in the deaths of two widely beloved women, though I had little knowledge of either Mother Teresa or Diana, Princess of Wales. No matter. When their deaths came just a few days apart, I knew all I needed: that the one was Catholic, and the other an adulteress. Elton John rewrote his song “Candle in the Wind” in tribute to Lady Diana, and less than twenty-four hours after he performed it at her funeral service, I was singing along to a chilling parody written by my mom and my aunt:
Goodbye, royal whore
Though you never spoke the truth
You know and hear it now
As do all of this world’s youth
You crashed into the stone wall
As you played your whorish games
They set you on a pedestal
And bow down to your name
But it seems to me you lived your life
Like a harlot full of sin
God cut you off
Now the flames set in
And you know we told you, though you’re
A throne away
Your name will die out long before
The pain will ever sway
Similar scenes played out following every death that caught my grandfather’s attention, everyone from Matthew Shepard (“His lying fag friends can’t help him now!”) to Mr. Rogers (“Sissy Pied Piper From Hell”). Day after day, month after month, year after year, I took in the gleeful reactions that Gramps modeled until they became mine. On the morning of 9/11, there was only a split second between a classmate’s frantic announcement of the attacks and my genuine excitement and glee at the demise of “those evil people.” I knew my lines. When the mayor of New York announced, “We will rebuild,” my memory called up the verse: We will return and build the desolate places; thus saith the Lord of hosts, They shall build, but I will throw down. When “United We Stand” became the national rallying cry, the simplest retort came from the book of Proverbs: Though hand join in hand, the wicked shall not be unpunished. And when other Christians insisted that God was not responsible for the calamity that had befallen the American people, many were the passages we would quote to confound their claims: shall there be evil in a city, and the Lord hath not done it? And again, God insists, See now that I, even I, am he, and there is no god with me: I kill, and I make alive; I wound, and I heal: neither is there any that can deliver out of my hand. And the Apostle Paul reminds the Ephesians, For this ye know, that no whoremonger, nor unclean person, nor covetous man, who is an idolater, hath any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God. Let no man deceive you with vain words: for because of these things cometh the wrath of God upon the children of disobedience. This last passage implies that some would deny a causal connection between the sins of men and the wrath of God—and declares that such denials are but vain words intended to deceive.
Clearly, the whole world was deceived—but we weren’t. How lucky we were to have the favor of God.
What stirred me most during my grandfather’s sermon that September day wasn’t just the oft-repeated refrains from the Bible; it was the historical context he had given these events. He had invoked “the Puritans of old England,” and the wheels turning in my mind almost audibly screeched to a halt. There had been people outside of the Bible who actually believed what we believed? It struck me as unlikely if not impossible, my surprise betraying how acutely myopic was my perspective at the time. As I experienced it, the modern world had always been deeply inhospitable to our beliefs, and it was easy to feel as if Westboro were an island existing outside of time, the one true connection to a righteous past—the lone bastion of truth in this “insane orgy of fag lies,” as Gramps was wont to say. He never needed to come right out and declare that our church was the only way to Heaven, not explicitly; that kind of sweeping assertion isn’t so easy to substantiate, and certainly would have invited much more suspicion and scrutiny from my highly analytical family.
Instead, my grandfather studied other churches extensively, teaching us all the ways they were full of error and sin. Methodists? Works righteousness. Catholics? Idolaters. Lutherans? Lukewarm idolaters. He referred to them as “social clubs” with little interest in knowing or doing what God required of them. In the era of megachurches and