The Bible Story Every Atheist Should Read, with Megan Phelps-Roper

Megan Phelps-Roper spent her childhood on picket lines with the Westboro Baptist Church—the hate group her grandfather founded—holding signs condemning gay people and Jews. She’s spent the years since trying to understand how people like her get swept into conviction and how they get out of it, work that’s taken her everywhere from her own memoir to hosting The Free Press’s The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling. For years, she believed her job on social media was simple: Convert strangers to Westboro’s worldview. Instead, a stranger converted her, or at least handed her the one question she couldn’t argue her way around, and that single crack spread until the whole structure came down. What followed, she told me, was a much harder question than losing her faith: After believing something false with your whole heart for that long, how do you ever trust your own judgment again? Rather than discarding the Bible along with the church that had twisted it, Phelps-Roper found herself drawn back to it, treating it less as sacred law and more as a body of stories worth wrestling with honestly. That’s the premise behind her new podcast, Book Keeper, where she revisits the material she once recited nightly as a child and asks what actually holds up. We walked through the specific question that cracked open her theology, a question about a Bible verse on capital punishment that, once she heard it followed to its logical end, she couldn’t unhear. We talked about why she still shares these stories with her own kids despite having no belief in God herself, and the anxiety she felt the first time she quoted a Bible verse to her daughter without immediately qualifying it. By the end, she turned to a bigger question than her own story: not whether people believe in God but whether they believe in anything at all. A culture with no stable convictions, she argued, one where belief just tracks whatever’s trending, is its own kind of danger. Book Keeper, a Longview original series. Listen at www.longview.report/bookkeeper Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/book-keeper/id6790978542 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/033NjTPZ0bfXfTG4AiEvbn?si=dd38582641674584 YouTube: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVSfePfPXNiU&si=hH2GrTbplwNaDlR4 For the Bart Ehrman lecture that Coleman mentioned in the show, click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CU1EZv-pFo