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A former publication from Medium about politics, power, and culture. Currently inactive and not taking submissions.

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Her Grandfather Founded the Westboro Baptist Church. Twitter Helped Her Leave It.

Lyz Lenz
9 min readOct 21, 2019

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MMegan Phelps-Roper’s conversion began on Twitter. Phelps-Roper is the granddaughter of Fred Phelps, the founder of Westboro Baptist Church, based in Topeka, Kansas. Westboro is infamous for its anti-queer protests at the sites of military funerals and other tragedies, deploying church members to hold up signs that say, “Thank God for dead soldiers,” “God blew up the troops,” “Thank God for 9/11,” and “God hates America.”

In 2008, when she was 22, Phelps-Roper started a Twitter account for the church, where she quickly gathered followers by replying to celebrities and politicians and asserting the church’s hateful message. But Twitter was also where Phelps-Roper’s understanding of faith, God, and identity began to change. In her memoir, Unfollow, Phelps-Roper tells the story of her life in the church and how the dialogue she encountered on Twitter caused her to leave her family and her entire way of life.

Like Phelps-Roper, I also grew up as a fundamentalist Christian and have struggled to come to terms with the faith that raised me and the faith I have…

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Published in GEN

A former publication from Medium about politics, power, and culture. Currently inactive and not taking submissions.

Lyz Lenz
Lyz Lenz

Written by Lyz Lenz

Author of God Land. Columnist for the Cedar Rapids Gazette. The book Belabored is forthcoming from Bold Type Books in August of 2020.