We Did This Already

Part One of an Occasional Series on a Recurring Nightmare

Megan Phelps-Roper is a former member of Westboro Baptist church, an organization infamous for protesting homosexuality at the funerals of soliders. She left the church and, in 2017, she gave a TED talk about her experience.

She spoke about what it was like living in Westboro Baptist Church, and she explained how she changed her mind. She lamented that many of the dynamics that she experienced at her church were pervasive in the culture she was leaving Westboro to join.

As a former evangelical Christian (so-called “exvangelical”), I related a great deal to Phelps-Roper’s story. My experience was not nearly as extreme in its behavior as hers, but the mindset Phelps-Roper describes is very similar to what I grew up with.

I want to share a few excerpts from her talk that describe how I grew up and who I was at one time—and also how that experience became a cautionary tale I want to share with others outside the church. This first excerpt describes the dichotomous mindset I had as an evangelical Christian.

In my home, life was framed as an epic spiritual battle between good and evil. The good was my church and its members, and the evil was everyone else…. "Make a difference between the unclean and the clean," the verse says, and so we did. This was the focus of our whole lives. This was the only way for me to do good in a world that sits in Satan's lap…. I believed what I was taught with all my heart….

It wasn’t that the rest of the world was evil, in my experience. But they were all deceived and pitiable and foolish and provably wrong.

The only true religion and way of thinking was evangelical Christianity. People who were Christian but not evangelical were alright, but they were just doing Christianity wrong. And everyone else—well they all might be going to hell.

And they better get right with God, because the world is ending soon, and Jesus will judge the nonbelievers and cast them into the Lake of Fire. And it was my responsibility to try to save my friends and family from this fate.

I know all of that sounds strange to many readers. I imagine it is hard to wrap your head around thinking this way. I get it. But also, I need you to understand that I believed these things as Phelps-Roper did: “with all my heart.” And just like her, “this was the focus of our whole lives.” This is who I was at one point. This was the most fundamental commitment I had made in my life.

I was a person second. I was a Christian first.

After she left Westboro, Phelps-Roper had a personal realization:

I realized that now I needed to learn. I needed to listen. This has been at the front of my mind lately, because I can't help but see in our public discourse so many of the same destructive impulses that ruled my former church. We celebrate tolerance and diversity more than at any other time in memory, and still we grow more and more divided. We want good things --justice, equality, freedom, dignity, prosperity --but the path we've chosen looks so much like the one I walked away from four years ago. We've broken the world into us and them…

I know what Phelps-Roper is describing. Every day, it's a constant dread, a lingering doom. Not that the world is ending. But that I'm just living in a recurring nightmare. I want to scream sometimes,

“We did this already!”

Because we did. In my teens and 20s. We did this. We had this dynamic. We had an us and them. We had a chasm between us. Between me and my friends. Between me and the rest of my family. We were going to heaven. They were going to hell. They needed saving. And the best thing in life would be if everyone in the world just suddenly became a part of our church.

I know it sounds inconceivable to many of you.

But replace “church” with your chosen political group or your intellectual group or your social group or your spiritual group or your cultural group. And you may start to see how the dynamics of how I grew up are similar to the world we live in today in 2022, and why I feel like I'm living in a recurring nightmare.

I want to shake someone and say:

“I've seen this before! I know where this goes! And you don't want to know what people's souls look like on the other side!"

You don’t want to see the anxiety you walk through every day when you’re certain you’ve found the truth, and the world just might end if more people don’t also wake up to that truth. You don’t want to see the deep, aching loneliness needlessly cultivated by people so afraid of the other that they avoid associating with them personally, except as a potential mechanism for conversion (it was called “friendship evangelism”).

You don’t want to see what that self-righteousness does to what otherwise would be beautiful relationships. You don’t want to see the destruction of community, the alienation from family, the shunning of those who left the group, and the fear forever in the back of your mind of losing your closest friends if you so much as asked the wrong question.

Or maybe you already know what this looks like. Maybe you’re already living in it. Maybe we all live in Westboro now.

Phelps-Roper ends her talk with hope and a way forward. And that’s good, because we're people first, and we like stories with a happy ending. Because it reminds us that we can change, and we can make things better.

What does Phelps-Roper recommend? She draws on her long journey from believing and doing terrible things to advocating for peace and tolerance. And when someone who was this broken tells you about how she got better, it would be wise to listen. Because she knows the way out better than others do.

And because there are a lot of us broken people out there. And we matter.

Here’s what she recommends:

1. Don’t assume bad intent.

2. Ask questions.

3. Stay calm.

4. Make an argument for what you believe.

I cannot agree more. And even though none of what she says is easy, when I do these things, I feel like I'm waking up from my recurring nightmare and seeing a world I want to live in.

Those four steps are steps we all can take to create a world that the Westboros of the world cannot compete with. It's a world where people are free to explore who they are and what they believe. It’s a world where I could be wrong about something and that’s okay. I could be wrong about this entire post. And in the world created by those four steps, I can accept that correction and change my mind. It’s a world where I can be open to other people’s perspectives, even those I vehemently disagree with.

It's a world where what we have in common matters more than what we don't.

It’s also a world where fear and anxiety and loneliness all still exist. But it's a world where we can face that darkness together. As people first.