Unfollow: A Memoir of Loving and Leaving the Westboro Baptist Church

by Megan Phelps-Roper

For my part, school seemed to be an elaborate play where each of the actors—teachers, classmates, parents—pretended not to notice that we were on opposite sides of an epic, spiritual battle between good and evil. It was a tenuous truce that relied heavily on the First Amendment: no matter how much they disagreed with us or how often we picketed their churches, teachers were agents of government and barred from punishing us for our religious activities. But more, it relied on mutual consent to keep up the pretense—our shared willingness not to speak, for instance, of the nine-foot-tall picket sign that called out the citizenry as TOPEKA: A CITY OF WHORES at pickets after school.

My daily existence was a living testimony against the slanders hurled at my family, and made it easy to dismiss the accusers as liars who could not be trusted in any context.

“There’s something wonderfully liberating in the notion that you’re one hundred percent right,”

It was another conundrum—“mindfucks,” as Grace began to call them—that I wouldn’t see until much later: That we could experience such a deep sense of personal shame and humility, saying with the Apostle Paul that we were the chiefest of sinners, while simultaneously declaring that God had given us the most righteousness and insisting that the world obey our understanding. Our position was inherently arrogant and full of hubris, but we felt humble.

It was time for final hugs. Dad first. “Well, we’re not gonna be doing this for a while.” He didn’t mean it unkindly. And then Mom. “Goodbye, doll.” I was shaking. I don’t remember if I said anything. I just held them tight for as long as they let me. Grace and I turned to cross the yard to the van. “Girls?” Mom called out. We turned. “You can always come back.” Her hope broke me more than her tears.

If Grace and I seemed in good spirits, we would be considered foolish and bestial, not recognizing how vain and worthless our lives now were. If we seemed mournful, we were pathetic, feeling the sentence of death in ourselves. In their eyes, we would never be truly happy—and we were delusional if we thought we could be.

She began to tell us about her mother, a woman who had created a religion of her own by cobbling together elements of Judaism and fringe Christian denominations. “My mother was very ‘book smart,’ and she read a lot about a lot of different religions. She was very strict. She thought she knew better than everybody else. The whole world was wrong, but she had figured it all out. Very strict, very controlling.” “What do you mean by ‘strict’?” I asked. Cora described several prohibitions her mother had imposed, including a ban on the celebration of birthdays, Christmas, and other holidays. “If anything bad happened to me,” she said, “it was because I was a sinner. It was because I deserved it. Instead of showing compassion or understanding or trying to help—you know, being a parent—my mother said things like that.”

Instead of booting me from the platform for “hate speech,” as many had demanded, it had put me in conversation with people and ideas that effectively challenged beliefs that had been hammered into me since I was a child—and that conversation had been far more illuminating than decades’ worth of rage, isolation, and efforts to shame and silence.

the discovery of internal inconsistency and hypocrisy as an important first step in seeing outside of group dogma.

While I engaged church members as an outsider, I started to understand that doubt was the point—that it was the most basic shift in how I experienced the world. Doubt was nothing more than epistemological humility: a deep and practical awareness that outside our sphere of knowledge there existed information and experiences that might show our position to be in error. Doubt causes us to hold a strong position a bit more loosely, such that an acknowledgment of ignorance or error doesn’t crush our sense of self or leave us totally unmoored if our position proves untenable. Certainty is the opposite: it hampers inquiry and hinders growth. It teaches us to ignore evidence that contradicts our ideas, and encourages us to defend our position at all costs, even as it reveals itself as indefensible. Certainty sees compromise as weak, hypocritical, evil, suppressing empathy and allowing us to justify inflicting horrible pain on others. Doubt wasn’t the sin, I came to believe. It was the arrogance of certainty that poisoned Westboro at its foundations.

“You left out of principle,” David had told Grace and me, “pretty much the same principles you were raised with. And your departure was both a rejection and an affirmation of everything you were taught. You are your parents’ children