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

by Megan Phelps-Roper

Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. —F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

I was animated by a set of twin desires that I now understand will never be satisfied: the need to understand, and to be understood.

It is disconcerting—shamefully, unimaginably so—to look back and accept that my fellow church members and I were collectively engaging in the most egregious display of logical blindness that I have ever witnessed. I cannot account for my failure to recognize that our new imprecatory prayers were entirely and fundamentally at odds with our long-standing, oft-professed desire to love thy neighbor, that they were perfect contradictions of Jesus’s command to love your enemies. Both positions had been derived from the Scriptures—but how could we have sincerely held such deeply incompatible views for so many years?

I’d begun to view her as a bit of an unreliable narrator,

He was always reevaluating, never so committed to a position that he couldn’t assimilate new evidence.

In the span of a few seconds, my world had disintegrated, slipping through my fingers like so much sand.

It was so much easier to rewrite history and cast him as a villain.

Her hope broke me more than her tears.

THE OLD MAN & THE SEA Now is no time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with what there is.

“The Snail and the Rosebush,” she began, “by Hans Christian Andersen.”

THE SUN ALSO RISES You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.

It couldn’t be a simple matter of a blanket rejection of my former beliefs, either, which would be no less silly and irrational than unquestioning acceptance of them. Instead, I would need to look at the evidence. I’d need to carefully examine each of these thought patterns, holdovers from Westboro that would have to be challenged and reconsidered—over and over again—if there was any hope for lasting change. Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.

Every question had a single correct answer. Miscommunication required blame, and mistakes required punishment.

The Great Gatsby Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope.

Los Angeles at the Museum of Tolerance, a modern, multilevel complex whose purpose was to encourage visitors to challenge their prejudices and assumptions.

The New Testament even says it plainly. Speak the truth in love. The Apostle Paul said, To the weak became I as weak and that we should weep with them that weep. I don’t know how we missed that for so long.”

I wouldn’t keep repeating the pattern we’d learned at Westboro—the tendency to moralize every decision as good or evil, the wielding of guilt and the withholding of affection to control the people I loved.

Sometimes, a person just needed to do what was right for them.

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.