The Oatmeal: The Backfire Effect
Excerpts from Chen’s Essay:
Turning Point #1 Feelings
But Phelps-Roper had loved Murphy in “Clueless,” and she felt an unexpected pang—not quite sadness, but something close—over her death. As she continued scrolling through Twitter, she saw that it was full of people mourning Murphy. The contrast between the grief on Twitter and the buoyant mood in the basement unsettled her. She couldn’t bring herself to post a tweet thanking God for Murphy’s death. “I felt like I would be such a jackass to go on and post something like that,” she said.
Her hesitance reflected a growing concern for the feelings of people outside Westboro. Church members disdained human feelings as something that people worshipped instead of the Bible. They even had a sign: “god hates your feelings.” They disregarded people’s feelings in order to break their idols.
Turning Point #2 Adapting to Twitter
But on Twitter Phelps-Roper found that it was better to take a gentler tone. For one thing, Twitter’s hundred-and-forty-character limit made it hard to fit both a florid insult and a scriptural point. And if she made things personal the conversation was inevitably derailed by a flood of angry tweets. She still preached God’s hate, and still liberally deployed the word “fag,” but she also sprinkled her tweets with cheerful exclamations and emoticons. She became adept at deflecting critics with a wry joke. “So, when do you drink the Kool-aid?” one user tweeted at her. “More of a Sunkist lemonade drinker, myself. =)” she replied. Phelps-Roper told me, “We weren’t supposed to care about what people thought about us, but I did.” As she developed her affable rhetorical style, she justified it with a proverb: “By long forbearing is a prince persuaded, and a soft tongue breaketh the bone.”
Turning Point #3 Making Friends on Twitter and Becoming Humanized
Other Twitter users were fascinated by the dissonance between Westboro’s loathsome reputation and the goofy, pop-culture-obsessed millennial who Phelps-Roper seemed to be on Twitter. “I remember just thinking, How can somebody who appreciates good music believe so many hateful things?” Graham Hughes said. In November, 2009, Hughes, then a college student in British Columbia, interviewed Phelps-Roper for a religious-studies class. Afterward, they corresponded frequently on Twitter. When Hughes was hospitalized with a brain infection, Phelps-Roper showed him more concern than many of his real-life friends. “I knew there was a genuine connection between us,” he said.
As Phelps-Roper continued to tweet, she developed relationships with more people like Hughes. There was a Jewish marketing consultant in Brooklyn who abhorred Westboro’s tactics but supported the church’s right to express its views. There was a young Australian guy who tweeted political jokes that she and her younger sister Grace found hilarious. “It was like I was becoming part of a community,” Phelps-Roper said. By following her opponents’ feeds, she absorbed their thoughts on the world, learned what food they ate, and saw photographs of their babies. “I was beginning to see them as human,” she said. When she read about an earthquake that struck off Canada’s Pacific coast, she sent a concerned tweet to Graham Hughes: “Isn’t this close to you?”
Turning Point #4 Megan Questions Her Literalism
Phelps-Roper and Abitbol continued their conversations via e-mail and Twitter’s direct-message function. In Phelps-Roper’s effort to better understand Westboro’s new prophecies, she had bought a copy of “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Understanding Judaism,” but she found it more profitable just to ask Abitbol her questions. Here was a real live Orthodox Jew who lived in Israel and was more than happy to enlighten her. During their debates over Scripture, Phelps-Roper sometimes quoted passages from the Old Testament; Abitbol often countered that their meaning differed in the original Hebrew, so Phelps-Roper bought some language-learning software. She figured that, since she would soon be living in Israel awaiting the end of the world, she should learn the language. Abitbol helped her with the vocabulary.
Phelps-Roper still urged Abitbol to repent, but as someone who was concerned about a wayward friend. “I just wish you would obey God and use your considerable platform to warn your audience about the consequences of engaging in conduct that God calls abomination,” she e-mailed Abitbol in October, 2010.
In response, Abitbol kept pressing Phelps-Roper on Westboro’s doctrine. One day, he asked about a Westboro sign that said “death penalty for fags,” referring to a commandment from Leviticus. Abitbol pointed out that Jesus had said, “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone.” Abitbol knew that at least one member of Westboro had committed a sin that Leviticus also deems a capital crime. Phelps-Roper’s oldest brother, Sam, was the product of a relationship that Shirley had had with a man she met while she was in law school, before she married Megan’s father.
Shirley’s sin of fornication was often thrown in the church members’ faces by counterprotesters. Westboro always argued that the difference between Shirley and gay people was that Shirley had repented of her sin, whereas gays marched in pride parades. But Abitbol wrote that if gay people were killed they wouldn’t have the opportunity to repent.
Turning Point #5 Megan Must Confront Inconsistencies and Double Standards in Her Religious Group
Phelps-Roper was struck by the double standard, and, as she did whenever she had a question about doctrine, she brought up the issue with her mother. Shirley responded that Romans said gays were “worthy of death,” and that if it was good enough for God it was good enough for Westboro. “It was such a settled point that they’ve been preaching for so long it’s almost like it didn’t mean anything to her,” Phelps-Roper said. Still, she concluded that Westboro was in the wrong. “That was the first time I came to a place where I disagreed, I knew I disagreed, and I didn’t accept the answer that they gave,” she said. Phelps-Roper knew that to press the issue would create problems for her in the church, so she quietly stopped holding the “death penalty for fags” sign. There were plenty of other signs whose message she still believed in wholeheartedly. She also put an end to the conversations with Abitbol.
Turning Point #6 Friendship with C.G. Causes Megan to Question Her Church’s Cruelty (Megan’s empathy grows)
Another online relationship proved more threatening. In February, 2011, Phelps-Roper began to have conversations on Twitter with a user named @F_K_A. His avatar was Robert Redford in “The Great Gatsby.” He had learned of Westboro after reading an article about the Anonymous hack. “He sent me a tweet, and initially it was like this angry, nasty tweet,” Phelps-Roper said. But @F_K_A was disarmed by Phelps-Roper’s friendly demeanor. He began to ask her questions about life in Westboro, and, because he was curious instead of condemning, she kept answering them. One day, Phelps-Roper recalled, “I asked him some kind of pointed question about the Bible. He said something like, ‘I can’t answer that, but I have never been beaten in Words with Friends’ ”—the popular online Scrabble knockoff. Phelps-Roper replied, “I can’t boast the same. =)” She put her Words with Friends username at the end of the tweet.
They began to talk about the church using the in-game chat function, free from Twitter’s character limit. @F_K_A told Phelps-Roper to call him C.G. But C.G. remained a mystery. She knew that he was an attorney, but she didn’t know where he lived or how old he was. “He was careful not to reveal anything about himself,” Phelps-Roper said.
Like David Abitbol, C.G. argued against Westboro’s beliefs and practices, but while Abitbol’s arguments were doctrinal C.G. was most critical of Westboro’s cruelty. “We had the same discussion several times when someone would die,” Phelps-Roper said. C.G. urged Phelps-Roper to think of how much hurt it must cause the families of the deceased to see Phelps-Roper and her family rejoicing. Westboro divided people into good and evil, but, Phelps-Roper said, C.G. “always tried to advocate for a third group of people: people who were decent but not religious.” She had heard all these arguments before, but they had never affected her as they did when C.G. made them. “I just really liked him,” she said. “He seemed to genuinely like people and care about people, and that resonated with me.”
Phelps-Roper increasingly found herself turning to Bible passages where tragedy is not met with joy. The Old Testament prophet Elisha, for example, weeps when he foresees disaster for Israel. One day in July, 2011, Phelps-Roper was on Twitter when she came across a link to a series of photographs about a famine in Somalia. The first image was of a tiny malnourished child. She burst into tears at her desk. Her mother asked what was wrong, and Phelps-Roper showed her the gallery. Her mother quickly composed a triumphant blog post about the famine. “Thank God for famine in East Africa!” she wrote. “God is longsuffering and patient, but he repays the wicked to their face!” When Brittany Murphy died, Phelps-Roper had seen the disparity between her reaction and that of the rest of the church as a sign that something was wrong with her. Now the contradiction of her mother’s glee and her own sadness made her wonder if something was wrong with the church.
Turning Point #7 Megan’s Sister Grace Sees a Forbidden Romance Brewing (Megan even has a “love dream”)
As Phelps-Roper developed her relationship with C.G., her sister Grace grew suspicious. “Suddenly, her taste in music started changing,” Grace told me. “It annoyed me, because it wasn’t coming from Megan. It was coming from him, this question mark of a person that I don’t get to know about, but she has some kind of thing with.” As young children, Grace and Megan had squabbled constantly, but they had grown close. Grace was seven years younger than Megan, and still in high school at the time. Grace would scroll through Megan’s iPhone, asking about the various messages and e-mails. But soon after Megan started talking to C.G. she stopped letting Grace look at her phone. “I remember thinking, What the heck? What are you hiding?” Grace said.
For young women in Westboro, having romantic interactions with someone outside the church was forbidden. When Phelps-Roper was growing up, one of her cousins had been pushed out of the church for, among other things, getting entangled with boys; other young women had been harshly punished. Phelps-Roper had long assumed that she would likely never get married, since she was related to almost every male in the church. “I was terrified of even thinking about guys,” she said. “It’s not just the physical stuff that can get you in trouble.” She did her best to displace her feelings for C.G. onto the music and books he recommended, which she fervently consumed. “I was in denial,” she said.
Then, on September 30, 2011, she had a dream: It was a beautiful summer day, and she was standing on the driveway of the church. A black car with tinted windows pulled up, and a tall, blond man got out. She couldn’t see his face, but she knew it was C.G. She walked up to him, and they embraced. She knew her family could see them on the surveillance cameras that line the Block, but she didn’t care. “It was so real, that feeling of wanting to be with him,” Phelps-Roper told me. She woke up fighting back tears. “He was not a good person, according to the church,” she said. “And the fact that I dreamed about him, and the strong feeling of wanting that relationship, represented huge danger to me.” That day, she told C.G. that they couldn’t talk anymore. She deleted her Words with Friends account. C.G. deleted his Twitter account.
Turning Point #8 Division Brews in the Church
Phelps-Roper tried to throw herself back into the Westboro community, but the atmosphere had changed while she was distracted by her relationship with C.G. It had started in April, 2011. Her mother seemed mysteriously troubled. After Phelps-Roper pressed her parents, they showed her an e-mail they’d received from her oldest brother, Sam, and Steve Drain, another church member. It accused her mother of lacking humility, saying that she was too zealous in correcting other members’ behavior and had overreached her authority on a number of occasions, Phelps-Roper told me. Reading the e-mail made her sick with fear. When a Westboro member was singled out for bad behavior, it often triggered a harrowing period of discipline. The smallest transgression could spark another round of punishment, until the member either shaped up or was kicked out of the church.
Turning Point #9 Confusion Turns to Outrage
Phelps-Roper’s confusion soon turned to outrage. In 2012, she was twenty-six years old, but she was still being treated like a child. Once-minor indignities, like being accompanied by an adult chaperone while eating lunch at a restaurant with other young church members, now seemed unbearable. In April, she was shocked when Westboro expelled a cousin of hers without adhering to the process that the church had always followed, which was derived from the Book of Matthew. Typically, expulsion resulted only after a unanimous decision, but in the cousin’s case she was excluded over other members’ objections. (Drain recalls no objections, and said, “Everything was done decently and in accordance with Scripture.”) “It stopped feeling like this larger-than-life divine institution ordained and led by God, and more like the sniping and sordid activity of men who wanted to be in control,” Phelps-Roper said.
She resented the increasing authority wielded by Drain. One of the few Westboro members unrelated to Fred Phelps, Drain had visited Topeka in 2000 to film a skeptical documentary about the church, but he soon became convinced of its message. The next year, he and his family joined the church. He’d long pushed for a larger role in Westboro, and after the elders came to power his influence increased. In February, 2012, during the funeral of Whitney Houston, in New Jersey, Drain urged Phelps-Roper and other members to tweet poorly Photoshopped images that depicted them haranguing mourners. The media quickly unravelled the hoax. (Drain told me that the fake picket was never meant to be taken literally.)
Phelps-Roper was embarrassed by the debacle. It undermined her own proud claims on Twitter to be spreading God’s truth—and lying violated Scripture. In addition, she now had to have all her media appearances approved by Drain. “It seems like he wants to be Pope Steve and for no one else to do anything without his permission,” she wrote in her journal. “I hate it so much.”
Megan’s doubt engendered by the “death penalty for fags” sign grew. She started to complain to her mother, saying that the elders were not obeying the Bible. They treated her mother and other members with cruelty when the Bible required brotherly love, she said. The elders acted arrogantly and tolerated no dissent, when God demanded meekness and humility. Phelps-Roper was struck by the similarities between her arguments and what C.G. and David Abitbol had always said about the church. “It was like we were finally doing to ourselves what we had done to everyone else,” she said. “Seeing those parallels was really disorienting.”
Turning Point #10 Megan and Her Sister Talk About Leaving Their Church
Phelps-Roper first considered leaving the church on July 4, 2012. She and Grace were in the basement of another Westboro family’s house, painting the walls. The song “Just One,” by the indie folk group Blind Pilot—a band that C.G. had recommended—played on the stereo. The lyrics seemed to reflect her dilemma perfectly: “And will I break and will I bow / if I cannot let it go?” Then came the chorus: “I can’t believe we get just one.” She suddenly thought, What if Westboro had been wrong about everything? What if she was spending her one life hurting people, picking fights with the entire world, for nothing? “It was, like, just the fact that I thought about it, I had to leave right then,” she said. “I felt like I was going to jump out of my skin.”
The next day, she mentioned the possibility of leaving to Grace. Grace was horrified. “It just sounded ridiculous to even suggest it,” Grace told me. “These were the points I brought up: we’re never going to see our families again, we’re going to go to Hell for eternity, and our life will be meaningless.” Megan, still uncertain, agreed. But she plunged into a profound crisis of faith. “It was like flipping a switch,” she said. “So many other thoughts came in that I’d never pursued, and that’s every doubt that I’d ever had, everything that had ever seemed illogical or off.”
When they were together, Megan engaged Grace in interminable theological conversations. When they were apart, Megan detailed her doubts in text messages. One day, she texted Grace, “What if the God of the Bible isn’t the God of creation? We don’t believe that the Koran has the truth about God. Is it just because we were told forever that this is How Things Are?” She added, “Does it really make you happy when you hear about people dying or starving or being maimed? Do you really want to ask God to hurt people? I ask myself these questions. I think the answer is no. When I’m not scared of the answer, I know the answer is no.” Two days later, she texted Grace about Hell: “Why do we think it’s real? It’s starting to seem made up to scare people into doing what they say.” Grace replied, “But what if?”
That day, Grace wrote to Megan, “Our belief in God has always curbed everything. Like, pain & sorrow, I mean. Without that we’d only have our belief in each other. But we are human & humans die. What would we have if we didn’t have each other?” For Megan, the answer could be found in other people. “We know what it is to be kind & good to people,” she wrote. “We would just have to find somewhere else, other people to love and care about and help, too.” Grace wrote back, “I don’t want other people.” In truth, Megan didn’t want other people, either; she desperately wanted things in Westboro to go back to the way they had been. But the idea of living among outsiders was no longer unimaginable.
Phelps-Roper spent the summer and the fall in an existential spiral. She would conclude that everything about Westboro’s doctrine was wrong, only to be seized with terror that these thoughts were a test from God, and she was failing. “You literally feel insane,” she said. Eventually, her doubts won out. “I just couldn’t keep up the charade,” she said. “I couldn’t bring myself to do the things we were doing and say the things we were saying.”
Turning Point #11 Grace’s Affair Forces an Exit
As the sisters agonized over whether to leave, they befriended an older man in the church and his wife, eventually becoming allies in discontent. For a while, they all planned to leave together. Then the couple’s marriage began to deteriorate, and the husband told Megan and Grace that they were going to divorce. Grace became involved in a brief romantic relationship with the man. After the relationship ended, the wife learned about it, and sent a letter to Megan and Grace’s parents revealing both the relationship and the sisters’ plan to leave.
On Sunday, November 11th, the family had just returned from church when Megan and Grace were called into their parents’ bedroom, where their father began to read the letter out loud. Megan told Grace quietly that they had to leave: “It was like the world was exploding and I didn’t want to be around to see it.” Their mother tried to calm things down. Their parents wanted to talk things over—they seemed to think that the sisters could be persuaded to stay—but Megan and Grace had made up their minds. As Grace packed, their father came into her room and asked what she wanted the church to do differently. “I want you and everyone else to leave with me,” Grace replied. Their parents were stunned, but they didn’t try to force the sisters to stay.
As the sisters packed, their younger brother Zach sat at the piano downstairs, crying and playing hymns, which he hoped might change their mind. Other church members stopped by to say goodbye and to warn the sisters of the consequences of their decision. “The fact that I’m coming face to face with the damage that I was doing to them was even worse than anything else that was happening to me,” Phelps-Roper said. Her parents told her to say goodbye to her grandfather. She walked over to the residence where her grandparents lived, above the church sanctuary. When Megan told them she was leaving, her grandfather looked at her grandmother and said, “Well, I thought we had a jewel this time.”
Megan and Grace’s father drove them to a hotel in Topeka, where he had paid for a room, but they were too scared to spend the night alone, so they called the teacher who had agreed to store their boxes. That night, they cried themselves to sleep on couches in his basement. Megan and Grace returned to their house the next day with a U-Haul truck to pick up their remaining possessions. As they walked away for the last time, Shirley called after them, “You know you can always come back.”
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