The metamorphic journey of Megan Phelps-Roper: a young woman raised in a religious hate group, who has become an advocate for equality, diversity and tolerance.



'For anyone who enjoyed Hillbilly Elegy or Educated, Unfollow is an essential text' - Louis Theroux
'A moving, redemptive, clear-eyed account of religious indoctrination' - Pandora Sykes
'A nuanced portrait of the lure and pain of zealotry' New York Times

As featured on the BBC documentaries, 'The Most Hated Family in America' and 'Surviving America's Most Hated Family'

It was an upbringing in many ways normal. A loving home, shared with squabbling siblings, overseen by devoted parents. Yet in other ways it was the precise opposite: a revolving door of TV camera crews and documentary makers, a world of extreme discipline, of siblings vanishing in the night.

Megan Phelps-Roper was raised in the Westboro Baptist Church - the fire-and-brimstone religious sect at once aggressively homophobic and anti-Semitic, rejoiceful for AIDS and natural disasters, and notorious for its picketing the funerals of American soldiers. From her first public protest, aged five, to her instrumental role in spreading the church's invective via social media, her formative years brought their difficulties. But being reviled was not one of them. She was preaching God's truth. She was, in her words, 'all in'.

In November 2012, at the age of twenty-six, she left the church, her family, and her life behind.