Megan Phelps-Roper was five years old when she started standing on picket lines with her family in the Westboro Baptist Church, holding signs proclaiming "God Hates F***," and other terrible sentiments. She grew up in the church, alongside her ten brothers and sisters, and became one of the family’s most famous faces, appearing in all three of the Louis Theroux documentaries that brought them to global attention.
As she grew older and began engaging with Westboro detractors on Twitter, the worldview she inherited started to seem less black and white. In 2012, aged twenty-six, Phelps-Roper left the church. She knew that meant the family who remained behind would not speak to her again.
Unsurprisingly, considering her unique upbringing, these days Phelps-Roper has a tough relationship with the Bible: a book that was behind Westboro’s vilest vitriol, and yet has also offered her and countless others comfort and inspiration. In Book Keeper, a seven-part series from Longview, Phelps-Roper unpacks her conflicting feelings.
Book Keeper is a show about the Bible, but it isn’t a religious podcast; Phelps-Roper doesn’t consider herself a Christian anymore. She states herself that although she had a very particular coming-of-age story, all of us are handed things by our parents – beliefs, traditions, habits – and are charged with deciding what we keep versus what we throw away. It’s a difficult, lifelong journey that we all must contend with.
Considering the Bible itself is famously full of contradictions, it’s an interesting vessel through which to explore this idea. While the Westboro Baptist Church’s preaching is horrifying, it does have a biblical foundation – yet, so does "let whoever is without sin cast the first stone." If you’re looking for excuses to condemn people, they are in there, right alongside commandments about loving thy neighbour. Phelps-Roper spent her whole childhood and early adulthood being taught just the bad stuff, but as a grown woman, she is determined to read those familiar passages with a kinder eye.
Much of each episode is taken up with Phelps-Roper retelling a Bible story. While the majority will be familiar to anyone with even a sporadic Sunday School attendance record – David and Goliath, The Good Samaritan, The Road to Damascus, etc., – her delivery centers on context and grounds them in recognisable emotions, so that they actually feel like something that happened to real people, not mythical figures from millennia ago.
The other main aspect of Book Keeper is Phelps-Roper discussing her life with the Westboro Baptist Church. There, again, sits the podcast’s theme of negotiating contradictions. To most of us, the Westboro Baptist Church is a heinous organisation who show up to people at some of the hardest moments of their lives to yell slurs at them. To Phelps-Roper however, they were her whole world. Though she hates what they stand for, and that they have cut her out of their lives, she still loves them. Can you really blame a person for loving their family?
Throughout the podcast, Phelps-Roper is admirably vulnerable when considering her feelings about both the family she left behind, and the Bible. She talks about having wanted to shield her own kids from any overt religious teaching and leaving them to make their own minds up when they were older, and how she then perhaps overreacted to a friend who started talking to them about Jesus. She reminisces about the cuddly side to her mom, and how much she misses her. Most of all, she talks about how uncertain she is about what to do with her tricky inheritance, or what she is meant to take from this book that has loomed over her whole life.
This embrace of uncertainty becomes Book Keeper’s presiding note. So much of the harm that Westboro Baptist Church has done comes from their fallacious confidence that their interpretation of the Bible is the right one, and that anyone who doesn’t agree can, and will quite literally, go to hell.
But the Bible, and life, is more complicated than that. Grappling with that complexity demands grace, humility and curiosity, which are three qualities Book Keeper possesses in abundance.
