Top 50 Megan Phelps-Roper Quotes

I do send messages to my family; I send letters in the mail, and when I’m in town, I almost always leave something in the door of my house in Topeka.

Westboro would quote this passage from the book of Leviticus that, for them, shows that the definition of ‘love thy neighbor’ is to rebuke your neighbor when you see him sinning. And if you don’t do that, then you hate your neighbor in your heart.

We played video games and read books, and we went to public school. And yeah, we went to amusement parks. We did all of those things, but we also – that was all sort of organized around this nationwide picketing campaign.

I was born and raised in the Westboro Baptist Church, an infamous congregation started by my grandfather, and consisting almost entirely of my extended family.

Arguing is fun when you think you have all the answers.

When people are in the thrall of poisonous ideology, it’s really not all about deliberate ill will, or inherent hatred, or a lack of intelligence. It’s about the unbelievable destructiveness and staying power of bad ideas and about finding ways to equip people with the tools they need to fight them.

Whatever state you find yourself in, you’re supposed to be content there.

In 2014, as a Christmas gift, I wrote an essay for my husband, about our story. Writing that showed me there was value in interrogating my experiences while they were fresh – especially because I was terrified of forgetting.

Take heart, and be patient; change takes time but it is possible, and it’s way more likely if we can reach out and disagree without demonizing.

At Westboro, the depictions of hell are extremely vivid. The only thing that changes in hell, according to the church, is your capacity to feel pain. As the capacity to feel pain increases, so does the pain. It’s absolutely terrifying. I believed God was going to curse me for having left this group of people.

When we engage people across ideological divides, asking questions helps us map the disconnect between our differing points of view.

I no longer believe that the Bible is the literal and infallible word of God. And I don’t believe in God as a figure in the sky listening to your prayers, things like that.

I’m constantly meeting people that I hurt, you know? This is not – when I go and talk about these things, this is not a theoretical – it’s not a theoretical apology. It’s something that I live every day.

Since leaving the church, I’ve been working with law enforcement involved in counterterrorism and deradicalization. I hoped that illuminating Westboro’s ideology – and especially the unraveling of that ideology – would be useful to the people doing that work.

I believe in so much – I believe in people. I believe in hope.

Once I saw that we were not the ultimate arbiters of divine truth but flawed human beings, I couldn’t pretend otherwise.

I don’t believe in God anymore.

I definitely regret hurting people.

The very first soldier’s funeral protest that I went to was in Omaha, Neb.

My first memories are of picketing ex-servicemen’s funerals and telling their families they were going to burn in hell.

The things I believe in now are grace and the power of human connection to change hearts and minds and the importance of civil dialogue.

It’s important to see people as being on a journey.

There’s a rich history at Westboro of parodying pop culture. The thing about pop culture is that it gives us a shared language. We were constantly trying to co-opt things that were popular to deliver our own message.

There are aspects of Westboro that are, of course, more extreme in the way that certain religious practices manifest. But the idea that the Bible is the infallible word of God, that it’s unquestionable – this is common.

I remember feeling like we at WBC were a persecuted minority, triumphant in the face of evil people ‘worshipping the dead’ as we picketed funerals or rejoiced at the destruction of the Twin Towers.

Twitter helped others to see me as a human being. And showed me their humanity, too.

We thought it was our duty to go and warn people of the consequences of their sins, and I understood that to be the definition of loving our neighbour.

We know that we’ve done and said things that hurt people. Inflicting pain on others wasn’t the goal, but it was one of the outcomes. We wish it weren’t so, and regret that hurt.

Empathy is not a betrayal of one’s cause.

All I could do was try to build a new life and find a way somehow to repair some of the damage. People had every reason to doubt my sincerity, but most of them didn’t. And – given my history, it was more than I could’ve hoped for – forgiveness and the benefit of the doubt. It still amazes me.

We believed it was a Good vs Evil situation: that the WBC was right and everybody else was wrong, so there was no questioning. It was a very public war we were waging against the ‘sinners.’

If you look at who you were a year ago and aren’t somewhat embarrassed, you’re not growing as a person.

I don’t think that, if you do everything else in your life right and you happen to be gay, you’re automatically going to hell.

My life was forever changed by people who took the time and had the patience to learn my story and to share theirs with me. They forsook judgment and came to me with kindness and empathy and the impact of that decision was huge.

You hear stories about Scientology, where people are prevented from leaving, and Westboro’s not like that. If you decide that you don’t want to be there, then they will help you leave. The shunning, cutting people off – they’re doing that because they believe it is for our highest good.

We were raised to believe that our way of seeing the world was the only way.

You know, I had grown up standing on public sidewalks, saying things that people, you know, were very provoked by and were upset by. And – but standing outside that first soldier’s funeral, it was eerily quiet.

If you can see these people… as human beings and capable of change, there is hope. We should be willing to reach out. Imagine what could happen if we kept reaching out to people like Westboro members?

Discussing and dissecting opposing viewpoints with others on Twitter opened up a whole new way of thinking for me.

I wrote an apology for the harm I’d caused, but I also knew that an apology could never undo any of it.

We did lots of fun normal-kids stuff.

My family, they cannot have anything to do with us. They believe that, you know, their duty is to deliver me to Satan for the destruction of the flesh.

My family thought – and thinks – very seriously about words. About language and what it means and how it shapes us and how it should shape us and change us.

As a member of Westboro Baptist Church, I became a fixture on picket lines across the country.

I went to my mother right before I was set to go protest my first soldier’s funeral and asked my mother: ‘I need to understand why we’re doing this.’

I always joke about how I get excited to go to the grocery store without permission.

I miss my family every single day.

My church’s antics were such that we were constantly at odds with the world. That reinforced our ‘otherness’ on a daily basis.

Several people I had conversations with were hugely influential. People who found internal inconsistency in Westboro’s ideology. It was the first thing that allowed me to recognize that Westboro was wrong.

As happy as we were in our backyard jumping on trampolines, it was the same general feeling, often euphoria, on the picket line, because we felt like the way our lives were falling on to us contorted with the people of God and the scriptures. It all felt very normal.