Megan Phelps-Roper

Megan Phelps-Roper was born into a hate group—and needed decades to realize it, said Johnny Dodd in People .com. A granddaughter of Westboro Baptist Church founder Fred Phelps, she was just 5 when she started picketing funerals with other members of the small but notorious Topeka congregation, most of them family. The church taught that God punished all who strayed from bible teaching, so the group’s picket signs were often shocking: “God Hates Fags” or “Thank God for Dead Soldiers.” Phelps-Roper long thought of the work as an expression of love. “According to Gramps,” she says, “we weren’t hating other groups— we were warning them of God’s hatred, giving them an opportunity to repent.”

As Unfollow, her new memoir, makes clear, leaving Westboro at 26 was not easy, said Brianna Childers in The Topeka Capital-Journal. Doubts had crept in for Phelps-Roper after she started trying to spread the church’s teachings on Twitter, and a few responders, rather than berating her, gently prodded her to re-examine those teachings. “I was certain that, whether Westboro was wrong or right, I was a monster,” she says. “If Westboro was wrong, I had spent my whole entire life demonizing the rest of the world. And if Westboro was right, then I was a betrayer.” Over time, she came to realize that the 5-year-old had only been trying to do good and deserved forgiveness. Also, that Twitter’s patient interrogators had modeled the way to break down walls. “If even people who were raised from birth to condemn the entire world can be changed by the power of human connection,” she says, “I feel like anyone can.”