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

by Megan Phelps-Roper

It’s always an English teacher that saves the day 😏

I couldn’t think of a more suitable use of our newfound freedom: trying to see the world from the perspectives of others.

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.

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. Others with

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.