the table, my eye was drawn instantly to a woman a few rows back. I recognized her as one of the counterprotesters from three years earlier. Long dark hair. Sharp brown eyes. She had been part of the group that had surrounded me, grabbing for my signs, pushing and pressing in on me. It had been her face, twisted in disgust, that had been screaming into mine while those two old women whispered in my ears. I felt my skin crawl, my stomach clenching as fear and betrayal surfaced again. Some of these people had attacked my family. What was I doing here?
But the woman’s face wasn’t vengeful now. It was splotchy with tears. As David began to call on audience members with questions, I was moved to find similar expressions on faces all over the room. Not angry. Mournful. They framed their questions with kindness. They offered forgiveness. Again and again, they expressed the hope that if we could change, then others could, too. Many would find Grace and me later, embrace after embrace, and tell us their stories of Westboro. Students with LGBT friends driven to self-harm by an atmosphere of intolerance we had fed. A twenty-something whose parents had forced him from his home when he’d come out as gay—“I know what it feels like to lose your family,” he said as he wrapped me in a bear hug. “You’re not alone.” A U.S. Marine who had witnessed Westboro’s presence at the funeral of his friend. It had been over a year, he told me, and still he had so much rage. He couldn’t turn on a dime and let it all go, but it helped him to understand. He believed he could find peace now.
Most shocking of all would be the handful of apologies. Some had accosted me on Twitter, others outside the festival three years earlier. “I didn’t know,” they said. “I was angry. Next time, I’ll try to find a better way.”
“Just a few more questions, guys,” David said. “They’re gonna need this room for the next session soon.”
“What’s the most important thing you’ve learned since you’ve been here?” one girl asked. “And what do you hope will happen to the church?”
I had spent the week parsing Bible verses with David and Rabbi Yonah Bookstein, who ran the festival with his wife, Rachel, and I couldn’t help diving into the verse I had most fixated on. “One of the most mind-blowing things is how they understand the verse that says, ‘Love thy neighbor.’” I quoted the verses. Thou shalt not hate thy brother in thine heart: thou shalt in any wise rebuke thy neighbour, and not suffer sin upon him. Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.
“At home,” I continued, “we always equated love with rebuke, because of that passage. As long as we believed our words to be truthful, we were free to rebuke the rest of the world at any time, in any place, and in any way that we wanted. We could be harsh, and crude, and insulting, and it didn’t matter, because everyone else was Hell-bound anyway. Those verses justified almost everything we did—including picketing funerals. But David told us about that passage from a Jewish perspective.”
“From our view,” David said, “a rebuke is supposed to happen privately, kindly, and with people you have reason to believe will hear you. If you’re attacking someone you know won’t listen—if you’re trying to correct them harshly, in a way that will provoke them to anger instead of encouraging them to change their ways—then you’re the one who is committing a sin.”
“I feel so stupid saying this,” I said, “but we really believed that it was irrelevant how we spoke to people. ‘Gospel preaching is not hateful!’ we always said. ‘Truth equals love!’ But now it seems so painfully obvious: of course it matters how we talk to people. Truth and love are not synonyms. The New Testament even says it plainly. Speak the truth in love. The Apostle Paul said, To the weak became I as weak and that we should weep with them that weep. I don’t know how we missed that for so long.”
“Your other question about what we hope will happen to the church…” Grace paused. “We want them all to leave. People have been speculating for a long time about what would happen if Gramps dies–”