Banished: Surviving My Years in the Westboro Baptist Church (18 page)

Internal policing was an effective way of keeping us all in check. Anything anyone did wrong was a transgression, and to be called out on one was a huge embarrassment. The pastor employed a system of humiliations. The mildest level was being scolded, being told something sternly. If you were facing the wrong direction at a picket or wore something too short, you were disobedient and you were scolded. Anyone older, college age or above, could do the scolding. It was a sanctioned method to keep the young ones in line. Older people were duty-bound to be overseers and spiritual guides.

The elders were not only looking out for themselves, they were looking out for others, which was an act of charity and love.

Scolding was designed to humiliate, and it almost always succeeded. When it didn't, and the behavior continued, someone would tell your parents, or it would be broadcast in an e-mail written by an elder and blasted to everyone in the congregation. The e-mail would be long, saying you were doing this and this wrong, and pointing you to appropriate passages in the scriptures you had to read to understand your errors. Sometimes, someone would call you on the phone with the same message, but with a little bit of a threat added. If things didn't change, no one was going to stand by you, no one was going to hang out with you at a picket, and people were going to outwardly turn their backs on you. You might even have a job or role taken away from you as punishment. Shirley knew that I loved babysitting the kids at the day-care center located in the basement of the law office, so she might temporarily take away that privilege or assign me to a solitary task if she needed to chastise me.

The highest level of humiliation was an admonishment that was taken right to the elders of the church. Admonishments were very demeaning and designed to make you feel like a lesser Christian. By then, the whole church community was involved and already shunning you. Privileges that involved trust, such as handling finances on pickets or in the law office, were revoked and replaced by really menial tasks like shredding papers or weeding the communal garden for hours. Your Christian status was diminished in the eyes of God, as well. You learned that you should fear going to hell. Even worse, you could be banished from the church, which would be a living hell before you died and went to real hell. We were taught that God would kill or harm those who left the church.

If any member's behavior or beliefs were called into question, there was a process the church followed. First, one person went to the wrongdoer in confidence and asked him or her to change. If the behavior continued, three members went together to confront him or her. If that still didn't change anything, then those three people presented the matter to the church leader and the entire group discussed it. The wrongdoer was given the opportunity to repent, but the membership ultimately had the power to decide if someone should be removed. It reminded me of when I played on athletic teams back in Florida. If you were no good, you were going to get cut. There was no room for people who made you look bad and who weren't carrying their weight.

If a member was in a bad situation, maybe wearing something ungodly or acting disrespectfully, and someone else brought it to everyone's attention, that person was in the spotlight. Members would say, "I just don't feel like so-and-so belongs here, I just don't get a good vibe from her or him." One of the respected elders, typically either Shirley or Margie, would receive these

"feelings," "intuitions," or "messages from the Holy Ghost" regarding a particular person's sin. The intuitions were so supernatural that we would wait to hear the women's prophecies with acute anticipation. Shirley might intuit that someone was an unrepentant sinner, living disobediently and unwilling to make atonement. She would pass on her intuition and everyone else would embellish her suspicion with other sins they had observed, such as gluttony or vanity.

On occasion, Shirley would get her intuitions in dreams. She would have visions that something was going to happen, or that such-and-such a picket was going to be dangerous. Other times, her feelings would come to her when she was reading scripture. Usually, though, they were intertwined with a sense of anxiety. "I am stressed out, and there must be a reason," she'd say. "We need to check on so-and-so." Then, we'd all obsessively focus on that person looking for possible transgressions. "I know this child is not going to make it into God's kingdom," she'd say about somebody else's kid.

"I know this child is evil, I can already tell. The devil is in him, and he is not going to make it." She said it about Timmy, Fred Jr.'s youngest child, and her prophecy was fulfilled when Timmy left a few years later.

From the beginning, I endured my share of criticism. I heard that a lot of members were saying things about me that were really harsh, like that I was too vain. Their criticism played with my mind a lot. Not only did I disagree, I didn't think I was pretty enough to be entitled to vanity. The church members made me doubt my intentions and my motives for many things I did regarding my appearance. I would hear the elders, and the pastor in particular, complimenting all his granddaughters with praises of their beauty.

Sometimes, he would tell me I was almost as pretty as them, a very awkward compliment. Once in a while, I confided in my father that I didn't feel attractive, hoping that he would reassure me. Instead, he told me that it didn't matter, that it wasn't important.

Being the target was the most horrifying, creepy feeling. If I was the center of the discussion, I felt like I was losing my identity, my life, and my eternity. I felt like no one was ever going to be on my side. The intimidation made me feel unworthy.
Am I really this person? Am I letting the devil take over my
mind?
I would think. I really struggled to understand how so many people could share an opinion of me that I thought was incorrect. Shirley, Margie, and even my parents would interrogate me with questions like "Do you feel like you belong here? Are you sure? Do you feel like you belong with God?

With good Christians? With people who are going to heaven? Or would you rather be with people who hate God?"

I wasn't used to being spoken to this way--these weren't the kinds of questions I had heard from people in Florida. I had a hard time remembering what Shirley had told me about not taking the questions too personally, that everyone was scrutinized. The way certain people posed them made me think,
Wow, maybe I
don't
belong.
Sometimes, I would feel paralyzed by the thought that I was, in fact, that lost. Margie, in particular, had many complaints against me. Because she thought I was a troublemaker, she made a lot of issues bigger than they were. For one, she thought I was too close to my father. When I would visit her, she would say, "You really don't need to be so close with your dad," adding her opinion that our relationship was weird. "Nobody can separate you two," she'd say reproachfully. "Why are you so close?"

Margie, Shirley, and Shirley's son Sam would all tell me to stop asking my father for things. They told him he treated me like a princess, but that I was just like any other member of the church. Those kinds of criticisms affected Dad more than me. Even though I listened and tried to act obediently, I could not distance myself like they wanted me to. I was closer to him than to anyone else. My father, on the other hand, wanted to prove himself to his community, so he tried to make it appear that he was not as close with me as Margie, Shirley, and the others perceived.

I had witnessed how Dad had struggled to be accepted as a valuable person, and how in time he was looked upon as an asset to the church. He was an eager worker with great ideas and useful skills. He made the church run so much more efficiently than it had before we got there. Not only was he an important member of the sign-making team, he created and managed several church websites that supplemented godhatesfags.com, and he was the go-to guy for photography and video work.

He started producing tons of video shorts with hip versions of the church's message inspired by pop culture. Sometimes, Taylor and I would assist him, whether it was filming the videos in the basement of the Phelps Chartered office or helping him edit at home. A number of us would create the parodies, changing the lyrics of top-of-the-chart pop songs to words that contained the church's message. Along with these, Dad also made one-to-three-minute music videos called "sign movies." Each one featured one or two church members and their favorite church message from our picket signs. Anybody who was interested could tape one, and we were given the freedom to say what we wanted. The message I chose was "Prepare to Meet Thy God." I started to write my script, but my father, who always wanted me to be the best, intervened to make it "better." After several retakes, he still didn't like it.

His criticism made me so nervous that there was no way I could do a good job. Meanwhile, he was telling everyone else how proud he was of them and what a good job they were doing, which of course made me feel even more horrible and inadequate. He took out so much of my wording, replacing it with his own, that I barely recognized the finished product. I preferred making movies with a lot of people in them, so I wouldn't have to feel so personally humiliated. They could be a lot of fun when they were made that way.

Everybody took a bit part and stepped out into the spotlight to jive and tell God's Word like a rap star.

Dad's sign movies were a hit, but he still needed to find full-time employment in Topeka. He found a job as a creative services director for a local television station, where he wrote the commercials for local advertisers. He was so good in that position, he won many "creativity in advertising" awards in the state of Kansas. He filled up an entire wall of our house with honors and plaques. In one year, he totally rebuilt the creative services department at the station. Then, in his second year he was abruptly fired when somebody from the administrative office deliberately left a newspaper with a front-page photo of my father protesting on his desk. It was taken at a Topeka city council meeting, where my father and other church members had gone to voice their opposition to a ruling that would define homosexuality as a civil right. The photo showed two men escorting my father out of the meeting for being disruptive. He had not tried to hide his church affiliation from his employer, but two people from human resources came to let him know that the company couldn't have the creative services director on the front page of the paper, causing a scene on such a sensitive topic. Shirley's husband, Brent, had been fired under similar circumstances.

My father opted not to sue, however, and collected unemployment instead.

After that, he couldn't find work for nearly six months.

Just as he and Mom were seriously beginning to panic, he was hired as a manager for an insurance company. Within a year, he was promoted first to senior manager and then to vice president. Even though he had never taken business courses and had no background in finance, he was a natural businessman and made the company a lot of money. Shirley credited his new employment to the good work of God. "God is blessing you; he is promoting you," she told him.

The church had a way of justifying everything that happened, good or bad, as an act of God. When my father was unemployed, Shirley had said it was because he wasn't committed enough to his beliefs. When he found work, that was also God's choice. It was a direct reward for his faith. "Your dad submitted himself to the church, and look what happened," Shirley said to me. That was the reason you didn't really question things. Everything Shirley predicted always ended up coming true and making sense, so why challenge it?

In addition to Dad's salary at the insurance office, he made money working for the church. He was self-taught in remodeling, so he took on the task of improving the houses on the block. One by one, he renovated them all. He also helped the Phelpses remodel their law offices in downtown Topeka.

Under my father's tutelage, the younger guys in the church became skilled as well. Boys started getting tools for their birthdays so they could apprentice, and I assisted whenever I had time. After a while, most of the houses on the block seemed like they were four times bigger. One-story, two-bedroom houses grew into two-story, four-bedroom homes. Kitchen makeovers turned everybody's little galley kitchen into something out of a magazine. Our own renovations were more modest and done only after everybody else's were completed, since Dad was mostly interested in impressing the elders with his abilities and work ethic. Shirley still had the biggest house. Of course, she also had the biggest family.

Mom was shy and insecure, so she didn't get as involved in the church business as Dad did. She worked Monday through Thursday, and

sometimes she worked Fridays, too, to make overtime. She went back and forth between wanting her Fridays off and working on Fridays. A lot of it had to do with our growing family. I was sixteen and Taylor was eleven when we learned that Mom was pregnant again. The news was shocking at first, because my sister and I didn't know that our parents were thinking about having a baby. But we were all excited.

The church prohibited the use of birth control, saying it interfered with God's plan for natural life, and was extremely adamant in its position. In fact, if you were married and hadn't had a child within a year, they'd suspect you were using it and might even throw you out. I heard a story about one of the members who had given a young couple "evil" advice by telling them if they were not feeling up to starting a family yet, they could always "spill on the floor." The couple told on him, and he was chastised.

Mom hadn't known about this rule when we were still in Florida, but it was a huge bone of contention between my parents once we got to Kansas. I would often hear them arguing about it when I was in my room. My mother thought she was too old, and she was done having children. My parents had other loud, frequent fights, on anything from frivolous spending to me. They were always nervous that I wasn't representing the Drains well enough. The oldest child had the burden of walking sin free, so anything I did out of step reflected poorly on them. The irony was that the church considered it a sin to argue, so their arguing about me was their sin. Kids were supposed to report their parents when they argued, but I didn't dare to report Mom and Dad to the pastor or Shirley, although I knew I should. That behavior was unacceptable in the church, but I couldn't bring myself to do it. I was tormented. I didn't want to get them in trouble, fearing the whole family would be kicked out of the church if I said anything. But I didn't want to be evil by withholding information about somebody's sins.