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

by Megan Phelps-Roper

When our father instructed Grace to choose a degree other than art, Sam and Steve advised him that he hadn’t gone far enough—that her options should be limited to the study of nursing or computers only.

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.

My dad walked in to discuss my assertion that I didn’t have a voice anymore. “Are you happy?” he asked Jael. She nodded. “Do you think you have a voice?” “Through my husband,” Jael said. Simpering. “And is that acceptable or unacceptable to you?” “That’s the way it should be,” Jael answered. “She has a voice through you. She has to submit to her father. That’s her lot.” And that was how the elders had managed to pull this off, I thought. 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.