Nathan Phelps

Early life

Phelps was born in Topeka, Kansas on November 22, 1958. From birth until age 18, Phelps lived with his parents Fred and Margie in his hometown. Although he attended a local public school, beyond that his life revolved around his father's Westboro Baptist Church (WBC), which adjoined their family home inside a walled compound. Attendance at scheduled sermons was strictly enforced, and after-school time was largely committed to raising money for the Church through selling candy. Later this was eclipsed by participation in his father's intensive exercise program, which would routinely involve Phelps and his siblings running 5 or 10 miles (8-16 km) after school, accompanied by participation in a fad diet.

Phelps describes his father as "deeply prejudiced", and also violent and abusive, and gives accounts of receiving extended beatings with a leather strap and later with a mattock handle. Phelps' brother Mark and sister Dortha have corroborated Phelps' claims of physical abuse by their father.

Leaving Westboro

On his 18th birthday, Phelps left his family home. Still in internal conflict, he abandoned his family and the WBC, despite his then deeply-held belief that this meant he would go immediately to hell. In great fear of having his escape interrupted by his abusive father, Phelps made a clandestine nighttime getaway in an old car he had bought specifically for this purpose, with little plan or preparation beyond this. He slept the first night in the men's room of a nearby gas station.

Phelps left WBC prior to the start of the Church's high-profile picketing activities, and has attributed the onset of Church picketing to his father's exclusion from the legal profession.

Kansas and California: From faith to atheism

After leaving WBC, Phelps undertook various jobs before reuniting with his older brother Mark, and in 1978 they established a printing company together in Prairie Village, near Kansas City. The company later relocated to Southern California. Phelps worked for 25 years in the print business.

Three years after leaving, Phelps contacted his family, and for a brief period left Mark and the firm to stay with them. His father had offered to fund him through law school, a path which took 11 of his siblings into careers as lawyers, but which Nathan declined. Fred never accepted him back, eventually denouncing him. Phelps then left again, this time for good, permanently breaking contact with his father.

During an interview while at QEDcon in April 2014, Nate Phelps explained how the lingering effects of his indoctrination as a youth were so entrenched. He understood how one could feel persecuted and sincerely surprised when other people react quite strongly against ideas of what "the truth" was as he saw it:

In the 20 years following his departure, Phelps tried to find a milder form of Christianity, and raised his own children in an Evangelical church, but his doubts only grew as he continued studying religion. At the Reason Rally in Washington on March 24, 2012, he told that the events of 9/11 finally brought him to disbelief:

In addition to this, Phelps identifies both his experience reading Michael Shermer's book The Science of Good and Evil and the birth of his first child as turning points in his worldview. Phelps now describes himself as an atheist.

Career as activist, speaker, and author

Phelps later moved to rural British Columbia, Canada, and currently lives in Calgary, Alberta. He is the Executive Director of the Centre for Inquiry Calgary, a secular organization that educates and advocates reason and science. He also serves on the board of directors of Recovering from Religion, which offers education and practical support for people leaving religious communities.

Phelps is an active public speaker and appears at events designed to promote the ideas of atheism, skepticism, and secularism, He has spoken at numerous Gay Pride events and describes himself as an "LBGT activist". He emphasises his work raising awareness of child abuse related to religion and its legal status and has published articles on this topic.

Phelps is known for his criticism of the Westboro Baptist Church through literature, interviews, public speaking at atheist conventions, and his website. He states that his father physically abused him and the other Phelps children, and he believes that the church was an organization for his father to "vent his rage and anger."

As of 2014, Phelps was working on a book called Leaving Westboro: Escaping America's Most Hated Church & Family. In the same year, he made a widely reported announcement that his father was terminally ill, and also that Pastor Phelps had been "excommunicated" from his own church during 2013. Phelps' father died of natural causes shortly before midnight on March 19, 2014. The Recovering From Religion organization released a statement on behalf of Phelps, who is on their board of directors, about his father's death.

Criticism

Phelps has been criticized by members of his family still active in the Westboro Baptist Church. His sister Shirley Phelps-Roper, a prominent spokesperson for the Church, said "Nathan Phelps is a rebel against God. He has nothing to look forward to except sorrow, misery, death, and hell", and stated that he "left when he was a raging disobedient rebel with selective memory". His only encounter with his father since 1980 was on a radio talk program, on which Fred Phelps was highly critical of his son.

Westboro Baptist Church has itself been widely criticized, and has been described as "roundly derided" and "widely rebuked and criticized" by Christian groups which distance WBC's views from their own, and in other cases WBC is accused of "misreading" and "misrepresenting" the Bible. Phelps has responded to this position arguing that WBC's position was derived by his father from bona fide Biblical text and has written on the wider subject of mainstream Christianity's rejection of extremists.