Banished: Surviving My Years in the Westboro Baptist Church (9 page)

As much as I adored my sister, I encouraged her to find other friends. I hated shooing her away, but I needed to be in good standing with my group. One-on-one, the Phelps girls were intelligent and very nice, but as a group they made me nervous, and my circumstances felt too precarious for me to risk being shunned. I learned very quickly that we didn't spend any time socializing with anybody but one another. No one in our church made any outside friends, and I didn't need them when I had the Phelps girls by my side. Because only people in the church had enough spirituality to guide me to my salvation, befriending heathens was a frivolous waste of time.

Favor is deceitful, and beauty is vain: but a woman that feareth the Lord, she
shall be praised.

--Proverbs 31:30

If I had expected some sort of formal newcomers' introduction into the ideology and practices of the Westboro Baptist Church, I was wrong. There was no initiation; instead, everybody was expected to fall in, which was certainly overwhelming for me. All these people had grown up in the church and learned scripture before they could read. They could cite any passage in the Bible without even thinking about it.

My foundation in scripture was adequate, but I was at a primary level of interpretation. I learned a lot more about the church's rules and views when I had sleepovers with the Phelps girls on the weekends. Our house was so small and cramped that I loved the chance to sleep somewhere else, and I'd go as often as I was invited. Usually the overnights took place at Shirley's enormous house, which had two giant living rooms on its first floor. One was a game room, the other a movie theater. Between the two, there was everything imaginable: a wall-to-wall TV, surround-sound stereo, Xboxes and video games, a Ping-Pong table, board and card games, and big comfortable couches for hanging out. The huge state-of-the-art kitchen had a center island surrounded by at least a dozen stools. Shirley loved to cook.

My favorite meal was her hamburger biscuits, a buttermilk biscuit baked with ground beef inside. For anybody who didn't like meat, she made a cabbage version. Either of them made a nice meal. The home-baked cookies on the kitchen island made that room the prized hangout for us teens.

Downstairs, the finished basement had even more bedrooms and a big reception hall, which was big enough to comfortably hold our entire congregation. Any big function, like the celebration after a baptism, was held there if the weather was too cold for an outdoor reception. Shirley's kids each had their own room on the second floor, all of them outfitted with a television and a computer. I loved Megan's room. It was large and comfortable, with a collection of framed candid photos of cousins and siblings, many of them taken at various pickets.

All the women in the photos had their hair down to their hips, uncut hair being an expression of obedience to God. Megan told me that none of the girls in our generation had ever had a haircut, because a woman's hair was a symbolic, religious covering that showed her submission to God and the church, according to 1 Corinthians 11:15. The angels could see whether women were good or bad by their hair. The generation before us had been allowed to have their hair cut, but at some point the pastor decided that it was rebellious and stopped letting them take scissors to their locks. We weren't allowed to color it or highlight it, either. Some women's hair never grew that long because of splitting, but it still couldn't be trimmed.

Most of the rules for women had to do with modesty and leading the godly life laid out for us in scripture. We couldn't wear makeup or paint our nails, either. We had to be modest in dress, although there was a lot of wiggle room for interpretation. When I first arrived, some of the girls criticized my wardrobe, telling me my shorts were too short and my shirts too tight. WBC

women were supposed to be modest, being careful to not expose the "four
b

's": boobs, butt, belly, and back. I knew the Phelps girls had already heard I was kind of rebellious, and I didn't want to do anything that could be misinterpreted as a misstep, so I took their opinions seriously.

Mom started throwing away a lot of my clothes, even the ones I wanted to keep. Any lingerie other than sports bras went in the trash, as did any of my shorts cut above the knees and all of my bikinis. I thought that without my favorite clothes and makeup, I looked ugly and frumpy, but I got used to it quickly.

My mother had never been a flashy dresser, but in Florida she had been understatedly fashionable. She wore makeup, dyed and styled her hair, and wore nice clothes. I guessed that she probably enhanced her figure with padded bras, too. She stopped after we moved to Topeka. My father told her that he found her more attractive when she gave up even those minimal trappings of vanity. He said he was proud of her when she was obedient.

According to him, everybody else was vain and whorish, and he was not attracted to the kind of women who were tan or wore makeup.

Mom settled into the house in Topeka with relative ease. A lot of tasks were communal, such as watching one another's kids and gardening, and Mom appreciated the support. But the other women, led by Shirley and her older sister Margie, made her understand she was not part of their inner circle. The two sisters would call each other to discuss matters large and small, such as who was worthy and who wasn't. They'd decide if a member needed to be chastised, or even removed from the church. The two women were the phone chain ringleaders for the community, and they never called my mother to ask her opinion about anything, although she was aware that the rest of the women all spoke on the phone regularly. It was important to have your voice heard, and my mother was anxious to be accepted on this level, but as she was naturally unassertive anyway, she knew not to push it. She was really intimidated by all of the Phelps women, but none more so than Shirley.

I didn't know how much of it was based on lingering feelings of jealousy about how tight my father and Shirley were; I'd certainly had my own resentments about it, like when he stopped smoking for her.

The Phelps women seemed so intelligent and powerful, and many of them had law degrees. They had committed Bible verses to memory and used them to decry the sins and disobedience they saw all around them. Mom just wasn't as versed as they were in scripture and interpretations of Bible passages, and if she had a question, she was too intimidated to speak up.

Sometimes she'd tell me how she felt like an outsider at church functions.

My mother was now under tremendous pressure to accept whatever Dad said. Before the move, she had been willing to be mildly confrontational with him when she didn't agree with him. Once we were established in our new house, however, those kinds of challenges were shut down, and she became his dutiful subordinate. She couldn't speak up when something troubled her or show that she ever doubted his judgment. One of the rules of the church was that a wife and husband were not to argue, as the Bible said arguing hindered prayer. She had thought of herself as a weaker vessel even before our move, and it was certainly reinforced now. According to the church, she'd spent her adult life thus far living wrong, surrounding herself with idols, and not serving God. Now at thirty-five years of age, and with no status in this new community, she was beginning again. The job she'd found as a dental hygienist at an office a few blocks from our house made for a respectable career, but it didn't carry with it the status of a lawyer. I thought she really missed her family back in Florida, too. She still wrote letters to them, but very rarely talked to them on the phone.

Now that we were in Topeka, my father was the happiest I'd ever seen him, partly because he had unlimited access to Shirley, whom he considered godly. He would check in with her before taking action on anything. The way she guided him, I often thought she was like the mother Dad never had, his own having been too self-absorbed to take an interest in him. Shirley seemed like a well-oiled machine. Her house was spotless; her school-age kids were straight-A students, eloquent speakers, and competitive runners; she was an attorney and a very active mom and homemaker at the same time; her family had the biggest house and the nicest car; and she was completely in charge of running the Phelps family law firm, the finances of the WBC, the picket schedule, and the daily media interviews.

Everyone looked up to Shirley, who, despite her extremist views, had a very kind, gentle, and caring manner. About a month after my family's arrival, I met with her one-on-one for the first time when I came by the house to see Megan. I had entered through the back door and was crossing the kitchen when Shirley motioned me into her large office at the back of the house. She pointed to a chair next to her desk, one of five large wooden ones in the room, and signaled for me to sit down while she answered e-mails and wrapped up a phone call. I was a little nervous, but I relaxed as soon as she finished her call and gave me a big smile.

"How are you doing, Lauren?" she asked. "How are you feeling about things?"

"Okay," I said tentatively, still wondering why she'd brought me in.

She said she wanted to explain to me what was expected of a teenager, seeming genuinely warmhearted in her concern. "I want to make sure you understand that everyone is going to be watching your behavior. You shouldn't feel threatened or singled out. Every young person faces the same scrutiny. You might even receive an e-mail from me from time to time calling you out on a behavior, but I'm only trying to make you a better person."

I had already seen Shirley openly chastise her nieces Libby and Jael, so I knew what she was talking about. She did this with every teenager. I left the office in great spirits. Shirley continued to welcome me whenever I was around. "Come in," she'd say when she'd see me at the house visiting her daughters. Sometimes, she'd invite me to sit on the couch while she made iced coffee. There was always some kind of cookie in the oven, filling the kitchen with the aroma of chocolate or cinnamon, and lots of kids running around the house or the yard.

Shirley was forty-three, and when we got to Topeka she hadn't even had the last of her eleven kids yet. I was very impressed with her. She was so natural, with a beautiful smile and long, wavy hair with just a few strands of gray. She had intense blue eyes, which were always deeply focused on whomever she was talking to. She was possessed in an earth-motherly way, never out of control or raging, even when she was loud. She spoke without being condescending, as if she was a mentoring professor and you were a student. She made me feel so embraced and warm in her presence.

She was also very organized, and a good delegator, so she farmed a lot of chores out to her kids. All her children respected what she asked of them.

Megan, her oldest girl, started helping her do the church's finances from the time she was fourteen. I personally had never seen such cooperation in one family unit.

Shirley managed everyone's tithes to the church. You had to give 10

percent, no matter how young you were. Sometimes I'd make a little money babysitting for the children of church members, and whatever my earnings were, 10 percent went to the church. I'd get paid $5 to $7 an hour, so if I made $20 on a job, I'd give $2 to the church. I loved taking care of the kids.

We'd take them on field trips, bring them books from the library, and teach them how to do chores like cleaning their rooms. I was happy to give my money to the church. I didn't need it, and giving it to the church made me feel responsible and a part of the community.

Shirley's husband was named Brent Roper. Brent was at least five years younger than Shirley. He'd been a friend of Shirley's younger brother, Tim, in junior high, and a few years later, when he was still a teenager, he fell in love with her. He actually approached her on a picket one day to ask her if she would like to start courting. By then, Shirley was in her early twenties and had a toddler son named Sam who had been born out of wedlock. I heard that she had conceived the child in a moment of weakness, when she had been completely stressed out from multitasking three enormous obligations--law school, the law office's books, and the church. She had acknowledged her fornication, atoned for it, and received forgiveness. She refused to say anything more about it or name the father of her child. After she and Brent were married in 1983, he adopted Sam, who was then about four years old.

Brent wasn't as convivial as his wife was. When he met people for the first time, he was nice enough, if a bit standoffish. He tended to let Shirley make the assessment if someone was worthy of a welcome. Often when I'd stop by on the weekends he was out in their garden, planting and pulling weeds. He was a long-distance runner, slight and in excellent shape. He loved being outside and enjoyed taking the teens jogging to the high school and back.

During the week, he worked as a human resources manager at a big company in Kansas City and made a lot of money. I heard from Megan that he had been fired from his previous job after his employer saw a picture of him picketing on the front page of the
Kansas City Star
. When he sued his employer, he won and was awarded a sizable sum, 10 percent of which went back to the church, of course. He also wrote popular law and mathematics textbooks that were published and sold in bookstores.

Brent had used the settlement money from his lawsuit to make additions to their house. By the time the work was done, it had twelve bedrooms, six bathrooms, two living rooms, and a basement reception hall. He also paid for improvements to the church. But even though he had prevailed in his lawsuit, he never wanted to be recognized by his picture in the paper again.

At the pickets he did attend, which were now only the out-of-town ones, he'd wear Oakley sunglasses and pull a hat down over his wavy brown hair, or keep a sign in front of his face to protect his identity.

When we were first settling in, my father was allowed to ask questions about the WBC's culture and lifestyle, and bring up things in the Bible that he interpreted slightly differently than the church did. After all, he was pretty knowledgeable in scripture, too, and thought he could add to the discussion.