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Their children hold signs that read, “God hates fags.” I was a child when their family, the extremist group called Westboro Baptist church, began picketing in Kansas in 1991. Driven by patriarch Fred Phelps’s homophobic interpretation of the Bible, they quickly became infamous for wielding shocking slogans and shouting lurid insults in public spaces.
It would be easy to write them off as monsters – a familiar impulse in today’s political climate, particularly toward supporters of Donald Trump. But, with democracy itself on the line this election year, we must remain open to the possibility of transformation.
I saw Westboro for the first time in the late 90s at the University of Kansas. I was a first-generation college student who had inherited no family political tradition. We were working in wheat fields when better-off families were attending civic events or reading opinion pages. In that void, I had absorbed a vague, moderate conservatism from the prevailing culture of my Reagan-era childhood and adolescence at the dawn of conservative talk radio.
On the typically liberal campus that was challenging my ideas, Westboro was a frequent, well-organized presence at the LGBTQ+ pride parade, music concerts or lectures. Over the previous decade, they had traversed the country to disrupt all manner of events, including the funerals of American soldiers and the murdered gay man Matthew Shepherd. But KU – “gay U”, some Kansas conservatives liked to call it – was just down the road from their home in Topeka, so students like myself saw them often.
“Fags die, God laughs,” read one sign. Later, in response to the 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center– deemed punishment for a culture increasingly accepting of queerness – “Planes crash, God laughs.”
The content of their message was horrifying, but the tone with which they shared it – smiling, smug selfrighteousness, casting pity on us who weren’t saved – was repugnant, as well. Their vitriol had the opposite of its intended effect, raising my awareness as a heterosexual, cis-gender woman of the trials faced by my LGBTQ+ peers.
By the time I graduated in 2002, my politics had significantly altered. I arrived deeming affirmative action unfair; after a sociology class for which I researched the impact of one’s race, gender and economic status on life outcomes, I concluded that affirmative action was right as rain. I arrived with no concept of worker rights, all but erased from consciousness in my union-busted state; after reading early 20th-century documents of the labor movement for an American literature class, I realized that I had been born near the bottom of a socioeconomic ladder my country kept insisting didn’t exist. I arrived believing I could be at once socially liberal and fiscally conservative; after excelling on campus while paying my own way through school and then graduating into poverty for lack of social capital – while watching less motivated, less capable children of affluence walk into prestigious internships and lucrative jobs
– I viewed the so-called free market, welfare reform and low taxes as a thoroughly rigged system that only progressive measures could remedy.
To be clear, for all the claims to the contrary about universities, there was no agenda to convert me to liberalism. The professors who questioned my conservative ideas did so respectfully and gave me As. Organizations such as the College Republicans were a visible presence.
Rather, my information sources and environment expanded. Upon reviewing these new discoveries, I converted myself.
Plenty of students make no such shift. Conservatism remains ever-available for those attending universities, as evidenced by the countless farright college graduates currently running this country. According to Pew Research Center, 51% of men who voted for Republican congressional candidates in 2018 held college degrees. While the Westboro group is hard to pin along modern party lines, their signature argument is decidedly far-right – and most of its leaders are credentialed attorneys. Conversely, millions of Americans without college degrees develop progressive views by way of informal education: reading, observing, life experience. It was not higher education that changed me but my willingness to change.
Among those born to bad or limited information – the flawed narratives of history books, the blinders of privilege, or propaganda on their parents’ televisions and car radios—there are those who will stick with existing beliefs regardless of what they are shown. But there are those who would reconsider, and we need them more than ever. •••
Megan Phelps-Roper would have been in her early teens, holding one of those hateful signs, when I passed her family on the way to class. Like me, she attended public schools and consumed popular culture. But, where my formative years were carved by mainstream influences – Catholicism, the nightly news, waiting tables – hers was the stuff of cults.
Her grandfather was the charismatic, zealous leader demanding commitment and claiming a monopoly on truth. Doubt and dissent were discouraged, sometimes through abuse. Shame and guilt were devices of control, and those who left were cut off from communication. Phelps-Roper participated in a family protest against homosexuality for the first time at age five.
As she came of age, Phelps-Roper’s ability to assess information had been thoroughly perverted. Westboro acted not out of hate but out of love, her elders taught her, to warn mortals of their sins so that they might repent and avoid eternal damnation.
At the age of 26, however, PhelpsRoper would make a much larger and braver leap than my political shift from center-right to solid left. In 2012, she left Westboro – her lifelong idea system, her only identity and nearly her entire family.
Just as the cruel signs she once held probably convinced few who saw them, it was not angry condemnations of her ideas that moved her toward the truth. It was, rather, a handful of friendly strangers on Twitter, including a Jewish man who responded to Phelps-Roper’s antisemitic provocation. Sensing the humanity beneath her inhumane behavior, they thoughtfully pressed her with intellectual and philosophical debate over the course of several years.
“People had grace for me when I seemed not to deserve it the most,” Phelps-Roper told PBS’s Amanpour & Co. last year after the release of her memoir, Unfollow. “The fact that they were able to suspend their judgments long enough to have those conversations with me completely changed my life. So now instead of me being out there with Westboro creating new victims, I’m working for healing and change to try to repair some of that damage.”
I noticed that, in her writings and interviews about her experience, Phelps-Roper does not favor the term “cult”. I asked her whether, perhaps, she found the descriptor accurate but not constructive.
Phelps-Roper conceded that the term is accurate enough, even though some common features of cults are not true of Westboro, such as moneymaking schemes or sexual ownership of women by the leader.
“‘Cult’ is definitely a convenient shorthand that rapidly conveys the gist of the situation at Westboro and communities like it: a small, fringe group that exerts an inordinate amount of control over its members, exalting