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Although it saddened me to hear, I also felt a surge of recognition that made me oddly hopeful. Maybe it wasn’t just us.
Now is no time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with what there is.
had shown me nothing but kindness, but I couldn’t seem to stop judging her according to the church’s rubric.
every decision had moral implications. Every question had a single correct answer. Miscommunication required blame, and mistakes required punishment.
And yet, here were two people whose kindness, intelligence, generosity, and good intentions were all self-evident. They weren’t evil, stupid, or delusional. They just saw things differently than I had been taught to, and they could articulate the logic and reasoning behind their thinking.
great revenues without right. He that answereth a matter before he heareth it, it is a folly and shame unto him.
Would knowing that change anything about where you go from here?”
Ultimately, it didn’t matter how much any single one of us was responsible for any particular wrong we had wrought in the world.
The idea that agreement was a prerequisite for friendship. That comity required conformity.
Honesty and good intentions weren’t worth much, I decided, if they were lost in translation.
“we always equated love with rebuke, because of that passage. As long as we believed our words to be truthful, we were free to rebuke the rest of the world at any time, in any place, and in any way that we wanted. We could be harsh, and crude, and insulting, and it didn’t matter, because everyone else was Hell-bound anyway. Those verses justified almost everything we did
we really believed that it was irrelevant how we spoke to people. ‘Gospel preaching is not hateful!’ we always said. ‘Truth equals love!’ But now it seems so painfully obvious: of course it matters how we talk to people. Truth and love are not synonyms.
For both Dustin and me, one of the earliest sources of doubt had been incredibly trivial matters that highlighted internal inconsistency and a deeper issue—a dawning awareness of human perception coloring and altering apparently divine laws.
I would notice this pattern again and again: an “unshakable faith” first called into question by the group’s failure to live up to its own standards.
And when these forces are coupled with group dynamics and a belief system that caters to so many of our most basic needs as human beings—a sense of meaning, of identity, of purpose, of reward, of goodness, of community—they provide group members with an astonishing level of motivation to cohere and conform, no matter the cost.
Ultimately, the same quality that makes Westboro so easy to dismiss—its extremism—is also what helps highlight the destructive nature of viewing the world in black and white, the danger of becoming calcified in a position and impervious to change.
