Banished: Surviving My Years in the Westboro Baptist Church by Lisa Pulitzer, Lauren Drain Page A
Authors: Lisa Pulitzer, Lauren Drain
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trouble paying.
To collect their fees, the firm might work out a deal with a client to garnish his paycheck. There were clients they did refuse to represent, such as any couple seeking a first divorce, because the church believed that a couple should be together for life. Phelps Chartered would, however, represent a client getting a second divorce, saying that perhaps by divorcing, the client would reunite with his or her first spouse.
My father was under the impression that Shirley would be delighted to hear he was interested in being a lawyer, too, so he took it upon himself to apply to Washburn University School of Law, the pastor's alma mater, without consulting her first. He was accepted and offered a full scholarship. Even though he had never studied anything related to law, his LSAT scores were near perfect. When he got his acceptance letter, he proudly took it to Shirley, and was totally taken aback when she told him she forbade it.
"We don't need anyone else to be a lawyer," Shirley told him. She made it clear that if he went against her and decided to go to law school anyway, she wouldn't hire him at Phelps Chartered, because his work there wouldn't help the firm's bottom line; instead, they would just end up having to pay him for work they were doing themselves. She told my father to stop copying what her family was doing and find a career path more suitable to his talents.
"Stop wasting your time in school. Your family needs you," she told him, referring to the fact that Dad had moved the family to Kansas to keep me from taking the wrong path, and he had to keep up his vigilance.
My father was really disappointed and upset. But, after some thought, he told the family that Shirley was right. Her guidance wasn't to be scorned or taken lightly; it was a gift. If Shirley told you anything, it was as good as hearing it from God. In this case, God was telling Dad how to help his family. "I need to stop being so arrogant," he said, and dropped the idea of law school altogether.
CHAPTER SIX
Lift ye up a banner upon the high mountain, exalt the voice unto them, shake the hand, that they may go into the gates of the nobles.
--Isaiah 13:2
People called us haters because the word hate was so prevalent in our protests. The rejoinders we heard most often from people trying to refute our message were: "God loves everybody" and "God is a loving, tolerant God."
But as the pastor told us, these were perhaps the biggest lies of all. In truth, it was God who hated, not us. The pastor was God's mouthpiece on earth, and we were only the messengers. Most of our detractors thought that we went around spewing the same handful of lines from scripture and hiding behind a distortion and perversion of the Baptist faith. This couldn't be less accurate.
The pastor might have called himself an "old school" or "primitive" Baptist, but the theology he preached was fundamental Calvinism.
Calvinism was not the least bit new in America. It had been the religion of the Pilgrims, the Puritans, and many of the Founding Fathers, and in one sense the reason why the Pilgrims left for the Promised Land in the first place.
Before John Calvin and Martin Luther, there really were no Protestant faiths.
They were two spiritual leaders who dared to challenge the status quo, Roman Catholicism, and they were the leading forces in the Protestant Reformation in Europe.
In the early years of their ministries, they were considered as radical as our pastor was now. Martin Luther had dared to challenge the Catholic hierarchy with his Ninety-Five Theses. For that, he was excommunicated by Pope Leo X, and condemned as an outlaw by the Holy Roman Emperor. John Calvin was only eight at that time, but later made his own break from the Catholic Church in France when he published his Institutes for the Christian Religion in 1536. He, too, made lots of enemies, and many men in power condemned him. He eventually fled from France to Geneva, where his teachings became
To collect their fees, the firm might work out a deal with a client to garnish his paycheck. There were clients they did refuse to represent, such as any couple seeking a first divorce, because the church believed that a couple should be together for life. Phelps Chartered would, however, represent a client getting a second divorce, saying that perhaps by divorcing, the client would reunite with his or her first spouse.
My father was under the impression that Shirley would be delighted to hear he was interested in being a lawyer, too, so he took it upon himself to apply to Washburn University School of Law, the pastor's alma mater, without consulting her first. He was accepted and offered a full scholarship. Even though he had never studied anything related to law, his LSAT scores were near perfect. When he got his acceptance letter, he proudly took it to Shirley, and was totally taken aback when she told him she forbade it.
"We don't need anyone else to be a lawyer," Shirley told him. She made it clear that if he went against her and decided to go to law school anyway, she wouldn't hire him at Phelps Chartered, because his work there wouldn't help the firm's bottom line; instead, they would just end up having to pay him for work they were doing themselves. She told my father to stop copying what her family was doing and find a career path more suitable to his talents.
"Stop wasting your time in school. Your family needs you," she told him, referring to the fact that Dad had moved the family to Kansas to keep me from taking the wrong path, and he had to keep up his vigilance.
My father was really disappointed and upset. But, after some thought, he told the family that Shirley was right. Her guidance wasn't to be scorned or taken lightly; it was a gift. If Shirley told you anything, it was as good as hearing it from God. In this case, God was telling Dad how to help his family. "I need to stop being so arrogant," he said, and dropped the idea of law school altogether.
CHAPTER SIX
Lift ye up a banner upon the high mountain, exalt the voice unto them, shake the hand, that they may go into the gates of the nobles.
--Isaiah 13:2
People called us haters because the word hate was so prevalent in our protests. The rejoinders we heard most often from people trying to refute our message were: "God loves everybody" and "God is a loving, tolerant God."
But as the pastor told us, these were perhaps the biggest lies of all. In truth, it was God who hated, not us. The pastor was God's mouthpiece on earth, and we were only the messengers. Most of our detractors thought that we went around spewing the same handful of lines from scripture and hiding behind a distortion and perversion of the Baptist faith. This couldn't be less accurate.
The pastor might have called himself an "old school" or "primitive" Baptist, but the theology he preached was fundamental Calvinism.
Calvinism was not the least bit new in America. It had been the religion of the Pilgrims, the Puritans, and many of the Founding Fathers, and in one sense the reason why the Pilgrims left for the Promised Land in the first place.
Before John Calvin and Martin Luther, there really were no Protestant faiths.
They were two spiritual leaders who dared to challenge the status quo, Roman Catholicism, and they were the leading forces in the Protestant Reformation in Europe.
In the early years of their ministries, they were considered as radical as our pastor was now. Martin Luther had dared to challenge the Catholic hierarchy with his Ninety-Five Theses. For that, he was excommunicated by Pope Leo X, and condemned as an outlaw by the Holy Roman Emperor. John Calvin was only eight at that time, but later made his own break from the Catholic Church in France when he published his Institutes for the Christian Religion in 1536. He, too, made lots of enemies, and many men in power condemned him. He eventually fled from France to Geneva, where his teachings became
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