and increased for months on end, and even though she and Gramps were close, she dared not be open with him about what was happening to her. If she had, her exclusion from the church would have been all but certain.
I struggled to conform to our new paradigm, and I struggled to understand and articulate why I was struggling. Theoretically, it was possible to implement a change like this in a biblical way. There were plenty of verses in the New Testament about elders, and I realized for the first time that at least some of them were referring to a specific office in the church—not just to “older people.” And when they had ordained them elders in every church, they commended them to the Lord. Let the elders that rule well be counted worthy of double honour. But unlike in that passage, we hadn’t ordained these elders; they had ordained themselves—a fact that would have been easier to accept if I hadn’t felt conflicted about nearly every decision they issued.
One of the first came just before the Royal Wedding, the marriage of Prince William to Kate Middleton. Per our usual practice, the church issued a news release and announced on Twitter that we would protest the affair: “Wedding vows mean nothing to these royal mutts!” We had no intention of actually traveling to London—not least because the United Kingdom had banned church members from entering the country—but even the announcement of a protest was enough to generate significant media coverage. We were engaging in what we called “virtual picketing”: protesting a faraway event in a local space, and reaching the target audience by publishing photos and messages on the Internet and through the media. There was nothing inherently dishonest about this tactic—injustice in one city often inspires public demonstrations in others—except, of course, that our intent was to deceive.
We had employed this strategy before, choosing words that were technically true, but designed to leave an impression that was not: that we were actually present outside the event. I’d thought this was funny when I was younger, viewing it as a prank or a trick, rather than a lie. The behavior seemed questionable to me now, but all doubt left my mind as soon as I saw my cousin Jael abandoning the “technically true” for outright lies: she was posting tweets about being on a plane to London. My heart sank when I received a group text from Steve instructing everyone with a Twitter profile to republish a post from an account he had just created: UGNewsWire. The account purported to be an “Int’l News Service,” complete with a fake logo to make it appear as if it were a legitimate media outlet. Its posts read:
WBC members (of ‘God Hates Fags’ infamy) picket outside Westminster Abbey day before #RoyalWedding
The infamous Westboro Baptist Church is on the ground in the UK - protesting the Royal Wedding:
Each of the posts included an image of Westminster Abbey that had been digitally altered to include picketers with signs. I saw that Steve had sent them to the BBC, the Associated Press, USA Today, and other news organizations.
I was mortified. These lies were idiotic, not only violating the Scriptures but offering the hordes of people who hated us a legitimate reason to impugn the integrity of the church. It undermined our claim to being messengers of God, and it was the picture of a verse my mother quoted often: Give none occasion to the adversary to speak reproachfully. I had several thousand followers on Twitter, and though I angered them on a regular basis, I had a growing sense of community with the people I encountered there. I felt like I owed them the truth, and I didn’t want to be attacked for being dishonest. And on top of everything else, I didn’t want them to think I was the type of person who would tell ridiculous lies for the sake of publicity.
In a pique, Grace found me at my desk not long after Steve’s message came through: “Did you see Steve’s text?!”
“Yeah,” I sighed. “Yikes.” Grace and I talked it through and were in agreement that the whole situation was petty, wrong, and embarrassing. We also knew that we would hear from Steve if we didn’t retweet him, and that we couldn’t decline his order without support from our parents. If we refused to obey—even in the matter of a