Banished: Surviving My Years in the Westboro Baptist Church (23 page)

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.

Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt
thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.

--Matthew 7:5

I still had more questions than anybody in the congregation was willing to answer. Certain verses in the Bible seemed contradictory to so many things we were preaching at the pickets, but I wasn't able to get explanations as to why. I thought people who challenged us deserved honest, straightforward answers. One of my biggest problems was trying to reconcile the scripture with our message, especially when it came to death. A lot of people at the pickets wanted to know how we could make definitive statements such as

"Thank God for September 11" and "Thank God for dead soldiers." I wondered, too, how we could say these things with such authority when Ezekiel 18:32 says, "For I have no pleasure in the death of him that dieth"

and Ezekiel 33:11, where he says, "I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked; but that the wicked turn from his way and live: turn ye, turn ye from your evil ways; for why will ye die, O house of Israel?" People at the pickets would ask me, "God wants us to go to hell?" I really didn't feel like I knew the answer.

The church had taught me to put my doubts in a certain context if I was having trouble with scripture, but it still didn't add up for me. I didn't want to fight, though, so I accepted that certain things were fundamental beliefs of the church, but I never felt satisfied. My name was already associated with words like
tension
,
strife
, and
contention
. Church members liked to say that I stirred up strife. They thought I was trying to change the rules, that I was up to no good, and that I was trying to find loopholes. I was not intentionally trying to be contrary or malicious. I was just trying to logically understand when things were okay in the WBC, what our religion was, and why we were allowed to do some things and not others.

Sometimes in a Bible study I just couldn't keep myself from posing what I thought were probing, intelligent questions or bringing up inconsistencies about things like unconditional election, eternal damnation in hell, and Judgment Day. I would read a verse in the Bible about a catastrophic disaster, then say, "This doesn't seem to match up with what we tell everyone about calamities and tragedies." We were telling people at our pickets all these prophecies, but I was reading something different. At the very least, I felt the biblical events were open to interpretation. God wasn't always straightforward, and His references didn't necessarily mean the same thing in every verse. The church was trying to make everything black and white, but I didn't see how we could be that certain.

There was nothing I could do about what the church members thought of me.

They misunderstood my curiosity as skepticism. I wanted to be a good Christian, and having my questions answered was important. Nevertheless, Shirley dismissed me. She told me, "Nobody else asks questions, not like this," and she said the pastor was in agreement. The part that bothered me the most was that everybody else was also asking questions that were seen as sincere. I thought mine should be, too, and I wasn't sure why I was being singled out as a contrarian. Doubting Thomas, one of Jesus' twelve apostles, had asked questions about the verity of the crucifixion, and he had later been sainted. I just wanted to know how to explain passages that seemed contradictory to me. If someone asked me, "Why would you thank God for killing our soldiers?" I wanted to have a dignified answer. I didn't think that saying "because he didn't obey" was sufficient. There were examples in the Bible where a person dutifully obedient to God was severely afflicted, like Job, and other people who had led disobedient lives went unpunished on earth, like Pontius Pilate.

My passion for studying the Bible was falling off because of the way I was constantly rejected. If I couldn't ask questions, I couldn't move forward. I still knew how to respond to people in public who would hammer us by asking how we could be so cruel and unpatriotic, or by telling us to move to another country. I knew the scripture inside out and many passages word for word. In terms of being passionate and being involved in the ministry, however, I was stuck and very frustrated.

I was feeling irrelevant, because I wanted to be in the church, but I heard rumblings that people were beginning to say that I didn't belong. I wasn't sure if there was a ringleader who was undermining me. Church members didn't mind sharing their intuitions with me, no matter how much they hurt my feelings. "Oh, you don't belong here," or "I'm not sure the church is for you,"

they would say. The intuitions did not come all at once, but throughout the years. They weren't always spoken. Sometimes they were in the way people acted. They didn't want you near them, or they didn't want your influence or opinion. They didn't want to take your advice anymore. They didn't want you to babysit or to come around for dinner. Everybody seemed to be drifting away. I felt that it was them against me, a very unpleasant, paranoid feeling.

My feeling of being excluded got even worse after I was involved in three little fender-benders. I admit I wasn't the greatest driver, and my constant anxiety about doing something wrong didn't help. One time, I rear-ended someone with a broken taillight in the rain. Another time, Taylor was with me while I was pulling Dad's big-ass truck into a parking space, and I scraped a parked car. I was so freaked out that I left the parking lot and stopped around the block to call my mother. She told me to go back to the parking lot and find the driver. When I got back, however, the car was gone, and I never heard anything more from the other car's driver. The third time was the scariest because I had young passengers. I was transporting two of Tim's kids from a picket, and as I was getting into traffic from the shoulder, I was sideswiped on the driver's side. After that, nobody asked me to drive their kids anymore, further cementing my black-sheep status. It wasn't an executive decision, as far as I knew, but I was one of the only teenagers who didn't get asked to drive other people's children. The stigma placed on me was that I was unsafe, that I was not a responsible person.

I was so scrutinized, I had a hard time enjoying myself on fun outings, such as Brent and Shirley's annual ski trip to Loveland, Colorado. It had taken two years for Shirley to even include me, and I tried my best to get my insecurities under control on the vacation. All the kids and teens would pile into the Phelps-Ropers' huge van for the eight-hour drive to Denver, where we'd ski and snowboard for a week. Brent was so much fun, helping us to improve our skills by moving us from the blue trails to the black diamonds.

Even on the slopes, though, I felt like I was being compared to the Phelps kids, and I always came up short. I craved acceptance. I wanted respect and recognition for the things I did do well, but I was so torn down or picked apart for small, inconsequential mistakes that my self-esteem was being completely eroded.

The worst part was, now that everything I did was being watched, my mother was on my case more than ever. She had always been insecure about her own status and about how our family was perceived. The Phelpses talked in a very condescending, highfalutin way: they knew the Bible better, they had more children, and their children did everything for their mothers. My bad status meant she was a bad parent. On the occasion that Shirley criticized me in front of my mother, Mom would respond by saying to me, "Oh, Lauren, you are so embarrassing." I believed Mom was so desperate to elevate her own status that she thought ripping me to shreds in front of others would ultimately be good for her. Plus, I was the oldest, so I represented "the best"

of Steve and Luci Drain's parenting.

If we'd been assigned a neighborhood project such as raking leaves, my mother would ask, "How many bags did you get? Did you get as many bags as the other girls?" For a cleaning project, it would be the same thing. "Did you clean up as much as the other kids?" She was a wreck over the thought that I wasn't as valuable to the group as someone else, and she was relentless in comparing me with people she thought were more worthy.

The first time my parents asked me if I thought I deserved to belong to the church, it scared the hell out of me. It was after I'd kissed the boy from the tech school that they questioned the validity of my membership, and I was reminded that I could fall off at any time and be thrown into hell. Such fear did keep me in check. It made me think twice before saying or doing things.

According to the church, when you died, you were in heaven, or you were in hell. There was no delay. Everyone who was dead was in one of those two places immediately upon his death and was there right now. Being a baptized member when you died was imperative for going to heaven. If you died out of membership, you were bound for hell. "Membership" did not extend to being in fellowship with other churches or congregations, just the WBC. The reason other churches fell short was that those institutions of God should have been out visibly and vocally protesting things and situations in His name. The end of the world was upon us, there were so many sins, and these other churches were just sitting on their hands. That meant God hadn't sent them to spread His Word, like He had sent us.

The WBC had a specific vision of what the afterlife was like. Heaven was being with God. You were with all knowledge and became all-knowing, like God. You were aware of all the scripture of the Bible, and all discrepancies and enigmas fell away. On one side of a divide were all God's people, which was heaven. Then, there was a gulf, a fence, a fixed area you couldn't pass, and beyond that gulf down below was hell.

There were billions of people in hell, 99.9 percent of all the people who had ever lived and died. The other 0.1 percent was in heaven. The "saved" could see the reprobates down in hell burning, which was conveyed to us as the most appealing part of being one of the chosen ones, though the way it was presented didn't make it look sadistic. Megan, Bekah, and Jael would tell me we were going to recognize the people who were covered in flames. I, too, bought into the idea that we deserved the pleasure of watching them get their due as they writhed in torment for all eternity, and every second filled with the worst pain imaginable. Just as we in heaven could see them, they could see us relishing God's glory in heaven, making their torment that much worse. Our comments and judgments could also pass through and be heard by the hell dwellers. Those of us in heaven could shout scripture and tell them, "I warned you, but you chose not to obey." We would also finally get to see who had made it to heaven before us. Sometimes, the pastor would search for a sister church of like opinion, not to merge with ours, but so that we could find other chosen ones. On the rare occasion that he found one that was quite similar, he would find something wrong with it, and that would be it. The WBC had been picketing since 1991, and had been all over the United States. If God had wanted our church to find a co-church, He would have made such a union happen by making the churches find out about each other. But it was not God's will. We were the only chosen few.

At one point in time, the pastor thought of the Westbrook New Testament Baptist Church in Indianapolis, Indiana, as a sister church. He and Westbrook Baptist's pastor, Forrest Stanley Judd, were longtime friends.

When Shirley was growing up, she had been particularly fond of the pastor's wife, Iva Jean, and was heartsick when Iva passed away in 1986 at the age of sixty. Shirley and a few of her siblings accompanied the pastor to Indianapolis for Iva's funeral, where Gramps performed the eulogy.

Nobody from our congregation had been back to their church since then, but when our picketing took us to Indianapolis, Shirley arranged for us to meet up with some of Westbrook's surviving members. On the drive to Indianapolis, she was wavering between joy at the reunion, sadness at remembering the loss of her friend Iva, and extreme apprehension that something was going to be wrong. She was having an intuition that they were no longer going to share our beliefs. The thirty of us in our group met up with them at a Burger King near our picket site. They were going to join us at a large convention where a homosexuality-endorsing event was taking place. They had their own signs and picketed local y, which was why the pastor thought they were like us.

It didn't take long for us to realize that they had changed. Megan, Bekah, and I were standing with the girls from the other church on one of the four corners we were occupying, as Megan led the questioning about their beliefs. We found out that women in their congregation had been cutting their hair, which was disrespectful to God. They gave us plenty of excuses, saying it was too heavy and giving them headaches, but they were changing other things, too.