Making Sense with Sam Harris - #171 — Escaping a Christian Cult

Episode Date: October 8, 2019

Sam Harris speaks with Megan Phelps-Roper about her book "Unfollow: A Memoir of Loving and Leaving the 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.

Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, very short intro today. Just two things. Okay, very short intro today. Just two things. Reminding supporters of the show to subscribe to the private RSS feed. Please go to my website, log in, preferably on mobile,

and go to the subscriber content page where you can push a button for your favorite podcasting app and get the private feed. Then you should be seeing this show appear in your podcatcher with a red Making Sense icon, not a black one. And then you will not miss any content because a few things are changing and I don't want you to fall through the cracks. Sorry for the inconvenience. And finally, with regards to my previous podcast with Andrew McAfee, whose book is More From Less. Many of you love that podcast, and I just want to let you know that his book is now available this week, publishing on Tuesday, the 8th of October. And now for today's guest, who also has a book publishing this week.

My guest today is Megan Phelps Roper. Megan is an amazing woman. She's been on the podcast before. Her book is Unfollow, a memoir of loving and leaving the Westboro Baptist Church. And Megan is a writer and formerly a member of the Westboro Baptist Church. And Megan is a writer and formerly a member of the Westboro Baptist Church, which she left in 2012. And she's now an educator on topics related to extremism and communication across ideological lines. As you'll hear, she is very well-placed to do that, and really just an amazingly resilient and wise and together person. Given her background, that is no small miracle. So without further delay, I bring you Megan Phelps-Roper.

I am here with Megan Phelps-Roper. Megan, thanks for coming back on the podcast. It's really good to be back. So you have been really busy. The last time we spoke on the podcast, you just had a Twitter feed, if I'm not mistaken, and now you have a daughter first and most important, but you also have a book and I think a movie that will be based on the book. You've been very busy. Yeah, there's been a lot going on. It's kind of funny.

For a long time, I felt like everything I was doing was really reactive. Somebody was asking me to come speak somewhere or talk about Westboro and my life and everything. And then when it came time to write this book, this was the first thing that I actually had to say, I want to do this. And that was a little bit. And I think we talked about that a little bit last time, just that feeling of not wanting to, having spent my entire life telling people how to live, to now say, okay, you guys, now I have it all figured out. And let me tell you what the answers are now. So obviously, that's not the tone I take in the book. And that's not the tone I take in real life. But definitely, it's kind of a little bit of a mental hurdle to get over.

Yeah, yeah. Well, it's certainly quite a task to decide to sit down and write a book as well. And you've written really a wonderful one to read. And I think our conversation will not do the book justice deliberately. I just want people to read it. The book is Unfollow, and it's your memoir and your account of leaving the Westboro Baptist Church. And on the last podcast, we spoke a fair amount about your life and what it was like to be in the church. I think we should recapitulate a little bit of that just so people have a sense of what's going on here. But, you know, then we'll move on to some other topics. And also, I got questions solicited from Twitter, which I want to cover. Sure. I guess, look, I think you have to tell people who don't

know, and that will be some significant percentage of people, I think, just what is the Westboro Baptist Church and how did it start? The Westboro Baptist Church is a group of about 70 to 80 people, and it's made up almost entirely of my extended family. And they have become really well known in the past. It's been almost 30 years now since they started this picketing ministry. They would go, we would go, starting from the time I was five years old in 1991, and protest. It started with the LGBTQ community and then just expanded from there until it included literally everyone outside of our church. Everyone outside was a legitimate target for our protests. The things that they're probably most well known for are, again, their protests of the LGBTQ community and then also military funerals,

the funerals of AIDS victims and anybody that they considered sinners, which again is literally everyone. So anybody that got any kind of attention was especially was a target. Yeah. So people have seen pictures of kids and you were one of those kids holding signs at military funerals and just in protest over whatever basketball games and just in random places. whatever, basketball games and just in random places. And the signs, the juxtaposition of the kids and the signage is what has been so shocking about this church. I mean, you know, the classic sign is God hates fags. Give me some of the other signs that were most offensive to military families and others. Thank God for September 11. Thank God for dead soldiers. Those especially were

really offensive to a lot of people. And then there were ones like, pray for more dead soldiers and pray for more dead kids. And those ultimately were, they became a huge problem for me. And I'm happy to say now that, you know, for, you know, in the time after I left the church, I started, you know, reaching out to my family and making these arguments to them, generally from a scriptural perspective. So even though I am no longer a believer, I don't believe in the, you know, the infallibility of the Bible, I still make arguments to my family from the scriptures, because I know that that will be what they find

most compelling. And so I started to say, I'm happy to say that since I left and started making those arguments, they no longer hold those signs. And of course, I always have to joke that not praying for people to die is kind of a low bar when it comes to human decency. But for Westboro, it was a huge shift in their position. And so for me, that's a really hopeful sign that just like I was reached, they can still be reached. That's interesting. So I wasn't aware that they had modified their message to that degree, because I saw the Louis Theroux documentary, the more recent one, which we'll talk about. So you're saying that they still hold the homophobic signs,

but they don't hold the ones celebrating the deaths of soldiers and children? I think they still have the thank God signs because for them, that's absolutely still a scriptural, you know, because they believe in predestination. That is a scriptural proposition that you are supposed to thank God for all of his judgments because they are, by definition, righteous. So I think the thank God signs are still there, but the praying for more dead, praying for more curses on their enemies, those ones are the ones that are not part of their repertoire anymore. So your grandfather started the church, and what was his background? I mean, how did he get his revelation or his commitment to an unusually doctrinaire version of Christianity?

I think he grew up Methodist. It didn't seem like they were particularly or especially religious. But then he graduated high school at 16 and got a principal appointment to West Point Military Academy. But he had to wait until he was 17 in order to matriculate. And so in that time between when he graduated and when he could actually enroll, he got saved at a tent revival meeting in the South. And he thought he needed to become a preacher. And so that's what he did. So for a while he was a traveling preacher. He went to a few different, he went to Bob Jones University, which at that time was in Tennessee, and then also to Prairie Bible Institute in Canada. And so he started this religious education and then he got to Topeka, you know, as a traveling preacher, he got to Topeka, Kansas.

And he was preaching at this church called Eastside Baptist. And they liked his preaching so much that they asked him to stay in Topeka and, you know, settle down and become the pastor of the Westboro Baptist Church on the other side of town. you know, settle down and become the pastor of the Westboro Baptist Church on the other side of town. But how do you think he became more hardcore than anyone within a thousand miles? What was that path like for him? You know, some of this, of course, is conjecture. It just seems like he had such confidence in his own thinking. He was extremely intelligent. You know, he graduated high school at the top of his class. But it just it just seemed to like over time, and especially once he became the pastor of his own church, it just seems like he, he had such a sense of certainty that the Bible was the literal and infallible word of God.

And that his understanding of it was necessarily the, the truth, you know, the only righteous view of it. He didn't believe in interpretation, which is, that's kind of a feature of groups like Westboro. They don't believe in interpretation, even while they are necessarily interpreting. They have to figure out how to apply these principles to their lives. But yeah, they don't believe in it so so they just think that just the the literal understanding as as from their perspective is the truth and and the unquestionable truth so it seems like you know with grams it was just that that sense of certainty that you know made him so sure that everyone else was wrong and that everyone needed to bow to his understanding of it.

Yeah. And so then he essentially indoctrinated the whole family. I mean, he didn't have a family yet, I suppose. And then he started having many children and many grandchildren and you all became the church. Right. Yeah. So most of the church, it's about 80%, 80, 85% is my extended family. And even now, the few outsiders who have joined the church, the very few outsiders, especially when you consider how much attention Westboro has gotten, the few outsiders who have joined, many of them have married into the family as well. So, you know, of this, if you saw Louis' most recent documentary, two of my siblings are now engaged to a family that had, you know, a father had joined with four children. Three of those four are now either married or engaged. And I think the oldest is just in their early 20s. Yeah, and there's a crazy story of the first documentarian who came from the outside world to cover the church wound up joining it.

Is he still a member of the church? He is. He's one of the elders actually he wasn't the first documentarian who came but he he is the first one who came and stayed right right he he really went native amazing so and from my i mean from my you know perspective he had this you know many of the same features you know just psychologically as gramps you know that that idea of there being one standard, that's a really compelling idea that there is one standard, that it is a divine and unquestionable standard. And that, that my judgment has to be followed, you know, in all things like that's for a lot of people that's, that can be really, and especially, especially people with large egos, which I believe is absolutely true of both that documentarian you mentioned and, and my grandfather. Well, it's also, it is the path to

perfect clarity, right? I mean, if you're just going to eschew any ambiguity or any burden of, of multiple readings, and you're just going to define the most literal one possible in every case. Was that the algorithm that you guys used as far as rendering interpretations that were not considered interpretations just be as literal as possible in every case? Basically. I mean, that was definitely a feature of how we read the Bible. It's kind of funny because I also feel like, you know, we tended to choose the most strict interpretation. So for instance, there was an expositor that we would read a lot named John Gill. And, you know, when it came to certain aspects of the New Testament, you know, where in cases like, you know, divorce and remarriage, Westbrook sees that as always,

that is always, you know, forbidden by God because Jesus, you know, in Luke 16 says, if you divorce your wife and marry another, then that's adultery. And if you marry a woman who's been put away from her husband, then that's adultery. So it seems like very clear. But there are other verses that kind of seem to moderate that position. And John Gill, you know, took the more lenient stance. And in that case, we thought John Gill was a heretic. So even the people that we looked to for a lot of guidance, you know, became heretics

if they weren't as hardline as we were. And the other interesting fact about your grandfather that became an interesting fact about the whole family is that basically everyone became a lawyer, right? Or so many of you became lawyers and there's a family legal firm that you must have had clients that were not religious maniacs. So how did all that work? Yeah, no, I would say most of the clients of Phelps Chartered, they're not related to us. They don't share any kind of ideology with us, but my family has a reputation of being good at their jobs, not, you know, overcharging. And I feel like it was very similar to the way

it was in school. People just kind of generally compartmentalize who we are at work or at school versus who we are on the picket line. And so, yeah, I mean, there were, we had clients that were, you know, part of the LGBT community. So like there was, there was a couple, I remember every time they sent in a payment, they were, it was a lesbian couple. They wrote on both the check and the envelope with the check. They would put the two female symbols like interlocked. And I just thought that was very funny. Just this, this, you know, this dichotomy. Yeah. But yeah. just this, you know, this dichotomy. That's going to work. Yeah. But yeah. Where did the emphasis on protest come from? I mean, this is not the usual way that people try to spread their brand of Christianity or any other faith. How is it that you guys spent so much time with all the kids in tow on the sidewalk with signs? Well, it didn't start with picketing. You know, there was about a two-year period from, you know,

because I mentioned, I think, last time, the incident that sparked the picketing. At the park, yeah. Yes, at this local park. And so from the time of that, you know, that incident to when we actually picked up the first picket sign was about two years. And in that time, my grandfather was going to city council meetings and writing letters to the mayor and such and the park commissioners and trying to figure out how to clean up Gage Park because it's this ongoing problem.

Right. So to remind people, there was a park where gay men were having sex in the bushes, essentially. And I assume all of that's true, right? This was not your grandfather's malignant fantasy. Not making this up. Right. No, he wasn't making it up. I mean, he wasn't making up that it was a pickup spot. I think once the picketing started and once he saw the kind of attention

that he could get from that kind of activity, that became, you know, it just became this, something that he couldn't turn away from. And even, I remember at a certain point after we'd been, I was in middle school, so we would have been picketing for, you know, nearly 10 years by then. You started when you were five? Yeah. So just before I started kindergarten, I started picketing. Wow. So, yeah, So I remember being in middle school and, uh, and it became, it was like a discussion they were having with a newspaper, a local newspaper about possibly like, like basically if we give you a column, a column, a weekly column in the newspaper, will you stop picketing?

Cause if your goal is to reach people, this could be a possible, this could be a way of doing that. And I remember first being aghast that we would even consider this. It didn't occur to me that... And then of course, everybody else in the church seemed to come to the same conclusion. This was not an option. Our place is, there's these phrases from the Bible, without the camp. We are outside of mainstream society. We are not inside talking to these people. We are outside because they have cast us out, because they have abhorred God and his message, and so therefore they abhor us. self-fulfilling about that kind of persecution complex. Once you tell yourselves a vivid enough story of how separate you are from the rest of human society and all that that entails, and you begin to act on that perception as you did, you then, as if by magic or some perverse irony, begin to attract all the hatred that seems to confirm your status as everlasting outsiders. And so your experience, you write about this in the book, but your experience even as a young child standing on the sidewalk picketing was the experience of just reaping

kind of an infinite amount of hatred from the rest of society. And I can only imagine that experience confirms the sense that these people are irretrievably lost and destined for hell. Yeah, absolutely. And I think it was those very human dynamics that kind of pushed us further and further to the extreme as time went on. Because there are passages, the things that led us to be praying for our enemies to die and for God to do horrible things to them. That didn't happen overnight. In some ways, it did happen overnight because it was a sudden shift in doctrine. But the theology and the mental state that got us there definitely developed over time. And so as time goes on and the louder we get, the more angry

the response gets, the more hostile that response gets. And so then you can't help but even though we work, and this is where I write about this in the book, like that moment where it finally hits me that I am believing these two completely contradictory things at the same time. I'm holding them in my mind together at the same time, but never in the same moment. So it's the sense that our stated goal for picketing, the reason we were out there, was the fulfillment of the commandment to love thy neighbor as thyself. It's the idea that you

go and rebuke your neighbor when you see him sinning because you know that the consequences of that sin is death and curses from God in this life and then hell in the next. So ostensibly, we're out there because we love these people and we need to go and warn them. And yet, because of those dynamics on the picket line, it just pushed us further and further to the extreme of we stopped thinking of them as our neighbors and people that we loved and that we needed to go and preach this to as their only hope for salvation and started thinking of them as these people who are irredeemably lost and hellbound and cursed by God. And so now we need to pray for God. So we would be demanding, we would be standing out there demanding that people repent.

And we hold these signs, repent or perish. And then we go in our prayers as we arrive to the picket and as we leave the picket for God to preserve them in their sins. So it's this, again, this completely contradictory ideas that I was simply unaware of at the time. I can't remember if we talked about this last time, but I think we must not have because you started to read on the podcast, The End of Faith. And you got to that, the part you kind of paused and told the story of about being in Paris with your wife and both at the same time trying to avoid the american embassy and then also trying to get a

room at a hotel next to the american embassy yeah and i think it just has to do with you know the way that our you know minds process information like in certain contexts and we have you know different we compartmentalize and so we can hold these completely contradictory ideas at the same time we're just and then when they finally meet when we finally become aware of them, I can't remember what you said about it, but I literally felt insane. How could I have believed both of these things at the same time? That is to say, you're praying that God keep them in ignorance so that they merit the pain of hell? Or does this have some other meaning? No, yeah, that's exactly right.

That's a theme in Islam as well. You encounter this a lot in the Quran, that if God had wanted to illuminate them and give them faith, he would have. So, you know, the fact that the unbelievers are blind to the truth is something that God intends. You know, it's really, it's a kind of a perverse vision of a psychological experiment that's never really honestly run. It's not like anyone outside the faith ever had a chance when you actually look at the details, and this is considered a good thing. Right. And that's actually something that, I mean, I still currently, you know, when I will be reading my family's tweets sometimes, and they're written from a perspective of, you know, as if it were possible for these people that they're accusing and, you know, demanding repentance from, as if it were possible for them to repent, even while believing in predestination, right? Or that anything that they have done could have been otherwise. They don't believe that it could have been otherwise,

because it happened. It must have happened exactly as God set it up to happen. So it's always very funny when they try to do that. It's like, but you don't believe that. You don't actually believe that it's possible. And yet you are working yourself up into a frenzy of rage, getting mad at these people and upset with them for taking the wrong path and for having done these things that Westboro imagines will lead them to hell. And yet, from your own perspective, from your own theology, it could not have been otherwise. And so that like, that was something that I also kind of would skim over, you know,

in my own mind when I was still with Westboro. And mostly people didn't bring it to our attention. And so now sometimes it just becomes, I just have to say something because it's, it is so, I don't know. It's like at some point, like, can't you, you hope at some point that they will be able to step back long enough to realize that this doesn't make sense. Yeah, it's interesting to see the footage of these protests because there's something, it almost has a kind of trolling feel to it. I mean, I know that you guys believed what you said you believed, and so there was on some level a sincere communication, but it's playful enough and kind of arch enough that it just seems like you're also sort of trolling. I mean, can you explain how that impression is coming across? Yeah. So, I mean, it was always very important for us to be happy on the picket line.

And just generally, like we had to be happy to show that we were content with our lot, right, that God had given us this ministry and we needed to be joyful about it, even when it was difficult. And so that is kind of just a big part of just the church culture. I mean, it's just so arresting to see a little girl of any age beaming, you know, the good vibes of childhood while holding in each hand a sign, you know, damning people to hell. I mean, that's why it does have a, perhaps trolling is the wrong framework, but there's something not straightforward about the communication.

It's just, it is a kind of goof that on some level is very high stakes and perverse because, you know, viewed from the outside, what's happening here is really a kind of child abuse. I mean, we have a child, i.e. you and your siblings, in a situation where you've been truly deprived of real-world information and have been indoctrinated into this kind of malicious and paranoid worldview, and now you're being put to work to spread it, and yet you're this happy little thing in a parka with a God-hate-fag sign, and it's just such a mind-stopper. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, when people look at groups like Westboro, they see them generally as very, like, uneducated, backwards, unhappy people who are just looking for something to be mad about,

and they have found it in whatever, the gay community or people committing fornication or whatever. So you see them as just... And so there was definitely part of that, part of the reason it was so important that we show our happiness on the picket line is to thwart that image. And also, there's this Bible passage that my mom would quote on the picket line is to thwart that image. And also, you know, there's this Bible passage that my mom would quote all the time about how this is the love of God, that you keep his commandments and that his commandments are not grievous to you. So if God's commandments, if it's grievous to you to follow his commandments, then clearly you're not one of God's elect. You're not one of his people. Because even if you follow the letter of the law and your spirit isn't in it, your heart isn't in it, and you're not joyful about it, then that is unacceptable service to God. And that dichotomy that you described, the juxtaposition between the extremely serious, you know, negative message and the happiness of the people proclaiming it, that was it like apart from just announcing it on the sidewalk and dealing with the blowback?

I mean, every day we were, you know, reading the Bible, memorizing Bible verses, and talking about what was happening in the world in light of Westboro's understanding of the scriptures. For me, I mean, I never felt like God was like talking to me or something, you know, that that wasn't how I experienced religion. I experienced it as this very rigid set of rules that it was literally only possible to follow if God was giving you the right kind of heart to want to do it. I experienced religion as fear, you know, initially, especially as a kid, because there was so much... Fear of hell. Yeah, fear of hell. Exactly. And what God would do to you if you stepped out of line.

I got baptized when I was 13. I had tried to get baptized a little earlier than that, a few years earlier. But apparently, one of my aunts thought I wasn't serious. So that closed down years earlier. But apparently one of my aunts thought I wasn't serious. So that closed down that discussion. So in that church, you can't get baptized before you demonstrate that you're actually serious in some ideological way? Yes, exactly. They do not believe in infant baptism. Actually, I saw on Twitter one of the questions that your tweet about this, or are doing this podcast, elicited. One of the questions that your tweet about this are doing this podcast elicited. One of the questions was, what was one of the funniest things that you thought was a sin at the church, you know, now looking back? And I think one of the funniest things that I wrote about this in the book was when I

look back at my grandfather gave a sermon about infant baptism and without any sense of hyperbole whatsoever, he compared that act of sprinkling some water and saying a few words about this infant and their hopes that they go to heaven or whatever, and they're washed in the blood of Jesus. He compared that to literally burning the child alive and sacrifice to a pagan god. And that was exactly, and when I look back at that now, that's a little extreme. Yeah. And that was exactly, and when I look back at that now, that's a little extreme. Yeah.

But yeah, so they do not believe in infant baptism at all. So you have to demonstrate an orderly walk. You have to talk to all of the members of the church. And so they say, like, if there's this question, can any forbid water? So is there any reason that anybody in the church has that you should not be baptized? As long as the answer is no, then you can be baptized. So, you know, kids as young as like, I think six, seven, eight have been baptized at Westboro. Well, it's a much stronger ceremony. I mean, it sounds like it has just far more import to it. I mean, there's obviously no content on the infant side

when you're getting baptized and you can't even speak a human language. And so this is the real thing. If you are demonstrating you have sufficient commitment to the creed, that's where you actually transition to something significant. So you got baptized at 13. I forgot where that was coming from. Sorry, you asked a question, but I've forgotten what it was that led me there. Yeah, it was just whether you were having religious experience of any kind and interpreting anything in the world apart from the harassment you were getting from the outside as confirmation of the truth of your faith? Yeah, I mean, obviously that the interaction with

outsiders and how much they hated it, you know, especially given all those passages in the New Testament where Jesus is saying, if you follow me, the world is going to hate you. You know, blessed are ye when men shall hate you and revile you and persecute you for my name's sake, for so did their fathers to the prophets. So we saw ourselves in that, you know, in that line of righteous people who had, who had delivered the word of God to a world that, that despised them and it. So there's no question that was a huge part of it. But, you know, just because of how, you know, everything in the church, you know, this, this extraordinary amount of love and support that you get as a church member, as long as you are a member in good standing, all of those, you know,

I felt enveloped in the love of God, you know, by those things. And because they teach you, you know, your own worthlessness from such a young age, that you are nothing and that you have nothing and that all things come from God. And so, you know, the sense that the idea that you could have this really wonderful family and people who loved and cared about you and showed you that in innumerable ways, you know, all of that felt like a wonderful gift from God. You know, I felt the same way singing in church on Sundays, you know, all these songs that talk about how worthless you are as a human being and how graceful God is and how merciful to have taken any pity on you and given you, you know, any good thing that just tells you how,

what a wonderful God he is and how generous, because clearly you are too worthless to deserve any of this on your own. Yeah. Well, it really is a complex picture because, you know, at first glance from outside, again, this just seems like pure misfortune. I mean, you were unlucky to be born to the people you were born to and insulated from sort of a normal, happy life in the modern world. And you're very lucky to have gotten out. And I would certainly sign off on that final claim. But your experience of being in your family and being your mother's daughter and your father's daughter and even your grandfather's granddaughter is far more complex than that. And I mean, you are clearly a remarkable person and you got some gifts from this ordeal as well. I mean, just how do you view

your childhood and what you got from this experience? You know, I think about this a lot now, because I, now that I am a mother and, and the kinds of things that I want, you know, there, there are so many aspects of my upbringing that I want to give my daughter. And I, you know, I think I talked about this, I think I talked about this last time. I definitely wrote about it in the book. And it's something that was really powerful to me, this moment where it was just a few months after I left and I was at the Shabbat table of this rabbi that I had protested a few years earlier with this, your rabbi is a whore sign being held by my sister. sign being held by my sister. And David Abbotball, he was the one who invited me there. And he was the one who made that first point on Twitter that first allowed me to, in my own mind, challenge Westboro's teachings. So as I'm sitting there with him just a few months after I left and feeling like a complete betrayer, that I, I had, you know, completely, I walked away from, from my family and everyone I loved and having betrayed everything that I stood for. And,

and I just felt so overcome with guilt and shame. And, and, and, you know, in that moment for David, what he said was, you know, in a lot of ways, leaving Westboro Baptist Church was the most Westboro Baptist Church thing you could have done. They're the ones, he told me and my sister, he said, you are your parents' children. They're the ones that taught you to stand up for what you believe in, no matter what it costs you. They just never imagined you'd be standing up to them. And that was the first time I realized that I, because I basically had accepted Westboro's framing of the whole situation, you know, that I had walked away from my family, that I had rejected all these people that I loved and, you know, being able

to start to see it with nuance and to realize, no, I didn't walk away from my family. I walked away from the church. I walked away from the ideology that I saw had come to see as extremely destructive, not just for the people that the church targeted, but for the church itself and all of its members. And then also to look back and realize that there was so much of my upbringing that was look back and realize that there was so much of my upbringing that was really wonderful. I mean, it's the idea of, and of course, you have to also keep in mind all of the destructive parts of it. Like, it's not like I'm, I'm not trying to take away from the destructiveness of it or, or the pain that we cause so many other people. But to look back and see this, this idea of, you know, that we were motivated by, you know, at least initially by this desire to love our neighbor, right? That we as a group of 70 to 80 people could be so dedicated and so active that we could get that much, you know, attention for our cause. And it's not just attention, right? It's this idea of dedicating yourself to something and sacrificing for it in such a way that you can accomplish the

objectives that you set out to. So like that kind of, you know, perseverance and the diligence, the hard work that went into that, the very, you know, spending so much time trying to get to the bottom of a thing and examining it from so many different angles. So obviously, I think, you know, now a lot of the things that we spent a lot of time on were not good. But the process itself is something that I absolutely still want to emulate, if that makes sense. Yeah. So you mentioned Twitter a couple of times, if that makes sense. Yeah. So you mentioned Twitter a couple of times and you are really, if anyone is a social media success story, it is you because Twitter was your way out of this. And you then met your husband on Twitter. Tell me why Twitter is a good thing for one person on this earth. So, I mean, for me, Twitter, yes, Twitter was the way out.

That was another question that somebody asked in response to your tweet yesterday was, it was about, do you think you would still be part of Westboro if not for Twitter? And I have every reason to believe that I would be because even though, you know, and I write, I write about this in the book, this whole process of this group of, you know, older men in the church kind of taking over as the, you know, becoming the elders, like taking over as this, you know, this church leadership role and a bunch of other things that happened that helped me see that we were doing wrong. But I just, I have every reason to believe that without those conversations on Twitter,

without having come to the realization that we could be wrong about something. Before that conversation with David Abbott Ball, you know, where he points out this internal contradiction in our theology. Before that, I always felt like I had the answer to everything. We spent hours, hours, hundreds, thousands of hours on the picket line talking to people about these doctrines and Westboro's theology. And there wasn't a person outside of our church who agreed with it all. And so we're constantly being challenged by it. And doing that from the time I was five years old and, you know, by the time I'm, you know, in my mid twenties on Twitter, the feeling that we had an answer for everything, that the doctrine was airtight. You mentioned that my family is full of lawyers and that's,

they're extremely intelligent, analytical people. And we spent a lot of time memorizing the evidence, AKA the Bible, so that so that we always were ready to give an answer to the people who asked these questions. So I had so much faith in the church and their understanding of the Bible, their interpretation of how the world worked. And I've mentioned all this, the sense that you have of yourself as being just this depraved human being and, you know, that Bible verse about how you can't trust your heart. The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked and who can know it? So having that be your framework and then having this group of people who it feels like this divine, unquestionable institution.

Until that came into question for me because of those conversations on Twitter, anytime something didn't quite make sense, I always assumed that the problem was in me, that the error was in my own thinking, or because I had some kind of depraved heart, or Satan was whispering in my ear. This is the framework I was dealing with. Yeah, I mean, and that is the way any religion or cult hermetically seals itself against criticism from the outside. I mean, so any point that seems unanswerable or, you know, any blow that seems to land can be reinterpreted as, you know, your own fallibility.

You can't trust your own intuitions here. Who can understand God's ways or that, you know, you're actually in dialogue with and being tempted by Satan or some, you know, divine adversary. Yep. And that, that was, if not for Twitter, I just have, I have every reason to believe that I would have continued to do the same thing I had always done. So what was the moment on Twitter where the first domino fell? If you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. You'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast and to other subscriber-only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the

conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now at SamHarris.org. Thank you.