Megan Phelps-Roper wasn’t content to just walk away the Westboro Baptist Church — reviled across the globe for its inflammatory hate speech against gays and dead soldiers.
“As someone who had contributed to that harm for so long, I felt an obligation to those communities to work to dismantle it,” writes Megan, whosenew memoirUnfollowis exclusively excerpted in this week’s PEOPLE.
“Loving someone whose ideas we find detestable can seem impossible, and empathizing with them isn’t much easier — but it’s so important to remember that listening is not agreeing. Empathy is not a betrayal of one’s cause. These are the tools of effective persuasion, and can bridge divides in a way that condemnation never could.”
Megan Phelps-Roper seated on Westboro founder Fred Phelp’s lap in 1988, with her mother and sister.Courtesy Megan Phelps-Roper
Megan left the church (and its 80-member congregation made up nearly entirely of family members) in 2012 after realizing that “we might not just be wrong about these few issues — that we might be fundamentally mistaken in how we viewed the world.”
She adds: “According to Gramps, what we were doing was ‘the definition of love thy neighbor.’ He would say thatweweren’t hating other groups — we were warning them ofGod’shatred, giving them an opportunity to repent.”
“Our duty was to declare God’s standards to the world: no adultery, no fornication, no gays, no idolatry.”
Megan Phelps-Roper during a protest in Los Angeles in 2009.Sipa/Shutterstock
Megan, who now travels the country speaking out against the hatred and divisions she once championed, takes heart that in recent years, Westboro’s cultural influence — and the amount of outrage and media coverage that its continual protests attract — has begun to wane.
“They’ve gotten kind of lost in a culture that’s increasingly polarized and hostile,” she says.
For more on Megan Phelps-Roper, pick up the new issue of PEOPLE, on newsstands Friday.
source: people.com
