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

by Megan Phelps-Roper

This was the eternal conflict between the righteous and the wicked, and we would not back down.

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.

In this battle, we would not be the ones to yield.

No matter how fierce the hostility to our message became, we delivered it with a Cheshire grin: “You’re going to Hell. Have a nice day!”

These were the wars of the Lord, and they would be remembered from everlasting to everlasting.

A soft answer turneth away wrath: but grievous words stir up anger.

we had the protection of the First Amendment and the foundation of Jesus Christ. No one was going to stop us.

I was in the habit of suppressing thoughts that conflicted with the Bible as my family understood it, and by the time I was twenty, that tendency was nearly as second nature as breathing. My feelings were irrelevant. I would sacrifice them on the altar of submission to the church, because that was my first and foremost duty in this life.

Who cares about marriage when the world will imminently be destroyed by God?

We don’t get to be mad at God for not giving us what we want, Sam said. How dare we?

“If you ever have a question about whether it’s appropriate to say something,” my mother always said, “just add the word judge to the end of it—as if you were addressing a judge in the middle of a courtroom.”

When I wanted to talk about commandments and truth, C.G. was focused on humility, gentleness, compassion. To him, our message and methods clearly lacked these qualities—no matter how truthful we believed our words to be.

We were offering the words of writers and journalists, musicians and comedians, in order to convey what fear and decorum prevented us from saying ourselves.

“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.

By visceral instinct more than conscious deliberation, I understood that no force silences doubt as effectively as zeal—a passionate clinging to familiar and reliable truths that quiets dissonance and snuffs out uncertainty in an avalanche of action.

Mercy. Humility. Meekness. Compassion. Where were they among this church body?

could not acquiesce to their conclusions the way I’d done with so many others before. I could no longer blindly trust the judgment of these men.

My eyes widened and my face flushed hot, overtaken by panic and shame and regret and humiliation in the split second it took my mind to find a way to make sense of the chaos that the church had become: 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.

I had wasted my life only to fill others’ with pain and misery.

If Hell is real, then God is evil.

What if the Bible wasn’t the literal and infallible word of God?

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

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.

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.

Coming face-to-face with my arrogance, aggressive in its misplaced certainty, was a special sort of shame.

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.

you let Satan nibble on your ear and flatter your vanity—during long and continual conversations. Whether that was with one or many Satan-inspired minions, it has caused you to dig for doctrinal fallacy—when you know better.

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 wasn’t the sin, I came to believe. It was the arrogance of certainty that poisoned Westboro at its foundations.