Banished: Surviving My Years in the Westboro Baptist Church (6 page)

Slowly, I became used to being referred to as the "evil daughter." I could do nothing right, my father was almost always angry with me, and he was making my life a living hell. My mother didn't come to my rescue, which really hurt. She didn't like voicing any opinion contrary to my father's, especially when it came to me, and she agreed with his objective, even if she may have felt that his methods were a little extreme at times. But however desperately I wanted her to intervene and support me, she did nothing.

In 1999, I was a high school sophomore at the height of my adolescence, when peer relationships were absolutely critical to me. I hated not being able to go to school, play on the softball team, or hang out with my friends. I used to look forward to weekends, but now every day was the same. I felt like a prisoner all the time. Taylor was still attending public school, so I was home alone with my father for most of the day. When I'd still been at the high school, I had been able to sneak over to my friends' houses by riding their buses after school. I had gotten in trouble a couple of times for doing that, but now the bus plan wasn't even an option. I didn't have a driver's license, just my learner's permit, so I had to have an adult with me if I wanted to use the car. All of the fun advantages of living in Florida were being taken away from me, one by one.

Somehow, I was still allowed to be on the computer, so I would talk to my friends online, using AOL Instant Messenger. They were upset that I had been withdrawn from school, and they understood that my father had done it to ground me, but didn't understand their role in it and why I was not allowed to see them anymore. That part was kind of hard for me to explain. My father now thought they were evil, too, but I obviously didn't want them to know that. Their parents just seemed to accept that I was being homeschooled for now.

Before long, I was cut off from AOL privileges, as well. My father found a conversation between me and a nineteen-year-old boy who had been a counselor at the summer camp I'd attended that past July. My father said it was highly inappropriate and again used the word
whore
before banning me from the Internet altogether.

The only communication I had now was with a few girls from the church. Dad had arranged for me to be pen pals and exchange letters with the ones around my age, all granddaughters of the pastor and cousins or siblings to one another. Shirley's daughter, Megan, who was fifteen, was the one I began corresponding with regularly.

Dad was extremely passionate about what he was doing for me and why he was doing it. In the beginning, I'd say things to challenge him, which also ended in wrathful rampages. After a while, I would try to hear him out just to keep him from raging at me. He wanted me to understand that God had a purpose for us here on earth, and that life was not all about doing whatever we wanted to do, and that included dating "heathen boys." And in the meantime, he had completely isolated me from everything and everybody.

All I could do was sit alone in the room Taylor and I shared, all by myself, bored and miserable, trying to figure out ways to get back in his good graces, and back to my friends and my school. He was definitely trying to break me.

Every time I told him I would do whatever he wanted as long as I could go back to school, he'd tell me that I was saying that because I hadn't given up on Will yet.

Any time I was defiant, his assaults went from verbal to physical in nature.

Oftentimes, they crossed the line into abuse, as far as I was concerned. He would shove me or push me or hit me to get my attention so I would stop whatever I was doing and listen to him. He'd try to hurt me when he hit me.

He'd drag me off my bunk and slap me around, screaming ugly names at me and frothing at the mouth. It frightened me. But he remained adamant that according to the Word of God, corporal punishment was an act of love. "He that spareth his rod hateth his son: but he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes" was written in Proverbs 13:24.

The WBC backed up his belief in corporal punishment for children, preaching that physical inflictions woke a person up to bring him into instruction. It was good to hurt, and good to spank until it hurt. I was of two minds about this. I wanted to rebel because I was so mad at my father for being so harsh, but I wanted him to love me, so I was struggling to be obedient. I would be angry because my father was strict, and I would be obedient because I didn't want him to disown me. But on the other hand, I was still just fourteen years old, and I couldn't deny that I liked boys.

During scuffles with Dad, my mother would focus on my role in them, accusing me of causing all the strife in the house. Sometimes, she'd hesitantly say something like, "Oh, Steve, stop. You don't need to say that.

The neighbors are going to hear." But that was the extent of her advocacy.

"This is what she needs," my father would respond. "I am supposed to be fighting a war. I have to get control of her!"

Even though my grandmother and my aunt Stacy lived in the neighborhood, I never saw or heard them trying to get my father to back off in any way. I knew Taylor overheard a lot of our fights, but at nine years old she probably thought it was too risky to defy Dad. She didn't get visibly upset, and she pretended not to be bothered by the arguments. I really had no allies.

On one occasion, Dad got so angry with me that I called Child Protective Services to intervene. He'd been in a mood, coming at me yet again and spewing venom about my wayward morals and my evil soul. I was so scared this time, though, that I brought the cordless phone outside to the front lawn, dialed Information to get the agency's phone number, and had the call forwarded automatically. It probably wasn't the best idea. They asked me all these questions about my situation, which I wasn't really prepared to answer standing on the sidewalk with my neighbors going about their business al around me and my father inside the house, steaming mad and likely to come out and catch me. I wasn't even convinced I wanted Child Protective Services to get involved. I just needed my father to know I was serious about defending myself from his physical bullying, and I was reaching my breaking point.

When someone from the CPS office called our house to say a complaint had just been phoned in, my father realized what I had done. He was livid, and he insisted that I call the office back and tell them it was just a prank and that I didn't realize the seriousness of my actions, then apologize for wasting their time and resources. I made the call with Dad listening in on a different phone. The whole thing was so lame. No one from CPS ever came to the house to speak to me or follow up in any way to be sure I was in fact okay.

Unbelievably, my father had been able to shut the whole thing down. My punishment was already so severe, though, that there was little else he could do to me except make me feel guilty for having told on him, and brand me as a liar once again.

I don't know if my mother knew about the call. If she did, she didn't mention it to me. She and my father might not have agreed about how much physical punishment was too much, but they were in agreement about one thing: that my behavior was out of line. They both thought I was acting out, and if I did get punished, I deserved it. I wasn't a wimp, so it wasn't the physical pain that bothered me, but being controlled by my father pissed me off more than anything else. I soon came to realize that Dad's new mission was to watch every move I made to make sure I wasn't straying. I'd been punished so harshly at that point, I don't think there was much disobedience left in me anyway, but as far as my father was concerned, I still wasn't to be trusted.

Dad had grown tired of his Home Shopping Network job and had given it up to devote more time to the documentary. To bring in a little money, he was teaching religion part-time at a community college not far from our house. If he had to be in the classroom, he brought me with him. He made me sit in the back, but he could still see me at all times. I'd do my online homework on my laptop while he was in the front giving his lecture. My father was under the impression that this made me miserable, but I actually thought the arrangement was pretty awesome. He had really cute guy students in his class, eighteen-, nineteen-, and twenty-year-olds, and because I never left the house except with Dad, they looked that much cuter. Any flirting, though, was only in my imagination.

At home, my parents often got into heated arguments, which kind of scared me. I knew I was the reason for a lot of the tension in their marriage, even though I wasn't always the topic of a given fight. My father's female friends were definitely an issue. Women, mostly Dad's students from the community college, would constantly call him or come up to him at school to tell him about their problems with their marriages and their personal lives, and my mother didn't approve. The two of them would go into a room, slam the door, and yell at one another for ten or fifteen minutes. They never got physical, as far as I knew, but it was pretty intense. Finally, my father would emerge a little calmer in his demeanor, leaving my mother behind to come out whenever she had collected herself. She almost always backed down.

Even if his religious fervor had a very angry aspect to it, one thing about Dad's new religion that I did like was his newfound self-restraint. He was still willing to get into arguments with Mom, but he didn't rage and carry on forever anymore. He'd make his point, then stop haranguing. When he was lecturing me, at least he was coming from a humble place. More often than not, he was even calm. Eventually, his peaceful delivery started making me feel like he was the best person there was to educate me about God's master plan for us. We were here for a reason, Dad said, but we had to adhere to the path of God. Dad was only trying to guide me along the right way. Slowly, his messages were beginning to have an impact on me, and I began to feel that I was really understanding faith. I took it to be proof that I was growing up.

Dad would give me lessons that went beyond scripture; he wanted me to embrace his new Westboro community with the same love and acceptance he did. "They love everyone, and they want to help everyone," he would repeatedly tell me. He said their zealousness came out of a fundamentally benevolent goal: to help the less enlightened people of the world to see.

Even if I didn't fully get why a message of love had to be delivered with such hateful language, I could see by the footage of the church members' fervor that they were on a crusade that was spiritually driven.

I had been cut off from seeing my friends for more than two months when Dad told me about a picket in Jacksonville that he was going to be filming, and he invited me to go along as his assistant. He saw it as a chance to spend some time with the members and to introduce me to them for the first time. I was excited. The Jacksonville protest would be the first time I would actually get to meet Megan and my other pen pals from the church. The idea of getting away and traveling the 250 miles to Jacksonville was more than welcome. I also loved the idea that Dad and I were going to make the trip together, leaving my mother and Taylor at home.

Despite the video footage I'd seen, I had no idea what to expect. I was eager because the Phelps girls already felt like friends to me, and yet I was nervous about making a good impression on all these new people who were so important to my dad. Plus, I was curious about what had stirred such a strong spiritual reaction in him, ever since he had first come in direct contact with them back in Washington, D.C.

The way Dad had described it, the church was so connected to the truth that it was grander than anything he had ever experienced. I decided I wanted to be part of something that big, too, something that was definitely bigger than my life. I might not have understood the church's picket signs or why certain current events spawned their protests, but I wanted to grow spiritually and join my father's passion, especially since I would have his blessing.

During the four-hour drive, I found it hard not to succumb to Dad's infectious enthusiasm. Things had settled down significantly at home now that Dad felt I was on board with his new religion. It was great to be on the road, just the two of us. When we finally arrived in Jacksonville, I was fired up. As I jumped out of the car, I knew I looked like the epitome of a Florida teen, with bleached-blonde hair past my shoulders and extra mascara to show off my eyes. My father unpacked all of his film equipment, and we headed for Alltel Stadium, Jacksonville's huge football stadium. The event the church was picketing was a Billy Graham revival, a four-day "crusade" event, which would no doubt draw huge crowds of evangelical Christians. The revival and the picket were scheduled on what turned out to be a beautiful fall weekend in November 2000.

I had heard on the radio that the crowd was the biggest ever for a Billy Graham gathering, with more than seventy thousand people in attendance this day alone. There was a rumor that this crusade would be his last public rally due to his declining health. The crusade was pitched for a younger crowd, with evangelical singers and rock bands on the slate. I'd never seen so many people around my age in one place.

By now I was familiar enough with the people in the WBC, especially Fred Phelps, that I was able to recognize them in person. As we made our way to the protest site, I had no problem spotting the six-foot-four pastor. Dressed in an oversize cowboy hat and a Kansas City Chiefs football jersey, he was hollering at Billy Graham's most ardent devotees, "Billy Graham is in hell!"

and "God hates false prophet Billy Graham and all of his parishioners!" He seemed to have no fear that seventy thousand Billy Graham followers outnumbered his handful of church members. He had a booming voice with a Southern drawl, but I didn't feel the least bit afraid of him. Rather, I was fascinated by his self-confidence, his charisma, and the boldness of his opinions in the face of such huge opposition.

The church's position--that Billy Graham was a false, lying prophet--was based on Graham's style of ministry. He liked to preach to the masses, and the WBC believed evangelistic megachurches like his turned religion into something really lazy. The pastor thought it was wrong for people to think they could do anything, or nothing, and still go to heaven. A certain lifestyle and procedure were required to get to God's kingdom, and simply attending a Billy Graham crusade once a year, clapping, singing, and praising the Lord, was not sufficient. The WBC also thought Billy Graham was a money whore. He was all about image and commercialism, not faith, and he would do or preach anything as long as he made money.