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

by Megan Phelps-Roper

Mom continued on, telling the story of Jacob and Esau to illustrate predestination. It wasn’t the long version of their story from the Old Testament, of Jacob’s deceit in securing the blessing of the firstborn and of Esau’s vow of murderous revenge. Instead, our mother focused on the most salient part of their tale, found in the book of Romans: their fates. Jacob and Esau had been grandsons of the patriarch Abraham—twin grandsons, Mom stressed, as biologically similar as it was possible for two humans to be. “And yet! Before those two boys were even born, God loved Jacob and hated Esau. They hadn’t done anything good or bad to deserve it. They were still in their mother’s womb!” In the Bible, she told us, God is likened to a heavenly Potter, with humans as clay in His hands to mold as He pleases. Cannot I do with you as this potter? saith the Lord. Behold, as the clay is in the potter’s hand, so are ye in mine hand. God had elected—chosen—the beloved Jacob for honor, to be welcomed into Heaven for an eternity of bliss. His twin brother, Esau, meanwhile, had been created to be condemned to Hellfire—all through no fault or cause of his own. For the children being not yet born, neither having done any good or evil, that the purpose of God according to election might stand, not of works … As it is written, Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated.

But Jacob and Esau weren’t the only ones created with their fates predetermined, Mom continued. Indeed, these twins were the standing symbols of the two types of people living in the world: the elect, represented by Jacob, chosen by God for love, mercy, honor, glory; and the reprobate, represented by Esau, chosen by God for hatred, cruelty, wrath, destruction. Of all the people who had ever existed or ever would, only a precious few were God’s elect. Narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it. The vast majority, both of the living and of the dead, were created for destruction. For wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat. My mother must have been through this story over and over ad nauseam through the years, but she spoke as if it were the first time, her tone filled with impossible awe—as if she still couldn’t believe the elegance of this scenario, as if the beauty of this divine truth could come only from the mind of God Himself. I

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.

We were engaging in what we called “virtual picketing”: protesting a faraway event in a local space, and reaching the target audience by publishing photos and messages on the Internet and through the media.

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.”

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.

open discourse and dialectic is the most effective enabler of the evolution of individuals and societies.

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.