documentary about Westboro in 2006, the year I turned twenty. Louis Theroux, the wily but affable presenter, spent a great deal of time talking to me and the other young adult women in my family. He and the rest of the crew seemed fascinated by the fact that our church was populated almost entirely by the children and grandchildren of the only pastor it had ever had—an especially salient consideration given the dearth of potential spouses for us, the grandchildren. We would likely never marry or have children of our own, which Louis saw as a huge problem for us, both personally and as a church. To him, the desire for companionship was in the essential nature of humanity, and without it we young, vivacious women would grow to be bitter spinsters, old and alone. He pointed out that our doctrines and strict policy of marriage only to church members were against our interests as a church body, too; they effectively cut off new blood that the church would need to grow. We would all eventually die off without it, and then Westboro would be no more.
We dismissed Louis’s arguments as utter poppycock. First of all, we told him, only the basest of humanity is ruled by carnal lust. There is no true member of God’s church who is so lascivious as to need marriage, and certainly not one who would be willing to defy God and marry an unbeliever. Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers: for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness? or what part hath he that believeth with an infidel? Wherefore come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing. The Apostle Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians is infinitely clear: no matter the circumstances, a desire to marry outside the church is dispositive evidence of one’s lack of salvation.
Second, we argued that God is entirely sovereign and controls the minds of all humankind. Of course, He’d chosen to harden the hearts of the vast majority of them—that’s why our church was so small—but with God, all things are possible. If He so chose, he could easily bring any or all of us a husband or wife. They would become believers and join the church, and then they would be suitable spouses for a servant of the Lord.
Finally and most important, we were living in the last of the Last Days, and Jesus would soon return through the clouds and save His people and dismantle the foundations of the earth. Who cares about marriage when the world will imminently be destroyed by God?
But when Louis approached Jael with questions of marriage and the future, she didn’t respond with a Bible verse—just a gentle laugh at his ignorance and a rhetorical question or two of her own: “Are you kidding? Who is gonna marry us?!”
After so many years, Jael had become a realist, too.
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At twenty-four, I had a major stumble. It was a short-lived infatuation with a young, foreign salesman who approached my seventeen-year-old sister, Grace, and me while we were walking through the mall (in a hurry, as always, because we couldn’t be out by ourselves for too long). He convinced us to let him do a demonstration on Grace’s hair of the curling iron he was selling, and we phoned home to get permission. The only reason we could even hope for a green light was that the salesman was Israeli. At that time, our church was exploring the book of Revelation, and many church members believed that we would be the instruments used by God to save 144,000 Jews. The whole doctrine was incredibly strange to me—it certainly wasn’t theology that I’d grown up with—but I wanted to understand it. I’d also never met an Israeli Jew, and he seemed different from the American Jews I’d met at pickets (which may have had something to do with the fact that I wasn’t holding a GOD HATES JEWS sign and singing an anti-Semitic parody of “Hatikvah,” but I digress). My mom was curious, too; it seemed like both of us were thinking something along the lines of “Maybe we’ll meet a saved Jew right here in Topeka!” So Grace and I got the go-ahead. Mom even told me to invite him and his colleague, also Israeli, to church on Sunday.
We sat there talking for about an hour while he worked through my sister’s impossibly long locks—a