Banished: Surviving My Years in the Westboro Baptist Church (12 page)

Lots of Baptist churches were independent, because there were more personal freedoms outside it. Independence was good. The independent churches, usually more conservative and fundamental, could set up their own rules and govern themselves. I thought other Baptists must be terrified we'd be the bane of their faith. The disclaimer on the Primitive Baptist Church's website read "PB-Online and the Primitive Baptist Church do not recognize the ministry of 'pastor' Fred Phelps, nor do we have fellowship with the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas....We find the actions of these people to be deplorable and against the very Scriptures they claim to believe."

As for the word
Westboro
, it was the name of a neighborhood that began just a block south of the church. It was a really cool residential area, filled with historic bungalows built in the 1920s and 1930s in the style of the famous "arts and crafts" movement. A local architect, L. F. Garlinghouse, had wanted to promote his home-building business by marketing floor plans to the bungalows in a catalog, so each month he'd put four or five floor plans into the catalog. The idea was that the rest of the schematic could be purchased if a homebuilder wanted that floor plan. He had a favorite designer who went around the country taking pictures of designs she liked.

She brought them back to Topeka, the models were built, and the Westboro neighborhood was born.

The pastor's first church in Topeka was not the Westboro Baptist Church, where he gave his first sermon in November 1955. His first church had been the East Side Baptist Church, a traditional Baptist church across town. I heard a few competing stories about why he left, but whatever the true reason, he wasn't there long. Some members of the East Side congregation followed him, including two of our elders, Bill and Mary Hockenbarger.

George Stutzman and his wife, whose name I never knew, were another couple who came with the pastor, although I never met either of them. Many of the East Siders who chose to follow him left his ministry pretty quickly.

Only the Hockenbargers and George Stutzman remained. Even though his Westboro congregation was small, the few willing to give him a try believed in him. Then as now, his views were fundamental, extreme, and provocative; his sermons focused on scripture as it related to current events; and his presentation was always compelling and full of conviction.

I was in awe of the high standards the pastor set for himself and his commitment to his passions, especially to God. He had always been a high achiever. He once told us a story of how he had planned to attend the U.S.

Military Academy, partly because his father had always wanted him to be a West Point cadet. To make that dream come true, he had worked hard at his public high school in Meridian, Mississippi. He made great grades, worked on the school newspaper, ran hurdles for the track team, was a star of the boxing club, played two instruments--the cornet and the bass horn--in the marching band, and belonged to the social fraternity. Not only that, he graduated sixth in his class at the age of sixteen. His focus and determination paid off, and he was accepted at West Point. However, under the Academy's rules, he couldn't actually matriculate until he turned seventeen. Around this time, the pastor had a huge change of direction and decided to pursue theology instead. He would have still been a teenager when he decided to go to Bob Jones College, a very strict, conservative Protestant college then in Cleveland, Tennessee; it's now called Bob Jones University and is located in South Carolina.

Students at Bob Jones were encouraged to do missionary work and plant evangelical churches in parts of the world that didn't have many, and the pastor said it was during a missionary trip to Utah with a friend that his life changed. During a tent revival there, he said the God of glory appeared to him, and he had his experience of grace. Whenever I heard stories of these kinds of spiritual awakenings in any of the elders, I could feel my insecurities coming back. Dad had had his own moment when he had gone to interview the pastor in Topeka for the first time. He had expected to find a snake oil salesman, but instead he found the truth about the Lord. I sometimes felt a little dejected that God hadn't come to me in such a singularly moving moment. Even though I had done my best to ignore Libby's comment that I didn't belong, I was still left with an insidious self-doubt that maybe she had a point: maybe I
was
unworthy.

Before the pastor's summer in Utah was over, he knew he wanted to be ordained, so made his case before ten pastors at the First Baptist Church of Vernal, which had been sponsoring him, and he was baptized in a very cold mountain stream near Dinosaur National Monument in Utah. When he went back to Tennessee, the pastor was a seventeen-year-old minister, years younger than most.

The pastor stayed only one more semester at Bob Jones College. I'm not sure why, but he went to the Prairie Bible Institute in Alberta, Canada, next, then finally earned his theology degree from John Muir College in Pasadena, California. That was where he really started making sure he was loud and vocal enough to be noticed. He spent a lot of his free time preaching on the street corners of the city against the decadent behavior of students and teachers. His curbside preaching got him a cameo in
Time
magazine. The article that mentioned him was clipped, framed, and displayed in his office. The clipping was dated June 11, 1951, and titled

"Repentance in Pasadena." I finished it with the conclusion that it didn't really have a bias either for or against the pastor. It said only that Fred Phelps spent a lot of his free time preaching against the decadent behavior of students and teachers, using the public sidewalks to condemn the weaknesses of profanity and filthy jokes. I thought the article was less about the pastor's values and more about his passion and his aggressive style of spreading his message. I realized that even then he had been willing to voice his opinion so boldly, whatever his audience thought of him. I was impressed that a person could be that fervent and courageous to speak his mind, even at the age of twenty-one.

From Pasadena, the pastor moved to Arizona to attend the Arizona Bible Institute. There, he met his future wife, Marge Simms, who was four years his senior but looked tiny next to him, at only four foot eleven compared to his six-foot-four frame. I really liked the very soft-spoken and kind Marge and enjoyed her company. The word was that she had been the pastor's one and only girl, and that he had never dated anybody else.

They were married in 1952 in Arizona. Within a year, the children started coming, one at a time for the next sixteen years. Fred Jr. was born in Arizona in 1953, and the rest were born in Topeka--Mark, Katherine, Margie, Shirley, Nathan, Jonathan, Rebekah, Elizabeth, Timothy, Dortha, Rachel, and finally Abigail in 1968. What's more, Marge didn't even start having children until she was twenty-eight.

I had never known a family with more than four kids and was amazed that anyone could raise that many children. Marge, one of nine children herself, said she raised hers with the same five rules that her own mother had used--

keep the kids' faces clean, their hands clean, their clothes clean, the house clean, and feed them. She told me that in those days, she had two washing machines and two clothes dryers operating all day long. She did have the older children to help her with the smaller ones, but her biggest dread was that when one child became ill, all the rest would get sick as well.

From bits I heard, I assumed the huge Phelps clan had to live for quite a few years on very modest means. The pastor never had a big congregation, nor did he want one. But preaching didn't bring in enough money to support his family. I read somewhere that he sold vacuum cleaners and baby carriages door-to-door to make extra money in the lean years. I also heard that his children sold candy door-to-door after school and on weekends, from the age of five on up. The pastor would buy it wholesale and have them sell it retail, using the profits to pay the bills. He said he had never intended to be a minister for the salary, but preached only for the opportunity to spread the Word of God.

I thought that the amount of negative attention directed at him meant his message really did mess with the moral high ground of his sinning critics. Of course they were going to condemn him and call him a heretic and a lunatic.

Even Jesus Christ had only a handful of believers in his lifetime. The pastor was only the messenger, no matter how unpopular the message. The words he spoke, which came off sounding spitted, violent, and despicable to the people not in the church, were all found in the Bible. Mainstream religion had so watered down God's wrath and guidance that the new myth was that God was a kind, benevolent presence and followers could do what they wanted. The pastor wanted that myth shattered. God was the One who elaborated on the cardinal sins and what would happen to the sinners.

There hadn't been any other pastor willing to tell the truth on a daily basis in the name of God. He certainly looked stern and angry when he was preaching, and he carried himself with a slouch, but that was because he was old. He really got himself worked up only when he needed to let God's people know they were disobedient. He didn't raise his voice when he was not picketing or preaching. Nobody in the WBC challenged the pastor, but we had no need to. He was our spiritual leader and was motivated only by our salvation.

If I was intimidated by the pastor, it was not out of fear but out of a sense of inferiority. To me, he was bigger than life. From my childhood in Florida and Kansas to my disrespectful, rebellious early teens, I could never have imagined myself so blessed as to be in the presence of and guided by such a holy man.

Cry aloud, spare not, lift up thy voice like a trumpet, and show my people
their transgression, and the house of Jacob their sins.

--Isaiah 58:1

Although I had experienced the two WBC pickets in Jacksonville and New York prior to our move to Topeka, I had no idea how important this form of public activism was for the church. Picketing was the fundamental way to get God's Word to the heretics, and it was an activity with a higher priority than marrying and bearing children. There were daily pickets, noon pickets, and out-of-town pickets. There were bigger pickets that took lots of advance planning, and small ones, like the biweekly ones outside our school, which could be organized in very little time. The picket schedule would go up on the church's website, but it was also e-mailed out to families, so that everyone knew who was supposed to be where, and when. We didn't care if people outside of our church knew our schedule. We weren't hiding anything from anyone.

The pastor and the church hadn't started picketing until 1991, only ten years before we had moved to Topeka. Before then, the pastor had spread his message through faxes. He'd mass-mail them out the same way he did now, elaborating on some story that interested him and faxing them by the thousands on the church's letterhead. He'd write about current events, scripture quotes, new sign ideas, anything that came to mind as something relevant.

The WBC was extremely proud of its first picket ever, a May 1991 protest that took place in Gage Park in Topeka. It had started with Shirley. She said that she and some of her kids were in the park, a public space about a half mile from the church, when a homosexual who was also in the park tried to lure her son away from her. She was horrified. Gage Park, one of Topeka's largest at 160 acres, with a zoo, a miniature fifteen-inch-gauge railroad, an outdoor theater, and a beautiful rose garden, was getting disgusting.

The pastor, who always had a flair for provocative language, put the battle cry into a flyer he passed out in the park after Shirley's brush with danger: GAGE PARK--SODOMITE RAT'S NEST. Then he launched his Great Gage Park Decency Drive. For the first time, the WBC carried picket signs denouncing homosexuals. The Gage Park pickets became weekly events.

By the time my family got to Topeka, the group was still picketing the park weekly.

The Gage Park pickets made the church visible, and the antihomosexual message attracted people who felt the same way. In fact, for quite a while, lots of Topekans outside the church supported the Decency Drive and joined in the pickets. They related to the pastor's printed literature about the situation, which read "Can God-fearing Christian families picnic or play touch football there without fear of contracting AIDS? HELL NO!" The handout described lots of upsetting, sinful behavior: "open fag rectal intercourse in public restrooms, in the rose garden, in the rock garden, in the theatre, in the rainforest, in the swimming pool, on the softball fields, on the swing sets, or the train--it's everywhere..." The language was so graphic that many couldn't help but feel disgusted by the situation. Maybe the pastor was too hard-core for his sympathizers, though, because by the time I joined the church, nobody in the public joined our ranks anymore.

The early church pickets started getting local press, and the pastor loved it.

He showed up regularly on the front pages of the city's newspapers beaming his huge ear-to-ear smile. I saw lots of clippings from those days, with him wearing his white cowboy hat and holding an American flag upside down.

So successful were the pickets that the church moved to local businesses next. The pastor chose the ones he thought deserved attention, like the ones that employed homosexuals. The Vintage Restaurant on SW Gage

Boulevard was a famous target in our picket history. It was a popular dining spot in town, with lots of regulars from the political realm. Jonathan Phelps, Jael's father, knew the then manager, and he knew her sexual orientation.

He also knew that the owner of the restaurant was Jewish. The WBC

thought God hated Jews almost as much as He hated homosexuals, and the pastor never hid his opinion that it had been the Jews who had killed Jesus.

The church started picketing the restaurant nightly with signs about God hating fags and Jews, and continued to do so for three years.