what I had wanted from my family—an improvement on several of our most objectionable doctrines. Where we had been deliberately provocative and even cruel, for instance, Witnesses strove for gentleness: in contrast to our boisterous funeral pickets, they knocked on doors to preach their gospel, meekly walking away when requested. And yet, in spite of that fact, I still found myself unsatisfied. My questions had become deeper since I left Topeka. In all my conversations with Dustin and Laura, I had refrained from asking the question that now weighed so heavily on my mind: Why did they believe that the Bible was the capital-T Truth in the first place?
I wasn’t looking to be persuaded from the position I had held throughout my conscious life. I had dearly loved the Scriptures from the time I was a child listening to my mother read from them each night, her reverence clear in every word. When I quoted from the King James Version to journalists or curious passersby on the picket line, their eyes would often glaze over at the seventeenth-century prose—but the language and the imagery were as familiar and beautiful to me as my own mother’s voice, and comforting in their familiarity. How sweet are thy words unto my taste! yea, sweeter than honey to my mouth! The Bible’s words became mine, and at all hours and in all circumstances, my mind would call them forth for guidance, courage, inspiration. I read them, studied them, memorized them, recited them, and defended them daily.
Though I had turned away from it while we were still at Westboro, the question I had posed to Grace months earlier wouldn’t be denied any longer: “What if the God of the Bible isn’t the God of creation? We don’t believe that the Koran has the truth about God. Is it just because we were told forever that this is How Things Are?”
At home, my siblings and I had learned a principle: Even if God’s actions or instructions in the Bible seemed evil to our finite minds, all that He did was—by definition—perfect and just. For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts. God’s Word was the standard by which all men were measured, and His actions were righteous simply by virtue of the fact that He had taken them. All that was in the Bible was unquestionably Good.
For me, this belief was becoming more and more difficult to sustain.
Fortunately, the Bible’s truth and reliability was the subject of the first Sunday meeting I attended at Rapid City’s Kingdom Hall, as Jehovah’s Witnesses call their meeting places. I hadn’t been inside a place of worship in nearly two months, and in all my years, I had been inside non-Westboro churches on only the rarest of occasions. The foreignness of this place was both an intense curiosity and a physical revulsion, and I had to fight to suppress the latter. The thoughts that kept me from bolting from the building were becoming something of a mantra: What am I feeling? Why am I feeling it? Are my feelings justified by evidence, or a matter of instinct?
Laura guided us to sit in the middle section of the hall, and I looked around, trying to collect myself by focusing on specific details. The room had a capacity of about two hundred, though fewer than half the seats were filled. Rows of upholstered chairs instead of pews. Industrial beige carpet and a raised platform with a small lectern for the speaker. “You” and “your” instead of “thee” and “thou” to address God. During the prayer, husbands in suits wrapped their arms around wives in long skirts. The women left their hair uncovered, giving me a sense of our collective nakedness among the congregation. When I asked Laura later about the lack of head coverings, she directed me to the very same passage that Westboro used to require them—which, I was shocked to realize, was not in keeping with the plain language used there. But every woman that prayeth or prophesieth with her head uncovered dishonoureth her head, the passage read, and then clarified that her hair is given her for a covering. In spite of this language, Westboro required a second head covering—and took other churches’ refusal to do so as dispositive evidence that the whole congregation was rebellious and damned