only because it would get Westboro a platform on the Oprah Winfrey Network, a show hosted by Rosie O’Donnell. My uncle Nate had been interviewed, and the producers wanted to give us an opportunity to respond to his claims. Stomach twisting, I watched the interview the day it was published, expecting my family to cleverly evade the grisly accusations, to tell selective truths, to employ misdirection. These were all deceptive tactics, I knew, but I was consoled by the fact that they weren’t outright lies. The truth was important to me—it was our defense against the never-ending attacks that came at us every day—and I anxiously wondered what Nate was going to say and just how my family would be able to respond honestly without hurting the church.
The answer was that they couldn’t. There sat my mother, four aunts, and two uncles—all in their forties and fifties by this point—giggling at the reporter’s grim questions, all pretending they had no idea what Nathan could possibly be referring to. “I don’t even know what a barber strap is!” said one incredulously. “Does he have a picture or something, so that we might know what he’s talking about?” another derided. “Nate always had an overactive imagination.” The smugness and condescension stunned me. The footage went on for nearly twenty minutes, and it was painful to watch. “There wasn’t any physical abuse, just forget that!” “They used to call it spanking!” As if it were all just a confusion of terms.
“Did you feel emotionally abused as a child?” the producer asked quietly. They erupted in laughter.
“Do you mean by Nathan?”
They went on at length about Nathan’s shortcomings as a child—“disruptive, destructive, distressing”—and I sat there mouth agape at the double standard. My family would never stop harping on the sins of Nathan’s youth, but would lay none of the responsibility at the feet of their father. Nate was to be held forever accountable for not conforming, for not just learning to fear and obey the way that they had all learned to. My mom and her siblings were holding Nate to account for the chaotic state of their childhood home—but they never would with Gramps.
Because Gramps had stayed. And Nate had left.
A vexing thought began to take hold. As members of Westboro, we behaved as if everyone in all the world were accountable to us, as if they all were steadfastly bound to obey our preaching—because we were the only ones who knew the true meaning of God’s Word. Presidents and kings, judges and governors, Princess Diana and Mother Teresa—all were subject to our understanding and our judgment. And all the while, we ourselves were accountable to no one outside our fences. But he that is spiritual judgeth all things, yet he himself is judged of no man. For who hath known the mind of the Lord, that he may instruct him? But we have the mind of Christ. Who would have the audacity to contradict the mind of Christ?
Nathan had dared to question the judgment of the church, and he had faced our collective wrath as a result. The facts were in Nate’s story, but we said he was fabricating it all in order to make a name for himself off of the church. “But go ahead and write some books and whatnot,” one of my uncles scoffed. “We don’t really care.” We dismissed Nathan as being driven by the same pecuniary motive people falsely assigned to us, and for partly the same reason: to avoid facing an uncomfortable truth, a blurring of the line between the good guys and the bad. So we called the truth a lie and rewrote history—as though it were in our power to dictate reality so long as it was in the church’s judgment and interest. So long as we all held the line, no one could prevail against us.
We were the Jacobs. We were always under Satan’s attack. We had to protect ourselves.
I was beginning to see that our first loyalty was not to the truth but to the church. That for us, the church was the truth, and disloyalty was the only sin unforgivable. This was the true Westboro legacy.
I walked away from the video and pushed the troubling thoughts away, knowing without thinking that Nate would go away at the end of this news cycle and something else would take his place. I wouldn’t have to think about it anymore. I instinctively held on to the hope that had carried me through all