life, we slid down off our pews and prostrated ourselves on the floor of the church sanctuary. The men took turns making elaborate prayers to God to kill these men that very weekend, before they had the opportunity to attack the Lord’s church in this way. We were the representatives of the Most High God, and we prayed He would show Himself strong on our behalf. Our requests were made in the spirit of King David’s imprecatory prayers—prayers of cursing, invocations of the wrath of God. When David was being pursued by his enemy, he prayed that the Lord would
Let his days be few; and let another take his office.
Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow.
Let his children be continually vagabonds, and beg.
Let there be none to extend mercy unto him: neither let there be any to favour his fatherless children.
Our enemies did not die over the weekend, but this pervasive doctrinal shift would affect the church for years to come, pushing us ever more to the extreme. As with Westboro’s decision to shift our focus to military funeral pickets, our new imprecatory prayers caused me significant consternation—but I had trouble discerning its root. King David had plainly made these prayers about his enemies, and God had called David a man after mine own heart. Even Jesus Himself had promised vengeance to His people: And shall not God avenge his own elect, which cry day and night unto him? I tell you that he will avenge them speedily. Clearly, our imprecatory prayers were consistent with Scripture.
But if that was true, why did they unsettle me so?
This was not a line of questioning that I could pursue. I was in the habit of suppressing thoughts that conflicted with the Bible as my family understood it, and by the time I was twenty, that tendency was nearly as second nature as breathing. My feelings were irrelevant. I would sacrifice them on the altar of submission to the church, because that was my first and foremost duty in this life. As Margie had told me in the email that sat in my top drawer: “Sometimes you have to step away from being the one with all the analysis and all the answers, and just submit.”
It is disconcerting—shamefully, unimaginably so—to look back and accept that my fellow church members and I were collectively engaging in the most egregious display of logical blindness that I have ever witnessed. I cannot account for my failure to recognize that our new imprecatory prayers were entirely and fundamentally at odds with our long-standing, oft-professed desire to love thy neighbor, that they were perfect contradictions of Jesus’s command to love your enemies. Both positions had been derived from the Scriptures—but how could we have sincerely held such deeply incompatible views for so many years? It should have been inconceivable in a group of Westboro’s size and intelligence. Still, the partition between the piece of my mind that confessed love for my neighbors and the piece that asked God to dash the young men to pieces was vast, opaque, and impenetrable. That brief spark of nagging discomfort was snuffed out, and I carried on.
A deceived heart hath turned him aside, that he cannot deliver his soul, nor say, Is there not a lie in my right hand?
* * *
I had decided to follow my mom and Margie to law school as a kindergartner, but the Snyder lawsuit was the first Westboro case I was able to follow up-close. I’d been too young to understand the broader context and the legal significance of the ones that came before, even though my mother had never been hesitant to teach me about them. And then as I got older, I became skeptical of my mother’s portrayals of the cases, anyway. Margie had an inclination to steel-man her opponent’s arguments—depicting them in the best possible light, and then expertly dismantling them to their foundations, brick by crumbling brick—but my mother tended to straw-man. She presented facts in such a way that our side came out as a paragon of virtue, and our opponents as the nadir of evil. Her analysis was just too intense and one-sided to be objective, and it became important for me to read the records for myself. My mother would always encourage me to do so. She seemed to sense that I’d begun to view her as a bit of an unreliable narrator, but she was confident that examining the primary source material would lead me to