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

by Megan Phelps-Roper

Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. —F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

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.

A soft answer turneth away wrath: but grievous words stir up anger.

My grandfather fixed his stare on a nearby wall for a moment, and then spoke matter-of-factly into the strained silence. “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.

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.

A deceived heart hath turned him aside, that he cannot deliver his soul, nor say, Is there not a lie in my right hand?

And in a moment of horrifying clarity, I finally saw what had eluded me for so long: We had all been behaving in the exact same way toward outsiders. It was as if we were finally doing to ourselves what we had been doing to others—for over twenty years. My eyes widened and my face flushed hot, overtaken by panic and shame and regret and humiliation in the split second it took my mind to find a way to make sense of the chaos that the church had become: What if we’re wrong? What if this isn’t The Place led by God Himself? What if we’re just people? And I felt sure that it was all true. I crossed a chasm in that split second, pursuing a thought my mind had never truly imagined and now could never take back. 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. And if the church was right? Then asking those questions and even beginning to consider their implications was an unforgivable betrayal of everyone I had ever loved and the ideals I’d dedicated my life to defending. In my mind, I was a betrayer already. I thought of my mother, and the guilt was crippling. I didn’t deserve to be part of this body of believers. The Lord was done with me—an Esau, after all. Already condemned. Overwhelmed by a sudden pressing need ...

And with that, the most powerful partition in my mind—the one that had kept me from seeing the most grievous contradiction of all—dissolved. We had been claiming to love thy neighbor all my life. We claimed we were the only ones who truly cared about anyone else. “We’re the only ones that love these fags!” Gramps would say in his Mississippi drawl. But at the same time, we had been wholly dedicated to antagonizing the world. We mocked and delighted in their suffering. We demanded they repent, and then asked God to preserve them in their sin. We prayed for Him to destroy them. Two diametrically opposed positions, held strongly and sincerely by the same mind at the same time—just never in the same moment. A deceived heart hath turned him aside, that he cannot deliver his soul, nor say, Is there not a lie in my right hand? I felt deranged. I numbly moved the brush up and down the wall, hot tears still sliding down my cheeks. 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.

There was no way to consider the magnitude of the devastation that I would soon be forever cut off from everyone I had ever loved: my faculties simply shut down before I could even approach that reality. I was betraying my beloved mother—treated unconscionably by the church body and then abandoned by her own daughter. How could I leave her? Monstrous. And all the while, Grace held my head in her lap, running her nails through my hair, periodically asking questions in a low, cautious voice. Distrustful. Why now? What has changed? Where would we go? I had no other ideas, so I mentioned C.G. Maybe he would help us. I didn’t tell Grace that I’d spoken with him already, partly because both she and he were behaving as though they were afraid of me. As if they didn’t know me. Their reactions were crushing, because they confirmed what I already believed: that outside of Westboro, I was nothing. Within the church, I was a cherished daughter—I wielded no power, but my skills were many and useful and valued. I was dependable, and trustworthy, and called upon frequently. I had built my life and identity around the church, and I was well-beloved. Who was I on the outside? I was the perpetrator of untold amounts of harm in the world. I was a lover of tragedy, cruelly attacking the grieving at their most vulnerable. I was a willing participant in the most aggressive anti-gay picketing campaign the country had ever seen. What reason did anyone have to give me a second chance? Grace and C....

I began to see that for many of our beliefs, there was absolutely no evidence that could be introduced to us that would cause us to change our minds. Unfalsifiable.

I realized it wasn’t just the change in my father that I was mourning. It was the final crumbling of an image I had held so long in mind. Westboro Baptist Church. Special interest of the Almighty. Uniquely guided to eternal triumph by God Himself. Sordid. Base. Banal. Human.

Dec. 18, 2012—Day 1 THE OLD MAN & THE SEA Now is no time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with what there is.

Dec. 19, 2012—Day 2 THE SUN ALSO RISES You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.

Dec. 20, 2012—Day 3 THE SUN ALSO RISES Wonderful how one loses track of the days up here in the mountains.

Dec. 30, 2012—Day 13 THE GOD DELUSION The journalist Andrew Mueller is of the opinion that pledging yourself to any particular religion “is no more or less weird than choosing to believe that the world is rhombus-shaped, and borne through the cosmos in the pincers of two enormous green lobsters called Esmerelda and Keith.”

I couldn’t dispute that the Scriptures were filled with practical advice, meditations on human nature, and beautiful sentiments that I could never imagine rejecting. Love your enemies. Better is a little with righteousness than great revenues without right. He that answereth a matter before he heareth it, it is a folly and shame unto him. Hatred stirreth up strifes: but love covereth all sins.

Ultimately, it didn’t matter how much any single one of us was responsible for any particular wrong we had wrought in the world. It was good that we hadn’t intended to do evil, but our intentions didn’t erase the harm we’d done. The fact was that harm was done, and what mattered now was finding a way to address it.

“I guess I just want to say that I’m truly not looking to avoid taking responsibility for my actions,” I clarified. “That isn’t really the point of the question. I think the point is that … I just have a hard time blaming my family. I don’t think they’re bad people. I think they’re good people who have been trapped by bad ideas … There just has to be a way out.”

Jan. 11, 2013—Day 25 The Great Gatsby Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope.

Except ye utter by the tongue words easy to be understood, how shall it be known what is spoken? for ye shall speak into the air. Honesty and good intentions weren’t worth much, I decided, if they were lost in translation.

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. In court, Margie’s job was to present and defend her interpretation of the facts and the law before a judge, who would hear all sides before making a final decision, which was subject to review by higher courts. But when it came to the purported Word of God, in all its complexity, we considered our judgment to be so reliable as to merit absolute confidence, so unquestionable that we could insist that all of humankind follow it. I shook my head and inwardly cringed. Coming face-to-face with my arrogance, aggressive in its misplaced certainty, was a special sort of shame.

Particularly moving were the messages from those with whom I had sparred on Twitter over the years—people I had come to know and like, people who had seen me regularly sling around condescension, condemnation, and words like “fag” and “whore.” Chad Darnell was one such person, a gay man living in Los Angeles. Our exchanges had been full of Bible verses, friendly sarcasm, and sincerity—but as with all outsiders, I had been suspicious of his kindness and concern. His response to my post about leaving Westboro was an open letter, which read in part: Dear Megan: Hey, girl, hey. When I woke up to messages from family and friends that you had left the church, I literally burst into tears. I sat in bed for 20 minutes reading your letter with ugly tears (like bad Oprah crying) streaming down my face and I couldn’t stop. I am so proud of you. I am so happy for you. I (we) never felt hate in our hearts toward YOU. Sure, we didn’t like you that much, but the action of you physically removing yourself from that situation is a strength that most humans will never know. That was your family and your main source of interaction with people. We get it. Trust me, we ALL get it. Megan, it would be the great honor of my church, my people to have you as a guest. We just want you to come and breathe and feel what a community trying to make the world a better place should be. We feel a special bond to you after all your tweeting over the years. And know that we all, everyone at our church, forgi...

They had to do it, though. Demonizing Grace and me was the only way to protect their image of Westboro as not just benign but wholly good. They couldn’t allow themselves to truly contemplate the idea that Westboro might be wrong about the ideals to which they had dedicated their lives. They needed to believe in the righteousness of their cause just as much as we needed them to see its destructiveness.

What were they telling my siblings right now? That I had traded them in because I wanted the approval and love and attention of outsiders—that I wanted to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season, because I loved the world more. Had I chosen the love of the world over the love of my family? My mind rebelled at the thought, at the crippling guilt. I would never have willingly made such an exchange. This had never been a choice between strangers and family, between the world’s love and its hatred. It wasn’t the desire for an easy life that led me to leave. Losing them was the price of honesty. A shredded heart for a quiet conscience.

How had this happened? How had my perspective changed so much in such a short amount of time, from an obedient follower who instinctively suppressed doubts to a malcontent who just couldn’t leave well enough alone? I had spent endless hours racking my brain for clues, tracking the changes in my perspective over time, and I found myself returning again and again to Twitter and to my complicated friendship with David—the source of my first conscious disagreement with one of Westboro’s doctrines. I had reflexively suppressed it, but it had come rushing back the day that I first considered leaving Westboro, painting in that cold basement.

At the root of my shame was the assumption that I had nothing to learn from people like David and C.G.—a premise that had so clearly proved false. Bit by bit, my shame was being replaced by profound gratitude to Twitter for its commitment to being “the free speech wing of the free speech party.” Instead of booting me from the platform for “hate speech,” as many had demanded, it had put me in conversation with people and ideas that effectively challenged beliefs that had been hammered into me since I was a child—and that conversation had been far more illuminating than decades’ worth of rage, isolation, and efforts to shame and silence. It struck me as ironic that this very idea had been repeatedly referenced by church members when they spoke of the First Amendment, a quote from 1920s-era Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis: “If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”

At Westboro, any admission that we might be wrong about any doctrine was accompanied by intense shame and fear. If we reversed course on any issue, we did so quietly, never admitting publicly to our mistakes. From our point of view, acknowledging error and ignorance was anathema, because doing so would cast doubt on our message. While I engaged church members as an outsider, I started to understand that doubt was the point—that it was the most basic shift in how I experienced the world. 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 causes us to hold a strong position a bit more loosely, such that an acknowledgment of ignorance or error doesn’t crush our sense of self or leave us totally unmoored if our position proves untenable. 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.

Westboro is not unique. The church’s garish signs lend themselves to this view of its members as crazed doomsayers, cartoonish villains who celebrate the calamities of others with fiendish glee. 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. Others with stories like mine have shown me repeatedly that the root of Westboro’s ideology—the idea that our beliefs were “the one true way”—is not by any means limited to Westboro members. In truth, that idea is common, widespread, and on display everywhere humans gather, from religious circles to political ones. It gives a comforting sense of certainty, freeing the believer from existential angst and providing a sense of stability—a foundation on which to build a life. But the costs of that certainty can be enormous and difficult to identify. Ultimately, the same quality that makes Westboro so easy to dismiss—its extremism...