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

by Megan Phelps-Roper

the acronym TULIP, which my grandfather put on a sign that hung behind his pulpit for years: Total Depravity: All humans are, by nature, slaves to sin and incapable of choosing to follow God. Unconditional Election: God has chosen who will be saved based solely on His mercy, not their merit. Limited Atonement: God could have chosen to save all men, but sent Jesus to die only for His elect. Irresistible Grace: Those chosen by God have no power to resist His call to salvation. Perseverance of the Saints: God’s elect will persevere to the end and be saved.

“The Lord could just kill them, you know.” And thus we began to pray for the Lord to kill the father of the Marine and his accomplices. Someone googled the names of the lawyers who were filing the complaint—former JAG officers—and for the first time in all my life, we slid down off our pews and prostrated ourselves on the floor of the church sanctuary. The men took turns making elaborate prayers to God to kill these men that very weekend, before they had the opportunity to attack the Lord’s church in this way. We were the representatives of the Most High God, and we prayed He would show Himself strong on our behalf. Our requests were made in the spirit of King David’s imprecatory prayers—prayers of cursing, invocations of the wrath of God.

It is disconcerting—shamefully, unimaginably so—to look back and accept that my fellow church members and I were collectively engaging in the most egregious display of logical blindness that I have ever witnessed. I cannot account for my failure to recognize that our new imprecatory prayers were entirely and fundamentally at odds with our long-standing, oft-professed desire to love thy neighbor, that they were perfect contradictions of Jesus’s command to love your enemies. Both positions had been derived from the Scriptures—but how could we have sincerely held such deeply incompatible views for so many years? It should have been inconceivable in a group of Westboro’s size and intelligence. Still, the partition between the piece of my mind that confessed love for my neighbors and the piece that asked God to dash the young men to pieces was vast, opaque, and impenetrable. That brief spark of nagging discomfort was snuffed out, and I carried on.

Margie’s words were echoes of a lament I’d been hearing from teachers and journalists for years: that a family as impressive as the Phelpses were wasting our lives and talents tormenting people on the streets. How startling it was to hear it in Margie’s voice, my mind stirring with the beginnings of a subtle realization: that even among the staunchest of us, the sacrifices we made in order to be at Westboro—our insistent rejection of the world outside—weren’t quite as simple and inevitable as they had always seemed.

At the time I had been vaguely aware of the changes that communication on Twitter was working in me, but it was only in hindsight that its effects became clear. The 140-character limit caused me to drastically cut back on my use of insults, which Westboro members made a habit of stringing together in long, alliterative lists: “bombastic, blowhard, bigmouth, bimbo, bastard.” Not only was there no space for insults in tweets, there was also an almost immediate feedback loop: unlike with email, I could watch a Twitter conversation derail in real time whenever I included personally disparaging language. The exchange would swiftly devolve from a theological debate to a playground quarrel. It became clear to me that causing offense with needless ad hominem attacks did nothing to communicate our core message, and I learned to avoid it. Hostile tweeters became almost like a game to me, and I delighted in learning to use humor, pop culture, and self-deprecation to diffuse and disarm antagonism. To change the nature of the conversation and convey our message in a way that outsiders could better hear it. The tongue might be a fire, I was learning, but it didn’t always have to be.

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.