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

by Megan Phelps-Roper

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.

Most of our discussions revolved around Westboro and theology, which he wasn’t terribly familiar with. I tried to educate him, but no matter how tenaciously I defended our positions, he just couldn’t get past some of them—especially the funeral protests. “But what about the family?” he would press me. My answer to this question sounded more and more hollow as time went by, but I refused to admit how uneasy—almost guilty—this line of questioning was making me feel. I argued the position I’d believed since I was a kid: that the definition of love was “truth,” and that any expression of truth was, by definition, loving. Truth was love regardless of context, target, or tone—even when it involved holding a sign that read THANK GOD FOR DEAD SOLDIERS on the sidewalk near a military funeral, while singing praises to the homemade bombs that killed them. C.G. strongly disagreed, and it became a point of contention that came up more often than the rest of his objections. When I wanted to talk about commandments and truth, C.G. was focused on humility, gentleness, compassion. To him, our message and methods clearly lacked these qualities—no matter how truthful we believed our words to be.

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.

“If you choose not to attend my funeral,” he wrote, “my friends and family will understand.” I’d felt my heart sink as Bekah read, but she was too excited to notice that I’d only managed a dull “Wow…” in response. I knew this letter was exactly the posture my family would take if we left. Grace and I had wept that night, realizing that it was gay people—I’d stopped using the “f” word by then—who would best understand what we were going through. The community we had antagonized more than any other. I hated that it had had to come to this for me to understand what the church had been doing to vulnerable people for so long.

I couldn’t think of a more suitable use of our newfound freedom: trying to see the world from the perspectives of others.

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.

It was an obvious point, but it suddenly struck me that this Us/Them mindset was deeply ingrained and resistant to change. Unless I wanted to be forever ruled by a nebulous fear of outsiders, it wasn’t enough for me just to cross that line a few times; I needed to decide whether the line should be moved, or changed, or erased entirely. It couldn’t be a simple matter of a blanket rejection of my former beliefs, either, which would be no less silly and irrational than unquestioning acceptance of them. Instead, I would need to look at the evidence. I’d need to carefully examine each of these thought patterns, holdovers from Westboro that would have to be challenged and reconsidered—over and over again—if there was any hope for lasting change. Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.

Listening to my grandmother describe her years of struggle and sadness, I began to see the lasting effects of Westboro’s treatment of outsiders. Nana’s pain didn’t come from a one-time decision to keep her at arm’s length and out of our lives, but from a continuing and active rejection—from watching the years of her life tick by without the love of her family. Nana had been living this nightmare for more than thirty years. The pain was ongoing. I wondered how I would ever bear it.

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.

“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.”

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.

As someone who had contributed to that harm for so long, I felt an obligation to those communities to work to dismantle it from the outside.

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.

Ultimately, the same quality that makes Westboro so easy to dismiss—its extremism—is also what helps highlight the destructive nature of viewing the world in black and white, the danger of becoming calcified in a position and impervious to change.

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.