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

by Megan Phelps-Roper

A vexing thought began to take hold. As members of Westboro, we behaved as if everyone in all the world were accountable to us, as if they all were steadfastly bound to obey our preaching—because we were the only ones who knew the true meaning of God’s Word. Presidents and kings, judges and governors, Princess Diana and Mother Teresa—all were subject to our understanding and our judgment. And all the while, we ourselves were accountable to no one outside our fences.

Mostly the words tumbling around inside my head mirrored the unruly curls that sat atop it: copious and uncontained, inevitably springing loose from every paltry attempt at confinement.

we became desensitized to the reality of the havoc we were wreaking on the lives of our targets. The only pain that mattered was ours.

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.

Forced to publicly reckon with a past I was still trying to understand, a present I was wholly unprepared to navigate, and a future that remained a terrifying abyss.

“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.”

“Why are you here?” he’d balk, searching my face as if an answer might be discovered in the blue of an iris or the curve of a cheekbone. “How?”

To have been transformed by the gentle, persistent entreaties of strangers—and then to walk away and forget that example, to refuse to extend that same courtesy and grace to others? Brutish.

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.

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.

the snowy darkness of midnight,