One more tweet on the early days of MeganPhelps on her God-appointed path: The HUGE happy personality is still with us!
And Grace:
26 years ago, MeganPhelps was born. I am above all blessed to have her as my sister, friend, counselor, teacher, +, +, +.
Boaz said to Ruth, “… for all the city of my people doth know that thou art a virtuous woman…” The same can be said of MeganPhelps.
Accompanying Grace’s tweet was a birthday gift on the same theme: a painting based on an album cover I loved, from a band called “Sons of an Illustrious Father.” Grace had replaced the name of the band with a new one: “Daughters of a Virtuous Mother,” in the radiant colors of sunset. It was beautiful, but I sensed in this gift a small act of defiance, too: unqualified praise of our mother, who was still an object of scrutiny and judgment by church members. Though I felt confident in condemning the whole world, the pronouncements of the church were sacrosanct and I had always been terrified of contradicting them in any way. For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness is as iniquity and idolatry. But in that moment, my sister’s subversion lit me from within. She was defending our mother.
And she was not afraid.
* * *
As the months ticked by, my vague hope that life would eventually return to some sense of normalcy began to dissolve. The shaming of my mother continued into the spring and summer of 2012, more than a year after it had begun. The church was caught in another incident of lies and Photoshop, and it became an international news story that we had pretended to protest Whitney Houston’s funeral. After this fiasco, and at the risk of getting ourselves into more trouble with our father, Grace and I were finally able to convince him to represent our concern to the rest of the elders. They agreed to end the public lies and manipulated photos, but only because they were deadlocked about the issue: four of them were against it, but four had no qualms. I was relieved that they had decided against continuing the practice, but I simply could not fathom that half of the elders saw nothing wrong with it.
Somehow, the situation deteriorated further still. A cousin of mine, then a woman in her early thirties, admitted to committing fornication and other sins, and she was ostracized and isolated by the church for months. The elders deemed her unrepentant. Just before the church-wide meeting that was to be her final warning from the congregation, I spoke with my brother Sam. I explained to him that I hadn’t been allowed to speak with our cousin for nearly half a year, and that I had no way of knowing the state of her heart and mind. She and I were both members of the church, and didn’t I have a duty to love one another with a pure heart fervently? But on the elders’ command, I hadn’t even spoken to her. I told Sam that I needed to actually interact with her to know how she was.
“You mean, ‘trust, but verify’?” Sam scoffed. He shook his head dismissively. “Nah.” He made it clear that I just had to take the elders’ word for it and accept their judgment that she was unrepentant. This was the clearest repudiation yet of the unanimity called for in Scripture. I was stunned.
We walked across the backyard in the cool air of late April—almost a year exactly after that email to my parents—and joined the meeting in the church sanctuary. My cousin pleaded sorrow and repentance for her misdeeds, and I heard true shame and sincerity in her voice. The elders were unmoved. The meeting quickly became a campaign to exclude her that very night, in spite of the fact that three church members spoke up in her defense. I was grateful when one elder voiced the same objection that I had: that my cousin had not been given the biblically required third and final warning from the church body—her last opportunity to demonstrate repentance.
All of her defenders were overruled.
“You need to be instructed in this matter,” one of my uncles said with stomach-turning condescension.
After thirty-odd years at Westboro, my cousin was kicked out of the church, her home, her family, and her life—all in violation of the very Scriptures we claimed to champion.
My sisters’ responses to these events reflected the internal struggle I was experiencing. For many