Novel explores Westboro Baptist

Kansas is home to one of the “most hated families in America,” the Fred Phelps family of Topeka, according to Susan Kraus, a Lawrence author.
The late Phelps and his family are famous for their Westboro Baptist Church and their picketing at funerals and other events. The church preaches against all forms of what they regard as sin, including gay rights.
Kraus writes about the family and its church in a book published last fall, “All God’s Children.”
Kraus’ fascination with the family began when she worked as a therapist at a counseling center at Washburn University in Topeka. Washburn is where many of the Phelps family members attended college. Most of the picketing began locally before it caught fire in the national media.
“I think people have an icky fascination with them,” she said in a phone interview. “You want to look away but then you look back.”
Kraus has graduate degrees in English and social work. She has written for the Kansas City Star and has numerous writing awards. Her background helped form the idea of a story about the Westboro Baptist Church.
“A part of me wondered what it is like to be a child in that environment,” she said. “The story idea fermented over the years.”
In the mid-90s she served as a mediator for the courts and mediated a custody battle. This is when the story started to develop more. “All God’s Children” is a novel about a combat soldier who finds out he has a 10-year-old son. The boy’s mother is a part of the Westboro Baptist Church. The story dives into the custody battle and what it’s like inside the church.
Kraus began searching for every drop of information on the Phelps family. She looked up newspaper articles, attorneys that went up against them and people who were sued.
“I never found a written factor of why they do what they do and this is what it’s like to be a child,” in a Phelps family, she said.
Although the book is fiction, it is based on fact, Kraus said.
Included in her research is a dissertation by a University of Kansas student who researched the church. The Phelps family welcomes academic research and the student attended its church services regularly for a year.
Westboro Baptist does not have an open-door policy. Visitors must first be approved and vouched for by someone in the church. The graduate student helped get Kraus inside. After passing three locked gates, Kraus was in.
At the church she met Fred Phelps’ son Jonathan, who became a valuable resource to Kraus.
“None of this is made up or manufactured,” she said of her story. “I would ask questions and he would send back verses,” that backed up the family’s stances on issues.
As she dug deeper into the Westboro church, she discovered most of Phelps’s descendants think their families have been chosen to spread God’s word. For a child, being able to picket is a right of passage.
 If a family member decides to part ways with the family’s mission, they are considered dead to the family and are not welcomed back into the fold. Kraus met with Fred’s son, Nate, who left the family once he was old enough.
Because the Phelps family is full of lawyers, Kraus said she began to get nervous when it came time to release the book. Fred Phelps’ daughter Margie has threatened to sue Kraus. Kraus consulted four different lawyers. Essential to her defense is that the characters depicted in her novel are not the Phelpses, but only bear a likeness to them.
From 2007 to 2014, Kraus worked as a counselor for the Department of Defense. She worked with military families pre- and-post deployment. She used that experience to develop the character of Mike, the father in the story.
Kraus will give a reading of her book at 7 p.m., April 9, at the Iola Public Library. She will be able to answer questions about the book and the church.