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

by Megan Phelps-Roper

Every woman in this story had been treated unconscionably: Men snatching unsuspecting women to force them into marriage. Other women given as gifts, having just witnessed all of their loved ones slain and their city destroyed. The old man offering his virgin daughter, and the woman sacrificed by her husband to a feral mob, raped to death. The husband then—finding her fallen with her hands on the threshold of the door—responding with “Up, and let us be going.” I’d wanted to punch him or vomit every time I’d read the words. Others might place the blame upon the men in the story, but as a predestinarian, I was most repulsed by the God who had instigated and orchestrated the whole thing. Disgusting.

Although my mom avoided saying so directly, I eventually came to believe that she and I were on the same page about the unscriptural nature of so many of the actions and decisions implemented by the elders. We would talk, and then we would pray together that the Lord would fix everything. The only difference between us, I realized, was that she had no doubt that God was with Westboro.

I looked at my sister and spoke in a low voice. “We need to go.” Our father hadn’t heard. Our mother had. I looked up. I watched her mouth drop open in a look of shocked horror that will haunt me until I die.

The conflation of parental and ecclesiastical authority was only possible in a church like ours, where nearly everyone was related. By rendering us “children” so long as we were unmarried, they thwarted all possible challenges to their control. There was no need to listen to what anyone else thought, because as our parents, they would tell us what to think. I shook my head involuntarily. My father had never been like this. I hated what this church had done to him. I hated what it had done to my mother. I hated what it was doing to our family, and to everyone we had taken aim at outside. This place was toxic.

Moses had been established as the Lord’s chosen leader via direct interaction with God Himself and a series of miracles—among them the parting of the Red Sea, the pillar of cloud that led the Israelites by day, and the pillar of fire that gave them light by night. Westboro’s elders had no such evidence to support their claim to unquestionable authority, and quite the opposite: their legacy was a series of unscriptural edicts and contradictory doctrines.

I had run my fingers along their spines for a few minutes, reading titles and noting authors: David Hume, Immanuel Kant, C. S. Lewis, Friedrich Nietzsche. After a moment, I’d found myself stepping back and staring up at the stacks, centuries’ worth of human thought devoted to understanding God and the world and how to live in it. I had wondered how we at Westboro could have ever believed that we alone had discovered the one true answer to it all. I had flushed with embarrassment at our arrogance, and at my own ignorance. What did I know of these philosophers and their ideas?

Did God exist? And was the Bible His infallible Word? I had been taught that these were the questions of fools, but now I felt foolish for all the years I had failed to ask them.

“The sun was warm and the air so refreshing. I drank of the clear dew and the strong rain. I breathed. I lived. A power rose in me from out of the earth; a strength came down from up above; I felt an increasing happiness, always new, always great, so I had to blossom over and over again. That was my life; I couldn’t do anything else.”

I called forth memories to steel myself against twin but opposing tendencies I felt warring inside me: between regretting the past and romanticizing it. I couldn’t allow bitterness to steal the beauty in my family, or love to conceal the destructiveness in it. I wouldn’t rewrite history. I would hold the whole messy truth of it to myself all at once.

It was an obvious point, but it suddenly struck me that this Us/Them mindset was deeply ingrained and resistant to change.

At Westboro, every decision had moral implications. Every question had a single correct answer. Miscommunication required blame, and mistakes required punishment. My sister and I knew how to cajole, issue ultimatums, attribute ill motives, and assign moral failure to the other party in a dispute, but we couldn’t compromise and we couldn’t move forward without a resolution as to which of us was in the wrong. Without an absolute authority who could resolve the problem and declare one side as just and righteous, we floundered.

Witnesses believe that Hell is simply death. When I quoted Bible verses that seemed to contradict this, Dustin and Laura brought forth other verses to support their position. For the living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing at all … there is no work nor planning nor knowledge nor wisdom in the Grave, where you are going. Their understanding of the verses I presented was fundamentally different from the one I had been raised with, and I was slack-jawed to realize that there was more than one way to read the text—that from one passage, multiple meanings could be deduced without contradicting the language in the original.

And yet, here were two people whose kindness, intelligence, generosity, and good intentions were all self-evident. They weren’t evil, stupid, or delusional. They just saw things differently than I had been taught to, and they could articulate the logic and reasoning behind their thinking.

If there truly was more than one legitimate way to understand the world, then there was nothing inherently wrong with people who believed differently than we did. We could cease presuming most people were evil and ill-intentioned.

The indoctrination, the physical enforcement, the absolute unwillingness to tolerate dissent of any kind—all of these had been hallmarks of my mother’s upbringing, too. The fact that she was now in her fifties didn’t suddenly give her the freedom to throw off the shackles of those beliefs. If anything, it just meant that she’d had more years to marinate in them. She could no more decide to deny those ideas than she could spontaneously decide not to believe in the existence of gravity.

I just have a hard time blaming my family. I don’t think they’re bad people. I think they’re good people who have been trapped by bad ideas

Twitter mobs could tear a person’s reputation to shreds, demanding that they lose their job over an errant tweet or a joke that didn’t land—transgressions that were far less egregious than the dedicated campaign of condemnation in which I had been a willing participant for many years.

Honesty and good intentions weren’t worth much, I decided, if they were lost in translation.

In court, Margie’s job was to present and defend her interpretation of the facts and the law before a judge, who would hear all sides before making a final decision, which was subject to review by higher courts. But when it came to the purported Word of God, in all its complexity, we considered our judgment to be so reliable as to merit absolute confidence, so unquestionable that we could insist that all of humankind follow it. I shook my head and inwardly cringed.

With each new kindness, I understood with ever greater clarity the depths of my ignorance about the world. Clearly, the people writing these words were not the demons I had been warned about. They didn’t hate Grace and me, and they didn’t expect us to hate our family. They understood that the same people who taught us to curse Westboro’s enemies were the ones who had kissed our cheeks and tucked us in at night. Though we had shown these people hostility and contempt in their most vulnerable moments, they extended generosity and compassion to us in ours. They empathized with us in our pain and wanted good things for our future.

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.

He brought me a Middle Eastern dessert from the market near his home in Jerusalem, and I brought him some of my favorite peppermint chocolate. He flipped the bar over and started teaching me about the kosher symbols on the packaging, while I listened earnestly and held a GOD HATES JEWS sign.

Bit by bit, my shame was being replaced by profound gratitude to Twitter for its commitment to being “the free speech wing of the free speech party.” 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.

“We’ll answer some questions in a minute,” David said, as Grace and I collected ourselves, “but the last thing I wanted to share is a revelation I had this week during my conversations with Megan and Grace. To be honest: I don’t know if I could do what they did. If I had been raised the way that they were raised, I would’ve been out there holding signs with Grandpa Phelps, too. If I was brought up in their family, would I have the strength of character and the moral fortitude to leave my family? To leave everything I’ve ever known?” He shook his head. “I want to say that I would have, but I don’t know.”

“At home,” I continued, “we always equated love with rebuke, because of that passage. As long as we believed our words to be truthful, we were free to rebuke the rest of the world at any time, in any place, and in any way that we wanted. We could be harsh, and crude, and insulting, and it didn’t matter, because everyone else was Hell-bound anyway. Those verses justified almost everything we did—including picketing funerals. But David told us about that passage from a Jewish perspective.” “From our view,” David said, “a rebuke is supposed to happen privately, kindly, and with people you have reason to believe will hear you. If you’re attacking someone you know won’t listen—if you’re trying to correct them harshly, in a way that will provoke them to anger instead of encouraging them to change their ways—then you’re the one who is committing a sin.”

‘Gospel preaching is not hateful!’ we always said. ‘Truth equals love!’ But now it seems so painfully obvious: of course it matters how we talk to people. Truth and love are not synonyms. 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.”

When it came to Grace, 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.

I also became closer with Dustin and Laura, who would remain two of my closest friends long after I left Deadwood, long after they left the Jehovah’s Witnesses and joined me in the wandering path of doubt and skepticism and confusion and wonder and awe at how different the world was than we had believed.

For both Dustin and me, one of the earliest sources of doubt had been incredibly trivial matters that highlighted internal inconsistency and a deeper issue—a dawning awareness of human perception coloring and altering apparently divine laws.

From our point of view, acknowledging error and ignorance was anathema, because doing so would cast doubt on our message. 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.

As someone who had contributed to that harm for so long, I felt an obligation to those communities to work to dismantle it from the outside. As the longtime recipient of so much love, attention, and care from my family, for me to simply abandon them seemed like the height of ingratitude, a failure to reflect the kind of person my parents raised me to be: strong in the face of difficulties, willing to do hard things and make sacrifices for those I love. And as someone who had learned to see Westboro’s ideology from both sides of the divide, I couldn’t help feeling that it would be an abdication of responsibility and the waste of a gift to turn my back on a problem into which I may have some useful insight.

But the truth is that the church’s radical, recalcitrant position is the result of very common, very human forces—everything from fear, family, guilt, and shame, to cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias. These are forces whose power affects us all, consciously and subconsciously, to one degree or another at every stage of our lives. And when these forces are coupled with group dynamics and a belief system that caters to so many of our most basic needs as human beings—a sense of meaning, of identity, of purpose, of reward, of goodness, of community—they provide group members with an astonishing level of motivation to cohere and conform, no matter the cost.

Ultimately, the same quality that makes Westboro so easy to dismiss—its extremism—is also what helps highlight the destructive nature of viewing the world in black and white, the danger of becoming calcified in a position and impervious to change.

But as I watch the human tribal instinct play out in the era of Donald Trump, the echoes of Westboro are undeniable: the division of the world into Us and Them; the vilification of compromise; the knee-jerk expulsion of insiders who violate group orthodoxy; and the demonization of outsiders and the inability to substantively engage with their ideas, because we simply cannot step outside of our own. In this environment, there is a growing insistence that opposing views must be silenced, whether by the powers of government, the self-regulation of social media companies, or the self-censorship of individuals. At the heart of this insistence lie several false assumptions, including a sentiment that Westboro members would readily recognize: We have nothing to learn from these people. This sentiment was troubling to witness even among our tiny fringe movement, and I was relieved to abandon it when I left the church—but watching it spread among a vast and growing populace has been altogether more alarming, filling me with a growing sense of unease.

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.

Although private companies like Twitter and Facebook are clearly free to set the terms of use for their platforms, the principles enshrined in the First Amendment are no less relevant to social media than they are in public spaces: that open discourse and dialectic is the most effective enabler of the evolution of individuals and societies. That the answer to bad ideas is to publicly reason against them, to advocate for and propagate better ones. And that it is dangerous to vest any central authority with broad powers to limit the bounds of acceptable discussion—because these powers lend themselves to authoritarian abuse, the creation of echo chambers, and the marginalization of ideas that are true but unpopular.

In short, the principles underlying the freedom of speech recognize that all of us are susceptible to cognitive deficiencies and groupthink, and that an open marketplace of ideas is our best defense against them. And though my life’s trajectory has led me to strongly believe in these principles, I continue to actively seek out, examine, and seriously consider the arguments of those who oppose them. 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 re...

According to Zach, my grandfather had come to see his congregation as cruel and unmerciful.

I believed Zach’s assessment, because in the months before I left Westboro, my grandfather had been one of the few men in the church who was encouraging more kindness, gentleness, and compassion. Only by pride cometh contention, the verse said, and after the new elders took over, Gramps had quoted and paraphrased it often. “If there is no pride, there will be no contention,” he intoned. “Where there is great humility, there will be no contention.” As if he were trying to reform the beast he had created.

Shortly before he was removed from church membership, as Zach told me, our grandfather had stepped out the front door of the church to address the young people running the Equality House across the street. A nonprofit called Planting Peace had bought the house in 2012 and painted it in the colors of the rainbow, the global symbol of the LGBT rights movement. It was a perpetual monument standing in opposition to the church and its message of judgment and damnation. “You’re good people,” Gramps called out to them from across the street, before he was hustled back inside by Westboro members. At the church meeting where he was excommunicated, the elders gave this incident as the clearest evidence of my grandfather’s heresy—casting his lot in with the Sodomites—and judged that he was lucid when it occurred.

My own change of heart and mind had already made me optimistic about the same potential in others—and now with evidence that even someone like Gramps could experience this kind of change, the idea of completely writing anyone off seemed senseless.

There is always a clinging to the land of one’s birth.

Their hearts beat just inside. I can’t knock, and I don’t pray anymore, but I can wish that it all would end. That the walls they built to keep me out would vanish. I want to tell them that the world isn’t evil. That it’s full and complicated and beautiful and good, filled with unknown truths and unbroken hopes, and that it’s waiting just for them. That I’m waiting just for them. I want to tell them that I love them. I’ll just have to find another way.