multimillionaire preachers of the prosperity gospel like Joel Osteen, he found the perfect foil: perverse disputings of men of corrupt minds, and destitute of the truth, supposing that gain is godliness. To us, such pastors were motivated by money, smoothing away the hard corners and sharp edges of Bible truths, sculpting them into enticing figurines to package and sell to ever larger congregations that sought not truth but comfort: which say to the prophets, Prophesy not unto us right things, speak unto us smooth things, prophesy deceits.
Divorce and remarriage had become a national pastime since the institution of no-fault divorce laws in the 1970s, and now “the pews of these churches—these whorehouses, these dog kennels!—are littered with divorced and remarried people! The Lord Jesus Christ calls them adulterers!” And indeed He had: Whosoever putteth away his wife, and marrieth another, committeth adultery: and whosoever marrieth her that is put away from her husband committeth adultery. Voice dripping with disdain, my grandfather railed against “Christians” so often in his weekly sermons that I spent my elementary school years believing the term to be synonymous with “evil” and denying that it applied to me. In the end, we drew the obvious conclusion from his attacks on other faiths—fortified by direct Bible quotes that we carefully memorized: that Westboro was the only safe haven from the wrath of God, both in this life and in the world to come.
But the Puritans had believed—or so Gramps declared. When the special 9/11 sermon came to a close, I walked home across our common backyard, flipped open the lid of my laptop, and brought up Google, searching for evidence of Gramps’s assertion about the destruction of London. Had the Puritans really believed as we did? Did their contemporaries believe them to be the crazy, hateful zealots that ours considered us? It didn’t take long for me to light upon the words of James Janeway, a popular Puritan minister and writer. To a city ravaged first by the Great Plague and just after by the Great Fire, Janeway wrote:
The Great and Dreadful God hath been pleading with poor England in these last Years […], and written Divine Displeasure in Letters of Blood. The Righteous Judge began his Circuit the last Year in London, and in that one City above one hundred thousand received the Sentence of Death from his just Tribunal. He hath not yet ended his dismal Circuit, but he rideth still […], pleading his Cause with us in a lamentable Fire, which in a few Days space, hath turned one of the most glorious Cities in the World to Ashes. The Voice of the Sword was not heard; the Language of the Plague was not understood; wherefore the dreadful Jehovah speaks louder and louder still […]. O stupid Creatures that we are, when shall we hear the Rod and him that appointed it!
I read on, astounded. Here it was, yet more proof—objective proof—that Gramps wasn’t just a hateful man fabricating these doctrines to bolster his preexisting prejudices, as the case was often made. Janeway was even quoting the same verses that my grandfather had. I would soon come to learn that this wasn’t the only Westboro doctrine deeply rooted in major branches of Christian theological tradition. My mother had so carefully used Barbies and Bible verses to explain the concept of predestination to my sister Bekah and me, but centuries before Westboro existed, this view was espoused by Christians the world over. It was popularized by the reformed theologian John Calvin and summarized by the acronym TULIP, which my grandfather put on a sign that hung behind his pulpit for years:
Total Depravity: All humans are, by nature, slaves to sin and incapable of choosing to follow God.
Unconditional Election: God has chosen who will be saved based solely on His mercy, not their merit.
Limited Atonement: God could have chosen to save all men, but sent Jesus to die only for His elect.
Irresistible Grace: Those chosen by God have no power to resist His call to salvation.
Perseverance of the Saints: God’s elect will persevere to the end and be saved.
These beliefs had long since fallen out of favor with the wider Christian community, and we understood their “evolution”—belief in free will, in universal salvation, in the idea that God loves all of mankind—to be apostasy and betrayal of the plain words of Scripture. The foolish shall not stand in thy sight: thou hatest all workers of iniquity. But all of this history, the venerable past of so