Dr. Maya Shankar
Maya Shankar is a cognitive scientist who served as a Senior Advisor in the Obama White House, where she founded and served as Chair of the White House Behavioral Science…
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Megan Phelps-Roper was born into the Westboro Baptist Church, a religious cult called the most rabid hate groups in America. Megan was a true believer and one of the Church’s most vocal advocates…until one day, she changed her mind.
Megan Phelps-Roper
My mom used to actually say this about the Bible. You can sum up the Bible in three words. Obey, obey, obey.
Maya Shankar
Megan Phelps-Roper grew up in the Westboro Baptist Church, a religious cult out of Topeka, Kansas that's often called the most obnoxious and rabid hate group in America. Megan was a fervent believer in everything Westboro stood for, but when she was in her mid 20s, Megan decided to leave it all behind. Her family, her community, and everything she had ever believed to be true.
Megan Phelps-Roper
It felt like this physical, like I had a giant boulder sitting on my chest and I couldn't breathe and I couldn't see around it, and I had no vision of the future. I had no idea what my life was going to look like.
Maya Shankar
Today, a story of someone who was absolutely persuaded by terrible ideas until one day she changed her mind.
I'm Maya Shankar, and this is A Slight Change of Plans, a show that dives deep into the world of change and hopefully gets us to think differently about change in our own lives.
All right, Megan. I'd love to start from the beginning. Your grandfather started the Westboro Baptist Church, right? Tell me more about the church. What did you guys believe in?
Megan Phelps-Roper
We believed that we were the elect of God, this very small remnant that was bound for heaven, and that basically almost everyone else in the world was headed for Hell, that God had condemned them because of their sins. For me, how I came into that was when I was five years old, my family started protesting. Protesting all across the country, usually several times a week and every single day in my hometown. Our most infamous message was, "God hates fags". So it started as a protest movement against the LGBTQ community, but as I say, it very quickly expanded to include everybody who wasn't part of our church.
Maya Shankar
Were you able to comprehend what those signs were even saying? Did you understand what it is that you were actually protesting? Just bring me back to that scene.
Megan Phelps-Roper
Yeah. After church, it started after church one Sunday, we piled into our vehicles and drove, it was about a half a mile. This park was about a half a mile from the church. We walked out there with these signs. I couldn't read at the time, of course. It was just before I started kindergarten. I remember people, of course, were very angry. The messages on our signs, one of the very early ones said, "Gays are worthy of death," and people saw those signs and were immediately inflamed. People would start driving their cars at us, jumping out of their cars, parking in the middle of the street on this busy thoroughfare, to come after us on foot. My dad and the older the men in the church would come and try to form a barricade between us and counter protestors and people who came out to attack us.
At the time, of course, I did not understand Westboro's theology in all of its particulars. But, the main theme that I understood was about obedience. This was a theme that was constantly harped upon in my family. It's the idea that if you obey God, he'll bless you, and if you disobey God, then he will curse you. My family taught me that this was the definition of love, what we were doing. To go out and warn people of the consequences of their sins. That if they continue to go down this path of supporting the LGBTQ community or fornication or adultery, which my family and church define as to include divorce and remarriage to go down this path, is to incur necessarily the curses of God.
We considered it a great privilege that we got to go and speak the truth into this... Gramps, the language that he used is we get to go and inject a little Bible truth into this insane orgy of fag lies. That's how he put it.
That's how they talked about death generally. It could never be just somebody dying of natural causes, of old age or something. No, this was a punishment from God because this person was a sinner.
I was kind of marinating in that ideology all the time. It was absolutely something that I lived and breathed and desperately wanted to be a good and proper advocate for. So when I graduated from college and I learned about Twitter, it was something that I really, I thought, "Okay, well this could be a new avenue for us to get this message out."
Maya Shankar
Can you tell me a bit more about what your Twitter exchanges were like?
Megan Phelps-Roper
When I got on Twitter, one of the first people that I targeted, because the Jewish community at that point was very much in focus of the church, and it was around the time of the high holidays, and I reached out to this man named David Abitbol who ran a blog called Jewlicious. I think my first tweet to him was something about Jewish people needing to really repent. I thought he mistook the tone of my tweet because he responded with, "Thanks Megan, that's handy what with Yom Kippur coming up." Then I made sure the next message wouldn't be misunderstood. I told him that Jewish customs were dead rote rituals that would lead them all to Hell.
That started this back and forth forth where at the beginning it started out very hostile, but very quickly David changed his tone. Not just David, but there were other people on the platform too, who, took this more relaxed... I'm not sure that's quite the right word. It just wasn't as aggressive. They were willing to ask questions and to be calm and to really try to understand where I was coming from instead of just assuming the worst of me and my family and our motives. Their willingness to listen ultimately allowed them to find these internal inconsistencies in our doctrine.
So David, actually, ended up being the first person to find one of those internal inconsistencies. It was really mind-blowing for me. I refused to admit it to him at the time. He had clearly pointed out this contradiction, and it wasn't something that I could argue my way out of. Coming from a family full of lawyers who had been teaching me this ideology every day, essentially from the time I was old enough to understand language, for me not to have the answer, I felt at a complete loss in that moment.
I didn't have an answer for the contradiction. I shut down the conversation and then I just stopped talking to him for a while.
Maya Shankar
What was the contradiction?
Megan Phelps-Roper
It's so funny looking back because it's a relatively small point of theology, or seemingly so. It was about a sign that we had that said, "death penalty for fags". I should say, the only reason I continue to use that language is because I think it's important to show the depths of the destructiveness of our message.
So that's what the sign said. It was calling for the death penalty for gay people. David pointed out, "Well, didn't Jesus say, 'let he who is without sin cast the first stone?;'" We had an answer for that because people would throw that verse at us, and what we would say is, "We're not casting stones, we're preaching words. We're not actually out trying to murder anybody." David points out the obvious problem with that argument, which is it's, "Yeah, but you're advocating that the government cast stones," which he's exactly right. That's what we were doing.
It had never occurred to me. Again, this is the moment that I first feel like, "Whoa, I feel like I've missed something here." But then David kept going. He said, "Didn't your mother have your oldest brother out of wedlock?" We had an answer for that too. The answer was that God doesn't require sinlessness. That's not the standard of God. He requires repentance. Of course, my mom repented up that sin, and it's not like she was still committing fornication. David said, "Yeah, but if you had instituted the death penalty for that sin, she would've been killed and would not have had the opportunity to repent and be forgiven." That realization that my family would not exist without the mercy that my mother experienced, the fact that she lived in a society where she was not murdered for that sin or executed, rather, for that sin, I was just like I said, at a complete loss.
Maya Shankar
It's interesting because David's approach with you reminds me of this concept in cognitive science called moral reframing. It basically says that we're more effective at changing people's minds when we ground our arguments in ways that affirm rather than threaten their moral values. So rather than trying to undermine the entire belief system, rather than trying to challenge all the axioms, the fundamental ideology, you root your arguments in basically the language they speak.
It seems like what David was doing was grounding his arguments to you in terms of existing values that you had and that had he gone the extra step of saying, "Megan, what you think is absolutely batshit crazy," it probably would not have worked as well. Can you share your thoughts on that?
Megan Phelps-Roper
Yeah, absolutely. This is so amazing. I didn't realize there was a word for that. I hadn't heard that phrase, moral reframing. The questions and the doubts often start with internal inconsistencies or the group's failure to live up to its own standards, that this is how doubt creeps in initially. Then the system overall can ultimately be undermined. But it has to start with those very small things.
Like you said, you are affirming or utilizing source material that they already find compelling, but you are also by asking questions and trying to understand where they're coming from, you are signaling to them that they're being heard, which tends to make people more receptive to hearing about your ideas as well.
So when David is asking me all these questions, David and a lot of other people on Twitter, when they're asking me these questions, you're learning about other parts of their lives and such and you're developing these, essentially, these relationships, however distant and kind of tenuous it is. I experienced that over and over again on Twitter until there was this community of people that I did feel like I had some kind of connection to.
That was the beginning of the process of... It was like the thread that started to unravel the rest of the tapestry of Westboro's ideology in my mind.
Maya Shankar
We'll be right back with A Slight Change of Plans.
Megan's faith in Westboro was beginning to falter. In the spring of 2011, another crack in her belief system formed when a group of Westboro's male leaders turned on Megan's mom. They said she wasn't following the rules. They called her a troublemaker and they stripped her of all her church duties. Megan's mom was devastated. The church had meant everything to her.
Megan Phelps-Roper
It was the first time. I'd watched it happen to other members of the church and I was never close enough to those people to really challenge it, even in my own mind. Seeing it happen to my mother, who I spent so much time with, so much of my day, to hear the things that the other church members were saying about her, I knew that they were wrong. It was a really terrifying thing for me to be feeling these things and to be rejecting the judgment of the church on any issue. It made me feel as if Satan was whispering in my ear and this was a test from God and I was failing it because I didn't just go along with it the way that everybody else seemed to be.
Maya Shankar
Was there one moment in particular where you felt, "Okay, now I'm fully beyond the point of return?"
Megan Phelps-Roper
Yeah, there was this moment in the summer of 2012. I was painting in a friend's basement with my sister. We were supposed to be covering up these purple stripes with white paint, and I just-
Maya Shankar
I advocate for that. I'm not a fan of purple stripes on the wall.
Megan Phelps-Roper
Funny thing, in hindsight, the more I tried to cover that paint up, nothing was working, you could still see the darkness underneath.
Maya Shankar
Is this a metaphor?
Megan Phelps-Roper
I know. It just was a horrible moment. So I was painting in the basement with my sister. We're painting opposite walls, so our backs are to each other, and this incredibly sad music is playing on the speaker.
Maya Shankar
What was the song?
Megan Phelps-Roper
It was called Just One by Blind Pilot. I'm barely hearing the music because at this point, all of those questions and doubts just building and building in my mind. There's the level of shame and regret and humiliation that I felt in that moment. It's hard to describe because if you imagine what it would be like to look back and think that you had spent decades of your life sewing doom and discord to the rest of the world, offering nothing but condemnation, going to people in their most vulnerable moments and telling them that God was punishing them, that they deserved this horrible thing that's happened to their family.
So I'm looking back at all of those things and realizing that, "Oh my God. This wasn't the work of God. This wasn't a necessary divine truth. No, this was gramps. This was his understanding of the world and it's completely wrong." So to have this thing that I had seen as such a blessing, and what a beautiful gift to go and speak for God. It's like having this beautiful gem in your hand and then suddenly realize that it's not a gem, it's turning to ashes. It was just horrifying.
Maya Shankar
Was there a particular song lyric that precipitated these thoughts?
Megan Phelps-Roper
The line was, "Will I break and will I bow? If I cannot let it go?"
Speaker 3
(singing)
Megan Phelps-Roper
I'm sitting there, again, holding onto all of these questions and the song continues and I know that I can't let those questions go. I was never going to be able to let it go.
Then it gets to a few lines later and he says, "I can't believe we get just one life," is what he's talking about. The idea of having spent all, at that point, all of my one life, doing nothing but going around hurting people. With all the best intentions, we had done this thing that had caused so much destruction in so many lives, including our own. The idea of spending the rest of my life that way, that was the moment I knew that I had just gone too far down the path in my mind that I would never be able to go back and pretend.
I actually thought in that moment, "Could I pretend for the sake of my families just so I could keep them to not have to lose them?" I'm the third of 11 children, 50 some cousins, and we all lived within a few blocks of each other. The church members were our entire life. They were our entire community. The only people we were ever allowed to be close with. The idea of walking away and losing all of them immediately in one fell swoop, that they would never talk to me again, the prospect of that kind of loss is just almost impossible to comprehend.
Maya Shankar
I was wondering if you could bring me back to the day when your parents found out that you were planning to leave.
Megan Phelps-Roper
Yeah. My sister and I had been making plans for a couple of months or so. At that point we had started moving out boxes, but we kept delaying our exit because we were just hoping that if we could just convince them, maybe we could just move it all back and pretend like it had never happened. Maybe we could convince them that they were wrong and then we wouldn't have to, that we would be saved from our plans.
One day a friend, a former friend actually, she knew about our plans to leave and she sent a message to our parents telling them that we were going to leave. That, of course, immediately brought everything to a crashing halt. We had barely been able to keep it together as it was, but then when that happened, we just knew, we can't delay this any longer. We just have to explain and we have to go,
Maya Shankar
What was the most important thing that you packed? You're packing up your entire life and you're not sure you're ever going to return.
Megan Phelps-Roper
I copied 60 some DVDs worth of home movies and watching the scenes play like it was a funeral reel. It was horrifying. But it was important for me to have those things to take with me. But it was also important for me to leave things behind.
As I was packing, I was looking at all of these letters and cards, birthday cards, and just thank you cards, things that my family had given me that I kept in this box. As I'm going through it and I'm reading, there's a qualification on all of these cards. "I love you because you love the Lord. I love you because you walk this path with us." Things like that. So everything that I wrote to my family in those months, it was, "I love you forever and ever no matter what, and I'm always going to be here for you, no matter what happens," things like that. When you know that this connection is going to be so cleanly severed, it just brings everything into very sharp focus.
Maya Shankar
I'm trying to put myself in your shoes. So there's the day you left, and anxiety, trepidation, fear, adrenaline, it's all getting you through the day. Then there's the next morning when you wake up and this stark reality hits you. It occurred to me, I think it's easy to see your childhood as having been oppressive, bound by the church's ideology and its rigidity. But I do feel that there is an ease that comes from never having to ask existential questions as a child. Every answer is spoonfed to you. Every decision and action is licensed. I'm just curious to know, how do you transition to a world? You're waking up that next morning, none of this is true anymore.
Megan Phelps-Roper
What it felt like for me, it felt like this physical, like I had a giant boulder sitting on my chest and I couldn't breathe and I couldn't see around it. I had no vision of the future. I had no idea what my life was going to look like. I had every reason to believe that the fact that I had so boldly gone forth in the name of Westboro and done all these horrible things and that nobody had any reason to give me a second chance. I had left the only people who had any reason to love me.
Once it was actually done, there was an enormous sense of relief, too. Along with that boulder, there was this weird strange sense of relief that I could now live and behave and speak according to my conscience, to not have to act for the sake of my family, that I could be upfront with the people around me about what I really thought, about what I really believed. To ask the questions that I needed to ask and talk to people and try to understand different ways of thinking and seeing the world. It was incredibly valuable to be able to be open.
Maya Shankar
When you reflect back on your time in Westboro, it must feel at least slightly jarring to reconcile that Megan, with the Megan you are today. I think it raises some interesting philosophical questions about what it really means to be you. Technically, you were the same physical person, you had the same consciousness, all the same memories, but you held a starkly different and harmful worldview. How do you feel about that? Do you actively try and distance yourself from that Megan?
Megan Phelps-Roper
I do not try to distance myself from it. When I left, I did not delete 20 some thousand tweets where I had been posting for the church and saying all those heinous things. I didn't go and delete all my Facebook photos and pictures from pickets and such. So I still get these memories popping up on my Facebook about these things. Sometimes in some moments I'm like, "Wow, I cannot believe that was my life." It does feel distant, but I think part of the reason, part of what helps me have such a posture of grace toward other people, and even specifically people that I believe are doing harmful things, is because I feel so close to the person that I was. I remember what it is like to be absolutely persuaded by very bad ideas.
So for me, I've been extremely grateful that people have been willing to allow me to show the nuance of this picture, to see the hope in that. Because if somebody is doing bad but has good intentions, you at least have the intentions to tap into. If you can just help them reframe whatever the situation is, then there is a possibility for change. I am a prisoner to that hope because I know what it's like to believe so strongly in something and then to now believe completely the opposite in so many ways.
Maya Shankar
I admire that despite the discomfort in having to embrace prior Megan, it is essentially the thing that allows you to sustain the empathy you feel. In many ways, it's something you probably feel you have to do in order to feel not fully alienated from your family, the people that you love. You have to cultivate this mindset.
Megan Phelps-Roper
I believe that I just responded in a very human way to people who treated me like a human being, and that if my family were exposed to the same kind of thing that I was exposed to, that they would've left too. They just haven't yet had the experiences that I had for it to become undeniable for me that we were wrong and that I had to find a different way. They haven't had those experiences yet, and that's the only difference between them and me.
Maya Shankar
It seems like there are a lot of counterfactual worlds where if things had played out ever so differently, it might have been your family who left and not you. I think that's such an important thought experiment because sometimes the best way to empathize with others, to forgive others, to try and understand where they're coming from is to recognize that there's not that much that actually separates you from them.
What's your relationship like with your parents? Do you talk to them?
Megan Phelps-Roper
I miss my mom so much. We spent so much time together all the time. When I see videos of her now, especially back when there was Vine, I remember just shortly after I left just watching videos of her on a loop, those six second videos, just to hear her voice.
It's very one-sided. They don't believe that they can have anything to do with me. I'm this wayward daughter and they have to show me that I'm doing wrong so that I can understand that I'm doing wrong and repent. Largely, our relationship consists of me sending letters and birthday cards and wedding gifts and tweets. Whenever I'm in Topeka, I always go and walk around the block where I used to live and I leave something in the door for my parents. I don't try to get them to come out and talk to me because I'm not trying to put them on the spot or make them feel like they're betraying the church or the rest of the family. But it's important to me to leave those things for them so that they know without a doubt that I have not forgotten them and that I love them.
I know, and this is one of the things that I think is the reason that I'm not an emotional basket case, is that I understand that they love me in spite of the fact that they have completely cut off this communication with me. I understand that they love me and that they're doing this because they believe it is for my good, and that the way that they raise me left me with no doubt of this deep motherly fatherly love that they have for me. It's something that I can't forget and that I won't forget.
Maya Shankar
Having gone through such a momentous change, do you fear change?
Megan Phelps-Roper
No, I really relish it, actually. I think one of the things that I realized after I left was what an enormous burden it was to feel like I had the answers to everything or that I had to have the answers to everything. What limits that places on your mind and on your life. Now, what an amazing thing to realize how big the world is. Wow, all these things that I just took for granted is as true and necessary and the way. It's all questionable and the possibility there is amazing. It's incredible to realize how much is undiscovered and what a joy that makes life.
Maya Shankar
Hey, thanks for listening. Join me next week when I talk with Adam Grant. We discuss how incredibly challenging it can be to change your mind about just about anything. Adam and I talk about science-based strategies we can use to help encourage this change in ourselves.
Adam Grant
People generally assume that they're less biased than others. This is my favorite bias. It's the, "I'm not biased," bias. Everybody else is biased. I am objective. I see things with perfect neutrality. I think that the higher your intelligence, the more likely you are to fall victim to that bias.
Maya Shankar
A Slight Change of Plans is created and executive produced by me, Maya Shankar.
Big thanks to everyone at Pushkin Industries, including our Producer, Mo LaBorde, Associate Producers, David Zha and Julia Goodman, Executive Producers Mia Lobel and Justine Lang, Senior Editor Jen Guerra and Sound Design and Mix Engineers, Ben Tolliday and Jason Gambrell.
Thanks also to Luis Guerra who wrote our theme song, and Ginger Smith, who helped arrange the vocals. Incidental music from Epidemic Sound. Of course, a very special thanks to Jimmy Lee.
You can follow A Slight Change of Plans on Instagram at Dr. Maya Shankar.
Megan, I just want to say thanks so much for joining me in this conversation. It was absolutely fascinating.
Can you say something back?
Megan Phelps-Roper
Sure. Sorry.
Maya Shankar
Well, I guess the feeling's one-sided folks.
Megan Phelps-Roper
No, I'm sorry.
Maya Shankar
Only one of us enjoyed the conversation. Oh, I'm totally kidding.
Megan Phelps-Roper
I thought I was supposed to be quiet so you could just talk.
The Host
