Banished: Surviving My Years in the Westboro Baptist Church (20 page)

Taylor wasn't expected to help as much as I was because she was younger.

She spent most of her after-school time in our bedroom reading or watching television. During the week, I couldn't expect much relief with Boaz when Mom and Dad came home from their jobs, either. Dad was now a vice president at his firm, and after his long workday, he'd want to head straight to his editing suite to work on church videos, which he considered to be a relaxing pastime. Mom was always exhausted, so if I tried to have her take Boaz, she'd get offended. "Why don't you want to take care of him anymore?" she'd ask. "Why are you annoyed?" I wasn't
annoyed
, really--I was simply overwhelmed.

On weekends, too, Mom wanted me to take care of Boaz's needs. One time, when Boaz was a toddler, he came down with the rotavirus. He had been suffering from extreme diarrhea and dehydration and was hospitalized for two days. He became so dehydrated that he needed IV fluids and medication. He was pale and weak, but I knew he would pull through. I stayed by his bedside for hours, rubbing his arms and back, and trying to make sure he felt comfortable. I brought him a DVD player from home so he could watch movies. I was helping the nurse, answering her questions about how he was doing right up until he was released.

I was still coming up short in my struggle to win my parents' approval, and this overwhelmed me with anxiety. I was babysitting Boaz while doing the household duties, running errands, and doing the grocery shopping. Every two weeks, I was given $300 and a list. I'd go to the local Walmart where all the church members shopped, a fifteen-minute drive from my house. My route to the store was determined by my parents, and I could not deviate from that course in the slightest. I had a time allotment, and if I ran even five minutes late getting home, I would get a phone call asking where I was. If I took a left instead of a right, I was steering into evil.

I loved having Taylor with me on these shopping trips and took her as often as I could. In the store, she and I would load up the cart with everything on the list but nothing else, no impulse items. My purchases could not exceed $300, so I focused on generic store brands and sale items. We had to be so careful. Taylor and I spent an entire hour just shopping. When we got home, Mom would review the receipt and the purchases. If I forgot a loaf of bread, it had been a failed mission. "I can't count on you for anything," Mom would say. "You didn't check the list. We printed the list for you, and you still didn't bring home bread." If I brought home a jar of mayonnaise, she'd say, "We already have mayonnaise. Why do you think we need two jars when we already have one?" She'd always focus on my mistakes instead of praising me for the things I did right.

I couldn't seem to please my father, either. He gave me more positive feedback than my mother did, but usually only when I did things for him and the church. Taylor and I helped him a lot with his editing, spending countless hours working with him on his videos of the pickets. I also helped him design and build the picket signs using Photoshop. On top of that, I apprenticed with him for his remodeling projects. I would get a sense of pride from our accomplishments, but he was often backhandedly critical. "That's helpful, but this is how I would do it," he'd say, shortchanging me. "You take twice as long as I do" or "This isn't up to par" were two more direct complaints I'd hear from him. I couldn't impress him, no matter how much I tried. "Why can't you pick it up? Why can't you just get it?" he'd scold.

These nitpicking comments would make me so anxious that my mind would go blank, and I couldn't absorb what he was trying to teach me. I would forget steps or just get them wrong. Of course, Dad would then call me flighty. "Where's your head?" he'd ask me. "Your head is in the clouds."

I was always being compared to the Phelps girls. Both my parents required so many adult responsibilities of me, but they never complimented me or said thank you. Instead, my mom was constantly calling me rebellious, which made me resent her. She was a very passive person, except when it came to me. Like a lot of teenage girls, I could get upset at my mother more than any other person in my life. Sometimes, it annoyed me that she wasn't stronger or more willing to show passion or an opinion. She never wanted to stick her neck out for me. She and Dad had moved me to Topeka, practically the dead geographical center of the United States, to save me, and she still didn't give me credit for all I had done to save myself.

"Why can't you be more like Shirley's girls?" she'd say. "You're so vain, Lauren. You always stir up strife or look to start an argument." All the while, she'd have nothing but praise for Shirley's girls. "They are so obedient, and they love their mother." I cried when I told her that I wanted to be as close with her as Shirley was with her daughters. Just as she wanted me to be like Megan and Bekah, I encouraged her to be more like Shirley, who really indulged her girls. She gave them first dibs for pickets and interviews, made sure they were financially set with everything, and bestowed them with praise.

I couldn't help but compare Mom to Shirley, who was the only person giving me the supportive kind of attention I craved. If Shirley was critical of me, she somehow ended her critique with guidance, whereas Mom's takedowns were just plain hurtful. My mother lacked Shirley's confidence and self-assurance, too, the qualities I wanted to emulate most in my own life. I started to feel that Shirley was more vested in my salvation than my own mother was. Shirley seemed to genuinely care about me, and we were becoming very close. She would talk to me about school, show a lot of interest in all my classes, and offer to help if I needed it. She managed the schedules of every kid in our generation, which meant she was responsible for about forty people. She knew where everyone was every minute of the day. She knew if I had an hour free, if I could help with lawn maintenance or the law office, if she could send me to a picket. But somehow, she found time to know about everything going on in the world, including every event in the news.

Mom was so busy she didn't seem to mind my growing relationship with my new mother figure. The more Shirley treated me as if I were another one of her daughters, the more I respected her advice. Many people outside the church directed their wrath exclusively at her, but that was the price she paid for being the spokesperson for a controversial organization. Shirley always took it in stride. To me, it seemed like she loved it. When she did interviews on television, she was often criticized for smiling when she was talking about horrific events, but she said she was just misunderstood. She always responded with a line from scripture, and on the rare occasion that she raised her voice a little or engaged in the bickering, it was only because the question was so ignorant.

Meanwhile, my insecurities were constantly challenging my self-confidence.

No matter how hard I worked to convince myself that the Phelps girls considered me to be on their level, I still had lingering doubts about their sincerity. I tried to do little things I thought would endear me to them. I zoned in on a craft project that Shirley's only daughter-in-law, Sam's wife, Jennifer Hockenbarger-Phelps, had done. Jennifer had made a kind of doll out of metal. It was a flat metal profile of a person with its hands extended up, was about a foot tall, and was propped on a doll stand. It was holding a to-scale picket sign made of magnetic material so it could be stuck onto the doll's hand and the messages changed out. Everybody admired it at Bible study one Wednesday evening, and Jael and I decided to see if we could make the dolls. I wanted to give one to each Phelps girl as a gift, customized with her favorite picket slogan. Megan's had GOD HATES FAGS, Bekah's read YOU ARE GOING TO HELL, and Jael's said GOD HATES AMERICA. I

made one for myself with my favorite sign, PREPARE TO MEET THY GOD.

Of course, no sooner had I handed them out than I began worrying about how they would be viewed. Idols were forbidden, and therefore making dolls might be sinful. I had trusted that Jennifer had known what she was doing, but I'd become so paranoid that everyone seemed to have an evil eye. I was almost too paralyzed to do anything that hadn't been approved. Luckily, no one said anything about making an idol, but I was still nervous until each of my friends had hers on display in her bedroom. Even then, I still had lingering expectations that down the line I was going to hear from someone that the dolls weren't allowed. It was probably all in my head.

I trusted Shirley, though, and when she liked the dolls, I relaxed. I was usually completely comfortable with her. She didn't make me feel dumb, like other people did. We talked a lot about the Bible. We had been reading Revelation, and there were a few chapters that were bothering me. We were always talking about the "end of the world," which Revelation described in great detail, but some of the timing didn't make sense. In Revelation, the end of the world came soon after the seventh of seven seals was broken. After it was broken, there was one half hour of silence; then seven angels appeared, each receiving a trumpet. At that point, the world came to an end, with God pouring down his wrath on all the sinners and escorting the chosen ones into His kingdom. Our church embraced the belief that the end was nigh. Our whole existence was waiting for the end, being prepared, and knowing what to expect.

The point I wanted to make to Shirley was that there was an urgency to study the events in the Bible in order to be ready. I believed that the end of the world could be determined with more certainty if we knew more specifically where we were in time. For example, the Bible said Satan was locked up in a bottomless pit, where he would remain for a thousand years. Knowing
exactly
when God had cast him there would give us a huge advantage in predicting when he would return.

We were always focusing on verses about the "end of the world." We read them over and over to make us feel we were more knowledgeable about those verses than any of our detractors. We would be the most equipped to describe it and preach about it at pickets. This was the reason my questions were so pressing: I needed to know for sure what I was talking about. If I was telling someone else his soul was going to hell, I couldn't just be spewing it without scriptural basis.

We read Matthew 24 often. The chapter wasn't as elaborate as the Book of Revelation, but it had stunning imagery about the end of the world. One image in particular was causing me some confusion, but nobody could ever tell me exactly what it meant: "And knew not until the flood came, and took them all away; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be. Then shall two be in the field; the one shall be taken, and the other left. Two women shall be grinding at the mill; the one shall be taken, and the other left. Watch therefore: for ye know not what hour your Lord doth come."

My confusion was about which was better: to be taken or to be left. The verses always seemed to be interpreted differently. Sometimes, they were referred to as the "fly away" or "rapture" doctrine: that at the end of the world, God's people would "fly away," or be swept up into the skies
before
the destruction on the earth, and therefore they would meet God in the skies
before
they died. However, the pastor said the only ones "getting raised up into the skies" were already dead, dead in the grave, dead in Christ, dead.

They would then rise to heaven instantaneously to meet God. According to our interpretation of scripture, people were either in heaven or hell
upon the
moment of death
, and if that was the case, they couldn't possibly rise for the rapture. He wasn't 100 percent sure about meeting God in the skies.

It was so confusing, yet the pastor insisted we be correct and fully informed on all things biblical. I would get very frustrated when I met with what I thought was a refusal to investigate possible contradictions in the text, even the contradictions that might be a little sensitive because they conflicted with what the church said or taught. We scrutinized every other religion, after all.

The pastor was obsessed with reading what other people of other faiths said they believed. He would read books, watch the news, or see something on a website related to faith, and then the whole congregation would analyze and dissect his discovery. He'd even send out a press release disputing the claims of other believers, especially when it came to God's return.

We studied all the apocalyptic visions in the Gospels, including those of Mark, John, and Luke. The book of Jude was so important for its vision, the pastor had us memorize the whole thing over one summer. All the kids who could read had to memorize it and know how to recite it. We would all read it aloud to one another and recite it at the pickets. At the end of the summer, we had to recite it in front of Shirley and all the other kids to prove that we had learned it. Kids as young as seven and eight years old could do it.

I didn't want to bother the pastor with my problem of Matthew's vision because I didn't want him to attribute my question to a weakness of faith. The older he was getting, the less approachable he became. I had been on only a handful of pickets with him in three years. He was starting to get paranoid that someone might want to assassinate him, so except to preach on Sundays, he mostly stayed in his own living quarters. For his daily exercise, he either used his indoor stationary bike or walked the church's track. I felt honored when Shirley told me to stand by while she went to discuss my conflict about the end of the world with him. She was very enthusiastic about my question and wanted to know the answer herself. Shirley had a way of saying things that sounded better anyway. She located the pastor walking laps around the track and joined him for about fifteen minutes, while I waited at the picnic tables. I couldn't hear what they were saying, but they seemed to be caught up in an earnest discussion.

When she came back, she told me the pastor didn't have a light on that right now. I accepted that, but her demeanor was now angry and frustrated. To my surprise, she started scolding me. "Gramps told me that you are not supposed to question things that you don't know, and you are not supposed to tell God when to tell you stuff. Beg for understanding when you don't get it," she warned me. "I don't have the answer. Don't ask me anymore, and I will tell you when I know. We are not investigating this or doing a study on this right now."