Megan Phelps Roper
When Megan Phelps-Roper was still a small child, her grandfather, a pastor who founded the Westboro Baptist Church, became enraged that gay men were using a park nearby the family’s home in Topeka, Kansas, to “cruise” for anonymous sex. Fred Phelps made violent homophobia a dominant feature of his ministry and the tiny church’s activism. Church members marched up and down in front of the park with huge signs denouncing gay people and describing unrelated harms, such as the deaths of American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, as God’s vengeance on the whole country, for tolerating LGBT+ life. Gradually Westboro members began picketing public events and even private ones such as soldiers’ funerals, to draw attention to its credo. In 2006, the father of one fallen soldier sued the church for it, in a case that went to the United States Supreme Court. The Court found that the Westboro signs including “Thank God for Dead Soldiers” and “God Hates Fags” were related to a matter of public concern, so the church won.
Phelps-Roper set up a Twitter account as a teenager in 2008, to spread the church’s messages. Her following grew quickly. Many people also challenged and contradicted her tweets. Phelps-Roper replied, and began extended conversations with a few of the counterspeakers, which opened up doubts in her. Gradually her adamant views changed - and eventually her life did as well. She left the church, though as she expected, it meant losing her tight-knit family as well.
During the process of changing her mind, two types of content were effective, Phelps-Roper recalls: arguments debating specific points of Biblical teaching, since they made her begin to doubt her ironclad beliefs, and messages from people who treated her as a person worthy of empathy and kindness. Those who stayed within the territory of Biblical teaching could reach her, as those who denounced religion altogether could not, she said. One of her most persistent and successful interlocutors was a rabbi.
“Atheistic arguments were so far from what I could have done, so they weren’t as effective,” she said in an interview with the DSP. More convincing were counterspeakers who “accepted the premises of my beliefs (the Bible), but then tried to find inconsistencies within it. That’s what opened the rest of it.”
Many of the people she responded to most were those who also asked questions about topics unrelated to the church or religion, such as music and food. As Phelps-Roper described:
I was getting to know these people, and starting to feel like I was becoming part of this community, even though they were not close friendships. It wasn’t that I was consciously thinking ‘oh, I don’t want to offend these people,’ but it definitely became a feeling that I wanted to communicate our message in a way that they would hear. I came to care what they thought.
Phelps-Roper cites this growing sense of connection with those who responding to her as a primary reason why their counterspeech efforts were successful. Feeling connection, she was able to question the ideas with which she had been raised in the tight-knit, insular world of Westboro, where most of the parishioners were also members of her family. After months of doubt and secret discussions with Phelps-Roper’s younger sister Grace, in November 2012 she and Grace left the church and their family.
Soon after leaving Westboro, Phelps-Roper decided to continue her efforts on Twitter, dedicating herself to counterspeaking against many of her own former views. Today she employs many of the same techniques that counterspeakers once used with her: factual arguments, trying to find common ground, and recognizing the humanity in other people. Occasionally, as in Phelps Roper’s case, such counterspeech may be convincing enough to completely change a person’s beliefs, behavior, and even the course of their life. In 2019, she published a book about her counterspeech-driven transformation called Unfollow: A Memoir of Loving and Leaving Extremism. The book vividly describes her childhood, her family, the church that dominated both, and how and why she left. Like Phelps-Roper’s TED talk, the book is an important resource on how to counterspeak effectively.
Featured Resources:
Ted Talk: “I grew up in the Westboro Baptist Church. Here's why I left”