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

by Megan Phelps-Roper

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.