indoctrination and coercion, but I never saw it that way. We were of one mind as the Lord required us to be, and these verses showed that each of us had a voice that was integral to the church’s success.
So why were the meetings about my parents taking place behind closed doors?
Grace shook her head, looking as disconcerted as I felt.
* * *
In spite of our refusal to leave our home, the threat had its desired effect on our mom and dad: the willingness to distance my siblings and me from our parents sent a clear signal that their exclusion from the church was an imminent possibility. Faced with the apparent fact that the congregation was in full agreement as to the enormity of my parents’ sin and the righteousness of their punishment, my mother and father could reach only one conclusion: that God had blinded and deluded them as to their grievous faults. That their judgment was impaired, their thoughts fatally compromised, and that the only way forward was to trust and submit to the collective wisdom of the church without question. My parents seemed lost and dejected that night when they pitifully thanked my siblings and me for choosing not to leave them. My heart ached for them. They seemed broken—and that was exactly the point. The fight had gone out of them.
Inexplicably, it had not gone out of me.
On an evening walk with my sister-in-law Jennifer, I raged. Working myself into a frenzy, I argued that no part of this process was being done in a Scriptural fashion. Jen kept saying, “You need to talk to the elders.”
“I have! I’ve talked with Margie and Lizz and—”
“No,” she insisted, “the elders.”
I paused, confused. Jen held forth for a few minutes, and it soon became clear that she was not referring to “the elders” as the term had always been used at Westboro: an informal descriptor of all of the older people in the church, men and women of wisdom and experience. Instead she was referring to “the elders” as if they were the holders of a formal position in the church. What…? I thought, surprised and shocked into silence yet again.
At the next break in Jen’s diatribe on submission, I asked, “And who are the elders?”
Fred Jr. Jon. Tim. Charles. Ben. Sam. Steve.
“Your dad is, too,” Jen said, “but he needs to get his house in order.”
All of the older, married men.
I felt sure that my father could not have been involved in this decision, but I was aghast at the rest of them—both the ones who had orchestrated it and those who had acquiesced. It occurred to me that over the course of just a few days, these men had managed to overturn the democratic system, gleaned from Scripture, that had ruled Westboro all my life. Only then did I understand that this had been the ultimate purpose of that email. No doubt they believed they were assuming their rightful place at the head of the church, and Sam and Steve must have seen that my mother had been the only member of the church with enough influence to take a stand against such a hostile takeover, so there were no two ways about it: if these men were going to supplant the church’s long-standing decision-making practices, she had to be neutered.
The new hierarchy they had instituted made it instantly apparent where the rest of us now stood.
They hadn’t even bothered to let us know.
* * *
My mother had always laughed at the remarkable resemblance between her sense of humor and Grace’s. Whereas Bekah and I tended to view life through rose-colored lenses, wanting our stories tied up with big red bows and happily-ever-afters, the thought patterns shared by Grace and our mother were often morbid, endlessly playful, and frequently resulted in a group of siblings laughing ourselves to tears. Grace was forever plotting, her mind spinning tales for us at every moment. One day I returned to my desk and found money she owed me for a pair of jeans she’d bought on my credit card. Attached was a note, typical of her mischievous machinations, written as if to a loan shark with a plea not to “hurt my family.”
Sisterhood had not always been so agreeable to me. I could never identify precisely when it happened, but somewhere along the line, my eight younger siblings had—mercifully—ceased devoting their every waking hour to fighting and fits. I had always felt protective of these adorable nuisances, but now