Sam Harris speaks with Megan Phelps-Roper, granddaughter of Fred Phelps of the infamous Westboro Baptist Church. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.
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| This is Sam Harris. | |
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| Today I'll be speaking with Megan Phelps Roper, who is the granddaughter of the infamous Fred Phelps, who is the pastor of the infamous Westboro Baptist Church. | |
| You've seen the signs they hold while picketing the funerals of dead soldiers. | |
| Signs that read, God hates fags, or thank God for dead soldiers, or thank God for AIDS. | |
| Megan grew up in this church, as did the rest of her family. | |
| Most of her family remains in it. | |
| She has since left and is in a unique position to bear witness to the power of religious belief, both in her own life and in the lives of everyone she grew up with. | |
| I found it a fascinating conversation. | |
| I found her a highly intelligent and seemingly very reliable witness to this sort of life experience, and I hope you find our conversation as enjoyable as I did. | |
| One thing I should point out is that it will seem highly anachronistic that we don't talk about the recent Supreme Court ruling that made it legal for gays and lesbians to marry throughout the United States. | |
| We actually spoke before that ruling came down. | |
| Also, I feel the need to apologize for the quality of the audio. | |
| The more I get into podcasting, the more I am horrified by the quality of the audio I've put out previously. | |
| But I assure you, eventually things will be stable on my end. | |
| Unfortunately, this was not such an occasion. | |
| I would fire my audio engineer, but then I would have to fire myself. | |
| And now I give you Megan Phelps Roper. | |
| Hey Megan, how you doing? | |
| I'm really good. | |
| How are you? | |
| I'm good. | |
| I'm good. | |
| Well, thank you for doing this. | |
| It's great to hear your voice. | |
| And you and I were put in touch by Graham Wood, the Atlantic writer. | |
| And how did you cross paths with him? | |
| And did he interview you for something previously? | |
| Yeah, so I was on Twitter and his cover story, What ISIS Really Wants, was in my feed a lot and I read it. | |
| And as I was reading it, I was hearing so many themes that were so similar to my own upbringing. | |
| I mean, obviously, my family, Westboro Baptist Church, is not ISIS, but there's so many aspects of the way they believe and things that just struck me as I was going through it. | |
| And when I got to the end of the article, I was just totally blown away, and I scrolled back to the top, and I saw his name, and I immediately recognized it. | |
| About eight years ago, I was talking to him for, I think it was, we were talking about soldiers' funerals. | |
| It was when, not that long after the soldiers' funerals protest had started at the church, and we exchanged emails back then, and so I, you know, found him on Twitter, and I was like, hey, I don't know if you remember me, but I just read your article, and it was amazing. | |
| And then we just started talking. | |
| Yeah. | |
| What Graham thought would be interesting in putting the two of us together is to talk about the power of religious belief and the role that it plays in inspiring people's behavior. | |
| And you obviously have a unique perspective on that, having the background that you have. | |
| But let's back up And talk about your background itself and what the Westboro Baptist Church is. | |
| Many people will have seen the visuals online of you and the rest of your family, I guess, holding signs that say, God hates fags or, I think, thank God for dead soldiers is one of them. | |
| So tell me about Westboro, and let's get into what you actually believed growing up. | |
| Right. | |
| Okay, so the protesting started when I was five, and the church is located about half a mile from a public park. | |
| In Topeka, Kansas, and this park was known as a place where gays could go and meet and have anonymous sex, and it was something that was well known in the community, and it was even listed in this nationally circulated address book of such places, you know, listings across the country. | |
| And, you know, one day, you know, a couple years before the picketing started, my grandfather was riding through the park with my older brother who was at the time about four or five maybe. | |
| They were riding their bikes and, you know, my grandfather would ride ahead a little way and then circle back. | |
| And one of the times when he was circling back, he saw two men, you know, trying to lure my brother into the bushes. | |
| And, you know, just immediately wanted to do something about it. | |
| So he started writing letters to the city fathers and, you know, and going to city council meetings trying to get, you know, the part cleaned up. | |
| I mean, this was, I mean, it was really something that was well known. | |
| There were, you know, journalists and cops. | |
| They were doing sting operations. | |
| And so it was an undeniable fact. | |
| So this was in what year? | |
| 88, 89. | |
| And this was your father or your grandfather who had this experience? | |
| My grandfather. | |
| Yes, my grandfather is Fred Phelps, sorry, and he's the one who founded, I mean, who was the first pastor of the Westboro Baptist Church. | |
| Was he a pastor already, or he just decided to become one at this point? | |
| So, he was ordained when he was, I think, 16 or 17 in Utah, and he was kind of a traveling preacher. | |
| And then he ended up in Topeka and he was preaching at a church called the East Side Baptist Church and they were about to start another church on the other side of town and they asked him to stay and be the pastor. | |
| So that's how he ended up in Topeka at this church. | |
| So he had this experience, which would spark homophobia in many predisposed to it, and so he decided to start this church. | |
| Was he already someone, he had to have already been someone who was quite fundamentalist in his belief anyway, right? | |
| Or was this a formative moment for him? | |
| So, I'm sorry, I should back up a little ways. | |
| So, the church actually started in 1955. | |
| He had been a preacher for some time before this incident. | |
| I'm sorry, I think I misunderstood what you were saying. | |
| His views over the years had gotten further and further away from the mainstream. | |
| When this happened, he spent about a year, maybe more than a year, trying to get the city to do something about it. | |
| He eventually got thrown out of a city council meeting for saying that the city council members were sitting around like last year's Christmas trees. | |
| So they threw him out and he said, okay, well, I'm going to do something about this myself. | |
| So that's when the picketing actually started. | |
| And it was just relatively innocuous signs like, you know, watch your kids, gays troll this park, you know, gays are in the restrooms and, you know, things like that. | |
| And the response, you know, from the community, other churches started coming out to counter protests saying things like God's love speaks loudest. | |
| There was a huge contingent of protesters from, or counter protesters from, you know, KU, which is about half an hour away from the church. | |
| And so yeah, and it started There really wasn't much about God initially, but then when these churches started to counter-protest, they were like, well, the Bible does say things about gays, and it's not good, and we are a church, and we have to address this issue. | |
| So that's how it initially got started and then over the years it just got more and more extreme. | |
| So first, you know, gays were the target and then it was churches for supporting gays and otherwise, you know, not following what my grandfather and the church members believed. | |
| They weren't following what the Bible said, not just about gays but about, you know, premarital sex and divorce and remarriage and adultery and, you know, so And then pretty quickly, the funeral protesting started. | |
| I think it was 93, so this was all in, 91 is actually when the protesting started. | |
| So I think 93, they were protesting funerals of gay people who had died of AIDS and it was Partly an attention-getting mechanism, but it was never, it was never just to get attention. | |
| I remember, and this is something that a lot of people, you know, have charged the church with. | |
| Yes, they're not really Christian. | |
| They don't really, they don't really follow the Bible. | |
| Here, look, they ignore this person, this person. | |
| But there was, I remember listening to my grandfather in an interview a few years ago, and the reporter said, some people say that you're just doing these things to get attention. | |
| And he kind of looked at her like she was crazy or stupid and said, well, of course I'm doing it to get attention. | |
| How can I preach to these people if I don't have their attention? | |
| So there was always a reason and a purpose for the protests themselves. | |
| But to get attention for them and to get attention for the message was always the primary goal. | |
| The charge that things are done just to get attention usually carries with it the insinuation that people don't really believe what they say they believe, that these expressions of hatred are just meant to be inflammatory but aren't necessarily an honest statement of one's outlook. | |
| Was there any distance between what you and the rest of the family believed and what you were saying publicly? | |
| Or were you just simply giving voice to your actual worldview? | |
| No, we were just giving voice to our actual worldview. | |
| I mean, my family didn't come to the table with hatred for LGBT people and then look to the Bible to justify that hatred, which is a common charge. | |
| They read, if a man also lie with mankind as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed abomination. | |
| They shall surely be put to death, their blood shall be upon them. | |
| And walked away from that with, and you know, not just that verse, but lots of other ones. | |
| They walked away from that with God hates fags and supporting the death penalty for gays. | |
| And to categorically deny a connection between those words from Leviticus and our beliefs to say that we read into the text what we wanted to see is, I think, to be blind to the nearly all-encompassing power of that sort of blinding faith. | |
| And that's why it was such, almost a relief to read in Graham Wood's article to say that ISIS is Islamic. | |
| Very Islamic, you know? | |
| It's not a matter of ISIS being representative of, you know, Muslims as a whole. | |
| It's a matter of them drawing inspiration from the text. | |
| Yeah, yeah. | |
| And the church and your grandfather are sometimes mentioned in this connection. | |
| So what I find, as someone who criticizes the link between religious belief, in this case Muslim jihadist ideas, and a phenomenon like ISIS, I find that people who don't like that connection very much will say, well we have our extremists, we have the Westboro Baptist Church. | |
| Now that's It's always a frustrating thing to hear as though what your family has done is in any way analogous to what is happening throughout much of the Muslim world and in particular in Syria and Iraq right now. | |
| But your family's church is often held out as the most extreme variant of Christianity in the West, and in particular in the U.S. | |
| I'm wondering if that's true. | |
| I'd like to just find out precisely what you believed on other topics, but it's It's clear that this attention-getting mechanism of standing out there with signs has convinced many people that you're extreme, but are you part of the Reconstructionist or Dominionist movement that wants all of the old laws in Leviticus and Deuteronomy practiced? | |
| I mean, do you think that homosexuals should be killed or adulterers should be killed? | |
| Because there are Christians in the U.S. | |
| who claim to believe that, and is your grandfather among them? | |
| Yes. | |
| They're not trying to reinstitute all of the Levitical code, the Mosaic code. | |
| They think that there's two categories according to the church. | |
| There's the ceremonial law, which is things like the dietary code. | |
| And then there's the moral law, which is things like laws against murder and against homosexuality and against adultery. | |
| So they're only trying to uphold the moral law. | |
| But this was actually one of the things that I've You know, that eventually helped me to see outside of our paradigm because my grandfather would say things like that the only way for the United States to show that they have truly repented of the sin of homosexuality is for them to institute the death penalty for homosexuality, make it a capital crime. | |
| And we had a sign that said death penalty for fags. | |
| Yeah, so the comparison to ISIS is somewhat more reasonable than I first thought. | |
| It's not that, obviously, you've been running around killing people, or your church has, but you're advocating a true commitment to Taliban-style theocracy, or ISIS-style theocracy. | |
| So what are other killing offenses? | |
| What else would your grandfather pull out of Leviticus as actionable? | |
| I might say adultery, but we never... This was one of the things that... Let me back up one second. | |
| So, I had... Okay, for one, they're not actually trying to institute a theocracy. | |
| They don't believe that the United States... They believe that the world is going to end and that only a tiny remnant of humanity, which is to say the church itself, but only the true the elect of God. | |
| So they're not trying to actually change the laws, they're not actually trying to make anything happen with the government. | |
| They don't believe it's possible and so it's not something that they pursue. | |
| But that question about death penalty for rags, that was the very first point, the very first real question that I had about our theology. | |
| And when I say question, I mean doubt. | |
| The first thing I realized that we were wrong about. | |
| And it came from a conversation with a Jewish guy on Twitter. | |
| It's really, I mean, I'm advocating for the death penalty for gays and he, you know, and I'm quoting these verses from Leviticus and, you know, and he says, well, what about this member of your church who had a child out of wedlock? | |
| And I said, you know, what about her? | |
| She repented, so she doesn't deserve that punishment. | |
| And he said, yeah, but that's also a sin worthy of death. | |
| And also, didn't Jesus say, let he who is without sin cast the first stone? | |
| And so this is the first time, you know, stepping back from that and realizing, you know, if she had been killed, You know, just if you kill someone, as soon as they sin, you completely cut off the opportunity to repent and be forgiven, which is a major foundation of Christian theology. | |
| This is what we are preaching. | |
| Repent or perish. | |
| You have to repent and follow God's laws and live as we live, and that's the only way to heaven. | |
| And then for him to say that, you know, quoting Jesus, "...let he who is without sin cast the first stone." I realized, because we would always answer that quote, because people would throw that in our face all the time. | |
| We would answer that by saying, yeah, but we're not casting stones. | |
| We're preaching words. | |
| All we have are words. | |
| We put words on signs and we stand on public sidewalks. | |
| We're not hurting anybody. | |
| But we were advocating for the government to kill people, and what was Jesus talking about there if not the death penalty? | |
| So I take that to my mom and a few other people in the church, and it was just immediately shut down. | |
| It's like, no. | |
| Leviticus calls for the death penalty. | |
| If that penalty was good enough for God, then it's good enough for us. | |
| Romans 1 says that gays are worthy of death, and so are their enablers. | |
| No. | |
| So what did your mom say about the analogy to the other member of your family who had had a child out of wedlock? | |
| Just that I was getting wrapped around an axle. | |
| Like, oh, this is just not an important piece of theology or that the point is they're not going to do it. | |
| That's what she said. | |
| And I remember thinking, well, yeah, but if we're going to use this as a litmus test, the fact that, you know, instituting death penalty, Since Jesus said, let he who is without sin cast the first stone, shouldn't the litmus test be the other direction? | |
| Shouldn't the fact that we don't do that be, you know, showing that we're obedient to God and such? | |
| One thing that I think we should flag here is that it's often believed on the atheist, secularist, rationalist side of the conversation that you just can't reason people out of their heartfelt religious convictions because there's this meme that has gone around often attributed to someone like Mark Twain. | |
| I don't know actually, I don't know who actually said it, but The idea is that if you can't reason somebody out of something they didn't reason themselves into. | |
| But that's clearly not true, and anyone who's actually been in dialogue with many people like yourself over the years knows it's not true. | |
| Your effort to make your beliefs self-consistent and This person on Twitter pointing out a logical contradiction in your beliefs was an entering wedge for you, which ultimately separated you from these ideas that had been drummed into you. | |
| So listen, I want to get into what you now believe in a minute, but I want to linger for a moment on just what the church doctrine is. | |
| In a church like Westboro, how do you resist the move that many, many Christian denominations make, which is to disavow more or less everything in the Old Testament because it no longer applies, you don't have to fulfill the law that Jesus gave a doctrine of grace and none of that old barbarism applies. | |
| Why wasn't that move open to you and your family? | |
| Because we believed that the, I mean there are a lot of verses in the New Testament, a lot of passages and writers in the New Testament who reference the Old Testament as you know, a basis and foundation for their doctrines, and sort of reinforcing them. | |
| And, you know, Jesus himself said that not one heaven and earth will pass away, but not one jot or tittle of my word will pass away until all is fulfilled. | |
| Yeah, there is that. | |
| Yeah. | |
| We definitely didn't disavow the Old Testament. | |
| And the only reason that distinction I was explaining a minute ago about The difference, the distinction between the ceremonial law and the moral law, the reason they don't, you know, keep kosher or something, is because of a New Testament passage that specifically sort of revises. | |
| It's in Acts 10 and 11. | |
| It talks about, you know, Peter is having a vision and, you know, God sends this sheet down with all these animals that were unclean under the Mosaic Code. | |
| And God says, rise Peter, kill and eat. | |
| And Peter says, not so, Lord. | |
| No unclean thing is past my lips. | |
| And this happens three times and God finally says, don't you call unclean what I've cleansed. | |
| So it's like, okay, this is now, now this, um, It's not no longer required to keep kosher or to follow these, and there are several other passages in the New Testament that specify which of the laws you have to follow. | |
| We definitely took a lot of our doctrine and a lot of our beliefs from the Old Testament. | |
| It doesn't help that Paul also endorses at least the morality of killing homosexuals. | |
| I think it's in Ephesians. | |
| Although, I think he also says that it doesn't have to be carried out. | |
| Isn't that how things shake down with Paul? | |
| I don't know, I'm not sure about that passage you're referring to in Ephesians, but I do know that, I mean, we memorized Romans, we memorized a lot of the Bible, but we memorized Romans 1 one summer, and the end of Romans 1, you know, it's basically starting from verse 18 towards the end, you know, it's talking about gay people, and then at the end it says that Don't you know that they which commit such things are worthy of death? | |
| Not only those which do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them. | |
| That really is always the issue, that a more literalist cueing to the text has a kind of self-consistency and power. | |
| Even when the text is, as the Bible is, rather amazingly inconsistent, The effort to connect the dots, the effort to make it as consistent as possible, keeps you as wedded as possible to a first century or a thousand year BC moral code, depending on what you're emphasizing. | |
| That really is always the issue I'm walking into here, where the theology is really on the side of the literalist when it comes down to an argument about what the books actually say. | |
| Any effort to make them seem merely metaphorical or more elastic than any plain reading of the text would suggest, that effort itself is clearly being driven not from some imperative that the reader is finding in the text, But an imperative that's coming from outside the text, from the world that's filled with libertines who want other things out of life. | |
| You have a different set of priorities that have come from a modern, secular, scientific, cosmopolitan commitment, and then you go back to the text trying to make sense of its sacredness, and the deck is stacked against you if you're a moderate or a liberal. | |
| Right, I mean I think the difference, and Graham talks about this a little bit I think, and there's a difference, there's different kinds of belief. | |
| There's belief like my family, and that I believe at least some percentage of ISIS is, and similar groups. | |
| And those are people who read the text and, you know, like you said, the plain meaning of the text. | |
| So, and whatever they take away from that plain reading, like that is what it says and there is no interpretation. | |
| And that idea about there not being any interpretation, that's another thing that was so similar. | |
| I don't know if you read the, in the New Yorker, there was a story recently called Journey to Jihad. | |
| And again with this, you know, all these similarities. | |
| And that one was one of the first ones. | |
| The leader of one of these, you know, groups, it was called Sharia for Belgium, asked this prospective recruit if he was prepared to learn the Quran without any distortion or editing or interpretation. | |
| It's like, okay, you just read the text and it means what it means and you have to go along with it no matter what your moral impulses would say otherwise. | |
| And then there are people who read it and there's a willingness when they read it to include their own thoughts of, like you said, things outside the text, their own beliefs and understanding of the world that obviously influences the way that they read it. | |
| Or that they're trying to You know read it in light of beliefs that they already have and my family saw that as as Explicitly evil like you are substituting your judgment for God's judgment when clearly the book says this and We would we would quote the Bible. | |
| We meant like I said, we would sit around we read the Bible every single day We talked about world events and the church's interpretation In the light of the church's interpretation of the Bible, and we would memorize big parts of it, and we would be standing out on the picket line, you know, talking with people, and just quoting verse after verse, and so many people, and I'm not saying everyone is like this, but so many of the people we were talking to had no idea that the Bible said these things. | |
| Right. | |
| I mean, and so it's, it's, it's a very, and again, this is one of those things, I mean, I was reading Reza Aslan, He said something like, if I were to... He was talking about you and Bill Maher, and he says, like, they believe that people derive their values from their religion. | |
| That, as every scholar of religion in the world will tell you, is false. | |
| People don't derive their values from their religion, they bring their values to their religion. | |
| And I can just say, flat out, that's exactly the reverse of what happened to my family. | |
| My family, without these texts, They would be doing amazing, incredible things that would change the world for the better. | |
| I mean, my family is full of lawyers and, you know, professionals and they work hard and they're incredibly intelligent. | |
| They have advanced degrees and incredibly, they can be incredibly kind and generous and that's one of the things, you know, when you're there, when you're part of it. | |
| that shows you the goodness of, like see, so much of this stuff comes directly from the scriptures and it's so good and so wonderful and it's such an amazing thing to be a part of. | |
| And yet, because they have to set aside, again, their own moral impulses, And accept this, you know, this reading of the text as they understand it because they believe it's the Word of God. | |
| They are left with, you know, picketing funerals and, you know, causing all sorts of trouble and heartache for people. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Well, none of that is a surprise to me, of course, and I think the same is true even amid all the grotesque violence you see in ISIS. | |
| You know, you see these guys. | |
| These are not depressed, suicidal psychopaths who just want to destroy their lives and go out with a bang. | |
| These are people who are deriving incredible experiences of meaning and highly energized, passionate experiences of bonding with their brothers-in-arms and they just have no doubt that what they're doing is morally right and that the creator of the universe is going to reward them for doing it. | |
| And so it's not to hear that your family was experiencing and probably still is experiencing a rich life in the context of these beliefs doesn't surprise me at all. | |
| What is it about, explain the picketing of funerals, in particular the funerals of soldiers. | |
| What is that about, and what does the sign, Thank God for Dead Soldiers, mean? | |
| Soldier's funerals, the picketing started in June of 2005. | |
| So it was a couple years into the war, and they were seeing that If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. | |
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