Outside the Norms

Unfollow: A Memoir of Loving and Leaving the Westboro Baptist Church    Megan Phelps-Roper     (2019)

Take a deep breath before you start to read Megan Phelps-Roper’s powerful memoir. She’s unsparing in her descriptions of the militant anti-gay crusade of the Westboro Baptist Church, citing the many gross and disgusting slogans and songs that the cult used online and in demonstrations across the United States.

In case you’re unfamiliar with the activities of Westboro, Phelps-Roper’s first chapter, “The Quarrel of the Covenant,” explains the genesis of her grandfather’s crusade against homosexuality. Fred Phelps, who led Westboro until his death in 2014, began his national campaign in Topeka, Kansas, in 1989, by picketing a local park where gay people congregated. Phelps justified the picketing with fiery sermons in which he preached that God commanded believers to denounce the sins of those around them in society. One favorite Bible passage, among the many that Fred Phelps cited, was “Cry aloud, spare not, lift up thy voice like a trumpet, and shew my people their transgression, and the house of Jacob their sins.” (71)

The actions that got Westboro the most international press coverage were their pickets at the funerals of US military service members. Though this picketing seems to defy logic, Phelps wanted to proclaim God’s punishment of the US for promoting homosexuality and other practices that Westboro deemed sinful. In other words, the US had promoted sin, therefore God had purposely killed US service members, therefore Westboro had to draw attention to the connection. To be clear, the deceased service members were very unlikely to have been gay themselves.

In 1986, Megan Phelps-Roper was born into the Westboro Baptist Church, which has never numbered more than 100 members, most of whom are and have been members of Fred Phelps’s large extended family. Although he kept close control, insisting on absolute obedience and adherence to rules, Fred Phelps also required that members receive formal education in public institutions, including colleges and law schools. Thus Megan Phelps-Roper, a bright and diligent student, became an articulate spokesperson for Westboro, handling the cult’s online presence starting around 2008, when she was in her early twenties.

By 2012, Megan Phelps-Roper’s concerns about Westboro grew to the point that she and one of her sisters moved out of their family home and severed ties with the cult. Her agonizing decision was based on recognition of multiple inconsistencies in Westboro’s dogmas, plus an internal coup by men (“elders”) who displaced her grandfather:

“I couldn’t believe how our love within the church had been warped beyond recognition by the elders’ unscriptural will to punish. By their implacable demands for unquestioning obedience. By their pernicious need for superiority and control. They had developed a toxic sense of certainty in their own righteousness, seizing for themselves the role of the ultimate arbiter of divine truth—and they now seemed willing to lay waste to anyone who disagreed with them. It was a heinous arrogance and sinfulness that could not be denied. And in a moment of horrifying clarity, I finally saw what had eluded me for so long: We had all been behaving in the exact same way toward outsiders. It was as if we were finally doing to ourselves what we had been doing to others—for over twenty years.” (158-9)

As I read Unfollow, I tried to track the theological arguments underpinning Westboro’s despicable actions. One doctrine, among many, that I could not get my head around was their belief in double predestination—an unchanging decision of God to send a human either to heaven or to hell. If the sinners of America were totally doomed, what was the point of picketing? Such sinners could not be saved, even if they turned away from their wickedness. The picketing did attract media coverage of Westboro, but the group did not gain converts to their belief system as a result of that coverage.

You need not immerse yourself deeply in such theological conundrums to appreciate Phelps-Roper’s moving story. However, it may help to know that she puts the many biblical quotes used by Westboro in italics in her text. And all Bible passages are from the 1611 King James version, which is the only English version that Westboro accepts as inspired by God. (Phelps-Roper also uses italics liberally in her own, non-Biblical text.)

Phelps-Roper presents the evolution of her understanding of the world and of her family in painstaking detail. Despite the constraints on her, she felt deep love from her family within Westboro, and in turn she continues to express love for all of them, both those who have remained with Westboro and those who have broken free. For me, the most astounding component of Phelps-Roper’s life story is her relationship with Chad Fjelland, the man who would eventually become her husband.

Fjelland began interacting with Phelps-Roper online when she was still Westboro’s PR person. He didn’t send the kind of angry messages that she usually received through social media. Instead, he was patient and inquiring, trying to understand why Westboro rejoiced in military deaths and in other tragedies around the world, though he was unambiguous in saying that he would never espouse the beliefs of Westboro. Fjelland and a couple of other brave souls who debated reasonably with Phelps-Roper online were instrumental in her departure from Westboro. My one minor complaint about Unfollow is that Phelps-Roper did not carry her story a little further, to describe her deepening relationship with Fjelland after she finally met him in person.

Unfollow demonstrates that religious beliefs that are taken to extremes, that fall outside the norms of a civil society, are dangerous, not only to the individuals caught within those belief systems but also to the society at large. Social media can spread falsehoods, imagined conspiracies, and bigotry, but, as the case of Chad Fjelland demonstrates, social media can also provide a way for rational, concerned people to connect with some cult members. The undercurrent of hatred in the United States today is frightening. We owe it to our nation to understand groups like Westboro Baptist Church, and Megan Phelps-Roper offers us a clear window to that understanding.

[Please note:  I call the Westboro Baptist Church a “cult” intentionally. For an explanation of how I approach such groups, see this previous review of mine. Note also that mainstream Baptists have renounced Westboro.]]

Especially for Thanksgiving

365 Thank Yous: The Year a Simple Act of Daily Gratitude Changed My Life    John Kralik     (2010)

I first read the memoir 365 Thank Yous when it came out in 2010. It made such an impression on me that I decided to re-read it to review on this blog for Thanksgiving 2019.

In 365 Thank Yous, John Kralik recalls how miserable he felt when he set out to hike the Echo Mountain Trail above Pasadena, California, on New Year’s Day in 2008. His small law firm was in dire financial straits; he was going through an acrimonious, drawn-out divorce; his new girlfriend had recently broken up with him; he was living in a tiny, uncomfortable apartment; he was overweight and in bad shape physically.

During Kralik’s hike, a voice seemed to speak to him, saying, “Until you learn to be grateful for the things you have . . .you will not receive the things you want.” (14) Upon hearing this voice, Kralik began to contemplate the concept of gratitude.

The next day, Kralik received in his apartment mailbox a brief but kind note from his ex-girlfriend, thanking him for the Christmas gift he had given her. This piece of mail confirmed for him that he should be thanking the people around him, and he resolved to pursue gratitude in a specific way:  by sending handwritten notes, one for each day of the coming year.

Thanking people for Christmas gifts that he’d received was an easy start, but Kralik soon went far beyond this, thanking his work colleagues, his friends, members of his extended family, and even the barista who served him coffee. “Many of my notes were not about material gifts. In these notes, I tried to describe just what the other person had done for me and to show my understanding of that person’s effort.  . . .This was part of my shift of focus from the gift to the giver.” (213-4)

The logistics of Kralik’s thank-you project were pretty simple. He wrote two or three sentences in longhand on a plain note card that he mailed through the postal service, and he maintained a spreadsheet of his recipients, with annotations of what he’d written. In today’s advanced internet culture, handwritten mail is an extreme rarity, but even in 2008 people were surprised and delighted to receive Kralik’s thoughtful notes.

The details of the individual thank-you notes that Kralik wrote are really the heart of this book. Kralik includes the texts of many of his notes, reconstructed from his spreadsheet. His words are unpretentious and honest, and they elicit warm responses from the recipients.

Almost immediately, Kralik’s thank-you notes brought him small doses of good fortune. These could, of course, have been coincidences, but Kralik saw them as evidence of the power of gratitude. As just one example, he sent personal thank-you notes to fellow lawyers who had referred cases to his firm. These lawyers then referred even more cases to Kralik’s firm, helping him with his financial woes. Month by month, Kralik wrote his thank-you notes, connecting with people he’d gone to college with or worked with early in his career. He began to realize that he had a powerful network of supporters.

In the end, Kralik didn’t quite make his goal of writing 365 thank-you notes in the 2008 calendar year. It took him about fifteen months to reach this number. But he kept writing, and as a result of the notes, he overcame quite a few of the difficult situations that he had faced on that New Year’s Day. Toward the end of 2008, he took stock:  “If the voice I’d heard in the mountains had implied that I would get all that I wanted, it seemed, at least at this juncture, that it was a promise unfulfilled. Yet, by being thankful for what I had, I realized that I had everything I needed.” (187)

What was that voice that Kralik heard on his hike? Was his conscience telling him that he was an ungrateful wretch? Was Nature reminding him that he wasn’t appreciating the splendor of his surroundings? Was the voice of a deity speaking to him in the wind? It doesn’t matter. Kralik states straightforwardly that he heard a voice, and the thank-you note from his ex-girlfriend confirmed the message of the voice: Be grateful.  

May all of us, even in the face of adversity, be able to ascend into the mountains of gratitude on the upcoming Thanksgiving Day.

Bonus Post: Michelle Obama's Memoir

Becoming     Michelle Obama     (2018)

Michelle Obama’s memoir was the bestselling book of 2018, even though it wasn’t published until November of that year. Many of the surprises of the book have been widely discussed in news articles—for instance, that Michelle had a miscarriage before her older daughter, Malia, was born and that she and Barack used IVF to conceive both Malia and their second daughter, Sasha.

Becoming is as engaging as a page-turner novel; I read it cover-to- cover in one day. Instead of rehearsing the biographical details of the book, which you can find in reviews all over the place, I’ll tell you what aspects struck me most:

• The authentic voice of Michelle Obama.

The Michelle in this memoir is the same Michelle that you know from talk shows and interviews and that slam-dunk speech that she gave at the 2016 Democratic National Convention. The cadence of the phrases is the same, the warmth is the same, the frankness is the same.

• The story of the evening that Barack proposed marriage.

Readers are aware, of course, that Michelle and Barack did get married, but the suspense in this scene is delightful.

• The insights into ordinary middle-class African American family life.

Yes, Michelle grew up on Chicago’s tough South Side, but she doesn’t whine about what she lacked. She describes gatherings of her large extended family with obvious affection. She praises her parents for the sacrifices they made so that she and her older brother could have good educations.

• The insights into life in the White House.

It’s luxurious, but the necessary security measures make it a virtual prison for the First Family. Michelle was determined that her young daughters have some semblance of a normal childhood, and this was a tall order for the eight years of Barack’s presidency.

• The sad truth of how hurtful right-wing media attacks are.

Over and over, Michelle describes how devastated she was when her patriotism was questioned about quotes taken out of context or when she was viciously attacked for wearing a particular piece of clothing. 

• The revelation of Michelle’s sense of insecurity.

The seemingly indomitable former First Lady recounts, repeatedly, when she felt inadequate, when she feared that she was not good enough. Her 2016 appearance on James Corden’s “Carpool Karaoke” seemed effortless and relaxed, but she tells us that it was “a little terrifying” (402) and that she practiced for weeks. She agreed to appear only to promote a song that would raise money for a global project for the education of girls.

You’ll notice that I refer to the author here as “Michelle,” and I mean no disrespect in using her given name. Don’t most Americans feel as if they know her personally? Didn’t she connect with the citizenry in a way that other First Ladies simply haven’t? Becoming cements that connection.

Postscript: Thanks to Dorothy Needham Moreno for lending me her copy of Becoming so that I didn’t have to sit for a year on the library’s wait list!

Bonus Post: 2 Blockbuster Memoirs

Educated     Tara Westover     (2018)

Heartland     Sarah Smarsh     (2018)

These two memoirs have many similarities: a woman grows up in an impoverished rural area of the United States, with limited or fragmented education, then eventually escapes that environment to make a successful life. This summary doesn’t reveal the stark differences between Tara Westover’s Educated and Sarah Smarsh’s Heartland. Westover was raised in Idaho by radical Mormon survivalist parents who didn’t allow her to attend school or receive medical treatment. Smarsh grew up in Kansas, on farms and in small towns, with a nominally Catholic extended family that moved frequently, pulling her in and out of schools. I found both memoirs riveting.

In Educated, Westover explains that she was born in September 1986, though no one is sure which day because she was born at home and did not have her birth recorded. She received virtually no education before the age of seventeen, not even nominal homeschooling, though she did learn how to read from the few religious books in the house. She clearly cherished the natural beauty that surrounded her in childhood: “There’s a sense of sovereignty that comes from life on a mountain, a perception of privacy and isolation, even of domination. In that vast space you can sail unaccompanied for hours, afloat on pine and brush and rock. It’s a tranquility born of sheer immensity; it calms with its very magnitude, which renders the merely human of no consequence.” (27)

Her father—an anti-government, conspiracy-theory fundamentalist—was particularly abusive in his insistence that his children start working in his scrap yard at a young age, performing highly dangerous tasks without any safety precautions. Many physical injuries resulted, though Westover doesn’t assign blame for these injuries. One brother of Westover’s also tormented her physically, while her parents turned a blind eye.

Westover’s restraint in holding her family accountable is truly amazing. She goes so far as to provide footnotes, giving particulars of possible alternate descriptions of brutal scenes that she describes from her memories. Perhaps because the first sections of the memoir are so disturbing, the later sections (in which Westover goes to Brigham Young University and eventually to Cambridge University for a PhD) seem much less vivid, almost flat. Another lack I felt in Educated was explanation of the specific role of the Mormon (Latter Day Saints) Church in her family. She’s very respectful of her parents’ beliefs, but readers don’t get too many examples of how their extreme views contrast with more mainstream Mormon beliefs. For example, most Mormons are assigned to a bishop, a lay person they can go to for counseling and other assistance. Where was this structure in the lives of the Westover family? Westover does write, “As a child, I’d been aware that although my family attended the same church as everyone in our town, our religion was not the same . . . I’d known that the members of my own family were the only true Mormons I had ever known.” (159)

While Westover does not preach about the political and religious views that shaped her childhood, Smarsh observes no such restrictions. The subtitle for Heartland summarizes its message: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth. A few quotations illustrate the lessons that Smarsh takes from her peripatetic upbringing: 

• “For the women in my family and their daughters, the constant moving was about staying safe from violent men and finding new ways to pay the bills. Leaving sad places behind, they seized on the promise of new ones. But they knew well enough that tomorrow’s promise would end up yesterday’s sadness.” (183)

• “In 1979, Reagan had built his first presidential campaign around shaming poor, unwed teenage girls the same year that my poor, unwed teenage mother became pregnant with me. Maybe that’s why she would be damned if she’d go on welfare even when she qualified those years after her and my dad’s divorce. Society’s contempt for the poor becomes the poor person’s contempt for herself.” (132)

• “In a country where personal value is supposed to create wealth, it is easy for a poor person to feel himself a bad one. Many of the people who raised me believed themselves to be bad. I know because they often treated me like I was bad. I greatest fortune of my life is that I knew they were wrong.” (282)

Like Westover, Smarsh was able to break away from rural poverty and go to college, which launched her on a career. In Heartland, she takes the unusual approach of addressing her entire memoir to an imaginary daughter named August. (Smarsh has no children.) The nonexistent August comes into the story at odd junctures, addressed as “you.” I found this technique jarring and ineffective. In addition, Smarsh’s frequent chronological leaps between decades, sometimes decades before her birth, and her references to a large cast of family members confused me. 

Why have both these books soared to the top of the charts, with Educated appearing on many lists of “best books of 2018”? I’m guessing that, despite some narrative flaws in both of the memoirs, readers are fascinated by the descriptions of poverty. (Face it, people currently living in poverty are not likely to be reading these memoirs.) The scenes of violence and child neglect in both books may have caused readers to keep turning the pages to see what horrors came next. There’s also the lure of the “up by your own bootstraps” myth that persists in American culture, overlooking the role of helpful teachers, for example, or of sheer chance in upward social mobility. I do not in any way want to discredit the extraordinary educational and professional achievements of Westover and Smarsh. Through incredible determination and hard work, they freed themselves from the tough situations in which they were raised. Both also avoided early motherhood, which traps many women in a lifetime of hardship.

My concern is that the reading public may draw the conclusion that, since Westover and Smarsh could rise from poverty, anyone can. That was an implicit conclusion of JD Vance in his 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, which I’ve also reviewed. Vance, who grew up poor in Appalachia and got himself through Yale Law School, blamed the explosive tempers and laziness of his fellow hillbillies for their economic status. Smarsh’s memoir offers more nuanced explanations, plus expositions about income inequality in the United States. Poverty is not as significant a theme in Educated, since Westover’s Idaho family eventually found financial success in selling homemade alternative medicines. Instead Westover offers a warning about the dangers of political and social paranoia, including millennialism.

Should you read these memoirs? Yes. They are important pieces for anyone seeking to understand the social and cultural milieu of the United States in these early decades of the twenty-first century.