LIFE AFTER HATE Megan Phelps-Roper moves on from Westboro Baptist Church
How Megan Phelps-Roper turned away from the Westboro Baptist Church and found happiness
Megan Phelps-Roper’s favourite childhood memory is of winter days sledding with her family close to their Topeka, Kansas, home. After the fun, “there was always a big pot of hot chocolate on the stove when we came back,” Phelps-Roper tells WHO, her voice warmed by the memory. As the third of 11 children, Phelps-Roper also fondly recalls making cookies with her dad, looking after her siblings, playing video games, and being “obsessed” with reading. “I remember all of those things, and of course, included in all of it is standing on the picket line.”
Phelps-Roper was a chubby-cheeked child of 5 when she first joined her religious-extremist family at their daily “picketing ministry”. The first sign she held, but was too young to read, said: “Gays are worthy of death.” As a member of the infamous Westboro Baptist Church, for the next two decades, she trumpeted her family’s hateful beliefs all over the US. In Westboro’s understanding, “you show your love for your neighbour by rebuking them when they’re sinning”, explains Phelps-Roper, 33, who turned away from the church – and the family she loved, and still loves – in 2012, as she writes in her memoir, Unfollow. “We saw our picketing ministry as the embodiment of ‘Love they neighbour’. So, on the one hand, we’re claiming to love our neighbour and on the other hand, we’re praying for God to destroy them.”
Such inconsistencies eventually led Phelps-Roper, with the help of people on Twitter, to courageously turn away from all that she had ever known and never previously questioned. “Somehow, in a family of extremely intelligent and analytical people –many of the adults are attorneys, they’re very
smart and well-educated – it all seemed to make sense,” says the articulate and quietly spoken writer and activist. “There were answers for everything.”
Founded in 1955 by her late maternal grandfather, award-winning civil-rights lawyer Fred Phelps, Westboro began the picketing it would become notorious for in 1991, two years after Fred Phelps learned that gay men were meeting in a local park. Eventually, many other groups – including military personnel – also bore the brunt of what Phelps-Roper calls “the hateful rhetoric that filled my childhood”. Members of the congregation (mainly made up of father-of-13 Fred Phelps’ extended family) picketed “anywhere that humans were gathered”, says Phelps-Roper. “Everybody outside the church was a sinner … everybody outside was a target.”
Phelps-Roper was 24 when social media put the first chink in the armour of her beliefs. “It started with conversations with people on Twitter,” she recalls. While she was used to being surrounded by people who were hostile and confrontational on the picket line, PhelpsRoper was unprepared for the sense of community she would find online. “A growing number of individuals came to me [on Twitter] within that same spirit of hostility, initially, and then realised that I was a sincere, genuine person who really believed we were doing the right thing, so they started to ask questions.”
Those questions led Phelps-Roper to an inconceivable truth: “They were getting into the nuances of our theology and they found these internal inconsistencies that I had missed my whole life,” she recalls. “We had these arguments that sounded right but then revealed themselves to be facetious. It was shocking for me to realise that.” One of those who helped her see a different perspective was her future husband, Chad, who “was kind of forcing me to look at the human impact of what we were doing,” she says. “When we see people in pain we tend to empathise, we think about how we would feel in their position and I had learned to not do that; not just to not feel their pain, but to celebrate it. That was such a huge part of our church’s culture.”
It took about 18 months for Phelps-Roper to leave the church, and while she remains estranged from her parents, Shirley and Brent, she has nothing but kind words for them. “My parents are amazing people, the book is dedicated to them,” says Phelps-Roper. Alongside Chad, whom she wed in 2016, Phelps-Roper is raising their daughter, Sølvi, 1, with a completely different set of values. “I believe in humanity, I believe in hope, in compassion, in grace,” she says. “And they don’t have a religious origin for me any more, but they still bring an enormous amount of wonder and gratitude into my life.”