A woman who appeared on Louis Theroux’s documentary, The Most Hated Family in America, has completely turned her life around.
Back in 2007, Theroux visited the Westboro Baptist Church, in Kansas, where he unpacked their extreme and very uncomfortable beliefs and practices, including picketing soldiers’ funerals and celebrating some of the world’s biggest disasters.
Theroux again decided to film them for a follow-up in 2019 with the release of Louis Theroux: Surviving America’s Most Hated Family.
But during the time in between both documentaries, something had changed.
Megan Phelps-Roper – daughter of Shirley Phelps-Roper and granddaughter of Fred Phelps, who founded the church – had decided to leave.
When Megan left the group, the young woman was cut off from her entire family.
However, since she walked away in 2012, Megan has completely turned her life around.
“The freedom was heady,” she wrote in her 2019 memoir, Unfollow.
“… It was devastating to lose my beloved family, my entire world, but I knew I had to walk away and start over.
“With each new kindness, I understood with ever greater clarity the depths of my ignorance about the world.
“It was starting to occur to me that there might be a lot more goodness in the world than I had believed.”
It was during her teenage years when Megan first started to feel increasingly uncomfortable with the beliefs she had grown up to follow.
But it was when a new, stricter code was introduced for women in the congregation that Megan knew she had to leave, along with her sister who had also been subject to the ‘toxic’ discipline.
“I could no longer blindly trust the judgement of these men,” she wrote.
“They had developed a toxic sense of certainty in their own righteousness… and now seemed ready to lay waste to anyone who disagreed with them.
“I finally saw what had eluded me for so long.
“We had all been behaving in the exact same way towards outsiders.
“I crossed a chasm in that split second. There was something terribly wrong at Westboro. God was not in this place. We were not special.”
Megan does not have any contact with her family.
In an interview with the Mad That Podcast, Megan’s mother Shirley opened up about her estranged daughter.
Asked whether she ever reads letters from Megan, she said: “Let me tell you what happens to them. They go in the shredder. She doesn’t have any more right to reach in here and try and convince us to be a traitor against God than the next person walking down the street.”
Pressed as to whether she’s curious about how Megan’s two children are doing, she responded: “I’m supposed to be happy that this child, who has crucified the son of God afresh, who’s in a terrible place, has now got children that she’s going to raise to defy and rebel against God.”
Meanwhile, in her memoir, Megan wrote of her family: “I want to tell them that the world isn’t evil.
“That it’s full and complicated and beautiful and good, filled with unknown truths and unbroken hopes, and that it’s waiting just for them.”
