Banished: Surviving My Years in the Westboro Baptist Church (10 page)

He frequently challenged Shirley, and at first she answered him enthusiastically, with lots of elaboration and details, but eventually she started to get annoyed with him. "He needs to stay at home and stop asking questions," Shirley said to me one day when I was at her house hanging out with Megan. "He needs to stay at home and read the Bible." I didn't have to relay the information to my father. Shirley told him herself, and Dad learned quickly that he was going to be humiliated if he didn't stop challenging her.

Sometimes when he got angry, Margie would tell Shirley that he was being rebellious. Although he didn't consider his style combative, I think he realized that people were going to start hating him if he didn't conform, and he started to make an effort to curb his tongue.

Obedience was a cornerstone of the church. There was no human endeavor more important than obedience to God, and as for obedience to the church rules, a defined system was in place to keep people in line. It was based on making everyone accountable for his own actions, and when that failed, humiliating them. Church elders and parents were the highest order of disciplinarians. Parents had authority over other people's children as well as their own, which meant they had the right to correct them if they were doing something wrong. Shirley didn't mind at all telling Dad or me what I was doing wrong, and I appreciated her guidance and advice.

I still had trouble being accepted, despite my efforts to do everything that was expected of me. One time, when we were at Logan Airport after a Boston picket, Margie's son Jacob said to me, "I feel really bad telling you this, but Libby doesn't think you belong here." I was really offended. Libby, who was a little bit older and already through with high school, had not made much of an effort to befriend me, but I was trying to be as close with her as I was with my other friends. She didn't seem to like the fact I had come into her age group of cousins, Megan, Rebekah, and Jael. She had grown up with them, and perhaps she felt I was taking her place, or that they were leaving her out.

I was so ashamed by what Libby had said I found it hard to discuss, even with my father. But I needed to confide in him, since I wasn't sure I trusted anyone else. When I finally worked up the courage to tell him what she had said about me, he was nonplussed.

"You need to try to have a better relationship with her," he instructed me.

"You need to work harder." He was suggesting the problem was with me, not her. That wasn't the kind of support I was looking for. He always seemed to be putting the onus on me these days. I knew my getting along with these girls was critical to Dad and to all the Drains, if we were going to be accepted, but I was doing my best.

I went to Shirley next. She recognized that there was competition among the teens, and that they might not trust me right away because I was so new.

She told me I should take advice only from the elders. "Young people say and do stupid things," she said with a smile. "Don't listen to what Libby says." Shirley always had a way of making me feel better.

Because Dad was an elder, he was under the impression that he was in a position of authority over Shirley's children, too. Once in a while, he would admonish one of them, if he thought the child was acting inappropriately. For example, he would tell Megan if he thought she was speaking vainly or being a tiny bit arrogant when in fact she was. "Stop talking that way around the younger children," he would tell her. "They will pick up on that easily and think it is acceptable." He thought this was expected of him as an elder.

However, the next thing he knew, Shirley was admonishing him in a church-wide e-mail, telling him he was trying to usurp her authority. She also denied that her children would ever behave in a way that needed correcting. So, after that he had to rethink his perception of his authority.

If he was being difficult, Shirley thought he was trying to assert too much power and control too quickly. That first summer, he wasn't permitted to have much say in terms of big ideas, like whom to picket, what signs we were going to use, or what slogans we were going to chant. He also wasn't allowed to approach the pastor when he was frustrated by a situation. But he was really trying. I could see that he was willing to do whatever it took to earn acceptance.

My father thought that going to law school might be the best path to gaining the Phelpses' respect and, from there, status in the church. Pastor Phelps and eleven of his thirteen children, including Shirley, had law degrees. Their law firm, Phelps Chartered, had been founded by the pastor in the 1960s. He had earned his law degree in 1964 from Washburn University School of Law in Topeka, but his reputation for being volatile and confrontational on a weekly radio show made it hard to find a judge to vouch for his good character, which was a prerequisite for admission to the Kansas state bar.

The pastor supported his own case by presenting evidence that he had been an Eagle Scout in Mississippi, earned an American Legion honor, and received a letter from President Harry S. Truman. The proof was sufficient to allow him into the bar, and he was admitted that year.

Interestingly enough, the pastor said he had originally become a lawyer because he wanted to represent the disenfranchised, particularly the black population. He had been born and raised in Mississippi, and he believed it violated the Word of God to treat black people as poorly as he had seen them treated in the South. During his first years as a lawyer in Kansas, he took on mostly civil rights cases and won nice settlements for his clients. He liked to boast that he himself had systematically taken down the rigid Jim Crow discrimination laws in Topeka, winning discrimination cases against school districts and police forces.

In 1977, though, his right to practice law in Kansas was revoked. He had been preparing a case for trial and requested a transcript from a court reporter, Carolene Brady, which she delivered a day later, but a day late.

Even though the transcript did not play a part in the outcome of the case, he sued the woman for $22,000 in damages. He called her to the stand as a hostile witness during her jury trial, where he badgered and bullied her for a week, leaving her distraught. During the cross- examination, he challenged her about her income tax returns, her reputation, her competency, and her morality or lack thereof. He alleged to the court that she was a slut, and to prove his point, he subpoenaed ex-boyfriends of hers whom he wanted to testify about their deviant sexual practices. Eventually, the pastor's case was thrown out. He immediately filed an appeal, claiming under oath to be in possession of eight affidavits from supporting witnesses, but when Brady's lawyer contacted those witnesses, he learned none of them had provided the pastor with an affidavit. On the basis of that perjury, the pastor was disbarred in the state of Kansas, although he could still practice on the federal level.

Eight years later, nine federal judges filed a complaint against the pastor, five of his children, and a daughter-in-law, alleging the family had made false accusations against all nine of them. It took four years for a settlement to be reached. The pastor agreed to surrender his law license permanently in exchange for leniency for his children, so he could no longer take on any cases. Charges were thrown out against three of the children and the daughter-in-law, but his daughter Margie was suspended from practicing in federal and state courts for one year, and Fred Jr. lost his right to practice in both courts for six months.

Nevertheless, the Phelps Chartered law firm was highly regarded and was always very busy with clients from all over northeast Kansas. The clients knew about the Phelpses' religious convictions, but they also recognized them as some of the best lawyers in town with a winning record. The firm also rarely turned down clients, even those who might have trouble paying.

To collect their fees, the firm might work out a deal with a client to garnish his paycheck. There were clients they did refuse to represent, such as any couple seeking a first divorce, because the church believed that a couple should be together for life. Phelps Chartered would, however, represent a client getting a second divorce, saying that perhaps by divorcing, the client would reunite with his or her first spouse.

My father was under the impression that Shirley would be delighted to hear he was interested in being a lawyer, too, so he took it upon himself to apply to Washburn University School of Law, the pastor's alma mater, without consulting her first. He was accepted and offered a full scholarship. Even though he had never studied anything related to law, his LSAT scores were near perfect. When he got his acceptance letter, he proudly took it to Shirley, and was totally taken aback when she told him she forbade it.

"We don't need anyone else to be a lawyer," Shirley told him. She made it clear that if he went against her and decided to go to law school anyway, she wouldn't hire him at Phelps Chartered, because his work there wouldn't help the firm's bottom line; instead, they would just end up having to pay him for work they were doing themselves. She told my father to stop copying what her family was doing and find a career path more suitable to his talents.

"Stop wasting your time in school. Your family needs you," she told him, referring to the fact that Dad had moved the family to Kansas to keep me from taking the wrong path, and he had to keep up his vigilance.

My father was really disappointed and upset. But, after some thought, he told the family that Shirley was right. Her guidance wasn't to be scorned or taken lightly; it was a gift. If Shirley told you anything, it was as good as hearing it from God. In this case, God was telling Dad how to help his family. "I need to stop being so arrogant," he said, and dropped the idea of law school altogether.

Lift ye up a banner upon the high mountain, exalt the voice unto them, shake
the hand, that they may go into the gates of the nobles.

--Isaiah 13:2

People called us haters because the word
hate
was so prevalent in our protests. The rejoinders we heard most often from people trying to refute our message were: "God loves everybody" and "God is a loving, tolerant God."

But as the pastor told us, these were perhaps the biggest lies of all. In truth, it was God who hated, not us. The pastor was God's mouthpiece on earth, and we were only the messengers. Most of our detractors thought that we went around spewing the same handful of lines from scripture and hiding behind a distortion and perversion of the Baptist faith. This couldn't be less accurate.

The pastor might have called himself an "old school" or "primitive" Baptist, but the theology he preached was fundamental Calvinism.

Calvinism was not the least bit new in America. It had been the religion of the Pilgrims, the Puritans, and many of the Founding Fathers, and in one sense the reason why the Pilgrims left for the Promised Land in the first place.

Before John Calvin and Martin Luther, there really were no Protestant faiths.

They were two spiritual leaders who dared to challenge the status quo, Roman Catholicism, and they were the leading forces in the Protestant Reformation in Europe.

In the early years of their ministries, they were considered as radical as our pastor was now. Martin Luther had dared to challenge the Catholic hierarchy with his Ninety-Five Theses. For that, he was excommunicated by Pope Leo X, and condemned as an outlaw by the Holy Roman Emperor. John Calvin was only eight at that time, but later made his own break from the Catholic Church in France when he published his
Institutes for the Christian Religion
in 1536. He, too, made lots of enemies, and many men in power condemned him. He eventually fled from France to Geneva, where his teachings became the foundation of Calvinism. He was basically a Christian apologist, with an excellent grasp of argument and logic. I could see this same trait in the pastor. There was no argument involving the logic of scripture he could not win.

Luther's and Calvin's biggest grievance against Catholicism was the hierarchical organization of the Catholic Church. They both thought every man had equal access to God through the scriptures. They were also opposed to the sacraments the Catholics insisted were required for salvation, especially since priests had become so corrupted, they were willing to sell indulgences to wealthy people to put them on the path to heaven. But for Calvin, the corruption was only part of the problem. He had the conviction that decisions about eternal life had been predestined by God, who had identified the people who would be saved before they were even born.

According to Calvin, no one could know if he was heaven-bound, because nobody understood God well enough, or was even capable of knowing God that well. However, there was the built-in presumption that if you lived your life like you had been chosen, with day-to-day, hard, honest work and rigorous moral standards, the chances were better that you lived that way
because
you were chosen. The assumption was that God wasn't going to bother creating people like that just to send them to hell. God's reward for the people he had prechosen was salvation and eternal life. But since there was still lingering doubt and no absolute certainty who was chosen, everyone still had to be decent and upright throughout his or her life.

The majority of the early settlers in New England had been either Calvinists or strongly influenced by the religion, and they didn't believe in God's overwhelming goodness and affection. The pastor preached about it in

"1,001 Reasons Why 'God Loves Everybody' is the Single Greatest Lie Ever Told," available on the church's website. He said, "Before the 20th Century

'God loves everyone' was largely a foreign theology to the United States....The Puritans that stepped off the
Mayflower
at Plymouth in 1620, and their progeny that inhabited the United States for nearly 300 years, largely did not believe that 'God loves everyone.'...They read the Bible daily and believed in the wrath of God and they feared Him greatly."

A hundred and fifty years later, many of the men who signed the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution were members of those churches. But during the 1800s, Calvinism was on the wane, and by the twentieth century, most people in our country had rejected the fundamentals of the faith outright. A lot of sincere Christians just couldn't accept that they were most likely going to hell despite the lives they led, so they threw out the rest of the Calvinist concepts at the same time.