Of five i went out to protest gay people originally and then from there it morphed to everyone outside our church was headed for hell and we had a duty to go and warn them of the consequences of their sins and our whole lives were organized around that ministry. How did the picketing Ministry Begin if you talk about this loving family that you u have a normal childhood, when did the god hates fags signs come. In 1991 when i was five years old and incident occurred, actually shortly before that incident happened at a local park where my grandfather was biking to the park and he thought he saw my older brother who was then about four years old or five years old, being approached by two men trying to lure them into the bushes and he discovered this local park that was wellknown as a Meeting Place for gay men. He went and started trying to get the city to clean up gage park at started my grandfather called it the great gage park decency drive. Even in the very first protests we had a sign that said gays are worthy of death. And invited this bible passage romans 132. Almost immediately, the response to that very first protests was outrage from the community. People came out local churches came out to counter protest and said things like gods love speaks loudest. The response to westborough ministry was always negative. I was taught it was a good thing. Jesus said, blessed are you women will hate you and revile you and persecute you and say all manner of evil against you falsely. They hated me. It hit you. I learned from a very young age that we were the good guys and everyone else they were the bad guys. We had a duty to go and tell them what god required of them. What was fred phelps like his grandfather . He was loving and sweet and funny. He was the fire and brimstone preacher you could hear in the sermons and see it in interviews. Very passionate believer and zealous believer. But he was also a loving grandfather who absolutely adored. What was the Phelps Family reputation in topeka . He talked about playing video games and having friends did other parents say stay away from megan phelps . We had acquaintances in school like we were so our parents raised us to be polite and friendly and Good Students to help others with their homework thing like that. We had these acquaintances but i started protesting before i started kindergarten. I grew up with this covert of classmates who knew i was going to be outside of their churches and outside the Topeka Performing Arts Center when they had performances of the nutcracker. By the time i got to high school i actually would leave class at the lunch period, cross the street and ticket my high school during lunch as my classmates were driving back sometime screaming and throwing things. There was always a sense of otherness, a sense of us versus them. Like we might be required to sit in class together and play t nice for a while but i understood that i couldnt trust them that i needed to keep them at arms length and of course i didnt have to work very hard to do that because for the most part people didnt want to be close to us. Did you revel in your otherness . For the most part. There could be times it could be a little bit awkward but for the most part i saw it as inevitable. If i was going to serve god if i was going to do my duty to my fellow man that i was going to be hated and because i was raised in an environment it seemed normal. It seemed like another fact of life that i needed to assimilate. The numbers are up on the screen if youd like to be displayed in our conversation this afternoon with megan phelpsroper formerly of the Westborough Baptist church. In november 2012 what happened . I left. I had gotten on twitter a few years before that and started having conversations with people there. You are the social media director basically for westborough. It wasnt a formal position it was just something i saw, edand learned about twitter i read an article about it on cnn. Com and thought it was a place for me to go and spread our message to another audience and i ended up being changed far more than the people i was trying to preach to. There was the same kind of hostility and competition i experienced on the picket line but there was also this group of individuals who started asking me questions and having real conversation with me even the people who started out with the instinct to shame me and to try to isolate me and make me think i was a bad person, they realize pretty quickly that i was sincere that i really believed in the value of what i was doing in the goodness and the righteousness of what i was doing and so they got curious and in starting these conversations with me they were able to really dig into the indepth questions to understand they were able to find these internal inconsistencies in our doctrine and for me that was the first time i was able to see that we could be ieiewrong that westbor Baptist Church does not in fact have a wmonopoly on truth. The truth of god. It was mind blowing for me. It was kind of the thread that began to unravel. Eventually unravel the whole system for me. Could you raise those questions to your grandfather, grandmother or your parents . I did to some people i did to my mother i think more than anyone. The problem was, mybecause of h westborough, their whole lives are organized around westboroughs ministry. Because theyve taken such a public position on all those issues the idea of changing her mind is aeven if they do change their minds they certainly almost never talk about it publicly because they think it would cast some doubt upon the rest of the message. Its something that is very hard to change their minds about something to acknowledge that you are wrong about something you have been so passionately preaching for so long. I tried to in a cautious way and the response was so visceral and so negative it terrified me. I kind of compartmentalized it. I had doubts and ultimately i rejected i stopped holding the picket signs but i didnt feel like i completely open. I thought, its just these few issues and the rest of westborough is preaching is right. Eventually i came to realize, if we are wrong about all these things, why do i think why do i just accept that the rest of this is true . That opened the door to bigger questions about the ideology as a whole. How many members of westborough . How many have left . The membership is stage largely the same for as long as i can remember between 70 and 80 people or so. Less than 100. The number of people who have left, so a few dozen at this point but theyve had a few converts from the outside and also Young Children being born into it. Now its my generation having children that are going to be raising in the environment. The tear from our viewers and lets begin with a call from jordan in alpharetta georgia. You are on with megan phelpsroper, unfollow is the name of the book. I just wanted to ask you, what exactly was the moment that catalyzed your decision to leave . Do you feel remorse . Im having a little trouble hearing you, what caused my . What lygoing to leave jordan reminder to viewers, speak clearly into your phone it makes it a lot easier. What catalyzed you to leave is what he wants to know. It started with a question about wha sign a lot of these people on twitter david at a ball to rent a blog called delicious raise this question he asked me about a picket sign that said Death Penalty for fags. We were calling for the Death Penalty for gay people because of the passage in the book of leviticus. He pointed to two situations, first he said about jesus like didnt jesus say let he who is without sin cast the first stone. I gave the response that we had always learned to give which is we are not casting stones we are preaching words and david gave the very obvious response that yes but youre advocating the government cast stones. There was the first time i realized that that quote from jesus wasnt just a general call to humility, he was specifically talking about the Death Penalty. That set me back for a minute but he also said didnt your mother have a child, your oldest brother out of wedlock he said thats another sin that deserves Death Penalty isnt it . That was the first time i thought to the fact that my mother we would say that she didnt deserve that punishment because she had repentance. And that if you kill somebody as soon as they send you completely cut off the opportunity to repent and be forgiven. These two points he made, this was one of those i couldnt acknowledge it to him at the time or even hardly in my own mind to acknowledge we could be wrong about something that was what started me down the path of questioning. Then the church started doing things i believed were unscriptural. A group of men kind of took over the decisionmaking process of the church and that d was contrary to the establish pattern from the bible they started doing things like lying, photo shopping themselves into protests they had not actually been at. So that was part of it too. Ultimately the questions became bigger. I knew before i left i realized i came upon this passage we are praying for people to die based on things that were king david, prayed for his enemies childrens to be fatherless and wives to be widows. I was raised in a culture that celebrated death and tragedy and came to realize their passages in the new testament where jesus said love your enemies. Last them that persecute you and the apostle paul said, blessed and cursed not. We were doing these things i came to believe were unscriptural and protesting funerals that i believed were wrong according to the bible itself. It was westborough failing to live up to its own standards. It was where i eventually came to realize like this is not biblical, there is no real justification for this and i cant keep doing it. Your family is quite educated. Yes. Lot of law degrees. Education was very important. It was something i understood i was going to be going to college. I thought, i plan to go to law school for a long time to follow in the family footsteps. I didnt do that because the apocalypse was coming. Its one of those things i think people have a hard time believing that educated people could really believe these things. And to be how can they be indoctrinated if theyre so smart . My answer to that is, almost everyone in the church was raised in the church. From a very young age they learned we all learn to marshal all of our faculties to defend the everything. This is why for me it was so important initial doubts came from these internal consistencies. Thank you very much everybody. Can you hear me all right . Please go ahead glencoe where we are listening. I wanted to quote something from miche i was just thinking love your enemies thing. Its not enough you love your enemies, you must also hate your friends. [laughter] i wanted to ask him a he said everything thats done out of love takes place beyond good and evil and i was just curious, does she think that order does she now think that what her family and i guess former friends were doing was does she think they are evil or at least being evil with this socalled hate speech . Or does she take a different view of it . Thank you glenn. I do think they do think that are evil. Especially for me the funeral protesting. Some of the worst things we ever did. Celebrating the death of children. Praying for god, we had a sign that said pray for more dead children. Pray for more dead kids. I believe that is evil. I do believe though that for me the fact that my family is motivated by good intentions and having lived among them for the first nearly 27 years of my life i see them as good people who have been trapped by bad ideas. I understand there are some people who really want me to completely condemn my family and the epigraph of my book unfollow is this line from the great gatsby that says reserving judgment as a matter of infinite hope. To me that encapsulates the idea of grace and its what people did for me when i was at westborough. They saw me, they were willing to suspend their judgments long enough to show me empathy and compassion at a time when i seem to deter rizzolis thats what changed, thats what i was able it allowed them to get through to me. Thats how i view my family now i try to give them the same grace and compassion and empathy that people showed me and i hope they can be reached as well. Megan phelpsroper, can you walk us through a couple steps christianity to pray for more dead children or protesting it at a soldiers funeral. The funeral protests, westborough, i was 19 years old when we started protesting soldiers funerals and this is a question i asked my mother, a change in our ministry. We had protested funerals before but specifically soldiers funerals and was asking you need to understand why we are doing this because im in be standing out here and i need to understand why. She took me over to me and my siblings to deuteronomy, the book of deuteronomy and said this passage where god says i set before you this day a blessing and a curse a blessing if you will obey me and a curse if you want. She said can we all agree that a dead child is a curse from god and not a blessing . Westborough views it as the go condign wrath of god that its welldeserved they believe in predestination so anything that happens is by definition the will of god, god willed it to happen. Its an punishment for the nations sins so going to meprotested funerals my mother said we were connecting the dots point aa was your filthy manner of life to point b which is this punishment this person is dead so now we need to go t tell the living the funeral protest it was about the dead, it was about the living. To give them an opportunity we are saying repent or perish. Its not repent or you will be killed in a war like this man was. Its repent or you will go to hell like this man did. Thats how we thought. They see it as the definition of love. The definition of compassion because the pc summary going down a path that leads to curses from god in this life and hell in the next, if you see them going down that path and you dont wear them, its because you hate them in your heart. Because of that framing it was one of those things it taps into your desire as a human being to do good and it was just, that was the definition i was taught and what it meant to do good. Lloyd is in des moines and youre on with megan phelpsroper, go ahead. You mentioned that as a child you held a poster in protest of homosexuality as a fouryearold or fiveyearold or sixyearold, what was your understanding of what homosexuality was . Obviously not a choice. It was westborough really an official Baptist Church . Or did you just claim the denominational title . Take you sir. Westborough sees themselves as baptist in the big vein of john the baptist in the bible. They had no affiliation with any other Baptist Church and they see that any kind of affiliation like that is unscriptural. So westborough is completely nindependent and saw that as what a new Testament Church should be. What did i understand homosexuality was . It became to understand it wasnt a choice. It was a decision that god had caused these people to be in other words, my grandfather would say, god doesnt hate you because you are gay, you are gay because god hates you. God has given you over to this sin. I understood that it was men having sex with men, that was how, my grandfather from the time i was very young would stand in the pulpit and describe gay sex acts as he understood them in detail and i read about this in the book it was something so by the time i was seven years old or eight years old i could describe these things to you because of what he taught us in the pulpit. It was to give us a sense of disgust to have that be the instinctive reaction when we saw gay people. You been out of the church now seven years, what was the last conversation you had with fred phelps your grandfather . That was on his deathbed i went to secretly come in secret my sister and i went to visit him in hospice. This was in 2014 march 2014. I found out at the end of february that he had been voted out of the church had a brother who had just left i wasnt sure exactly, i wasnt sure the last conversation i had with him was the day before that was the day i left the church. Aking to look at him and realizing i was losing my community and family and home and every aspect of my life. To leave the church. And then he was incredibly kind. And those are shutting down the systems before he passed away but eventually he came back and was incredibly kind to my sister and me am so incredibly kind. Why was he voting out quex. My brother said the day my grandfather was voted out he went to the church directly across the church lgbt q group had bought the house and they put up a rainbow so my grandfather went out and called out to those people running the charity and said you are good people. So when he was voted out that he cast his law and what further proof did they need. I see that westborough has tried not to talk about that since i left for my literally saw a video where one of my uncles said that gramps is probably in hell. It is true he was voted out and its heartbreaking. Goahead topeka kansas. Caller i just came across you on tv i normally record Something Else but thank you i hope people read your book and get the truth of what is going on because a lot of people dont understand what is going on. Host being from topeka what is it like having the teethree Baptist Church in your city . Sometimes i go to church i see them in different churches around town i just drive by and ignore them. It is pretty colorful. [laughter] i have to hand it to them. . I dont know much about them. Host thank you so lets hear about the city of topeka growing up. But when people recognize you you have kept phelps in your married name. I took it for granted prick i knew we would never leave. By grandfathers saw topeka as the seat of satan like the zip code begins with six success one 666 and things like that he thought that it was the most evil place in the world. And we were put there to preach against the. But since i left the church i run into my family there but i cant help going back when im there i cant help it going back to the place i spent my life. But they are also human beings. It is complicated. I think i lost sight of your question. Host thats fine. Author of the book on follow
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