months before our arrival in Topeka.

  After Ben and Mara’s marriage, the pastor made more restrictive rules. A person who wanted to marry could choose only someone who was already a church member. This made the prospect of growing the church through marriage and babies pretty impossible, since there certainly weren’t any people knocking down the church doors looking to join.

  Sam Phelps, who was three years younger than his cousin Ben, had two choices for a wife within the membership: Jennifer or Katherine Hockenbarger. Everyone else his age was related to him. He chose to court Jennifer, who at twenty-four was two years his senior. He owned a home, and he and Jennifer both had college degrees and careers, so the pastor gave them his blessing to court. This was the one and only courtship I ever witnessed, and it was fascinating.

  Courtships were a very old-fashioned regimented ritual and weren’t necessarily designed to help you decide if you liked somebody. Once you began a courtship, the expectation was that you were going to marry that person. It was a total arrangement to be entered into no more lightly than marriage itself. It seemed backward and weird, but that was the rule. But in the case of Sam and Jen, they really liked each other even before they started courting officially, so that was good.

  Couples in a courtship had to have a chaperone with them whenever they were together. Once in a while I was a chaperone for Sam and Jennifer. Sam was six years older than me, but it wasn’t weird to be his chaperone. Both Sam and Jennifer were already my friends. We went to pickets together, ate together, and did schoolwork together. When I chaperoned them, I was really just hanging out with two people who happened to be courting. We’d go to the mall, walk around, and grab a bite at the food court.

  I wasn’t sure if there were actual rules for chaperones or behavior on their part that I had to be on guard for. Were they allowed to kiss? They didn’t try to do anything physical, but I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to report back to Shirley if they did. I knew people who courted were allowed to talk on the phone, but they weren’t allowed to be alone together in person. After six months, Sam officially proposed to Jennifer. They were allotted five minutes alone together, enough time for him to pop the question, her to accept, and them to give each other a peck. Even after they were officially engaged, they couldn’t be together without a chaperone until they were married.

  Six months later, on August 10, 2002, the wedding took place. It was a festive celebration, with all of the elements of a traditional Christian wedding—the church service with an exchange of vows, the pronunciations of man and wife offered by the pastor, and the reception immediately following. Shirley had the reception in her basement, with lots of donated potluck dishes, soft drinks, photos, toasts to the bride and groom, and dancing. Consuming alcohol was frowned upon, so there was no booze.

  I wasn’t at an age where getting married was a pressing concern, but probably like any other teenage girl at a wedding, I fantasized about what my future had in store for me. Being a WBC member made getting married particularly problematic, but if I asked how to bring someone into my life, I got either “You are such a whore for focusing so much on boys” or “God will bring someone to you.” The whole system seemed so filled with inconsistencies and bent rules, all depending on the circumstances.

  My friends never expressed much of an interest in getting married, except for Sara. She was Libby’s older sister, another daughter of Fred Phelps Jr. She was four years older than me and two years older than Libby. She was petite, with an infectious, bright white smile and green eyes, and a loud, beautiful singing voice, which she loved to use on the picket line. One day I heard Sara tell Shirley that someone was flirting with her at work, which she said made her realize she wanted to get married. She added that she was feeling vulnerable and had wanted to flirt back, but she had stifled the urge. I wasn’t sure if she was asking Shirley for advice on how to handle it, but Sara did say that she didn’t think anyone was ever going to join the church just to marry her. “I am glad you are realizing that,” Shirley said with great satisfaction.

  Shirley thought she and her niece were in agreement, but then Sara started bawling her eyes out at the thought that she was never going to get married. A day later, after she had settled herself, she made a complete about-face. She told me that she had come to realize how evil marriage was, how it brought you down and away from your true purpose. Marriage was hell and fire, and celibacy was a singleness of devotion to God, she said, so it wasn’t like you were really alone.

  “You have to find focus in something else, put your energy into something else,” Sara told me, explaining her rejection of marital dreams. I wasn’t convinced she was fine. I thought she was probably just suppressing her desires. She feared being humiliated for flirting, so she had decided to forget the whole thing.

  The marriage system was so arbitrary, though. Some of the members hadn’t courted people in the church. How were they meeting someone outside the church at all? Wasn’t it frowned upon to talk to outsiders of the opposite sex unless they were at a picket listening to our message about God? If the standard for a marriage partner was going to be whether or not the person agreed with our religion, then how come anyone wasn’t allowed to find someone on the outside who was willing to join our religion?

  I couldn’t make sense of it. If I was going to marry someone in the church, I occasionally thought about who that might be. I wasn’t daydreaming or fantasizing about anyone in particular; I was
just trying to understand in a concrete way. Some of the boys in the church were my age, but I had grown up with them over the past few years, so it would be like marrying my brother.

  Jael had three brothers whom I was friendly with, but they were closer to Taylor in age. Paulette, Jael’s mother, was funny about my interactions with them, though. “I have teenage boys to protect,” she’d say to me if I arrived at their house dressed in baggy boy shorts and a tank top. “Wear more layers.” I’d say okay and add a T-shirt, but she made me feel like I was causing problems. I was too young to worry about it and just did what she asked.

  Shirley’s son Joshua, who was about two years older than me, and Margie’s son Jacob, who was my age, were my only real prospects. Joshua was really nice, but he was already through high school. There was the tiniest bit of something between Jacob and me. I knew that he had always liked me. He used to ask me loaded questions. “When are you going to finish school?” he’d say. “You can’t get married unless you finish school.” I hadn’t even had the time to question if I could ever have feelings for him. Every minor action had to have such long-term consequences. The “community involvement” filled anything and everything with so much pressure that I didn’t know how to act. I didn’t know if I should be reserved, forward, coy, naïve, uninterested, or anything else when I was around him. He was nice, but I hadn’t been sitting around thinking I wonder if he would be a good match for me until the pastor’s announcement banning outside marriages. Then, I started asking myself questions. Should I like him because he was the only one available to me? Did I have options? Did I want to be married? I thought I did, but sometimes I wondered if WBC marriages were more like arranged marriages and not based on love. Going on about something as important as who I would marry, with the community weighing in, felt so unnatural. Sometimes I thought it might be better to deny my hormones and forget boys forever, like the nuns, just to let God know I could conquer mortal feelings if I tried my very best.