simple retweet—there would be trouble. I briefly considered pretending to have missed Steve’s message, but that also would’ve been a lie, and it wouldn’t have worked, anyway: I had at least a few thousand more Twitter followers than all other church members, and he would certainly check my account to see if I’d done his bidding.
As if on cue, a follow-up text from Steve popped up on my screen.
I went in search of my mother and asked if we had to follow Steve’s instruction, explaining the objection that Grace and I shared. This was just a week after my mother had sent her apology email to the church, and though she agreed with us, she had no standing to question or correct another church member on any matter—especially an elder—no matter how egregious. She contacted my father at work, and returned later to report that we just needed to do what Steve had directed.
I picked up my phone and tapped the “retweet” button feeling utterly disgusted with Steve, with myself, and with the state of the church. What was the matter with these elders? Our integrity, our fidelity to the Scriptures—these were our foundation and our only defense against the accusations that the world was forever hurling in our direction. Our signs were plastered with the wrath of God, but here we were, hypocritically ignoring one of the clearest declarations of God’s hatred in the Scriptures:
These six things doth the Lord hate: yea, seven are an abomination unto him: A proud look, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood, An heart that deviseth wicked imaginations, feet that be swift in running to mischief, A false witness that speaketh lies, and he that soweth discord among brethren.
Not just one but two of these seven abominations addressed lying. A lying tongue. A false witness that speaketh lies.
Just as I’d known they would, Twitter users quickly discovered the truth and began to call us out for the lies and manipulated photos. They quoted Bible verses to me, the same ones I had quoted to my mother. Ashamed and angry, I repeated the party line about “virtual picketing” and Steve’s ridiculous claim that the fake picket was never meant to be taken literally—that the photos were so poorly Photoshopped that no one could possibly have been taken in by them—but this, too, was demonstrably false. When someone on Twitter pointed out to UGNewsWire that Westboro members were banned from the U.K., Steve had tweeted back, “it was reported that the ban was lifted, but authorities can’t confirm.” Of course he meant to deceive people, I thought, he just did a shitty job.
Lying on my bed that night, Grace wasn’t spinning her absurd tales, and I wasn’t twisting her hair into French braids the way I’d done since she was a little girl. It felt foolish to be worked up over something as small as a retweet. Was our father right when he accused us of carping and self-righteousness? He had reminded us that we knew these people in the church, that they were kind and thoughtful and trying to do right by the Lord. They were working hard to preach to this God-forsaken world, and the two of us were sitting on the sidelines looking down our noses and sniping at them. What was our problem?
Grace and I stared at the ceiling for a time, talking quietly until we came to the answer:
For the first time, we had been told to do something unscriptural by someone in a position of authority.
For the first time, we had no way to make our objections heard by the church.
And as always, we had no choice but to submit.
* * *
By July, three months after the initial disciplinary email, visible signs of the elders’ influence were multiplying. A new, stricter modesty standard for women and girls had come first, implemented within days of the elder takeover. Before that, the general rule had been to cover the “4 B’s”—“breasts, back, butt, and belly,” my mother recited—but its enforcement had never been draconian. Now, showing any hint of skin in these areas—as, when reaching into the truck bed to grab a picket sign, a girl’s shirt rose and briefly exposed an inch of her stomach—was cause for censure. Legs, too, had become a problem. My parents sent my sisters and me to the mall in search of longer shorts, and we found several pairs that reached below mid-thigh. Our father approved, but he had been given to understand