just; the practice was still highly questionable and suspect to my mind, and I couldn’t understand why anyone would risk it—especially my smart and pious parents.
I soon learned that sex wasn’t the only thing that could get you into trouble, though. “Lust,” too, was dangerous and forbidden. My mom explained it carefully to my siblings and me sitting around the living room during one of our daily Bible readings. “Lust is a strong desire for something you’re not entitled to. You cannot be said to ‘lust’ after your spouse, for instance, because that’s something you are entitled to. The word doesn’t apply!” I vaguely understood that the context here was boys and girls, but my mind went straight to my little sister’s Barbies. Bekah refused to let me play with them, but I’d always dreamed of combining our dolls into one giant collection, which I would then apportion between us as I deemed appropriate (the naked ones with the ratty hair and missing limbs would be hers, obviously). I strongly desired to take control of her toys; was this lust? I wasn’t positive, but Mom had already moved on, so it didn’t seem like the perfect time to ask.
“Then when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin: and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death.” She was quoting James 1:15. “You need to understand this, children. Lust is the beginning of every sin, and death and Hell are the end of every sin. Every evil thing arises from lust. We have to be vigilant about it. Don’t think that you’re special or strong, that you can just go down a lustful path in your mind and not have it affect your actions and behavior. This is a truism: Then when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin: and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death. Make no mistake: lust will bring sin, and sin will bring death. You have to cut it off, and not let it take root in your heart.”
She paired this verse with another, and they will be forever linked in my mind: Can a man take fire in his bosom, and his clothes not be burned? It’s one of the Proverbs, captivating in its simplicity. The imagery clearly hearkens back to Hell again, where most of our conversations eventually led.
The discussion continued one day when my mother came to my kindergarten class to have lunch with me. On our way to the cafeteria, she spotted my first-grade cousin walking down the far end of the nearly empty hallway. Mom suddenly seemed disturbed and disgusted. “The way she walks is so inappropriate!”
“What do you mean, Mama?”
“She swishes her butt when she walks. Do you see that? She does it on purpose. No one walks like that.”
I watched my cousin as she disappeared into the lunchroom, trying to see what my mother saw. As far as I could tell it was the way she’d always walked, and I said so, confused.
“No. She walks like that to get attention from boys.”
Ah, it dawned on me.
Lust.
Suddenly very aware of my gait, I began to walk stiffly, keeping my little hips as still as I could make them. I asked my mom if I did that sort of thing when I walked, too. She shook her head. “No. I’ll have to talk to her mom about it. I’m worried about that girl.”
* * *
As my childhood years passed, and then my teenage ones, ever more praise was heaped on virgin marriages, and ever more vilification on any relationship outside of that. There was no such thing as “dating” in this context. God hated fornication, and having dinner alone with an unrelated member of the opposite sex would inexorably lead to fornication—or at the very least, it had the appearance of evil, which we were strictly instructed to avoid. Even if a couple was engaged, there would be no kissing, and certainly no time to themselves, until after the vows. If they didn’t have a chaperone at all times, there was the appearance of evil: the presumption would be that the betrothed had been in flagrante, their undefiled status would be called into question, and the church would have to suss out exactly what had happened during the time in question.
And although marriages weren’t terribly frequent at Westboro, it seemed like there was never any shortage of such matters for the church to suss out. Before I was born and as I was growing up, several women in the church