Megan Phelps-Roper was just a child when she joined her family in Westboro Baptist Church’s picket lines.
The granddaughter of Westboro’s founding pastor, Fred Phelps, she was raised in a church that preached hate against homosexuality and held demonstrations displaying hate-filled signs outside of the funerals of members of the LGBTQ+ and Jewish communities. The church’s picket lines and demonstrations were so vitriolic that it was recognized as a hate group by the Anti-Defamation League and by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Phelps-Roper came to believe that the more the outside world condemned their views and actions, the more righteous they were.
In 2012, she left the church and cut ties with much of her family, a story she recounts in her new book, “Unfollow: A Memoir of Loving and Leaving the Westboro Baptist Church.” She’s since become an advocate for overcoming conflicts between religious and political groups. In her book, she recalls her life inside the cult and how joining Twitter helped her escape.
Samantha McMurdock: When you first joined Twitter, you were trolled in the most heinous ways (death threats, threats of sexual attacks, etc.). This didn’t bother you because you’d been raised dealing with such verbal attacks. Do you remember your early days picketing, and were you frightened?
Megan Phelps-Roper: I do remember those early days on the picket line. I recall being kind of unnerved at first, but almost never afraid. People were incredibly angry about our signs and often attempted violence, but my family kept us safe — which just reinforced the narrative I was learning at Westboro Church: that we were the good guys, and outsiders were hateful and evil.
McMurdock: You were taught to be suspicious of the kindness of strangers. Did this stand in the way of making friends at school and college, and how did you navigate teenage life without a network of girl pals?
Phelps-Roper: There was a verse my mom would quote: Faithful are the wounds of a friend, but the kisses of an enemy are deceitful. That definitely stopped me from making true friends of my classmates. We could be friendly and joke around, but I didn’t trust them at all. I did have a network of girl pals growing up, though: my sister Bekah and my cousins Libby and Jael, primarily. Only church members were acceptable friends.
McMurdock: You talk about how great it is to have freedom now, even cherishing walking down the street alone. Were you given a curfew and watched closely as an adult woman in the church?
Phelps-Roper: It wasn’t so much that I was given a curfew as that my mother directed everything about my life. They view the multiplicity of rules and the micromanagement of members — especially girls and women — as for our own protection. They were keeping us from veering off the path, and any attempt on our part to push back against that was seen as rebellion — an indicator that our hearts weren’t in the right place. We weren’t just supposed to follow those rules, but to love them, to welcome the oversight. Anything less than that was a sign that we were headed down a bad path.
McMurdock: Despite being wary of strangers, you developed a trusting relationship on Twitter, even falling in love. How did you tear down that instinctive barrier?
Phelps-Roper: There was something about being physically distant from people on Twitter that allowed me to be open and vulnerable in a way that I never would have been in a physical space with others. The fact that tweets were only 140 characters, too, gave me the sense that my engagement there wasn’t the kind of deep connection that could get me in trouble. It felt safe and innocent, and provided me with this wonderful outlet to really open up and connect with people.
McMurdock: You still send your mother greeting cards. Is there any way the two of you could lay your differences aside to just be mother and daughter?
Phelps-Roper: I wish there were, and there might be, but it will certainly take some convincing on my mother’s part. I’ll keep working toward that end as I keep writing and reaching out to her and the rest of our family.
McMurdock: As you’ve walked away from the hate speech like “God hates Jews,” etc., do you ever find yourself behaving instinctively (in thought) and then having to almost reprogram yourself that you don’t believe that?
Phelps-Roper: It was certainly a process to overwrite the beliefs of Westboro that had become instinctive to me. I recognized pretty soon after I left the church that those ideas wouldn’t just take care of themselves. That if I had any hope of lasting change, I would need to be very deliberate about putting myself in situations to challenge those beliefs and to create new memories and associations. I started spending a lot of time with people I used to target at Westboro — people in the LGBTQ community, Jewish people, non-Westboro Christians, atheists, etc. — and that was hugely important to changing how I thought and felt about people in those communities. Those negative thoughts about people don’t really happen anymore and haven’t in a long time. At this point, the former beliefs that surface most often have to do with parenting. My little girl is 14 months old now, and I completely reject that idea that I need to physically hurt my daughter to teach her anything. I reject the authoritarian style of parenting that I experienced particularly from my mother. But since I never witnessed an alternative, I’m constantly searching for examples of good, humanistic parenting practices.
McMurdock: What advice would you give 16-year-old Megan — and do you think she would take it?
Phelps-Roper: I would encourage my 16-year-old self to consider how she knows what she thinks she knows. More effective, I think, would be a series of conversations, developing rapport and gently pointing out the internal inconsistencies in Westboro’s doctrines. Outside of that, I don’t think she’d pay much attention to my advice.
McMurdock: What did Louis Theroux think when you contacted him to say you’d left Westboro? (The British documentarian made three films based on the inner machinations of the Westboro Baptist Church.)
Phelps-Roper: Louis had a lot of questions about what exactly had happened. I think he was trying to understand where my mind was and what had caused it to change so drastically in such a short amount of time. He was incredibly kind and empathetic. I was very grateful to have the support and compassion of someone who knew my family and who knew what it had cost me to leave them.
McMurdock: You are only 33 now. What are your hopes for the future, personally and professionally?
Phelps-Roper: I love being a mom to my baby girl Sølvi, and I think Chad and I would love to add to our family. I also definitely want to continue writing, to help people who disagree have better conversations, and to find more ways of fighting extremism.
McMurdock: What attracts people to cults in your opinion?
Phelps-Roper: Cults have a lot to recommend them: an intense sense of community, of purpose and sanctity and identity, a promise of reward, a comforting sense of certainty in a chaotic world. They cater to a lot of our most basic needs as human beings, and the costs of joining aren’t always obvious up front.
Courtesy of Ireland’s Big Issue / INSP.ngo