years, my perspective had been much aligned with Bekah’s. We both felt a deep sense of inferiority when it came to matters of Scripture, and we were willing to yield to the judgment of older church members—even in cases where we at first felt discomfort or disagreement. The church had taught us to distrust our own judgment from the time we were children, and we had taken the verses to heart. The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it? When I spoke with Bekah about the doubts I was having, she responded in the same way that I always had: to see herself as insufficiently spiritual to question the wisdom of the elders. “We must be missing something,” she would say. “The elders must know something we don’t.” She trusted them, but little by little, my trust was eroding and withering. I wanted to believe Bekah, but for the first time in my life, I couldn’t shut off the questions running through my mind. I couldn’t identify the source of my new willingness to challenge the church, but I wanted it to go away. I wanted the simplicity of my old position—“trust and obey”—but it was proving elusive no matter how many times Bekah inspired me to reach for it.
Grace was another matter entirely. She had always had a unique role in the Phelps-Roper family, and I’d watched her grow into it with joy. As the seventh child of eleven, Grace tended to have fewer of the more mundane household responsibilities, because those generally fell to the older ones of us. Instead she had more free time and fun projects: arranging creative portrait sessions for other families in the church, painting street addresses onto the curb outside each Westboro home, and entertaining our little brothers. She was full of mischief and dubbed the “Pied Piper” by our mother, because the four youngest boys would follow her anywhere—including into the girls’ bathroom on one memorable occasion. Whereas Bekah and I were regarded as submissive and obedient, Grace’s free spirit and apparent lack of discipline earned her a reputation in the church as willful and coddled. It was a branding I considered undeserved: though it appeared that Grace’s daily tasks were more distraction than discipline, she was doing all that our parents required of her.
I felt motherly toward all my youngest siblings, each of whom I had read to and sung to and rocked to sleep when they were small, but Grace would always be special to me. She was the youngest of us three sisters in a family full of boys, and her name suited her well: she was graceful both in features and manner. My sister’s beauty and charm could be almost unnerving at times, though we never spoke of such things in our home. Any discussion of beauty was limited to an oft-quoted admonition about its emptiness. Favour is deceitful, and beauty is vain: but a woman that feareth the Lord, she shall be praised.
It was hard for me to hear the way our aunts and uncles impugned Grace’s obedience, and I became her champion of sorts, subtly pushing back against their disparaging words. I wouldn’t realize until much later that the protectiveness I felt for Grace wasn’t just because she was following the rules. It was because she was managing to do so without losing herself. I adored Grace’s creativity and free spirit and the dreams she would so casually mention—of traveling to Paris or Rome to see the sculptures she was studying in art history, or off to Russia, home of Pushkin and Tolstoy. I loved her dreams even though I knew them to be impossible. We could never leave the United States and the broad protection of the First Amendment, and the church’s ban on international travel was just one of the innumerable limitations on our lives that I had long ago assimilated. But because “Grace flies under the radar,” as my parents often noted, she was somewhat insulated from our mother’s watchful gaze and need for submission. She hadn’t yet been broken. She’d made it to age nineteen with her will intact, and she was the only person with whom I could speak openly about my concerns—the only one willing to express disagreement with the elders’ positions without including the standard caveat: “The elders know better. We must be missing something.”
Neither of us was prepared when Grace became their next target.