What about me? Was I a Jacob or an Esau? What about Bekah? What about Sam and Josh? How could we know? From the driver’s seat, Mom somberly explained that we couldn’t. That we wouldn’t know for sure until we all stood before God at the Judgment. Her words filled me with dread, calling forth a mental image of the whole world awaiting judgment at the feet of God, standing at rapt attention like an army of the damned—and me, standing among them. What could I do to avoid a ruinous outcome? Predestination, clearly, had not yet sunk into my little skull—of course, I could do nothing to change my fate if God had chosen me for Hell—but my mother understood my need for comfort. “It’s a good sign that you’re afraid,” she said. “It means that you care what God requires of you.” Come, ye children, hearken unto me: I will teach you the fear of the Lord.
Many more years and innumerable Bible studies would pass before I fully and practically appreciated the meaning of this doctrine—that a person’s goodness was a symptom of God’s love, the effect of it, and not the cause—but I soon found predestination an immediate and compelling motivator. Its power came from beauty and from terror, a confluence of two desires. There was the desire to be like Jacob, to be one of God’s jewels, with all the rarity, purity, and virtue that signified. And they shall be mine, saith the Lord of hosts, in that day when I make up my jewels; and I will spare them, as a man spareth his own son that serveth him. And then there was the abject fear of being like the despised Esau, before of old ordained to this condemnation. We were powerless to alter our destiny, but the surest sign we could have that we were one of God’s elect? Our obedience.
I came to love the clarity and simplicity of this idea, how directly the Scriptures connected obedience to goodness. It was even implicated in God’s commandment to “love thy neighbor.” Thou shalt not hate thy brother in thine heart: thou shalt in any wise rebuke thy neighbour, and not suffer sin upon him. Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. The context made it abundantly clear to us that to love our neighbor was to rebuke him, to warn him away from the sins that would result in punishment from God. If we failed to do so, the blood of the wicked would be on our hands. When I say unto the wicked, Thou shalt surely die; and thou givest him not warning, nor speakest to warn the wicked from his wicked way, to save his life; the same wicked man shall die in his iniquity; but his blood will I require at thine hand.
We had taken to the streets because we had a solemn duty to obey God and to plead with our neighbors to do the same. It didn’t matter that the world hated the message. It didn’t matter that it required vast amounts of our time, money, energy, resources. This was what God required of His elect.
Whatever it cost us, we would pay.
* * *
While our daily protests were an explosion of overt hostility between my family and the city, school was a subtler matter. The decision to send us to public school was due primarily to practical considerations: the adults needed to work in order to support their growing families and the church, which refused all (exceedingly rare) donations from nonmembers. But once it became clear that our protests would continue for years and decades to come, the elders came to a few additional conclusions. First, that our presence in public school classrooms was a testimony against the people of Topeka: though they accused us of being hateful, we were polite, friendly, well-behaved, and accomplished students. Having your conversation honest among the Gentiles: that, whereas they speak against you as evildoers, they may by your good works, which they shall behold, glorify God in the day of visitation. Our parents described us as “walking picket signs.” They also weren’t especially afraid that we would be unduly influenced by our peers or teachers, that we might be persuaded to doubt or question Westboro’s teachings. The intensity of our daily religious education at home was a bulwark against such heresies.