Megan Phelps-Roper on The argument from religious experience

Megan Phelps-Roper's religious experiences at Westboro Baptist Church were intense and, at the time, utterly convincing. She describes feeling God's presence during worship, sensing divine confirmation of the church's mission, and experiencing a profound sense of purpose and belonging that she interpreted as evidence of being in God's will. These experiences were among the most powerful psychological forces keeping her in the church.

Since leaving, Phelps-Roper has had to reckon with the fact that her religious experiences were real as experiences — she genuinely felt what she felt — while recognising that they were not evidence for the truth of Westboro's theology. The feeling of divine confirmation can be generated by any tightly-knit community with strong shared beliefs; it does not require an actual deity to explain it.

Phelps-Roper's story is valuable precisely because it comes from someone who experienced religious conviction at its most intense and is now able to evaluate it from the outside. She does not dismiss religious experience as trivial or fake — she knows how powerful it is. But she argues that the power of an experience is not evidence for its supernatural origin, and that human psychology is more than sufficient to explain even the most overwhelming feelings of divine presence.