as our pastor spoke. Not a cough or a sneeze, not even from the babies—just a somber stillness as we contemplated the exhortations of this holy preacher, referred to as a star in the right hand of God in the book of Revelation. Regardless of how unpopular or unpalatable his message, we trusted him to preach it with complete faithfulness to the Scriptures, without ambiguity and without timidity, as he’d done for more than fifty years. He didn’t have the praise of the world, and he didn’t seek it. His work was unpaid as a matter of principle. My grandfather would have no financial conflicts of interest, no incentive to abridge the Bible the way he so frequently accused others of doing. That my grandfather kept himself from such sordid concerns was another layer of assurance of his dedication to preaching the unvarnished Word of God.
I never saw the confidence we had in our pastor as being rooted in the familial relationship he shared with about eighty percent of us, though this was generally presumed by outsiders to be the case. It was a galling thought—as if we, unique among human beings, would be forever possessed of our childhood credulity. As if all our faculties of reason, perception, and will could be entirely overruled by blood relation. It seemed that the goal of this assertion was to render us blind followers of an angry patriarch—because if we could be dismissed as such, it meant that no one need fear the wrath of the God we preached. In truth, the familial nature of Westboro’s ministry tended to make us, his children and grandchildren, more skeptical of our pastor, not less. As hecklers and journalists so frequently pointed to it as evidence of the lemming-like nature of our following, his status as “Gramps” became a pit out of which my grandfather had to climb. The burden of proof weighed the more heavily on him as a result, and he delighted in meeting that burden, utilizing every tool at his disposal to demonstrate the errors of the masses, their failures of logic, law, history, Scripture, righteousness.
My grandfather continued his sermon, which was—like all his sermons—laden with Bible quotes and references to expositors and theologians, evidence to support his frequent assertion that “I do not make this stuff up!” He never appealed to his own authority. Today’s sermon was a freewheeling condemnation of “fag America,” delivered in an old-time fire-and-brimstone polemic. But he wasn’t speaking only or even primarily to those of us seated in the austere sanctuary—1960s-era wood-veneer paneling, pews to seat about a hundred, devoid of iconography except a few new picket signs propped on easels flanking the pulpit (THANK GOD FOR SEPT. 11), and carpet a friend would later describe as “shockingly mauve.” This special sermon would be uploaded to GodHatesFags, an address to the nation intended to make the power brokers of the world stand up and take notice. He contrasted America’s maudlin response to the carnage of September 11 to England’s godly call for repentance in 1666, when the Great Fire blazed through London leaving immense destruction in its wake. He pointed to the old Puritan preachers who had seen the hand of God in that conflagration, proclaiming that the Almighty was punishing the inhabitants of London for their sins—and that England was doomed if they failed to heed God’s warning and repent.
As a fifteen-year-old, I was familiar with some of the Scriptural support for this theology, but it had failed to crystallize in my mind the way it did sitting in my pew that day. My formative years were an endless stream of opportunities to learn the church’s culture emphasizing the celebration and mockery of tragedy and death, and I had fully assimilated into that culture by the time 9/11 rolled around. Any misgivings I might have had were long since snuffed out by the verses demonstrating the example of our God, who had declared, Because I have called, and ye refused; I have stretched out my hand, and no man regarded; I also will laugh at your calamity; I will mock when your fear cometh. And then there was the passage in the book of Psalms: The righteous shall rejoice when he seeth the vengeance: he shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked. By age eleven, I was standing on the picket line exultantly repeating the words I’d heard from Gramps: “Two whores in a week!” I fancied myself cutely counterculture to be reveling