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

by Megan Phelps-Roper

It struck me that this desire to exchange a financial motive for an ideological one was a convenient evasion of a distressing truth: it was easier to dismiss our stated intentions than to acknowledge that people who were otherwise bright and well-intentioned could believe and behave as we did as members of Westboro.

I needed to believe that our ministry had not been influenced by the pathologies of a human being.

Nate was to be held forever accountable for not conforming, for not just learning to fear and obey the way that they had all learned to. My mom and her siblings were holding Nate to account for the chaotic state of their childhood home—but they never would with Gramps. Because Gramps had stayed. And Nate had left.

So long as we all held the line, no one could prevail against us.

I wouldn’t have had the vocabulary or self-awareness to convey it at the time, but at the root of all my words was a pathological imperative that has never left me, one that continues to override the usual etiquette of distant, restrained discourse with strangers. 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.

That strength abides as fully in restraint as it does in aggression.

but my mother tended to straw-man. She presented facts in such a way that our side came out as a paragon of virtue, and our opponents as the nadir of evil. Her analysis was just too intense and one-sided to be objective, and it became important for me to read the records for myself.

My time at Washburn didn’t fit the typical experience of college as a time of questioning and independence.

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

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.

I understood that no force silences doubt as effectively as zeal—a passionate clinging to familiar and reliable truths that quiets dissonance and snuffs out uncertainty in an avalanche of action.

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

We harbored a deep curiosity about the world outside, and we indulged it as much as the constraints of our lives would allow.

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. 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.

No, the thought resounded now. I picked up a stack of bath towels and handed them to my brother. If Hell is real, then God is evil. Terrified, I mentally backtracked. Maybe.

Others might place the blame upon the men in the story, but as a predestinarian, I was most repulsed by the God who had instigated and orchestrated the whole thing.

But what if we are wrong and we go to hell? MEGAN: Why do we think it’s real? It’s starting to seem made up to scare people into doing what they say. GRACE: But what if? MEGAN: Then it would be horrible. If someone told us we had to obey Artemis or we’d be tormented by Hades when we die, we’d laugh at them. I think we worry now because we’ve believed it was real forever.

The conflation of parental and ecclesiastical authority was only possible in a church like ours, where nearly everyone was related. By rendering us “children” so long as we were unmarried, they thwarted all possible challenges to their control.

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.

I couldn’t allow bitterness to steal the beauty in my family, or love to conceal the destructiveness in it. I wouldn’t rewrite history. I would hold the whole messy truth of it to myself all at once.

Perhaps because the speaker was not my beloved mother or grandfather or relative, I listened to his sermon more critically than I ever had at Westboro.

With each new kindness, I understood with ever greater clarity the depths of my ignorance about the world.

“From our view,” David said, “a rebuke is supposed to happen privately, kindly, and with people you have reason to believe will hear you. If you’re attacking someone you know won’t listen—if you’re trying to correct them harshly, in a way that will provoke them to anger instead of encouraging them to change their ways—then you’re the one who is committing a sin.”

the tendency to moralize every decision as good or evil, the wielding of guilt and the withholding of affection to control the people I loved.

Sometimes, a person just needed to do what was right for them.

For both Dustin and me, one of the earliest sources of doubt had been incredibly trivial matters that highlighted internal inconsistency and a deeper issue—a dawning awareness of human perception coloring and altering apparently divine laws.

Instead, I let my arguments be guided by the pattern that had worked with me, with Dustin and Laura, and with others whose stories I was coming to learn: the discovery of internal inconsistency and hypocrisy as an important first step in seeing outside of group dogma.

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, suppre...

“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.”

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. In this environment, there is a growing insistence that opposing views must be silenced, whether by the powers of government, the self-regulation of social media companies, or the self-censorship of individuals. At the heart of this insistence lie several false assumptions, including a sentiment that Westboro members would readily recognize: We have nothing to learn from these people.

Especially in the age of the Internet, it seems clear that we cannot reasonably expect to permanently halt the spread of an idea, whether good or bad. 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.

In short, the principles underlying the freedom of speech recognize that all of us are susceptible to cognitive deficiencies and groupthink, and that an open marketplace of ideas is our best defense against them.

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.

A soft tongue breaketh the bone.

I want to tell them that the world isn’t evil. That it’s full and complicated and beautiful and good, filled with unknown truths and unbroken hopes, and that it’s waiting just for them. That I’m waiting just for them. I want to tell them that I love them.