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

by Megan Phelps-Roper

There were no chores at school, no crying babies, no laundry, no vacuuming. We only had to learn. It was the freest time we had, and became the portal to my favorite place: books.

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.

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.

I was animated by a set of twin desires that I now understand will never be satisfied: the need to understand, and to be understood.

Neither side walked away convinced by the other’s beliefs, but it was a noteworthy conversation—less because of its substance and more because of its tone. It was contemplative rather than contentious, which wasn’t generally the norm when it came to Westboro members and theological debates.

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.

thought bitterly of Jack Boughton, a character from Gilead, the first book he’d ever recommended to me: “I think hope is the worst thing in the world. I really do. It makes a fool of you while it lasts. And then, when it’s gone, it’s like there’s nothing left of you at all.”

That the problem went far deeper: hypocrisy, and the dawning realization that the rules we had been taught—the divine rules of a sovereign God—were being systematically replaced by the caprices of fallible men.

Our position was inherently arrogant and full of hubris, but we felt humble.

for the first time in my life, I couldn’t shut off the questions running through my mind. I couldn’t identify the source of my new willingness to challenge the church, but I wanted it to go away.

“What are we doing? There is nothing Scriptural about what’s going on here! The elders act as if their judgment is infallible and they refuse to listen to anyone else—even when they’re directly violating the commandments! All the verses about being of one mind mean nothing to them! The women are angry and spiteful and always finding reasons to be offended!”

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

I couldn’t believe how our love within the church had been warped beyond recognition by the elders’ unscriptural will to punish. By their implacable demands for unquestioning obedience. By their pernicious need for superiority and control. They had developed a toxic sense of certainty in their own righteousness, seizing for themselves the role of the ultimate arbiter of divine truth—and they now seemed willing to lay waste to anyone who disagreed with them. It was a heinous arrogance and sinfulness that could not be denied.

My mind was finally settling on its inevitable conclusion: There was something terribly wrong at Westboro. God was not in this place. We were not special. Not hand-selected by the Lord to do His divine work. We were a deluded people.

“If anything bad happened to me,” she said, “it was because I was a sinner. It was because I deserved it. Instead of showing compassion or understanding or trying to help—you know, being a parent—my mother said things like that.” I was dumbfounded. Westboro and this woman’s mother clearly did not draw from all the same wells, but their attitudes sounded remarkably similar: an unwavering certainty in their righteousness and a categorical disdain for any ideas that did not fit with their own. Although it saddened me to hear, I also felt a surge of recognition that made me oddly hopeful. Maybe it wasn’t just us.

Back at the beginning of my communication with C.G.—Chad, I chided myself—he had introduced me to the writer David Foster Wallace. I’d begun exploring Wallace’s words in whatever forms I could find them—short stories, essays, interviews—and had shared them with Grace. We were particularly enthralled with a scene from one interview, in which Wallace recalled taking a year off from college to drive a school bus. He was unhappy, and there was much he wanted to read that wouldn’t be assigned in his classes. “And I read,” Wallace said; “pretty much everything I’ve read was read during that year.”

When I shared my epiphany about interpretation with Jeff, he said, “That’s one thing I have never understood about your family. They’re all lawyers, right? The U.S. Constitution was written some two hundred years ago in essentially modern English, and there’s so much disagreement about how the U.S. Supreme Court should interpret and apply those words today. The Bible was written thousands of years ago in languages no one speaks anymore … and somehow, Westboro alone has figured out its one true meaning?” Articulated that way, the arrogance of our position seemed even more incomprehensible.

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.

there might be a lot more goodness in the world than I had believed.

“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.”

“I feel so stupid saying this,” I said, “but we really believed that it was irrelevant how we spoke to people. ‘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.

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.

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.

“In a way,” he said, “leaving Westboro Baptist Church was the most Westboro Baptist Church thing you could have done. They’re the ones who taught you to stand up for what you believe in, no matter what it cost you. They taught you that. They just never imagined you’d be standing up to them.”

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.

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.

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.

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.