If you expected Unfollow, the new memoir of Megan Phelps-Roper, who is a former member of the notorious Westboro Baptist Church (WBC), to be a salacious tell-all about life in a cult and how its prodigal daughter escaped, you’d be shocked to read the dedication page. Roper doesn’t dedicate the book to her husband or new baby, but instead, to her parents Brent and Shirley — the parents still picketing funerals with Westboro with their famous “God Hates Fags” signs: “To my beloved parents, Shirley and Brent, whose tenderness fills my memories. I left the church, but never you — and never will. I am humbled to be your daughter.”
Unfollow isn’t an invective against the parents who shunned her or even against the church that taught her hate; it’s something far deeper. And it offers an important lesson in our current, angry political climate.
The WBC is known for carrying hate-filled signs at the most unlikely of places — most notably, at soldier funerals. Phelps-Roper begins the book with the history of the church, founded by her maternal grandfather, who was a civil rights pioneer in the Midwest. But the church went off course, and by the time Phelps-Roper was five, it was already coming to resemble its current form.
The church’s vile, homophobic rhetoric provoked hostile reactions from outsiders, encouraging members of the Phelps family to adopt a single mentality: “From behind my sign, I watched them approach us to hit and threaten and shove and bellow and spit and grab for our signs, our bodies, our hair … What made them think they could do this to us? Why weren’t the cops stopping them? But my grandfather had a different perspective on the opposition and scorn we faced: It was proof that God was with us. He would quote Jesus, who warned his disciples to expect the hatred of the world.”
Yet what is most instructive about Unfollow isn’t its explanation of why Phelps-Roper took so long to defect from the church, but its account of what currently prompted her to do so: the gentle and consistent prodding from Twitter users, including her future husband and an Orthodox Jew living in Jerusalem. The latter, a Twitter user with the username “Jewlicious,” consistently debated theology with Phelps-Roper, using Jesus’ words to rebuke the actions of the WBC. While Phelps-Roper stood outside a Jewish conference in Los Angeles protesting “God Hates Jews,” “Jewlicious,” aka David Abitbol, brought her confections from Jerusalem to the picket line.
Phelps-Roper served as the WBC’s presence on Twitter and was, for most of the outside world, the voice and future of the church. Soon after her defection in 2012, she released a statement about her decision to leave her family and church. It wasn’t groveling for forgiveness, nor was it a blanket condemnation of her family, but nevertheless, her announcement was met with near-universal cheer.
Roper was surprised; she expected to be left without anyone or anything after she left her large and tight-knit family. They warned her she would never be acceptable to the outside world after what she said and believed, and yet she was met with open arms. She appeared as a speaker at the same Jewish conference in Los Angeles she had once protested and engaged in meaningful dialogue with those who lunged at her on the picket lines.
Consider the state of apologies in the present day, less than a decade after Phelps-Roper released hers. Groveling apologies for errant tweets are met with the wrath of an angry mob. Yet in the recent past, Phelps-Roper was somehow able to parlay a nuanced apology for a lifetime of hate into an inspiring career as a writer and speaker on ideological extremism. Phelps-Roper told me, “I think if I left 2014 or after, it would have been very different — which is so sad and frankly scary to think about. We want people to leave these groups. If they feel like there’s no chance they’ll be able to make a life without paying for their mistakes for the rest of their life, that will just make it more likely they’ll stay inside. [It’s] the devil, you know.”
Phelps-Roper’s story is instructive and captivating in itself, but it also contains a critical message about communication and understanding for an era in which they are increasingly scarce. Listening and persuading have become rare skills, and they are needed now more than ever. If the spokeswoman raised on the picket lines of the most hated family and church in America can be persuaded to leave bigotry and everything she’s ever known behind and make amends with those she once tormented, what excuse can there be for our age of competitive pettiness?
Bethany Mandel is a part-time editor at Ricochet and a stay-at-home mother.
