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

by Megan Phelps-Roper

This was the same era in which I sat just to her left during church, when she belted out the hymns so high and so loud that it hurt my ears. I discovered that to protect myself from the sonic onslaught, I could stick a finger into my left ear, press myself into my mother’s side, and listen to her sing from inside her body. It was so soothing, the warmth and the vibrations and the feeling of her arm holding me close as I tucked into her. I didn’t know then that this special place at her side would always be mine. That as her eldest daughter, I would become to her what she had become to her father—and as that relationship had defined my mother, so this one would define me. For I was tender and only beloved in the sight of my mother.

The word gay had disappeared entirely from our signs and vocabulary—a misnomer, Gramps said—and it was replaced by fag, a word that literally signified a bundle of sticks used for kindling. “Fag is an elegant metaphor!” Gramps insisted. “In the same way a literal fag is used to kindle the fires of nature, these metaphorical fags fuel the flames of Hell and the fires of God’s wrath!” Of course, fag also had the added benefit of being scandalous and offensive, which only garnered more attention for our message.

I knew even then that this was transgressive, but there was something so delightful about it, so appealing: this sense that my family had some secret knowledge about the world, that we were not subject to its rules or its judgments. There might be an overabundance of regulations governing life within our own community, but the social niceties of the broader world held no sway over us in the context of the protests. In that respect, we were a law unto ourselves, and all bets were off as long as our words were justified by the Bible. Truth was an absolute defense against any and all claims made against us.

Plus, they were in possession of divine truth. They weren’t afraid of questions, because they had all the answers.

We had wide latitude in our consumption of books, television, film, and music, and for much the same reason that we attended public schools: our parents weren’t particularly worried about negative influences slipping into our minds undetected. They’d prepared us too well for that, and our response to depictions of sinful behavior was instinctive. Whore. Criminal. Adulterer. When fundamentalists would approach us and tout their decision to rid their homes of television and secular music, our response was chastisement. “How can you preach against the abominable teachings that litter the landscape of this nation if you don’t even know what they are?” my mom would admonish.

I never saw the confidence we had in our pastor as being rooted in the familial relationship he shared with about eighty percent of us, though this was generally presumed by outsiders to be the case.

As I experienced it, the modern world had always been deeply inhospitable to our beliefs, and it was easy to feel as if Westboro were an island existing outside of time, the one true connection to a righteous past—the lone bastion of truth in this “insane orgy of fag lies,” as Gramps was wont to say. He never needed to come right out and declare that our church was the only way to Heaven, not explicitly; that kind of sweeping assertion isn’t so easy to substantiate, and certainly would have invited much more suspicion and scrutiny from my highly analytical family.

In the era of megachurches and multimillionaire preachers of the prosperity gospel like Joel Osteen, he found the perfect foil: perverse disputings of men of corrupt minds, and destitute of the truth, supposing that gain is godliness. To us, such pastors were motivated by money, smoothing away the hard corners and sharp edges of Bible truths, sculpting them into enticing figurines to package and sell to ever larger congregations that sought not truth but comfort: which say to the prophets, Prophesy not unto us right things, speak unto us smooth things, prophesy deceits.

Born in 1929, Gramps had grown up in Meridian, Mississippi, in the deep South—a place where first slavery and then segregation had had roots sunk deep. “He saw the way those black people were treated,” my mother told me, “and by the mercy of God, he knew it was wrong.” She quoted to me and my siblings the same verses that her father had quoted to her and her siblings: One law shall be to him that is homeborn, and unto the stranger that sojourneth among you, because God hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth. In the eyes of the law, all must be equal.

My grandfather’s growing certainty in the righteousness of his every belief made him unwilling to yield to another perspective on any matter.

None of it moved my grandfather, not the violence or threats of violence, not the backlash, not the unrelenting opposition from the legal community. None of it moved him an inch off his mark. In his view, racism was the great sin of society during that part of his life, and I imagine he quoted the same verses to steel himself in the face of that opposition as he did later, during our fight against LGBT rights: Behold, I have made thy face strong against their faces, and thy forehead strong against their foreheads. As an adamant harder than flint have I made thy forehead: fear them not, neither be dismayed at their looks.

I learned early to ignore the casual insults they tossed around—“hateful,” “evil,” “monsters,” “stupid”—for the simple fact that I knew my family. Not only did these descriptors fail to capture the essence of the people I knew and loved, they were diametrically opposed to it. Nearly all of the adults in my orbit were college graduates, many with postgraduate degrees in law, business, and public administration. Whether they chose to pursue work in health care, corrections, or information technology, their careers flourished. They were natural comedians, clever and creative, and I’d often laugh myself to tears listening to outrageous stories they’d spin and parodies they’d write. 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.

I noted a similar accusation people made about our protesting, too, the insistence that the true heart of Westboro was an elaborate scheme to make money. We would provoke onlookers into assaulting us on the picket line, they proffered, and then we would sue both our attackers and the police for failing to protect us. Such a scenario never played out even a single time, but that never stopped people from believing it was true. 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.

Reading her account of those days, the first thing that leapt out at me was the timeline—a connection I had missed all my life. Gramps had surrendered his law license in the spring of 1989, the end of his decades of successful and acclaimed civil rights work. At nearly sixty years old, he was suddenly and unwillingly facing an enormous vacuum in his life—and just a few months later, the biking incident at Gage Park with my brother Josh and the two men emerging from the bushes. The end of one crusade leading directly into the beginning of another.

I was beginning to see that our first loyalty was not to the truth but to the church. That for us, the church was the truth, and disloyalty was the only sin unforgivable. This was the true Westboro legacy.

Gramps was not God, but Westboro members were inclined to conflate the moral judgments of the two—in practice, if not in theory—because in spite of his faults, my grandfather had been chosen by God to lead us. Who were we to question His choice?

Westboro’s relationship with the media became symbiotic almost instantly: they gave attention to our message, and we helped them sell newspapers and generate clicks.

In our estimation, Westboro’s chief objective by far was fidelity to the Scriptures. Apart from that, however, we gauged success primarily by the amount of media attention we received—a fact which garnered no shortage of accusations that we were feigning our faith for the sake of notoriety. People often took our constant employment of shock tactics as cynical and purely attention-seeking behavior, but this was a fundamental misunderstanding of our purpose and the dynamics of the picket line.

Not only did we firmly believe in the truth and goodness of all our message and methods—including what others wrote off as “shock tactics”—we also recognized that we were living in a sound-bite generation with endless demands on its attention. “You’ve got to speak to people where they are!” my mother insisted. We had a message to preach, and we were going to use every tool in our arsenal to get the job done: sexually explicit signs and insults, parodies and pop culture references, sarcasm and sass.

It was important that people understood that our protests were not done in service of any personal hatred, but of the truth of God.

Our belief in predestination prevented us from using conversion numbers as a measure of our success—fortuitous, considering how paltry they were—because whether a person had the faith to believe the truth of our doctrines was in God’s hands alone. In light of this, our goal was not to convert, but rather to preach to as many people as possible using all the means that God had put at our disposal.

“You think the Internet was created by God for these pornographers?” Gramps snorted. “The heck you say. He created it for us. For our preaching.”

As with Westboro’s decision to shift our focus to military funeral pickets, our new imprecatory prayers caused me significant consternation—but I had trouble discerning its root. King David had plainly made these prayers about his enemies, and God had called David a man after mine own heart. Even Jesus Himself had promised vengeance to His people: And shall not God avenge his own elect, which cry day and night unto him? I tell you that he will avenge them speedily. Clearly, our imprecatory prayers were consistent with Scripture. But if that was true, why did they unsettle me so?

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.

Margie’s words were echoes of a lament I’d been hearing from teachers and journalists for years: that a family as impressive as the Phelpses were wasting our lives and talents tormenting people on the streets. How startling it was to hear it in Margie’s voice, my mind stirring with the beginnings of a subtle realization: that even among the staunchest of us, the sacrifices we made in order to be at Westboro—our insistent rejection of the world outside—weren’t quite as simple and inevitable as they had always seemed.

The explosions of media coverage wherever we roamed, the growing mobs of angry counterprotesters, the teams of journalists who continued to arrive on our doorstep—all of it was proof that God was with us, strengthening our hands for this good work, and causing our efforts to prosper.

In truth, C.G. seemed to find shades of nuance and complexity in every situation—even when it meant reversing himself on opinions he’d previously expressed in strong terms. I found this tendency perplexing at first—as if I could never know for sure what he was really thinking—but I soon came to admire this quality, too. He was always reevaluating, never so committed to a position that he couldn’t assimilate new evidence.

When a far-right terrorist murdered seventy-seven in a car bombing of Oslo and subsequent attack on a youth summer camp, church members rejoiced again. “My entire Facebook wall is shattered Norwegian innocence,” C.G. told me. He simply could not imagine telling the parents of murdered children to PRAY FOR MORE DEAD KIDS. I insisted to C.G. that God was good and that all His judgments were righteous. I quoted verses wherein God laughs at the calamity of unbelievers because they rejected Him. Because I have called, and ye refused; I have stretched out my hand, and no man regarded; I also will laugh at your calamity; I will mock when your fear cometh. But watching my family track the rising body count with glee, I felt mournful.

On Twitter, I came across a photo-essay about a famine in Somalia, bursting into tears at the sight of the first image: a tiny emaciated child. My mother heard and immediately walked over to my desk, asking what was wrong. I pointed to the photo on my screen and shook my head. “Would you send me that link, hon?” she said eagerly, “I’m going to write a GodSmack about it!” The disparity between my response and my mother’s gave me pause, but she didn’t seem to notice.

I thought bitterly of Jack Boughton, a character from Gilead, the first book he’d ever recommended to me: “I think hope is the worst thing in the world. I really do. It makes a fool of you while it lasts. And then, when it’s gone, it’s like there’s nothing left of you at all.”

The need for church unity was one of our animating principles, the reason we were in constant communion and communication with one another. It’s why we often answered questions from journalists and passersby using the same words in the same order with the same tone. To some, this phenomenon was evidence of indoctrination and coercion, but I never saw it that way. We were of one mind as the Lord required us to be, and these verses showed that each of us had a voice that was integral to the church’s success.

Not even Gramps was an appropriate audience for questions or doubts, as he was kept only minimally aware of all the maneuverings of the elders and the day-to-day happenings of the church. This had already been a trend for some time. My grandfather was getting older, and my family had taken an example from the book of Exodus, when Jethro, the father-in-law of Moses, saw that the job of leading the Israelites had become too much for Moses to do alone.

Jethro proposed that a system of lesser judges be instituted beneath Moses, and it shall be, that every great matter they shall bring unto thee, but every small matter they shall judge: so shall it be easier for thyself, and they shall bear the burden with thee. The new elders seemed to see themselves in this manner, relieving my grandfather of the burden of leading the church. To go over their heads and seek aid or comfort or understanding from our pastor directly—to call the elders’ judgment into question in any way—was not allowed.

There were plenty of verses in the New Testament about elders, and I realized for the first time that at least some of them were referring to a specific office in the church—not just to “older people.” And when they had ordained them elders in every church, they commended them to the Lord. Let the elders that rule well be counted worthy of double honour. But unlike in that passage, we hadn’t ordained these elders; they had ordained themselves—a fact that would have been easier to accept if I hadn’t felt conflicted about nearly every decision they issued.

We were engaging in what we called “virtual picketing”: protesting a faraway event in a local space, and reaching the target audience by publishing photos and messages on the Internet and through the media. There was nothing inherently dishonest about this tactic—injustice in one city often inspires public demonstrations in others—except, of course, that our intent was to deceive. We had employed this strategy before, choosing words that were technically true, but designed to leave an impression that was not: that we were actually present outside the event.

My heart sank when I received a group text from Steve instructing everyone with a Twitter profile to republish a post from an account he had just created: @UGNewsWire. The account purported to be an “Int’l News Service,” complete with a fake logo to make it appear as if it were a legitimate media outlet. Its posts read: WBC members (of ‘God Hates Fags’ infamy) picket outside Westminster Abbey day before #RoyalWedding Westboro Baptist protesters outside Westminster Abbey - singing songs & chanting ‘God Hates the UK’ The infamous Westboro Baptist Church is on the ground in the UK - protesting the Royal Wedding: Each of the posts included an image of Westminster Abbey that had been digitally altered to include picketers with signs. I saw that Steve had sent them to the BBC, the Associated Press, USA Today, and other news organizations. I was mortified. These lies were idiotic, not only violating the Scriptures but offering the hordes of people who hated us a legitimate reason to impugn the integrity of the church. It undermined our claim to being messengers of God, and it was the picture of a verse my mother quoted often: Give none occasion to the adversary to speak reproachfully. I had several thousand followers on Twitter, and though I angered them on a regular basis, I had a growing sense of community with the people I encountered there. I felt like I owed them the truth, and I didn’t want to be attacked for being dishonest. And on top of everything else, I didn’t want the...

For the first time, we had been told to do something unscriptural by someone in a position of authority. For the first time, we had no way to make our objections heard by the church. And as always, we had no choice but to submit.

Why would we be punished for unintentionally flashing an inch of skin on our back or belly, while our brothers were permitted to swim shirtless, with all of theirs on full display? Why were girls in other Westboro families subject to more lenient rules of modesty? How could the standards of God differ from house to house? Let us walk by the same rule, let us mind the same thing. Sam dismissed our objections, seeming to believe that they originated from a desire to dress like sluts. Grace and I knew better. That the problem went far deeper: hypocrisy, and the dawning realization that the rules we had been taught—the divine rules of a sovereign God—were being systematically replaced by the caprices of fallible men. Church members had always denied that we were “interpreting” the Bible, insisting that we were only reading and obeying what was plainly written in the Scriptures. But once I was excluded from the discussions, it soon became obvious that interpretation was inescapable—that it was happening daily, hourly, and always in ways that protected and expanded the authority of these eight elders.

“There’s something wonderfully liberating in the notion that you’re one hundred percent right,” my grandfather often noted with calm and confidence. 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.

We weren’t just holding signs on street corners. We were preaching the standards of God, “maintaining and defending pure Gospel truth,” as Gramps always said from the pulpit. The Wars of the Lord.

The church had taught us to distrust our own judgment from the time we were children, and we had taken the verses to heart. The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?

I couldn’t believe how our love within the church had been warped beyond recognition by the elders’ unscriptural will to punish. By their implacable demands for unquestioning obedience. By their pernicious need for superiority and control. They had developed a toxic sense of certainty in their own righteousness, seizing for themselves the role of the ultimate arbiter of divine truth—and they now seemed willing to lay waste to anyone who disagreed with them. It was a heinous arrogance and sinfulness that could not be denied. And in a moment of horrifying clarity, I finally saw what had eluded me for so long: We had all been behaving in the exact same way toward outsiders.

What if we’re wrong? What if this isn’t The Place led by God Himself? What if we’re just people? And I felt sure that it was all true.

With stark clarity I understood that whether the church was wrong or right, I was a monster. If we were wrong, then I had spent every day of my life industriously sowing doom, discord, and rage to so many—not at the behest of God, but of my grandfather. I had wasted my life only to fill others’ with pain and misery. And if the church was right? Then asking those questions and even beginning to consider their implications was an unforgivable betrayal of everyone I had ever loved and the ideals I’d dedicated my life to defending.

We had been claiming to love thy neighbor all my life. We claimed we were the only ones who truly cared about anyone else. “We’re the only ones that love these fags!” Gramps would say in his Mississippi drawl. But at the same time, we had been wholly dedicated to antagonizing the world. We mocked and delighted in their suffering. We demanded they repent, and then asked God to preserve them in their sin. We prayed for Him to destroy them.

My mind was finally settling on its inevitable conclusion: There was something terribly wrong at Westboro. God was not in this place. We were not special. Not hand-selected by the Lord to do His divine work. We were a deluded people.

I wanted to jump out of my skin. There was no way to consider the magnitude of the devastation that I would soon be forever cut off from everyone I had ever loved: my faculties simply shut down before I could even approach that reality. I was betraying my beloved mother—treated unconscionably by the church body and then abandoned by her own daughter. How could I leave her? Monstrous.

Within the church, I was a cherished daughter—I wielded no power, but my skills were many and useful and valued. I was dependable, and trustworthy, and called upon frequently. I had built my life and identity around the church, and I was well-beloved. Who was I on the outside? I was the perpetrator of untold amounts of harm in the world. I was a lover of tragedy, cruelly attacking the grieving at their most vulnerable. I was a willing participant in the most aggressive anti-gay picketing campaign the country had ever seen. What reason did anyone have to give me a second chance?

We believed all outsiders hated us. If they said they hated us, we believed them. If they said they loved us, we believed they were either lying or delusional, and nothing could persuade us otherwise. I began to see that for many of our beliefs, there was absolutely no evidence that could be introduced to us that would cause us to change our minds. Unfalsifiable.

As I listened to my grandfather’s words, it suddenly occurred to me to consider Heaven and Hell in practical terms: I would be condemning people to torture? And I would be happy about it? I couldn’t even watch a torture scene in a film without jumping out of my seat, overcome with outrage, disgust, and revulsion that anyone could be capable of visiting such horror on a living, breathing human being. I didn’t think I could condemn people to torture, and sitting in my pew that day, I’d wondered if there was something wrong with me.