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

by Megan Phelps-Roper

Throughout my childhood, my mother was determined to make my siblings and me understand one idea above all: We were not in charge of our lives, but God—and that God ruled via the parents and elders He had set over us. Our duty was singular: to obey them. Children, obey your parents in all things: for this is well pleasing unto the Lord. Their power over us was absolute, and we would do well to accept that without question or protest. These were, as the New Testament put it, the bounds of our habitation. It was one of my mother’s favorite phrases.

We were powerless to alter our destiny, but the surest sign we could have that we were one of God’s elect? Our obedience.

Plus, they were in possession of divine truth. They weren’t afraid of questions, because they had all the answers.

When fundamentalists would approach us and tout their decision to rid their homes of television and secular music, our response was chastisement. “How can you preach against the abominable teachings that litter the landscape of this nation if you don’t even know what they are?” my mom would admonish. I cherished the time I spent peering into alternate realities, and each day I’d race through my schoolwork so that I could escape into them: worlds where I had no responsibilities and lives that bore no resemblance whatsoever to my own.

In truth, school itself became an escape for me—an escape from Mom and the frequent eruptions of her caustic temper. This was a fact that I acknowledged to myself uneasily, with a deep awareness of how foolish, how melodramatic I was being. I had a good life, I was always told. The best life, one filled with people who loved God and hated evil and would teach me the truth about the world, unlike my misfortunate classmates.

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. But he that is spiritual judgeth all things, yet he himself is judged of no man. For who hath known the mind of the Lord, that he may instruct him? But we have the mind of Christ. Who would have the audacity to contradict the mind of Christ?

Many years would pass before I felt the least bit unsettled by the striking correlation between her view of her father and her view of God. “You wanna sum up the whole Bible in just three words?” she would ask. “‘Obey, obey, obey!’” It was an approach of appeasement: if only you could work hard enough to placate the strict demands of an exacting taskmaster, his wrath would turn away from you. Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man. For God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil. Gramps was not God, but Westboro members were inclined to conflate the moral judgments of the two—in practice, if not in theory—because in spite of his faults, my grandfather had been chosen by God to lead us.

She trailed off, and we both walked together like that for a time, contemplating the choices we would have made if we’d had any choice at all.

He was always reevaluating, never so committed to a position that he couldn’t assimilate new evidence.

Being part of a family this size—especially with our imaginative and ever-attentive parents at the helm—had helped to teach us humility and patience.

For the first time, we had been told to do something unscriptural by someone in a position of authority. For the first time, we had no way to make our objections heard by the church. And as always, we had no choice but to submit.

Grace and I knew better. 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.

That we could experience such a deep sense of personal shame and humility, saying with the Apostle Paul that we were the chiefest of sinners, while simultaneously declaring that God had given us the most righteousness and insisting that the world obey our understanding. Our position was inherently arrogant and full of hubris, but we felt humble.

The church had taught us to distrust our own judgment from the time we were children, and we had taken the verses to heart.

Any discussion of beauty was limited to an oft-quoted admonition about its emptiness. Favour is deceitful, and beauty is vain: but a woman that feareth the Lord, she shall be praised.

I wouldn’t realize until much later that the protectiveness I felt for Grace wasn’t just because she was following the rules. It was because she was managing to do so without losing herself. I adored Grace’s creativity and free spirit and the dreams she would so casually mention—of traveling to Paris or Rome to see the sculptures she was studying in art history, or off to Russia, home of Pushkin and Tolstoy. I loved her dreams even though I knew them to be impossible. We could never leave the United States and the broad protection of the First Amendment, and the church’s ban on international travel was just one of the innumerable limitations on our lives that I had long ago assimilated. But because “Grace flies under the radar,” as my parents often noted, she was somewhat insulated from our mother’s watchful gaze and need for submission. She hadn’t yet been broken. She’d made it to age nineteen with her will intact, and she was the only person with whom I could speak openly about my concerns—the only one willing to express disagreement with the elders’ positions without including the standard caveat: “The elders know better. We must be missing something.”

And more, the fact that Justin was married gave Grace an even greater sense of safety in their closeness. It was unthinkable that anything improper could happen with him, because he was married. The line was so bright and crossing it was so far outside the realm of possibility that she simply didn’t believe it could be improper.

That Grace would request such a silly thing was taken as evidence that her heart wasn’t in the right place. The appearance of evil.

Just by virtue of their authority over us, I fell back into the position that they were right, that our doubts were wrong, and that any disagreements we had were the rebellious impulses of disobedient children. How dare we think that we knew better than the leaders God had set over us? I wanted to yield, and I chided myself for any thought that contradicted the church.

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 sister had never been anywhere without permission, never been given any freedom or independence of any kind, and now she was on the cusp of being thrust into the world on her own at nineteen, with almost no practical life skills—for texting.

I couldn’t settle on any one idea long enough to articulate it, because I was overcome by a hysteria the likes of which I had never known.

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?

This was the plan we came up with: Stay. Attempt to convince the rest of the church to hear our objections. Pray for the best. And only if our best efforts failed would we again consider leaving.

They ascribed ill motives to many of her actions—even positive actions—and then they retaliated against her on that basis.

I made my case, citing verse after verse that showed how we had done her wrong. I tried and failed to be calm, and he erupted in response, justifying it all: the church had made a decision, and God was with us, and that was that.

The church had always been all or nothing—in or out—and this was no-man’s-land. I could not survive here.

The closer we came to walking out the door, the less I had to lose by sticking my neck out to petition the others. And what if Grace somehow managed to get kicked out before we could actually leave?

That I had to rebel in order to apologize struck me as hopelessly corrupt.

To my mind, it was now undeniable that the elders’ decisions were primarily driven not by Scripture, but by a need to keep church members in our place. To make us understand that bending to their will was the only option. Nothing else mattered.

They wouldn’t understand that I’d wanted to tell them everything. That I’d tried so hard to keep them. That I’d been begging for change. That I’d wanted to stay.

By rendering us “children” so long as we were unmarried, they thwarted all possible challenges to their control. There was no need to listen to what anyone else thought, because as our parents, they would tell us what to think.

Why had they made it so hard to tell the truth?

After so many years of a life micromanaged by my mother, I now felt paralyzed each time I had to render an opinion about what steps to take next—as if decision-making were a muscle that had long since atrophied from disuse.

And beneath the urgency and the loss and the yawning chasm of uncertainty, there was a deeper sort of terror: that no matter what I did, I was spinning my wheels in a futile effort to outpace the wrath of God reserved for the children of disobedience. My grip on the steering wheel tightened as I imagined my little black Pontiac spinning off into a ditch, smashing into a concrete divide, crumpling into a mass of metal and broken bones protruding from torn, sizzling flesh resting in pools of blood after a head-on collision with a southbound semi and— Stop! I ordered myself.

But after two weeks, I’d started to realize that Grace was right. It did matter that we were still so close to home.

I couldn’t bear to think of the things my siblings would hear from the rest of the church members, who made it a habit to report back whenever they saw ex-members. If Grace and I seemed in good spirits, we would be considered foolish and bestial, not recognizing how vain and worthless our lives now were. If we seemed mournful, we were pathetic, feeling the sentence of death in ourselves. In their eyes, we would never be truly happy—and we were delusional if we thought we could be.

It still felt almost criminal to simply wander around with no rules.

Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the traditions of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ. It was a catchall verse that had kept me from ever venturing too far off the beaten path, allowing me to dismiss out of hand any challenges to the most fundamental premises of our beliefs: Did God exist? And was the Bible His infallible Word? I had been taught that these were the questions of fools, but now I felt foolish for all the years I had failed to ask them.

I called forth memories to steel myself against twin but opposing tendencies I felt warring inside me: between regretting the past and romanticizing it.

I was slack-jawed to realize that there was more than one way to read the text—that from one passage, multiple meanings could be deduced without contradicting the language in the original. That interpretation was a phenomenon with real implications for believers.

For any question or issue, there was a single correct understanding, and it was ours. Legitimate disagreement with Westboro’s theology could not exist within this framework, and though I had come to reject some of the church’s precepts, I immediately fell back into that paradigm—that there was only one way—because I hadn’t yet seen another that made sense to me. I was still assuming that anyone contradicting “the clear meaning of Scripture” was either deliberately mangling the truth or deluded by God into believing a lie.

The hope that sprang from this realization would become the new foundation of my life, but along with that hope came still more confusion: If there was more than one possible answer, how did anyone manage to decide between them?

If I was going to grow out of the mental and emotional boundaries that had so long characterized my existence—the bounds of my habitation—I would need to forge my own path.

In the stories of others departing similar high-control groups, I would notice this pattern again and again: an “unshakable faith” first called into question by the group’s failure to live up to its own standards.

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.

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.

“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.”

As the longtime recipient of so much love, attention, and care from my family, for me to simply abandon them seemed like the height of ingratitude, a failure to reflect the kind of person my parents raised me to be: strong in the face of difficulties, willing to do hard things and make sacrifices for those I love. And as someone who had learned to see Westboro’s ideology from both sides of the divide, I couldn’t help feeling that it would be an abdication of responsibility and the waste of a gift to turn my back on a problem into which I may have some useful insight. I didn’t want to become the embodiment of the example from the book of James: For if any be a hearer of the word, and not a doer, he is like unto a man beholding his natural face in a glass: For he beholdeth himself, and goeth his way, and straightway forgetteth what manner of man he was. To have been transformed by the gentle, persistent entreaties of strangers—and then to walk away and forget that example, to refuse to extend that same courtesy and grace to others? Brutish.

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.