Banished: Surviving My Years in the Westboro Baptist Church (28 page)

Mom was really upset by the new restriction, even though she pretended it was not a big deal. Up until then, she had been occasionally exchanging letters, e-mails, and holiday cards with our family back in Tampa. They knew we didn't celebrate Christmas, and out of respect for our faith, they didn't send us gifts. After the pastor's announcement, Dad sent a really long letter on Mom's behalf to my grandmother in Tampa, explaining why he thought their family was not good for her. His letter was typed, not handwritten like Mom's always were, so they would know it was coming from him. He cited scripture and told them why they were all evil and going to hell. My mother contributed some lines to the letter, but Dad read it over and edited her parts.

Grandma wrote us a couple of more times, but eventually she stopped. As for my mother, she would have put our entire family in jeopardy if she hadn't obeyed the order and could have even been kicked out. I felt so bad for her.

The world was getting smaller and smaller now that we couldn't even communicate with our extended family. The pastor had already banned bringing new people into the church through marriage, and now we couldn't communicate with our own extended families. I was wondering how I would ever find someone to marry. With Josh's departure, the only viable candidate was Margie's son, Jacob. I still couldn't picture myself with him. I didn't even have the ability to question if I liked him. I heard that he told one of the other Phelps boys that he had started thinking about me, and the boy told him,

"Don't think about Lauren. She hasn't graduated yet."

Slowly, they were changing the rules. During a phone call I had with Margie, somehow we got on the subject of marriage. I figured this was the perfect opportunity to clarify the procedure for finding someone. "I don't think there should be marriages anymore," she responded. "I don't think it's appropriate.

I'll be God-damned if I ever sit in the pew and watch another person get married."

I was shocked. When I asked her why, she said with the end of the world so imminent it wasn't necessary for us to keep marrying and procreating. We could wait for Judgment Day with the membership we had, with, of course, those children born to members already married. She wanted me to know that it was better to rejoice in the fact we would never get married and have families of our own. After all, it was a privilege and a blessing to be able to focus on being obedient to God.

For whatever reason, I took Margie's declaration personally, especially when she said she had known for a while that I wanted to get married. "It is worldly lust to want to marry," she proclaimed during the phone call. "You are so vain and selfish."

Margie tried to argue that the marriage ceremony was an American tradition, and just as the church no longer honored the Fourth of July or other American holidays, we'd stop celebrating marriage, too. I tried to challenge her on this point. "Where in the Bible does it say there shouldn't be marriages?" I asked sheepishly. When she couldn't find any passages, I began to cite verses that wholeheartedly endorsed my position, going so far as to say, "Marry or burn." Margie was totally offended and told me I was being outrageous. However, she always had a way of spinning her own views to make them sound reasonable and shut down the conversation.

Whatever my thoughts had been up until then, I was really angry at Margie for thinking that she could just invent a new rule on a whim. I wanted to obey the rules and to look for guidance when I wasn't sure. But that marriage was no longer a possibility? That was ridiculous. I started asking the other members what they thought of Margie's new "rule." Some of them clearly hadn't heard it yet, but by the way they reacted, they were beginning to put it together. Most of them took her side immediately and said, "How dare you try to preoccupy yourself with marriage and pregnancy?" I should be picketing instead, they told me.

The only one who gave me any hope was Ben, the pastor's oldest grandchild, who married a few months before we arrived in Topeka. Ben called me on the phone to tell me that Margie didn't get to make the rules, despite her very strong influence over the other members. He said that it wasn't up to Margie to declare a ban on marriage. Ben's opinion was that I could marry anyone I wanted, as long as my choice proved to be a good person and joined the church. If it was God's will, God would bring me somebody, and it would all work out. To me, it seemed so unlikely. But at least I didn't have to resign myself to not marrying at all.

I couldn't help but think that Margie's crusade was motivated by an overwhelming desire to ensure I didn't end up with her son. She had never been married herself, so there was just the two of them. I had never felt that she liked me much, nor did she seem to like anyone in my family. Margie and my dad frequently butted heads. Both of them had type-A personalities, so if my dad was speaking, Margie couldn't be talking, and vice versa.

Margie was extremely overbearing and overprotective of Jacob. Nobody was ever going to be good enough for him. Banning marriage was a surefire way to keep him close.

Besides Ben, the rest of the church members still thought I was marriage obsessed, and I couldn't seem to please anybody. Any time I thought I had a grasp on the behaviors that defined a good Christian, the rules changed. If I asked for clarifications, I was attacked for that as well. Our focus in life was supposed to be our pickets and protests. I was told by several of the elders that I didn't need to be married to do that. In fact, if you were married, you were going to have kids, and you couldn't be out protesting with tiny infants.

Infants tied you down and took you away from what you were meant to do.

Besides, no one was good enough to marry Shirley's or Margie's kids. No one could possibly prove to be as Christian as they were. They had been doing this ministry since they had been born.

Shirley ripped into me for objecting to the marriage ban, which made me think that she didn't want the rest of her kids married, either. "How dare you question God and his plan?" she asked me. "The Lord is returning soon and the world will end. Everyone will be judged. The Lord is going to destroy the world, save the people who are good, and send the rest to hell for all eternity." I had no hidden agenda. I was only twenty-one, and I just couldn't accept the idea that I would never be married.

But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts: and be ready always to give an
answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with
meekness and fear.

--1 Peter 3:15

Jael and I finished nursing school and graduated together near the top of our class. In keeping with tradition, we picketed our college graduation, and neither of us went to our pinning ceremony. We accepted full-time jobs in the cardiac wing of St. Francis Hospital, where we had both worked part-time for several years. If I wasn't working, I was focusing on everything the church expected of me, studying the Bible without being contentious or splitting hairs. I was successfully staying away from boys and evil, spreading the Word of God, and contributing financially to the church coffers and to my family.

On top of my usual contributions for room and board, I used my $5,000

signing bonus from St. Francis to cover the down payment for Dad's new Ford F-150 at his request. He said the truck he was driving was too old, and he needed a new one for the church to use. Mom and Dad said my paying for these things was a good idea, because they had taken care of me my whole childhood. I wasn't particularly happy about that, but having feelings was lame, anyway. Shirley liked to let us know that God didn't mention feelings all that often in scripture. "He didn't mention one word about the feelings of the sixteen billion rebels he sent straight to hell in Noah's flood,"

she wisely pointed out.

By the time I finished nursing school, I had already been picketing on behalf of the church for five years and still found it thrilling. More so than ever, picketing was the favorite tactic of the church, and the pastor was definitely working hard to give us a presence at the location of any calamity or sinful behavior in the nation we could get to. As far as he was concerned, doomsday was undeniably imminent. Although no specific date was on the calendar, the day was getting closer, and the church started firing up its rhetoric against Jews. They didn't see the message as anti-Semitic--the pastor was actually welcoming of any Jew who might be one of the chosen few. I had never had any Jewish friends, so I wasn't personally offended. I wasn't the one hating Jews, God was, and it was all in the Bible. It wasn't meant to be an ethnic slur. The pastor said it was prophesied in Revelation that in the end, all nations of the world would march on Israel, and only 144,000 righteous Jews would survive. He said the rest of the Jews were false prophets and Jesus killers who mistakenly considered themselves the chosen ones. He even put out an invitation that if any of the 144,000 Jews eligible for heaven read his message, which he'd posted on

godhatesfags.com, they could emerge and join our ranks. "Join the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ! We are your friends and brethren, we are eager to meet you; to oppose the Wicked with you; and to join Christ in the air with you, when he comes in power and glory to claim his own and punish the disobedient!"

Atheists, Catholics, Muslims, Irish, Australians, and Swedes made the list of the specific kinds of people God hated as well. Although the ignorant might think some of our targets were ludicrous, God was guiding us to the locations that piqued his wrath, usually on the grounds of homosexuality or religious practice. Our godhatestheworld.com website had a map of the world on it, where you could click on any country to find out why God hated that country. All the countries had subcategories: "Filthy Manner of Life,"

"God's Wrath Revealed," "False Religious Systems," "Government," "Poster Children for Sin," which gave more details about our specific objections. We picketed appliance stores that sold Swedish vacuums, because God hated Swedes for their tolerance of homosexuality. We picketed Coretta Scott King's funeral, because she supported gay rights. The late Princess Diana was referred to as a royal whore. Anyone at all who was prominent in society should use his or her position to take a stand against sin. If he didn't, he was abusing his power, like Caesar. The more powerful and prominent someone was, the more likely he or she was to be the subject of one of our pickets.

Every untimely death, from murders perpetrated by madmen to deaths in storms, floods, or accidents, was really an angry sign from an angry God.

The pastor believed that God sent warnings before total destruction. There were the minor destructions, sent to wake up the nation to a grand revival.

God hadn't destroyed our entire country during his September 11 wake-up call. Things happened for a reason, and our nation didn't wake up; we were doomed. Sometimes, the punishment of a minor calamity woke you up to your spiritual side.

But a year or so after September 11, nobody was protesting the sins that provoked the attacks. We realized that there was no more hope for this country. We had to pray for God to destroy it, because there was no enlightenment here. The pastor told us that the apple of America had gone rotten, and though we were the elect, there still could be hope of enlightening a few. All the other churches were praying for God to bless this nation. He had blessed it, but no one had been listening. In January 2006, Shirley began signing people up to picket the funerals of twelve West Virginia coal miners who had lost their lives in a mine accident in Sago, West Virginia. "Thank God for this tragedy on America," the pastor said in his flyer. The pickets no longer had to have direct links to homosexuality or the military, because God created havoc wherever there was tolerance of homosexuality, which was in every corner of our depraved nation. We went where the news trucks went, basically. God's anger toward America was obvious to us, even though the mining community and the rest of the world might have thought their miners were innocent victims.

Within twenty-four hours of sending out the protest request to the municipal hall of Buckhannon, West Virginia, the church received its highest-ever number of angry phone calls. "You better not come here, we have guns,"

some of the messages warned. Shirley decided no one under eighteen could go. She said she was going to replay the messages for the police department to hear, so that they could be prepared to protect us properly.

Our picket location had to be relocated after West Virginia Wesleyan College refused to let us stand on campus property, but other than that, nothing extraordinarily violent took place. There was just the usual hurling of insults and vulgar names by the counterprotesters. My father was among those who went on the picket. He, Shirley, and the other in-your-face people always signed up for the pickets that stirred the most controversy and grabbed the most media attention.

Mass shootings were another way God was punishing America. When a milkman shot and killed five Amish schoolgirls in their one-room schoolhouse in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, before killing himself, we were planning to picket the funerals. However, Shirley made a deal with Mike Gallagher of the nationally syndicated
Mike Gallagher Show
: In exchange for an hour of airtime on his program, we would forgo our demonstration. On the show, Shirley commented that the girls deserved to die because the Amish created their own form of righteousness.

The pastor also agreed with her that the slayings were justified. They demonstrated God's retaliation for sins committed by the blasphemous governor of Pennsylvania, Ed Rendell. The governor had recently signed legislation that made it a crime to picket within five hundred feet of funerals or memorial services in Pennsylvania, and then slandered the WBC on Fox News. In truth, the logic of God taking the lives of the young Amish schoolgirls made sense to me. If God was mad at America, He was going to hurt its people where it hurt the most--by killing their children.

The contrast between how the Amish community looked at the tragedy and how we viewed it was stunning. Both communities were strict adherents to the Word of God in every aspect of their lives. However, the Amish, through God's grace, forgave the shooter and prayed that God would judge him with mercy. We, on the other hand, just knew everybody was going to hell. If it was God's will that I spread His Word at these kinds of events, then even if I personally found it distasteful and exploitative to picket the funerals of small children, I was in no position to say no.