Banished: Surviving My Years in the Westboro Baptist Church (33 page)

One time, I saw my father in the St. Francis cafeteria and realized that my mother was in the hospital as a patient. I figured it was probably something related to her recurring back problems. My father would never have come to my workplace unless there was a medical reason. I did a double take when I saw him. He looked me straight in the eye, then turned around and walked away. He wasn't even courteous enough to acknowledge me. I was a nurse, a person, and his daughter. He looked at me with an expression that let me know that I was not even human in his eyes. It was the scariest feeling I ever had. I suddenly thought that I had no importance, that I was nothing but a ghost. I was not a source of comfort to him whatsoever. That I was his daughter and a Christian--none of that mattered.

There was no way I could have gone to see my mother in her hospital room.

For one thing, I would be violating HIPAA privacy laws if I did, and I could be disciplined or fired. Unless someone summoned me and called me in, I couldn't make the decision to visit because I was technically not family anymore. Besides that, since I was no longer a member of the WBC, I wasn't allowed to visit one of God's people. To call on one of our own who was laid up in the hospital was an act of charity and godliness, and I no longer had the right to visit my own mother. I wasn't about to do anything that violated the law or the church, so I stayed away.

However upsetting it was, this encounter in the hospital was actually a major breakthrough for me. It made me realize just how cut off I was. Someone in my family could be dead, and I would never know. At that moment, I realized that I had to carry forward with that in mind.

I ran into other people from the congregation as well. Once, I ran into Liz Phelps and her baby in the Walmart closest to the block. She looked at me like I was demonic and passed me without saying a word. I took to shopping at the Walmart in the more dangerous part of town after that to avoid those kinds of encounters. I didn't care if it was risky; I really didn't care if I lived or died. I ran into Abigail Phelps a couple of times at the gym. I didn't even know we both went to the same YMCA until I heard someone laughing and looked up. It was Abigail, laughing disdainfully and pointing at me. "Oh, my God, it's the whore," she said.

Despite these little emotional setbacks, my spirituality was still a huge priority for me. Without the church, the void where my faith had been was almost unbearable. What did I believe? Had I completely lost my intelligence for seven years? I was so scared of having been lied to or perverted or having lost all my knowledge that I had to hold on to the possibility that the church would invite me back. I didn't want to mess too much with what I had been taught. Making interpretations and judgments on my own was overwhelming.

My life was in a downward spiral. I was in total confusion and turmoil, and I had a god who wanted me dead. I sensed that God was lying in wait ready to kill me. The only reason He hadn't yet was that He liked watching my terror. I had always trusted that the people around me loved and cared enough about me to tell me the truth. Their judgments about me had given me my moral direction, and their picketing had structured my life, too. I hadn't rejoiced in being cast out in any way. It had no freedom in it, only terror. Now that my people were gone, I still believed in the same angry God I had described to anyone who had seen me with a sign and shaken a fist at me.

But now, those warnings were against myself. "Prepare to Meet thy God"

underscored my every move.

It was so scary, but it was real. I had to second-guess every move I made. I'd been telling people for seven years that these horrible things were going to happen to them, and they hadn't believed me. My predicament was that I
did
believe that the pain, death, and eternal, hottest part of hell were indeed my immediate destiny. Now that I wasn't a chosen one, I couldn't really think for a minute I was going anywhere else.

Scott and I continued our relationship. I really liked his support and had fleeting feelings I was falling in love with him. I had no one else to talk to, so I could vent and release with him. He came to Topeka in early spring for another three or four weeks, even deferring a semester in college to stay with me. He said he would move to Kansas if I wanted him to, but I was in no position to be so committed. I was working on navigating the world on my own.

My mother usually didn't take my calls, but I kept trying. Whenever she did pick up, I'd beg her to give me a time frame for a second chance. Chris Davis had been invited back after a year. "Is it six months? Is it a year?" I pleaded.

She told me the pastor wasn't saying anything, and she didn't add any encouragement that things might turn in my favor. Only once did she briefly ask me about my life. "Are you still with that boy?" I said I was. "That's what I thought. I knew you wouldn't stop," she said before hanging up the phone.

On March 14, 2008, I called my father to wish him a happy birthday. He picked up while he was driving and put me on speakerphone. I could hear other people in the car. He was so rude I couldn't even figure out why he'd bothered to answer when he saw my number on his caller ID. I guess he just needed to sink his teeth into me one more time. "I don't know why you're calling me," he said. "I enjoyed my time with you, but we are done now. I don't really know what else we have to say." He was devoid of any emotion.

I was crying, and all he said was, "Well, good-bye." I thought God was reminding me just how much I wasn't missed.

Slowly, I began to trust that there were nice people in the world. I had a few coworkers who were really kind to me, and I also met people at my gym who shared my love of outdoor sports. Still, I really struggled with opening up and warming to people, despite the fact that I no longer thought they were all evil, vile, and unworthy. I was not particularly social. For some reason, I held on to the fear that one of these essentially good-hearted strangers was a fraud and a hypocrite who only wanted to take me down. But I tried to stop judging people's motives, and I trusted that I was no better than anybody else. I might have known more Bible verses, but who was I to say that made me better? I was still too scared to look at things from a radically different perspective, though, because I didn't want God hating me for that, too.

I had spent six months on my own in Topeka, almost to the day, when I made the decision to move to Connecticut. There was nothing in Kansas for me anymore, and I was tired of running into places and people that stirred up my pain. On some sidewalk somewhere in Topeka on any given day, there was a row of picketers who said God condemned fags, fag enablers, Jews, priests, mothers who ate their babies, Louis Theroux, Santa Claus, and me. I was finally sick of believing them. I had flown to Hartford to visit Scott, who was now my boyfriend, and while I was there, I interviewed for a cardiac nursing position at a hospital in his area. When I was hired, I packed up my apartment in Topeka, selling a few little things like my microwave. I made the fifteen-hundred-mile, twenty-four-hour drive with Fozzy beside me, stopping for the night at a motel somewhere along I-80 in Ohio. Scott's family had invited us to move in with them in New Britain, which made the move that much easier.

I needed to study the Bible with someone to find other interpretations to the scriptures, and now that I was relocating physically, I was ready to move spiritually. I saw that there were huge holes in what the church had been teaching me. I had believed every angle of the church's standpoint until they had started shutting me down. When I learned there were other

interpretations equally valid as theirs based on the very same words, I was terrified that my last seven years had been all a waste, all a scam. I wanted to know there was hope.

There was something about a god who hated almost everybody in the world with a vengeance that made abandoning faith altogether an attractive alternative. Nate Phelps, the pastor's first son to leave, became an outspoken, self-proclaimed atheist. I don't know if it was easy for him to give up his god, but I still believed in God and cherished my spirituality, even though I no longer went to church. I still loved reading the Bible, and I started studying with my boyfriend's mother, a woman extremely well versed in scripture.

Changing my beliefs was not easy and took a long time. It was like asking someone who had a PhD in math to change his position on numbers not divisible by zero. I already had verses and passages from the Bible memorized, so I knew my scripture by heart. My problem was with interpretation, discrepancies, and nuances. My study sessions with my boyfriend's mother were scriptural investigations that went well beyond the rigid dogma of the WBC, and I discovered that the Bible was fluid and alive.

She never shut me down or reprimanded me for asking questions.

After about two years with Scott, I made a break from him. It wasn't a great relationship for me, but I was so used to being controlled from my seven years in the church, I wasn't really able to see what was happening between us until I couldn't stand it another day. I had saved enough money to buy a place of my own, a nice condo within an easy commute of my job. I let my ex keep Fozzy, as they had gotten to be quite good friends.

I liked living alone. My supportive friendships were based on trust, not fear. I was getting self-confidence for the first time in my life, which created a new sense of purpose. I kept faith a daily part of my life. I was already at a really high level of Bible study, and I had been looking up challenging words to find their Greek and Hebrew roots. I would look up each word and then look up the Greek and Hebrew translations. I was still pissed at the approach the WBC took to scripture. You don't just read a verse, not in any version, and revise it a million times until you make it mean what you want it to. In the Westboro Baptist Church, we used the King James Bible, which is a great English translation of the original languages, authorized by King James I in England in 1604. But it was in English; that was it.

I started watching a television pastor out of Arkansas on public programming by the name of Arnold Murray. His lessons were for people who were sort of beginner/intermediate Bible readers. He did detailed studies on particular verses, which I found fascinating. Most of all, I loved his Q & A time slot at the end of each program.

In the church, I had been shut down and made to feel contentious for so long that listening to this guy answer callers' questions with passion and enthusiasm was like a miracle. Reading the Bible
at
someone was not a process in which the recipient learned anything, but it happened every week at the WBC's services. Half the time, the person reading was reciting the same story over and over. There was little input or room for doubt. Arnold Murray accepted in-depth questions as well as more juvenile ones. He wasn't arrogant enough to pretend he had all the answers. Things he didn't know, he'd look up, right then and there. "I am here to instruct and not to judge," he'd say. He admitted he had stances on certain things, but those were his opinions and not necessarily the absolute truth. I wholeheartedly believed him and loved his teaching style. I liked that more than anything.

One day, my aunt Stacy found me on Facebook. After a few online conversations, she gave me her telephone number, and we started to speak on the phone. She told me that my grandmother was very anxious to talk to me and asked me to give her a call. When I reached her, she was happy and upset at the same time. She was always so emotional. She was under the impression that the church held people against their wills, and she thought my mother might be a prisoner. She was not in great health. Her kidneys were failing, and she thought she would have to go to the dialysis center near her home on a regular basis.

She told me she thought my mother had been calling her recently, based on a number of hang-up calls to her house from the Topeka area code. "I hope she's not feeling trapped," she said. I couldn't help but feel a little sad for my mother. My father had severed her relationship with my grandmother by taking her to Kansas to save me, and then threw me out, severing her relationship with me, too.

Sometimes, I agreed with my grandmother that my mother might be struggling and feeling helpless. There was virtually no one for her to turn to.

She couldn't go to people inside or outside of the church with complaints or problems, because either way she would be kicked out. When I was still living at home, I'd sometimes heard my parents arguing about church doctrine. My father always told me that he and my mother were "clarifying,"

which I think he said because he didn't want Shirley to get wind of their disagreements and scrutinize Mom.

After my grandmother told me about the calls, I wanted Mom to know I was there if she needed me. I loved her madly, despite everything we had been through. I didn't have a guy in my life, I had a steady job, and I had my condo with a spare bedroom if she ever needed to come live with me. I decided to reach out to her. I hadn't talked to her in two years, but I wanted to see if there was anything I could read into what she said that would let me know she was okay.

"Lauren, why are you calling me?" were the first words out of her mouth. I immediately felt like I'd made a huge mistake.

"Hi, Mom," I said. "I just wanted to talk to you. I miss you. I love you." She didn't hang up, so I continued. I told her what I was up to and about my job. I shared with her I had a room for her if she was considering leaving.

"I just wanted to find out if you are okay," I said.

"Why do you want to know how I am doing?" she asked. I told her I had just talked to Grandma, who was worried.

"You are lying right now," she said. "You are not supposed to be talking to them." I didn't point out to her the absurdity of the statement. The church no longer had me bound by their rules, although obedience was still second nature to me, and hearing my mother scold me made me feel loved. Plus, part of me still feared going to hell. It was so ingrained in me that either you were part of God's elect people or you were destined for eternal incineration in the lake of fire that sometimes I had fleeting thoughts of trying to get back into the good graces of the church. I didn't want marks against me if I ever changed my mind.