Unfollow: A Memoir of Loving and Leaving the Westboro Baptist Church by Megan Phelps-Roper

Megan Phelps-Roper is a granddaughter of Fred Phelps the founder and pastor of the infamous Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas. Megan left the church in 2012 at the age of 26. Fred Phelps died in 2014. The church continues, now led by a council of male elders.

Megan started this memoir as an essay to help explain her childhood to her new husband. Her essay turned into a book published in 2019. I bought the book a year ago after reading a review in the Gay and Lesbian Review, but once it was on my shelf I was reluctant to start reading. Did I really want to spend that much time in the hateful world of Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church? But I finally did read it and I’m glad I did.

Megan is a great writer. Her story is compelling and human. She is intelligent, thoughtful, sensitive, and humble. She confesses to the hurtful things she did with her family including daily picketing with offensive signs. Megan was personally in charge of the church’s Twitter account and used all the same hateful language that others in the church used. But we follow her journey from childhood obedience in a totalizing family culture, through to understanding and regret, finally deciding to leave, and onto her recent effort to apologize to those harmed and repair the damage. I felt sympathy for her, respect for her courage in getting out, and sadness, with Megan, for her family members still involved in the church as well as for the many, many, people they have harassed and bullied over the years.

I learned several things that surprised me. The family is not stupid. The Phelps clan are highly intelligent and successful. Most of them have college and post-graduate degrees. Many are attorneys working for the family law firm. I was surprised that Megan’s childhood was not sheltered in any way. She attended public school. She read any books she wanted to read (mostly sci-fi and fantasy). The children watched television. They had access to the internet and smart phones. But they were also obsessively indoctrinated in Fred Phelp’s version of Christianity.

The Westboro Baptist religion also surprised me. We would call it extreme but it’s not unusual. Phelp’s religion is simply a hyper-committed Calvinism. The Puritans would have recognized and respected it. In high school Megan read the Jonathan Edwards sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” and was surprised how much it read like the sermons her grandfather preached every Sunday. The Calvinist theology begins with the principle that God is omnipotent and eternal. God knows the destiny of every person before we are created. Some are born “elect”, meaning saved and destined for Heaven by God’s grace (Unconditional Election), others are damned . And because God is omnipotent there is nothing we can do by our actions to change our destiny (Irresistible Grace). Human beings are born sinners and incapable of choosing the good (Total Depravity). God chose not to save all of us (Limited Atonement) but we should be thankful that any of us are saved. If we are among the elect we will find out only after we die, but one sign of the elect is that the elect follow God’s word given in the Bible in all things and stay fast against the trials and tribulations set up by Satan to lure us off the path (Perseverance of the Saints).

The only peculiar aspect of Fred Phelps’ Calvinist church is the public ministry of calling out the sins of others through inflammatory and offensive language. The church feels they are following a commandment from Leviticus, part of the text that Jesus quotes as the commandment to “Love thy neighbor”. (This is the King James translation, the only translation allowed in the church). Leviticus 19:17-18: “Thou shalt not hate thy brother in thine heart: thou shalt in any wise rebuke thy neighbour, and not suffer sin upon him. Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself: I am the Lord.” Rebuking a neighbor for their sin is a way of loving them. So the street corner protests, and the shouting, and the disruption of military funerals is part of “loving.”

The book is filled with Bible quotes, printed in italics, giving the Biblical justification for every rule of the church and the order of the church member’s lives. Knowledge of the Bible was extremely important for Megan and her family. I wish that the book included the chapter and verse reference for the many quotes. I know the Bible, too, but not nearly that well.

Fred Phelps began his ministry in Topeka in 1954, four decades before the ministry began. He worked as a lawyer. Many are surprised to know that Phelps spent his career as a civil rights lawyer defending African American clients and earning the praise of the NAACP. Phelps’ disgust at racism seems to be sincere, even if it doesn’t seem to fit with other parts of his life. However, Phelps’ work as an attorney got him into legal trouble with the courts. He was disbarred from working in State courts in 1979 but continued working in Federal courts. Then in 1986 a further complaint was raised against Phelps and six of his attorney children working with him. In 1989 he agreed to turn in his license in exchange for allowing the others to continue to practice.

Thus, in 1989, Fred Phelps no longer had legal work in which to channel his zeal. In the summer of that year he was riding his bicycle with a five year-old grandson (Megan’s older brother, Josh) beside a park in Topeka called Gage Park that was a cruising location for gay men. Phelps claims that some men tried to accost his grandson, which sounds unlikely to me, but in any case Phelps started a campaign with the local government to clean up the park. When the city failed to do what Phelps thought necessary he began the church’s picketing campaign, in 1991, first at the park, and later at a restaurant owned by a lesbian and in front of insufficiently righteous churches and other locations throughout the city, and eventually throughout the country. Megan tells of picketing her own schools, and at the college that she would later apply to and attend. The church picketed the trial of the killers of Matthew Shepard, although Megan says she didn’t attend that occasion.

That the Phelps clan includes numerous lawyers came in handy during a case in 2010. The church had begun to protest at military funerals. Their message was that the deaths of US soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan were a testament to God’s wrath against the United States for our sins. Their signs claimed we should be thankful for dead soldiers. The father of a soldier named Matthew Snyder sued the church for civil damages after they protested at his son’s funeral in Maryland and won a 10 million dollar award. The church, with Megan’s aunt, Margie, acting as attorney, took the case to the Supreme Court, where the lower court decision was over-turned. As repugnant as the church’s action is, it’s the right decision. Megan quotes from Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority:

“Speech is powerful. It can stir people to action, move them to tears of both joy and sorrow, and–as it did here–inflict great pain. On the facts before us we cannot react to that pain by punishing the speaker. As a Nation we have chosen a different course–to protect even hurtful speech on public issues to ensure that we do not stifle public debate. That choice requires that we shield Westboro from tort liability for its picketing in this case.”

Megan’s break with the church began following a church action against her mother, Shirley Phelps-Roper, shortly after the decision in Snyder v. Phelps. As Fred Phelps had aged he began to give more and more administrative work to Shirley, and Shirley’s power and abrasive style apparently irritated other members of the clan. Secretly, eight of Fred’s sons and sons-in-law took power over for themselves, calling themselves elders, and used their power to condemn Shirley. They ostracized her from the clan and re-assigned her work to others, including Megan who took over the job of scheduling protests. The unfair and disrespectful treatment of her mother disturbed the now 24 year-old Megan.

Meanwhile, Megan had been using Twitter to spread the church’s message, but other Twitter users were also talking back to her, and some of their challenges were starting to stick. Free speech was working exactly as it is intended to in a liberal system. Megan was free to spread hurtful messages, but by engaging in debate, her own ideology was starting to crack. From a Rabbi she learned a new way to consider the “rebuke” text in the context of loving thy neighbor: that a rebuke must be done in private and in language that is calculated to persuade the hearer away from their sin, neither of which was happening with Westboro’s public picketing. She became uncomfortable with the way the new church elders were disobeying commandments, such as the commandment not to lie when she was asked to use photoshop to fake a picture of church members supposedly picketing at Prince William and Kate Middleton’s wedding, and that the elders refused to listen to her objections. Twitter users called her out for this deception and she had no answer for them. In a critical moment when she was painting a basement wall with her sister she had a sudden revelation of the way the elders were asserting certainty in their own righteousness and setting themselves as the ultimate arbiters of divine truth, and realized that this was exactly what she and her family had been doing to the rest of the world for years. She was horrified.

And then quickly, struck with the stone of doubt, the walls crumbled. She re-tells a particularly horrible Bible story from Judges, Chapters 19-21, (we looked at this same story in seminary as one of several “texts of terror”) and Megan wonders whether the God in the Bible, cruel, capricious, divisive, is the real God. Her entire faith has rested on the truth of the Bible, but on what does her faith in the truth of the Bible rest? Only on her own feelings, or rather, the feelings of Fred Phelps who told her to believe in the Bible in the first place.

These are all the same doubts I wrestled with as a teenager in the Methodist Church. But my experience in the church wasn’t as suffocating as Megan’s. And for Megan to leave the church also meant to leave her family. She’d already seen her older brother leave the church, and aunts, and uncles; they were shunned; they disappeared. Leaving was an act of courage, but she did it openly. Her sister, Grace, left with her. Grace had also come under discipline, falsely accused of a flirtation with a married man in the church. Her parents watched them both go. And her mother said they were always welcome to come back.

The girls, or young women at this time, Megan is 26, Grace, 19, left the church in November, 2012. They spent a few months, randomly, at an Air B and B in Deadwood, South Dakota. Fortuitiously, the couple who owned the Air B and B were Jehovah’s Witnesses, and the wife had left her family’s Presbyterian faith to convert to her husband’s faith, so the couple knew something about restrictive religions and leaving faith and family behind. They became friends. Megan got a job doing PR at the company owned by the owner of the Air B and B. And most importantly, she finally met in person the man who would become her husband, a man she first met through Twitter, and then through playing the online game “Words With Friends,” and who was a patient, and compassionate presence throughout her journey.

The books ends with the death of Fred Phelps in 2014. He had suffered dementia in his last years. Amazingly, he was finally excommunicated from his own church. The story is that in 2012 an organization called Planting Peace had opened a center called Equality House across the street from Westboro Baptist Church and painted their building in rainbow stripes as a provocation. One day Fred Phelps stood on his lawn and yelled across the street, “You’re good people!” Megan sees this as a softening in her grandfather late in life, perhaps a re-awakening of the values he operated under in his civil rights work. The church elders saw his friendly tone to the neighbors as apostasy and his dementia as a punishment for losing the faith. Megan visits her grandfather in hospice. They have a sweet visit. Megan uses her phone to find a hymn request and play it for him. And then, the family discovering she has been there, she is banned from visiting again.

Megan lives with her husband and a daughter in South Dakota. Fred Phelps is buried in an unmarked grave in Topeka, Kansas.