dropped and broken into heavy chunks. All of our garden hoses had been sliced open, and a huge gash in our beloved trampoline had rendered it worthless. As a kid, I was most frightened by the lacerated state of the trampoline; anyone who could do harm to such a beautiful object clearly would not hesitate to turn the knife on a person. Later on, someone did take a knife to my cousin’s tiny Westie, nearly beheading the poor creature for being on the wrong picketer’s property at the wrong time. Little April managed to pull through, but we took this as just another in a long line of violent criminal attacks we faced for lawfully standing on public sidewalks to preach the standards of God. Persecution in the purest sense of the word.
2. The Bounds of Our Habitation
Throughout my childhood, my mother was determined to make my siblings and me understand one idea above all: We were not in charge of our lives, but God—and that God ruled via the parents and elders He had set over us. Our duty was singular: to obey them. Children, obey your parents in all things: for this is well pleasing unto the Lord. Their power over us was absolute, and we would do well to accept that without question or protest. These were, as the New Testament put it, the bounds of our habitation. It was one of my mother’s favorite phrases.
In Westboro’s theology, obedience was about more than family life. My mother began trying to get this across to us as soon as we were old enough to understand words, and my earliest understanding of it came during a car ride we took together. I was settled in the backseat of our white Toyota Camry, with Bekah buckled into the seat next to me and our mother at the wheel. I think we were headed to or from the family law office, but some parts of the recollection are slippery—sometimes I look over and Bekah is in a car seat, sometimes not, sometimes it’s winter, sometimes spring—so I can’t be sure. What I do remember is that we were young enough to each have a Barbie doll in our laps, and that Mom was telling us about predestination.
My mother’s ardent love for the Scriptures manifested itself in many ways, but it was especially apparent in the joy she took in teaching the Bible for its own sake—not when one of us had disobeyed and needed correction, but while she read and expounded upon the stories to us, taking care to make sure we understood the complexities as well as we could at any given age, going a little deeper each time we returned to the same story. For precept must be upon precept, precept upon precept; line upon line, line upon line; here a little, and there a little. She was revealing to us the secret ways in which the world worked, and Bekah and I were full of questions. In the car that day, we were trying for the first time—but certainly not the last—to wrap our young minds around the idea that everything we did, every word, every deed, every blink of an eye, beat of the heart, twitch of a muscle—all had been caused by God, who worketh all things after the counsel of his own will. My first response to this assertion was to do what I assume many people do upon discovering predestination: to make a split-second decision and suddenly shift course in an attempt to prove the idea false. With all my strength, I squeezed my fists into tiny balls, fingernails biting into my palms, and then released. Had God seen that coming? My eyes widened as I realized that the doctrine of predestination was impossible to thwart; God controlled even those impulsive flailings, even the impulses themselves. (“Unfalsifiability” was not yet a term in my repertoire, and so presented no difficulty for me at the time.)
Mom continued on, telling the story of Jacob and Esau to illustrate predestination. It wasn’t the long version of their story from the Old Testament, of Jacob’s deceit in securing the blessing of the firstborn and of Esau’s vow of murderous revenge. Instead, our mother focused on the most salient part of their tale, found in the book of Romans: their fates. Jacob and Esau had been grandsons of the patriarch Abraham—twin grandsons, Mom stressed, as biologically similar as it was possible for two humans to be. “And yet! Before