dismissal, I understood that the end result for me—that I would be forced to come to grips with the church and my beliefs without outside influence—was the best possible outcome. My decision had to be untainted. If we did eventually leave, it could only be because it was the right choice to make—because the church had replaced the Scriptures with the word of these fallible men—and not because I wanted something to which I wasn’t entitled. But every man is tempted, when he is drawn away of his own lust, and enticed. Do not err, my beloved brethren.
And—I thought bitterly—whatever else C.G. intended, he was teaching me a valuable lesson: on the outside, Grace and I could count on no one but ourselves.
* * *
Having established our intention to stay, Grace and I found ourselves right back where we began: in an intolerable situation that had to be confronted. But how? We decided to start slowly at first. Rather, we decided that I would start slowly. My sister was still the subject of ongoing church discipline, and like our mother, had no space at all to object. No matter how legitimate the complaint, she would be seen as recalcitrant and almost certainly excluded from the church without delay. I had only marginally more leeway, and I was well on my way to losing even that. Grace and I had refrained from using Twitter almost entirely since July 4, though she had a good excuse: as part of her punishment, the elders had forbidden her from doing so. But given my generally prolific use of the platform, my sudden lack of Twitter activity—combined with an inability to hide my heavy heart—had almost immediately become cause for worry. I began to receive concerned text messages, phone calls, and visits from other church members, with Steve at the head of the pack.
He called me up one day in late July. I was out at the noontime pickets with two of my cousins when my phone rang—and though I wanted badly to decline the call, I picked up. Delaying the discussion would only make things worse. I could never stay still when stressed, so as soon as I answered, “Hello, Steve?,” I began dragging myself up and down the sidewalk in the heavy humidity, pacing in front of a church we’d protested every single day since I was about six. Steve said I seemed down. No shit, I thought, but held my tongue. He said he was worried because I didn’t seem as unguarded as I’d always been. I didn’t attempt to deny it, but I focused on the safer sources of my despondency: the difficulty of watching my mother go through this long period of transition and general fatigue from all the work on my plate.
“You didn’t mention Grace,” Steve said flatly.
Suspicious.
I mumbled for a moment, unsure of how to proceed except to say that I was weary and wary, and then he jumped in again.
“It’s not a doctrinal thing, is it?” He was incredulous at the thought, but before he could make me answer, he launched into a diatribe about the importance of regularly engaging other members of the church. I wanted to shoot back that he and the other elders had made that impossible. That they had created such a sense of fear within the body that there was no way to speak openly about any objection to their actions. An Orwellian level of control over our every word, our every movement.
But I kept quiet. When he finished, I thanked him kindly, hung up the phone, and made a decision. I had already suspected that doctrinal errors would be the most difficult to change, because they were seen as coming directly from the Word of God: “Death Penalty for Fags,” “Fags Can’t Repent,” “Pray for More Dead Soldiers,” “Pray for More Dead Kids.” What if I focused instead on the application of doctrine? Not theology. Not major foundational principles or anything that required extensive exegesis. Just kindness within the church—the lack of which seemed to me the clearest and the simplest example that Westboro had veered far off track. This was the place to start.
Grace and I also decided that our mother seemed the safest person to approach first. Although she, too, had been deprived of her voice in church matters, she was the one who had helped convince our father to hear us out about the Photoshopping incidents. I had to believe that she knew her treatment to be unscriptural,