visit the Booksteins.
Two weeks later, I drove twenty-two hours straight from Los Angeles to Deadwood to see him. He made the six-hour drive to meet me that weekend, and we met up nearly every weekend of my first summer away from home. We explored the wild of the Black Hills all season long, my elation tempered only by the knowledge that my parents would be dismayed by the path I had chosen. Instead of becoming habituated to Chad’s visits, I found each one more improbable than the last. As I came to know him, it became clear that just about every part of his existence made our relationship so unlikely that it should have been impossible. He had painstakingly built for himself a successful life and career, arranging it all to be as simple and quiet and predictable as possible. Understanding how intensely he valued privacy, the lengths to which he went to eschew attention, how little of himself he tended to reveal to others, I couldn’t help but marvel that he had ever shared anything with me while I was still at Westboro. He marveled, too, with that particular smile he’d get—awe mixed with disbelief—when he couldn’t seem to grasp the reality of us. “Why are you here?” he’d balk, searching my face as if an answer might be discovered in the blue of an iris or the curve of a cheekbone. “How?”
That question became my obsession, too, and the further I ventured from the constraints of Westboro’s belief system, the more I found myself looking back across what seemed to be an ever-widening gulf, wondering how others might be able to traverse it. I remembered how much sense the church’s beliefs had made to me while I was a member, and became fixated on trying to pinpoint exactly where Westboro’s error lay—and most important, how to communicate my changing perspective to my family in a way that they could hear, and wouldn’t just dismiss out of hand. I read through their tweets and sermons compulsively, challenging myself to articulate both sides of the argument: why Westboro held each of their positions, and why I no longer did. In some cases, the distance between us felt too vast to even make an attempt at persuasion—rushing directly into casting doubt on a literal interpretation of the Bible, for instance, would certainly go nowhere. Instead, I let my arguments be guided by the pattern that had worked with me, with Dustin and Laura, and with others whose stories I was coming to learn: the discovery of internal inconsistency and hypocrisy as an important first step in seeing outside of group dogma.
Though my arguments largely went unanswered, I made them to Westboro members via interviews, on Twitter, and through private messages. Coming up against their wall of certainty was often a frustrating and painful exercise, and not just because of the callousness and condescension that so often filled their rhetoric. At Westboro, any admission that we might be wrong about any doctrine was accompanied by intense shame and fear. If we reversed course on any issue, we did so quietly, never admitting publicly to our mistakes. From our point of view, acknowledging error and ignorance was anathema, because doing so would cast doubt on our message. While I engaged church members as an outsider, I started to understand that doubt was the point—that it was the most basic shift in how I experienced the world. Doubt was nothing more than epistemological humility: a deep and practical awareness that outside our sphere of knowledge there existed information and experiences that might show our position to be in error. Doubt causes us to hold a strong position a bit more loosely, such that an acknowledgment of ignorance or error doesn’t crush our sense of self or leave us totally unmoored if our position proves untenable. Certainty is the opposite: it hampers inquiry and hinders growth. It teaches us to ignore evidence that contradicts our ideas, and encourages us to defend our position at all costs, even as it reveals itself as indefensible. Certainty sees compromise as weak, hypocritical, evil, suppressing empathy and allowing us to justify inflicting horrible pain on others.
Doubt wasn’t the sin, I came to believe. It was the arrogance of certainty that poisoned Westboro at its foundations.
Whenever friends and family expressed concern about my continued focus on the church and the past, I would gently dismiss them—but inwardly, I began to wonder if my identity would be forever tied to Westboro.