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

by Drain, Lauren; Pulitzer, Lisa (CON)

  The saddest event was when Bill and Mary Hockenbarger, after having been in the church for almost five decades, found themselves under intense scrutiny. For years, the pastor had been trying to get them to move to the block, saying the world was ending soon. They lived about half an hour away, but the Phelpses wanted everybody close. Shirley and others who had money were still buying up houses, and they had one they thought the Hockenbargers should occupy. Bill and Mary said no; they were happy where they were. Shirley thought it was because they were older, so moving would be too much trouble for them.

  She started to send e-mails about them, beginning with lines like “I wonder what is going on with them.” E-mails and church gossip started to intensify. “I kind of want to go over to their house and see what is going on, because maybe they have too much to do to move,” Shirley would say or write. The Hockenbargers had no idea they were the center of discussion, because they were older, didn’t use e-mail, and weren’t around the church to hear the gossip. Finally, one day Shirley said, “Let’s just go do it. Let’s go help them move.” Everyone listened to Shirley about things like this. She had a very generous heart and knew the collective action of the community would really make the task manageable, like a barn raising.

  One day about thirty of us showed up at their house. As was typical, the workforce was mostly the young people, sprinkled with a few elders like Dad and Shirley, who liked this kind of hands-on work and acted as the overseers. Two of the Hockenbargers’ grandchildren, Charles and Katherine, were also with us that afternoon. We descended on the Hockenbarger property in a few vehicles and parked along the street to begin the surprise cleanup, pack-up, and move. Mary and Bill met us at the door.

  We were almost in shock when we saw what was ahead of us. We’d known that the Hockenbargers had a hobby of going to garage sales and buying things, but we thought it was a casual pastime, something they did on Sunday afternoons. It turned out that they had so much stuff, we couldn’t get through the rooms. It looked like a hoarder’s mess, with garbage, clothes, and useless things everywhere. The garage and shed were filled with rusted tools, an old tractor, and a big rusted snowplow.

  Shirley ordered a Dumpster to be delivered immediately to get rid of the “idols.” She was always talking about “idols,” which weren’t just images but any worldly possessions you had become attached to, as well as attitudes and behaviors. Anything that was put before God in somebody’s life, such as pride, vanity, or even a child, could be labeled an “idol.” The church members would find your idols if you did something wrong before God.

  As soon as the Dumpster arrived, we followed Shirley’s order to throw everything in it. The Holy Ghost was telling Shirley to tell us to clean this house now, and we got started immediately. There was no reason to postpone a decision to think it through. If you were not doing it right away, you were not serving God.

  The thirty of us began throwing away everything in this house of idols, from lamps and knickknacks to household appliances that no longer worked. We began tossing things into the Dumpster with abandon, and having all the kids together made the gigantic task fun. Bill Hockenbarger had no choice in the matter. He was stunned and shaken. “Your idols are gone,” Shirley preached at him in front of everyone. She was practically taunting him. “Are you upset we are doing this? If you are, then you are going against God.”

  My father was trying to use a more practical approach, explaining to Bill that getting rid of things that had no function was for the best. He found a set of rusty levels that were totally outmoded. Dad thought he needed to show him how useless these tools were by demonstrating how the metal piece of the level toppled over when he tried to use it. He was trying to reason with him, but he was being really overbearing and controlling. I wasn’t sure why watching the way my father was speaking to Bill struck me as really funny, when it was really so sad.

  This was Bill’s lifetime hobby, collecting all this stuff. He was freaking out and pacing. When we moved toward his old snowplow in the shed, he began screaming. Normally, he was a soft-spoken, gentle, skinny old guy, but the anxiety was killing him. “You are not throwing this away! Get out!” he screamed, throwing himself onto the plow. A few people wrestled him away, picked up the rusted heap of metal, and dragged it into the Dumpster.

  We all stopped what we were doing. We looked to the elders for what to do next. Shirley said, “We are done, we are done with them.” She looked at Bill and said, “You are over. You are out”—just like that.

  “We’re leaving them with their idols,” Shirley announced to the group. As we walked to the vans, she threw up her hands. “Well,” she said, “we had to kick someone out because of their love of trash.” As quickly as we had arrived, we left the Hockenbargers with half their possessions in the Dumpster. The consensus was we didn’t need them any longer. The church was a complete body. If there was a member missing who was supposed to be there, the church would be off balance until it was complete again. On the other hand, people who weren’t supposed to be in our community were like a cancer, and the sooner we got rid of them the better. Leaving there that day, I knew that the disfellowship process was about to begin.

  The process of banishing someone was the strangest thing I’d ever witnessed. Some people were just stunned, like the Hockenbargers. Others, like Chris, were unbelievably distraught. I personally had a weird feeling of entitlement before another member was kicked out. There was so much power in telling someone he was unworthy. Sometimes, I couldn’t wait until the day came when we would disfellowship someone. But other times, I was so heartbroken over the loss I would bawl my eyes out.

  The official meeting to declare the Hockenbargers disfellowshipped took place in two parts: first, the members met to discuss the matter in private, and then the Hockenbargers were invited in to make their case. The private meeting took place in Shirley’s basement. Those who were out of town or couldn’t make it joined by conference call. We were all invited to share remarks about their transgressions. “They are rebellious and not part of God’s people,” someone said. Everyone started making fun of Bill and how he liked old tools, an old snowplow, and garbage more than God. Even his son and grandson joined in, with his grandson repeating, “Just get him out, just get him out.”

  I was crying and very upset, but I didn’t have anything to add in their defense or to further the attack on them. The harshness was overwhelming. Mary and Bill had been in the church since 1955, had raised their children and grandchildren there, and had great-grandchildren on the way. Most people were red-faced mad at the Hockenbargers, but Bekah, like me, was crying, too.

  Jael’s mother, Paulette, tried to console me. “This is the way it is supposed to go down,” she said, telling me to get a tougher skin. “You can’t avoid God’s will.”

  As the discussion continued, I got the sense that the members were leaving the final decision about the Hockenbargers’ fate until after they heard from Mary and Bill.

  When the premeeting was over, the Hockenbargers were invited in. I watched them shuffle in slowly and take two chairs placed just for them. Once everyone was settled, Shirley asked Bill if he had anything to say, but all he did was lament the loss of his snowplow, and said nothing about wanting to stay in the church. Mary didn’t have much to add, either. The meeting started to get a little out of control, as the expectation had been that Bill was going to admit to his transgression and atone for it. When Mary and Bill got up to leave, some of the members surrounded them outside the meeting room. Through the taunts, I could hear Bill yelling, “Just give me my snowplow back!” They managed to get to their car and drove off.

  I loved the Hockenbargers. I couldn’t believe what was happening to them. I thought, How dare we get rid of the snowplow? I had seen how much it meant to Bill when we had been at their house trying to throw it away. I knew they could have changed people’s minds if they had just offered some words in their own defense. If Bill had shown any regret, they might have given them a second
chance. Once you were kicked out, communication with your family members who were still in was forbidden. You were at the bottom of the world. You had no authority and no say. You were done. That was God’s will—the way it was going to be.

  The Hockenbargers didn’t make any attempt to come back. They remained in their home in Topeka, but as far as the church was concerned, they were just gone. The Hockenbarger family had been the church’s second largest family group after the Phelpses. As high as the animosity in the disfellowship meeting had been, many other members besides me were hurt by the decision to cast them out, but we made peace with it, knowing it was God’s will.

  Two years later, Karl Hockenbarger, Bill and Mary’s son, was also kicked out. He was fifty-three years old and had been baptized into the church when he was nine. He and his wife, Kay, had seven children, two of whom were married to Phelpses. But Karl had committed two transgressions. The first had to do with disciplining his children. He had both underpunished his son by sparing the rod, and then allegedly overcompensated by hitting him too hard. His other sin had been a lack of grace, which meant not living up to God’s standard. In his case, it manifested itself as misbehaving at pickets. He was willing to get into physical fights with people who assaulted our groups on the picket lines, which was forbidden. Matthew 5:39 and Luke 6:29 stated that if someone struck you in the face, you were supposed to turn the other cheek, and doing otherwise would severely compromise the integrity of our message.

  Unlike his parents, Karl desperately wanted to stay in fellowship. Being kicked out meant he could no longer talk to his wife or children. In the early days of his exile, he had to look for photos of his family on our godhatesfags.com website, where we posted the albums from our latest pickets. Two of his children, James and Michael, left within a few months of their father. James, who was then in his midtwenties, departed on his own, because he was interested in a relationship with a woman at work. Michael was seventeen when he left. He had always been a troublemaker. In the middle of a Bible study, he’d say something absurd like, “There’s no proof Pharaoh died.” He was arrogant and always begging for attention. When he started defending Karl, the membership asked him to leave.

  Eventually, Kay left, too, to be with her husband, though both Kay and Karl wanted to get back in. I heard that they were terrified of going to hell, the hottest part of which was saved for people who were thrown out of the WBC or had left on their own. There was no chance for their salvation, since they were no longer part of God’s elect.

  Shirley would go through the motions of sadness when somebody left, either by choice or the church’s decision. “They just didn’t make it,” she’d lament. Then, everyone would get overwhelmed with happiness, whether they were truly happy or not. We would have to offer praise to God for His decision. “It’s God’s judgment, God’s will” was the joyful consensus. The members would dramatically declare they had never loved the person who’d left. They’d bash the person’s character with any negative comment they could think of. Libby, Megan, and Jael were particularly mean-spirited. I would always feel relief that I was not the one God had sent away. I could only imagine what would happen to my reputation if I were to get kicked out.

  When anyone left, the church members would get so giddy and excited about the cleaning out of the church, the sweeping out of the imposters and weak members. Ever since our arrival, the church had been getting smaller and smaller. But it didn’t seem to be cause for concern—according to the pastor, this meant we were getting closer and closer to Judgment Day, the end of the world. On Judgment Day, the Lord Jesus Christ would return in a form that everyone would recognize, a human form, an authoritative form. Every person on earth would be able to see him and know who he was. Instantaneously, everyone would know if he or she was doomed or going to heaven.

  The standards for the heaven-bound were simple enough to understand—be a chosen one and repent for your sins. The degree of sinning that could be atoned for was impressive. Shirley had given birth to Sam Phelps out of wedlock, which was not a secret. Anybody in the press who attacked her or the church seemed to bring it up. Shirley tried to minimize it, saying it was due to the foolishness of her youth, but that at least it hadn’t excluded her from learning and doing better than other reprobates. She admitted that sex out of wedlock was a sin, but she said the people who mentioned it were engaged in a personal attack, because she had already atoned for it.

  Liz Phelps, the pastor’s ninth child (and fifth daughter), also had a baby out of wedlock. I heard she blamed her transgression on stress. She had been on a picket where church members had been injured in an attack, and the situation had caused her a moment of weakness. As a result, she had slept with an African-American man and given birth to his baby. “You don’t understand—I was stressed out about serving God too much,” she’d say. She’d mention her atonement in a totally sanctimonious manner.

  I saw such hypocrisy in these kinds of situations. It seemed to me that forgiveness was not being doled out evenly for everyone, that only the Phelpses got to make justifications for their sins. They often blamed transgressions on stress—the stress of the law firm, the stress of being in service to God, the stress of being hated. But they had atoned. It was all about the sins they’d atoned for. God forgave them, but nobody else had the liberty to mess up and atone. I thought it was so bogus, but I tried to submit and understand.

  Others seemed to struggle with this, too. Betty Schurle-Phelps, Fred Jr.’s wife, made the mistake of holding a grudge against Shirley on account of her fornication. Betty and Shirley were about the same age and hadn’t been friends for years. Betty was a church member before the time Shirley had given birth to Sam out of wedlock, so she held on to that bit of information and tended to use it against Shirley if Shirley was acting too righteously.

  All the women of that age group—Shirley, Betty, all of Shirley’s sisters, and my mother—were in a meeting together when Betty said something insulting to Shirley. My mom spoke up for the first time ever. We had been in the church for about four years by then, and my mother was finally feeling empowered. “You really need to stop this; you need to get along. You are both women of God,” she said with conviction. “The only reason I’m bringing this up is because I’m an outsider, so God sent you someone who has an outside perspective.”

  Shirley and Betty were both stunned, especially since this came from someone as nonthreatening as Mom. They preached that everyone was supposed to be humbled in one way or another, but they usually didn’t think it applied to them. The two women did get along after that, so I was sure it made my mother feel like she was part of something important. It gave her some sense of identity to advise on the subject of humility in such an appropriate, sober manner.

  Margie wasn’t without her own black marks. Her weakness was described as a preoccupation with having a baby, perhaps fueled by seeing Shirley with all of her kids. She didn’t have a husband, which was a bit of an obstacle. She had already chosen a name for her daughter, Hannah, and she had the name sanctified so nobody in the church would ever be able to use it. In time, Margie adopted her son, Jacob, from a pregnant client of hers and had raised him on her own. I found Margie’s treatment of me hypocritical, especially in light of her own personal story; she had clearly forgotten what it was like to be a young girl who was attracted to men and wanted a family.

  Jonathan Phelps, the pastor’s seventh child, had been involved in a scandal in 1984. He was a law school student when he met Paulette Ossiander, a high school graduate who was not a member of the WBC. She joined the church to please the pastor, but she was still considered substandard by the pastor because she wasn’t headed to law school, like his children were. The pastor soon found out that the two were sexually involved and threw Paulette out, but allowed Jonathan to stay under extremely tight restrictions, including being monitored by another church member twenty-four hours a day. The next thing anyone knew, Paulette, by then living nearby with her parents, had given birth t
o a baby girl, Jael. Six months after the birth, Jonathan petitioned the court for joint custody, since Paulette was refusing to let him have anything to do with her or the child.

  At their first court appearance, they both fell back in love, and Paulette invited him to move in with her and her family. They stayed out for more than three years, until the pastor accepted Paulette and brought their whole family back into the fold in 1988. He personally married them at the pulpit of the church. Jael, who was then three, was at the service. They made their atonements, asked God for forgiveness, and picked up their journey from there. The pastor was truly blessed in his decision to invite them back. Jonathan and Jael grew into two of his most faithful and fiery supporters.

  Jonathan had actually been the fourth of the pastor’s children to leave. Nate, Mark, and Katherine had all left in the 1970s. Katherine supposedly left because her father had been very harsh to her after she talked to a boy on the phone. I heard that she tried to run away a few times, but the pastor always found her and brought her back. When she was eighteen, she left for good. Nate and Mark also left after alleging that their father had physically abused them, their mother, and all their siblings. They said he beat them with his bare fists or a wooden mattock handle, and they couldn’t take the torture anymore. Nate was talked into coming back, only to make his final farewell three years later. Dortha, the last of the pastor’s children to part ways, left the church in 1990, and changed her last name to make sure her disassociation with the Phelps family was complete. According to her, she chose the surname Bird because that was how she felt: free as a bird.