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

by Megan Phelps-Roper

I harbored few desires stronger than the one for her approval, but her standards seemed always to be shifting, tightening like a noose until I felt choked with the futility of my own rage.

This was how you taught obedience. Until fear of God replaced fear of pain, this was how you learned obedience.

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.

As long as I stayed and did what I was told—as long as I believed—everything would turn out okay.

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.

“I think hope is the worst thing in the world. I really do. It makes a fool of you while it lasts. And then, when it’s gone, it’s like there’s nothing left of you at all.”

After a moment, I’d found myself stepping back and staring up at the stacks, centuries’ worth of human thought devoted to understanding God and the world and how to live in it. I had wondered how we at Westboro could have ever believed that we alone had discovered the one true answer to it all. I had flushed with embarrassment at our arrogance, and at my own ignorance. What did I know of these philosophers and their ideas? 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.

Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.

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.