[Nate Phelps'] father, pastor Fred Phelps, leads the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kan. The family, and a handful of followers, has held nearly 43,000 demonstrations, mostly in U.S., a few in Canada, once in Iraq, picketing synagogues and Holocaust memorials, disrupting the funerals of American soldiers killed in action, and of murdered Amish schoolgirls.
They are infamous for their hatred and cruelty. Their signs insist that "God Hates Fags," and hates America, too, for tolerating homosexuality. They chant "Thank God for 9/11," and for the bombs killing U.S. marines. They tried infiltrating the Winnipeg funeral in 2008 of Tim McLean, who was brutally murdered and decapitated on a Greyhound bus, calling it God's punishment for Canadians' sins, but backed off over fears for their safety. They march with broad smiles on their faces, their young children beside them, delighting in the outrage they provoke.
This is the family into which Nate Phelps was born 51 years ago and fled 33 years ago. At the time, his father had not yet graduated to street protests, but used a fleet of fax machines to broadcast his unabashedly hate-filled screeds to the world. Of his 12 brothers and sisters, only he and two others have deserted: The rest have grown Westboro with their own sons and daughters, inculcated in Pastor Phelps' intolerant, Armageddonist preaching.
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Mr. Phelps' own story itself is not an easy one. His father, as he tells it, was a tyrant who believed strongly in the Biblical injunctions not to "spare the rod," thrashing his children with barber straps and mattock handles in ways designed to evoke maximum levels of righteous pain. By the age of 7, Nate could recite all 66 books of the bible in 19 seconds; his father, impatient at his children's inability to follow quickly along with his preaching, demanded it. The pastor was a bigoted, furious man.
Mr. Phelps has blurry memories of grandparents who were so bold once as to bring him Christmas gifts, and were banished for their pagan worship, and their attempts to moderate their increasingly zealous son. The children were forced onto eccentric, punitive fitness regimes, required to run 10 miles a day and eat milk curds for dinner, to treat their bodies as the temples the Bible commands. In the pastor's version of Calvinism, he promised that nearly all humans were sinners, pre-destined before birth to spend an eternity in a lake of fire. There was nothing anyone could do about it. It was terrifying.
"What has stayed with me all these years is the psychological [effect]," Mr. Phelps says. "It's the message, it's the information that you take in in your youth that you carry with you for the rest of your life."
Yet there was an undeniable integrity in his father's message, he believes. This was a literal translation of the Bible; it was a rigid interpretation, but all the mercilessness, all of it, could be justified by scripture.
But, as he matured, he noticed hypocrisies: the beatings were, the Bible said, a loving father's duty, yet his dad only spewed hatred for his children. There was all the ruthless judgment of an angry God toward the world, but none of Jesus's mercy.
A cocktail of "doubts, contradictions and fears" led Mr. Phelps to leave home the very moment, midnight, of his 18th birthday. His family calls him a "rebel against God" condemned to hell; his ties with the brother and sister who also left are strained, at best. They'd like to have a relationship, he thinks, but "we just don't know how." There are "trust issues," he says.
He tried keeping up links to his Christianity, occasionally attending mainstream churches in California, where he first settled. But they seemed "pale and feeble" compared to the fervency he felt in Westboro's pews. He got married, and had children. His faith began to die.
"I didn't think I was going to have kids. I really held somewhere inside of me this notion that I was going to be punished" for abandoning his father's church, his defiance of his father's will. "When you have been told, over and over, your whole life that there is a force out there, a malevolent force that will strike you down, that will cause you harm if you stray... it was unconscious, but I believed for years that I was going to pay a price." He didn't.
Attempting one Christmas to explain to his three kids notions of heaven and hell, they burst into tears at the prospect of eternal punishment. Remembering his own boyhood terror at God's wrath, he left Christianity for good.
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