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

by Megan Phelps-Roper

It struck me that this desire to exchange a financial motive for an ideological one was a convenient evasion of a distressing truth: it was easier to dismiss our stated intentions than to acknowledge that people who were otherwise bright and well-intentioned could believe and behave as we did as members of Westboro.

This had never been a choice between strangers and family, between the world’s love and its hatred. It wasn’t the desire for an easy life that led me to leave. Losing them was the price of honesty. A shredded heart for a quiet conscience.

I let my arguments be guided by the pattern that had worked with me, with Dustin and Laura, and with others whose stories I was coming to learn: the discovery of internal inconsistency and hypocrisy as an important first step in seeing outside of group dogma.

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.

Another assumption gaining particular traction is that refusing to grant mainstream platforms to hated ideas will halt their spread. While the desire to shield people from these ideas is well-intentioned and completely understandable, I can’t help but see it as a fundamentally flawed strategy, one that ignores the practicalities of human nature. The fact is that people come to embrace these ideas in a multitude of ways: some argue themselves into destructive beliefs; others come to them as I did, taught by parents and loved ones; still others find them in books, films, and the annals of history. Especially in the age of the Internet, it seems clear that we cannot reasonably expect to permanently halt the spread of an idea, whether good or bad. What we can do, however, is foster a culture in which we have the language to articulate

and defend sound arguments as to why certain ideas are harmful, the precise ways in which they’re flawed, and the suffering they have caused in the past.

the answer to bad ideas is to publicly reason against them, to advocate for and propagate better ones.

To my mind, this is the essence of epistemological humility—not a lack of belief or principle or faith, not the refusal to take a position or the abdication of responsibility to stand against injustice, but a constant examination of one’s worldview, a commitment to honestly grappling with criticisms of it.