laundry with my four youngest brothers outside the upstairs laundry room, I was abruptly transported back to my pew one Sunday morning a few years earlier. My grandfather was preaching about Hell again, expounding eloquently on what it entailed. The same shall drink of the wine of the wrath of God … and he shall be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels, and in the presence of the Lamb: And the smoke of their torment ascendeth up for ever and ever: and they have no rest day nor night. In Hell, my grandfather explained, the damned would each in turn be put on trial: every wrong thought and word and deed that they had ever committed would be adjudicated in exhaustive detail. And the adjudicators? The people in Heaven. Each one of the Saints of God would have a caseload, as it were, personally condemning the reprobates to an eternity of agony and rejoicing at their endless suffering. It was a very real and present fear that my grandfather elicited with his detailed descriptions of torment—but the idea had been abstract to me until that moment. As I listened to my grandfather’s words, it suddenly occurred to me to consider Heaven and Hell in practical terms: I would be condemning people to torture? And I would be happy about it? I couldn’t even watch a torture scene in a film without jumping out of my seat, overcome with outrage, disgust, and revulsion that anyone could be capable of visiting such horror on a living, breathing human being. I didn’t think I could condemn people to torture, and sitting in my pew that day, I’d wondered if there was something wrong with me. No, the thought resounded now. I picked up a stack of bath towels and handed them to my brother. If Hell is real, then God is evil. Terrified, I mentally backtracked. Maybe.
Walking with Grace and our nieces to the park that weekend, my thoughts veered to a letter to the editor published by the local newspaper when I was sixteen. It bore my signature, but my aunt Margie had written it. Though I had agreed with every word, there was one part that rang strongly discordant in my mind: “I’ve watched carefully and listened to my grandfather and those who oppose him. My grandfather’s Bible-preaching is more agreeable to my heart.” We never appealed to our own thoughts or feelings as reliable evidence of truth, and we routinely disparaged others for doing so. The Bible was true because it was true, regardless of how I—or anyone else—felt about it or any of its teachings. This had been a theme of my life, oft-repeated by my mother: The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it? There was always urgent warning in my mother’s voice when she quoted this passage: we could not trust our hearts. Our feelings would lead us astray. Why had Margie written that sentence? I’d been almost physically repulsed by it, and watching my nieces bound across the field as we arrived at the park, I was finally able to pinpoint why: my sixteen-year-old self had started to recognize the contradiction. We used our hearts to authenticate the moral truth of the Bible—the same Bible that told us our hearts were deceitful. I shook my head as I realized that all we had was our hearts. In writing that sentence, Margie had unwittingly betrayed that at bottom—resting beneath all the chapters and verses that we’d spent years quoting and memorizing—the foundation of it all was a belief that our hearts had led us true when they told us the Bible was the answer.
The few weeks following that Fourth of July were the longest I’d ever lived. Whenever Grace couldn’t avoid being alone with me, our conversations followed a predictable pattern. I would attempt to dissect the problems at Westboro, and she would nod in agreement at my analysis—but then she would insist on addressing the consequences that I could not bear to consider. Our family. How worthless our lives would be without them. The pathetic emptiness of a life without this divine purpose. And eternity in Hell. These were unfathomably horrifying, but I could not let go of the failures of Scripture and logic that I now saw so clearly in the church. How could we go on living like this?