Banished: Surviving My Years in the Westboro Baptist Church (25 page)

I loved the Hockenbargers. I couldn't believe what was happening to them. I thought,
How dare we get rid of the snowplow?
I had seen how much it meant to Bill when we had been at their house trying to throw it away. I knew they could have changed people's minds if they had just offered some words in their own defense. If Bill had shown any regret, they might have given them a second chance. Once you were kicked out, communication with your family members who were still in was forbidden. You were at the bottom of the world. You had no authority and no say. You were done. That was God's will--the way it was going to be.

The Hockenbargers didn't make any attempt to come back. They remained in their home in Topeka, but as far as the church was concerned, they were just gone. The Hockenbarger family had been the church's second largest family group after the Phelpses. As high as the animosity in the disfellowship meeting had been, many other members besides me were hurt by the decision to cast them out, but we made peace with it, knowing it was God's will.

Two years later, Karl Hockenbarger, Bill and Mary's son, was also kicked out. He was fifty-three years old and had been baptized into the church when he was nine. He and his wife, Kay, had seven children, two of whom were married to Phelpses. But Karl had committed two transgressions. The first had to do with disciplining his children. He had both underpunished his son by sparing the rod, and then allegedly overcompensated by hitting him too hard. His other sin had been a lack of grace, which meant not living up to God's standard. In his case, it manifested itself as misbehaving at pickets.

He was willing to get into physical fights with people who assaulted our groups on the picket lines, which was forbidden. Matthew 5:39 and Luke 6:29 stated that if someone struck you in the face, you were supposed to turn the other cheek, and doing otherwise would severely compromise the integrity of our message.

Unlike his parents, Karl desperately wanted to stay in fellowship. Being kicked out meant he could no longer talk to his wife or children. In the early days of his exile, he had to look for photos of his family on our godhatesfags.com website, where we posted the albums from our latest pickets. Two of his children, James and Michael, left within a few months of their father. James, who was then in his midtwenties, departed on his own, because he was interested in a relationship with a woman at work. Michael was seventeen when he left. He had always been a troublemaker. In the middle of a Bible study, he'd say something absurd like, "There's no proof Pharaoh died." He was arrogant and always begging for attention. When he started defending Karl, the membership asked him to leave.

Eventually, Kay left, too, to be with her husband, though both Kay and Karl wanted to get back in. I heard that they were terrified of going to hell, the hottest part of which was saved for people who were thrown out of the WBC

or had left on their own. There was no chance for their salvation, since they were no longer part of God's elect.

Shirley would go through the motions of sadness when somebody left, either by choice or the church's decision. "They just didn't make it," she'd lament.

Then, everyone would get overwhelmed with happiness, whether they were truly happy or not. We would have to offer praise to God for His decision. "It's God's judgment, God's will" was the joyful consensus. The members would dramatically declare they had never loved the person who'd left. They'd bash the person's character with any negative comment they could think of. Libby, Megan, and Jael were particularly mean-spirited. I would always feel relief that I was not the one God had sent away. I could only imagine what would happen to my reputation if I were to get kicked out.

When anyone left, the church members would get so giddy and excited about the cleaning out of the church, the sweeping out of the imposters and weak members. Ever since our arrival, the church had been getting smaller and smaller. But it didn't seem to be cause for concern--according to the pastor, this meant we were getting closer and closer to Judgment Day, the end of the world. On Judgment Day, the Lord Jesus Christ would return in a form that everyone would recognize, a human form, an authoritative form.

Every person on earth would be able to see him and know who he was.

Instantaneously, everyone would know if he or she was doomed or going to heaven.

The standards for the heaven-bound were simple enough to understand--be a chosen one and repent for your sins. The degree of sinning that could be atoned for was impressive. Shirley had given birth to Sam Phelps out of wedlock, which was not a secret. Anybody in the press who attacked her or the church seemed to bring it up. Shirley tried to minimize it, saying it was due to the foolishness of her youth, but that at least it hadn't excluded her from learning and doing better than other reprobates. She admitted that sex out of wedlock was a sin, but she said the people who mentioned it were engaged in a personal attack, because she had already atoned for it.

Liz Phelps, the pastor's ninth child (and fifth daughter), also had a baby out of wedlock. I heard she blamed her transgression on stress. She had been on a picket where church members had been injured in an attack, and the situation had caused her a moment of weakness. As a result, she had slept with an African-American man and given birth to his baby. "You don't understand--I was stressed out about serving God too much," she'd say.

She'd mention her atonement in a totally sanctimonious manner.

I saw such hypocrisy in these kinds of situations. It seemed to me that forgiveness was not being doled out evenly for everyone, that only the Phelpses got to make justifications for their sins. They often blamed transgressions on stress--the stress of the law firm, the stress of being in service to God, the stress of being hated. But they had atoned. It was all about the sins they'd atoned for. God forgave them, but nobody else had the liberty to mess up and atone. I thought it was so bogus, but I tried to submit and understand.

Others seemed to struggle with this, too. Betty Schurle-Phelps, Fred Jr.'s wife, made the mistake of holding a grudge against Shirley on account of her fornication. Betty and Shirley were about the same age and hadn't been friends for years. Betty was a church member before the time Shirley had given birth to Sam out of wedlock, so she held on to that bit of information and tended to use it against Shirley if Shirley was acting too righteously.

All the women of that age group--Shirley, Betty, all of Shirley's sisters, and my mother--were in a meeting together when Betty said something insulting to Shirley. My mom spoke up for the first time ever. We had been in the church for about four years by then, and my mother was finally feeling empowered. "You really need to stop this; you need to get along. You are both women of God," she said with conviction. "The only reason I'm bringing this up is because I'm an outsider, so God sent you someone who has an outside perspective."

Shirley and Betty were both stunned, especially since this came from someone as nonthreatening as Mom. They preached that everyone was supposed to be humbled in one way or another, but they usually didn't think it applied to them. The two women did get along after that, so I was sure it made my mother feel like she was part of something important. It gave her some sense of identity to advise on the subject of humility in such an appropriate, sober manner.

Margie wasn't without her own black marks. Her weakness was described as a preoccupation with having a baby, perhaps fueled by seeing Shirley with all of her kids. She didn't have a husband, which was a bit of an obstacle. She had already chosen a name for her daughter, Hannah, and she had the name sanctified so nobody in the church would ever be able to use it. In time, Margie adopted her son, Jacob, from a pregnant client of hers and had raised him on her own. I found Margie's treatment of me hypocritical, especially in light of her own personal story; she had clearly forgotten what it was like to be a young girl who was attracted to men and wanted a family.

Jonathan Phelps, the pastor's seventh child, had been involved in a scandal in 1984. He was a law school student when he met Paulette Ossiander, a high school graduate who was not a member of the WBC. She joined the church to please the pastor, but she was still considered substandard by the pastor because she wasn't headed to law school, like his children were. The pastor soon found out that the two were sexually involved and threw Paulette out, but allowed Jonathan to stay under extremely tight restrictions, including being monitored by another church member twenty-four hours a day. The next thing anyone knew, Paulette, by then living nearby with her parents, had given birth to a baby girl, Jael. Six months after the birth, Jonathan petitioned the court for joint custody, since Paulette was refusing to let him have anything to do with her or the child.

At their first court appearance, they both fell back in love, and Paulette invited him to move in with her and her family. They stayed out for more than three years, until the pastor accepted Paulette and brought their whole family back into the fold in 1988. He personally married them at the pulpit of the church. Jael, who was then three, was at the service. They made their atonements, asked God for forgiveness, and picked up their journey from there. The pastor was truly blessed in his decision to invite them back.

Jonathan and Jael grew into two of his most faithful and fiery supporters.

Jonathan had actually been the fourth of the pastor's children to leave. Nate, Mark, and Katherine had all left in the 1970s. Katherine supposedly left because her father had been very harsh to her after she talked to a boy on the phone. I heard that she tried to run away a few times, but the pastor always found her and brought her back. When she was eighteen, she left for good. Nate and Mark also left after alleging that their father had physically abused them, their mother, and all their siblings. They said he beat them with his bare fists or a wooden mattock handle, and they couldn't take the torture anymore. Nate was talked into coming back, only to make his final farewell three years later. Dortha, the last of the pastor's children to part ways, left the church in 1990, and changed her last name to make sure her disassociation with the Phelps family was complete. According to her, she chose the surname Bird because that was how she felt: free as a bird.

The Phelpses who had left were pretty vocal about their opinion of their father, but I thought the pastor had a different sensibility about the self-initiated exiles of his sons and daughters. They weren't children of God, plain and simple, and therefore they were liars. They didn't believe in obedience and preferred chasing the opposite sex, the common thread being they had all left out of lust. As for the allegations of abuse, they lied about that because they held grudges about their childhood and their father's military-style application of discipline. We were warned that every media person who brought up the pastor's wayward children was trying to mock the church, so I knew I was going to be subjected to that skewed viewpoint. We did believe in corporal punishment, but we didn't engage in scarring or torture such as the estranged Phelps children tended to describe. Any kid under the age of ten who misbehaved could be taken to another room and spanked and yelled at, but there wasn't anything I saw that was over the top.

Before the church, I'd been exposed to corporal punishment, too. Since I had never spoken to Kathy, Mark, Nate, or Dortha, I took the pastor's word for it that the media was asking manipulative questions and trying to demonize the church.

However, I did hear some harrowing stories firsthand. One day, I was sitting with some of my friends and three of the pastor's children, Shirley, Becky, and Fred Jr., as they reminisced about their childhood in the church.

"It wasn't always this easy," Shirley said.

"What do you mean?" I asked her.

The three of them started laughing as they recounted incidents from the past.

Some weren't that humorous, but the passage of time had softened their impact and their recollections came off lightly. "Gramps used to be a lot harder on our generation. He was more demanding and the chores were more grueling," Shirley said with a chuckle.

Shirley, Becky, and Fred went on with stories that had examples of his really extreme behavior, such as the time he made them water plants for eight hours straight. One of them said Gramps had a wicked temper back then and would get irate and spank them or be rough with Gran over little things, such as not watering the lawn sufficiently or being overweight.

I was speechless. She was such a gentle, soft-spoken person that I couldn't even fathom it. The three said other things, too, but I wasn't comfortable trying to get any details. I knew I wasn't supposed to ask questions, because all the sins of the past were supposed to stay there.

The Phelps children in my generation had nothing bad to say about their grandfather. He had never harmed any of them in any fashion. They described him as gentle and compassionate. His nine children stil in the church seemed extremely fond of him as well, and some of his children who had left eventually came back.

Sometimes, the Holy Ghost made it known that a sinner deserved a second chance. After a period of time, the Holy Ghost would tell a church member about the opportunity to let someone back. This always baffled me. Why was the Holy Ghost telling the pastor or Shirley or Tim to check on this person and give them another chance? Why didn't the Holy Ghost speak to me?

Another thing was becoming rather obvious, too. The Holy Ghost gave second chances only to the blood relatives of the Phelpses.

Because I will publish the name of the Lord: ascribe ye greatness unto our
God.

--Deuteronomy 32:3

I graduated after two years at Topeka West High School with a great GPA.

As usual, about thirty members of the church were going to be picketing the graduation ceremony, which was being held at the Kansas Expocentre downtown. We always picketed the Topeka West graduations, because we thought it was a homosexual-enabling school, for example, allowing a Gay-Straight Alliance club. The school's team was the Topeka Chargers and the mascot was a purple horse, so in addition to our usual signs, we had a special one for the graduation, FAG CHARGERS, featuring an image of a horse.