Would I ever be truly free of it? Should I be doing more to try to extract myself from anything related to them?
For several reasons, I ultimately answered these questions with an emphatic no. First, when I stopped to consider the idea, I realized that I didn’t want to be free of them—and that it didn’t seem possible anyway, not without rewriting or erasing most of my history. Attempting to do so would have been inauthentic, the denial of a truth that David had been quick to recognize and point out: that the church had made me who I was, including many of the best parts of me. “You left out of principle,” David had told Grace and me, “pretty much the same principles you were raised with. And your departure was both a rejection and an affirmation of everything you were taught. You are your parents’ children.” Weeping, I had asked him how he could possibly say such a thing. We were betrayers. “In a way,” he said, “leaving Westboro Baptist Church was the most Westboro Baptist Church thing you could have done. They’re the ones who taught you to stand up for what you believe in, no matter what it cost you. They taught you that. They just never imagined you’d be standing up to them.”
I also fundamentally disagreed with the characterization that I was “focused on the past.” Though I occasionally found myself litigating old grievances, my examinations of the past felt urgent precisely because this was a present and future issue. My family remained stuck in a pattern of thinking and behavior that inflicted unnecessary harm on themselves and on the communities they continued to target every single day. As someone who had contributed to that harm for so long, I felt an obligation to those communities to work to dismantle it from the outside. As the longtime recipient of so much love, attention, and care from my family, for me to simply abandon them seemed like the height of ingratitude, a failure to reflect the kind of person my parents raised me to be: strong in the face of difficulties, willing to do hard things and make sacrifices for those I love. And as someone who had learned to see Westboro’s ideology from both sides of the divide, I couldn’t help feeling that it would be an abdication of responsibility and the waste of a gift to turn my back on a problem into which I may have some useful insight. I didn’t want to become the embodiment of the example from the book of James: For if any be a hearer of the word, and not a doer, he is like unto a man beholding his natural face in a glass: For he beholdeth himself, and goeth his way, and straightway forgetteth what manner of man he was. To have been transformed by the gentle, persistent entreaties of strangers—and then to walk away and forget that example, to refuse to extend that same courtesy and grace to others? Brutish.
But perhaps the most important reason I couldn’t just leave it all behind was the lesson that began to crystallize in my mind from my very first night in Deadwood, talking with Cora at the bar inside the Four Aces Casino:
Westboro is not unique.
The church’s garish signs lend themselves to this view of its members as crazed doomsayers, cartoonish villains who celebrate the calamities of others with fiendish glee. But the truth is that the church’s radical, recalcitrant position is the result of very common, very human forces—everything from fear, family, guilt, and shame, to cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias. These are forces whose power affects us all, consciously and subconsciously, to one degree or another at every stage of our lives. And when these forces are coupled with group dynamics and a belief system that caters to so many of our most basic needs as human beings—a sense of meaning, of identity, of purpose, of reward, of goodness, of community—they provide group members with an astonishing level of motivation to cohere and conform, no matter the cost.
Others with stories like mine have shown me repeatedly that the root of Westboro’s ideology—the idea that our beliefs were “the one true way”—is not by any means limited to Westboro members. In truth, that idea is common, widespread, and on display everywhere humans gather, from religious circles to political ones. It gives a comforting sense of certainty, freeing the believer from existential angst and providing a sense of