for it, if they believed that they were one of God’s elect—a Jacob, and not an Esau. They would have to show evidence of an “orderly walk,” obedience to the standards held by the church, and active, eager participation in the work of the church. A candidate for baptism must speak with every member of the church, and may only be baptized if all members respond with silence when the question is posed: Can any forbid water?
When I turned thirteen and asked to be baptized, no one forbade me. My mother would be the first to tell you that I could be as willful and goofy as any thirteen-year-old girl, but she kept me on a tight leash, and I was learning. Earnest and enthusiastic about our beliefs, I zealously pursued the Bible knowledge needed to “defend them against all comers,” as Gramps instructed. Eight years on the picket line had convinced me that there was nothing in the world of greater significance than this battle for the cause of God and truth, and I was ready to dedicate the rest of my life in service of it. I’d had a brief crisis of conscience that spring, when I’d been involved in the seventh-grade musical, and when I came out of it, I knew it was time to seek baptism. School had become a parallel culture to the one I inhabited at home, one that I had long since adapted to. I knew my classmates saw me as some sort of weird hybrid of a person: a friendly girl who enjoyed helping others with homework on the one hand, but a hateful religious fanatic who believed everyone was going to Hell on the other. I had friendly acquaintances, and, for the most part, we all compartmentalized my conduct during class from my existence outside of it. I rarely saw my peers outside of school, but in spending extracurricular time with them each day—sitting around joking about mean teachers, listening to music, doing homework together—I began to wonder: Were my classmates really as bad as I’d been taught?
The question lingered in the back of my mind for a time, but I batted it away as soon as I consciously acknowledged it. There were only two kinds of people in the world, and my classmates belonged firmly in the Esau category. They didn’t seem to know or care about the Bible. Their parents were divorced and remarried. And some of them were as good as committing fornication already, what with all the hand-holding and kissing they were doing in the hallways. They might be friendly to me, but these “friends” of mine were enemies of God—and therefore must be my enemies, as well. Do not I hate them, O Lord, that hate thee? and am not I grieved with those that rise up against thee? I hate them with perfect hatred: I count them mine enemies.
During the winter, baptisms were done in the baptismal font in the church sanctuary—essentially a large blue bathtub near the pulpit, typically hidden from view by peach-colored curtains. Summer baptisms took place in the in-ground pool. It was about fifty feet long and located just outside Westboro’s rear entrance. On the afternoon I was baptized, the congregation filed out into that communal space in the blinding noonday sun, and I joined them a moment later, after changing into a white T-shirt and cutoff jeans. In silence, we all clustered around the shallow end, waiting for my grandfather to emerge. Three black stripes were painted the length of the pool to identify lanes for lap swims, and when Gramps walked out in a red windbreaker suit and old Nikes, I followed him as he waded to the stripe in the center. When I was a child, he would stand in just this spot, lift me out of the water as if it cost him no effort at all, and toss me several feet for a big splash, to the place where the bottom of the pool slopes down to the deep end. And then Bekah. And then Josh. My cousins. Over and over we swam back to him, one after another after another.
Now he stood to my left and motioned for me to use both of my hands to take hold of his left wrist. He was nearly seventy now, with slight tremors in his hands. He began with a passage of Scripture: Know ye not, that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were