She’d cut contact when his opinions made her question Westboro’s teachings.

She made friends with David, the founder of a Jewish blog who she had sparred with on Twitter years earlier. “It was starting to occur to me that there might be a lot more goodness in the world than I had believed.” “With each new kindness, I understood with ever greater clarity the depths of my ignorance about the world,” says Megan. They were inundated with encouragement and offers of friendship and places to stay by the hundreds. Grace and Megan released a statement, explaining their decision and apologising for the hurt they had caused. At the age of 27 she went to a bar for the first time. And yet, “The freedom was heady,” says Megan. The sisters were homeless, friendless and near penniless. Before, the Church had controlled her every move but now Megan had to make decisions for herself, and it was terrifying. They headed to Deadwood, a city in South Dakota, to begin a new life. Her mind settled on its terrible conclusion: “There was something terribly wrong at Westboro. “I crossed a chasm in that split second,” says Megan, and there was no going back. “We had all been behaving in the exact same way towards outsiders.” They were doing to themselves what they had been doing to others for 20 years. “I finally saw what had eluded me for so long,” says Megan. “They had developed a toxic sense of certainty in their own righteousness… and now seemed ready to lay waste to anyone who disagreed with them.” “I could no longer blindly trust the judgement of these men,” says Megan. Megan knew that the judgements levelled at her sister were wrong. And she was informed that with one wrong move, she would be excluded from the Church. She was forbidden from seeing friends, told what course to study, told what summer job to do. Megan’s younger sister, the wilful 19-year-old Grace, found herself the target of this new brand of draconian discipline.

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