Megan Phelps-Roper on Divine command theory
Phelps-Roper's experience at Westboro is a devastating case study in what happens when divine command theory is taken to its logical conclusion.
Megan Phelps-Roper's life at Westboro Baptist Church is perhaps the most vivid contemporary illustration of divine command theory in action — and of its catastrophic consequences. Westboro's theology was pure voluntarism: God's commands defined morality, period. If God commanded hatred of homosexuals, then hatred of homosexuals was moral. If God commanded picketing the funerals of dead soldiers, then picketing funerals was moral. No appeal to human compassion, empathy, or reason could override the divine decree.
The result was a community that inflicted extraordinary cruelty while being genuinely convinced of its own righteousness. Phelps-Roper has described in Unfollow the anguish she felt at funerals, holding signs that she knew caused pain to grieving families — and the way she suppressed that anguish because God had commanded the picketing. Divine command theory, in practice, meant the systematic overriding of moral intuition in favour of textual authority.
Phelps-Roper's deconversion was, at its core, a rejection of divine command theory. She began to trust her own moral perceptions — her sense that causing gratuitous suffering was wrong — over the commands she had been taught to attribute to God. This was the decisive intellectual and emotional break: the recognition that her own moral compass was more reliable than the divine commands her church claimed to follow.
“I was taught that God's commands trumped everything — my feelings, my compassion, my sense of right and wrong. Learning to trust my own moral compass was the beginning of leaving Westboro.”