Take heart, and be patient; change takes time but it is possible, and it's way more likely if we can reach out and disagree without demonizing.

Since leaving the church, I've been working with law enforcement involved in counterterrorism and deradicalization. I hoped that illuminating Westboro's ideology - and especially the unraveling of that ideology - would be useful to the people doing that work.

My church's antics were such that we were constantly at odds with the world. That reinforced our 'otherness' on a daily basis.

As a member of Westboro Baptist Church, I became a fixture on picket lines across the country.

In my home, life was framed as an epic spiritual battle between good and evil.

I don't like to say I'm not a believer because I still feel like a believer in a lot of things, primarily hope and grace and the power of human connection.

I don't believe in God anymore.

We thought it was our duty to go and warn people of the consequences of their sins, and I understood that to be the definition of loving our neighbour.

As happy as we were in our backyard jumping on trampolines, it was the same general feeling, often euphoria, on the picket line, because we felt like the way our lives were falling on to us contorted with the people of God and the scriptures. It all felt very normal.

The pickets were just a fact of life. And the fact that people hated us from the time I was tiny, the fact that we were hated, I was taught, was a cause for great rejoicing.

When I got on Twitter, that was the first time I was able to have lasting relationships with outsiders. And even though they were limited to those 140 characters, it was the duration of the friendships and the rapport we were able to develop.

Generally, people don't change their minds about fundamentally deeply held beliefs; it doesn't happen in an instant - it's a process.

My family, they cannot have anything to do with us. They believe that, you know, their duty is to deliver me to Satan for the destruction of the flesh.

I got on Twitter in 2009.

I will say, this is something, this praying for people to die thing, that's something that I came to believe was unscriptural. And for years, I made these arguments to my family, in writing, privately in letters that didn't get responses and in interviews. And for a while, they just doubled down. Eventually, they came to stop doing it.

I'm constantly meeting people that I hurt, you know? This is not - when I go and talk about these things, this is not a theoretical - it's not a theoretical apology. It's something that I live every day.

We held signs that said 'Thank God For Dead Soldiers,' 'Thank God For IEDs.'

We were supposed to be able to use the Bible's words to explain what we were doing, and if we couldn't do that, then we shouldn't be doing it.

We read the whole Bible, cover to cover, over and over again... It wasn't that we read selective parts of the Bible. It was that we interpreted it in this very selective way.

The things I believe in now are grace and the power of human connection to change hearts and minds and the importance of civil dialogue.

Even though I was 27 when I left, I still was largely treated like a child, because I wasn't married. My parents, my mother specifically, knew where I was and what I was doing at all times.

Showing your own righteousness by pointing out someone's unrighteousness, the race to the bottom, the transgressions getting smaller and smaller and smaller but still treated with the same level of intolerance and condemnation, all of that stuff, even as I say it I am talking about Twitter but I am thinking about Westboro.

I always joke about how I get excited to go to the grocery store without permission.

Whenever people would speculate about the death of my grandfather it was always this very retributive thing. That they were going to picket his funeral after all the things that he had done to so many other people. That vindictiveness is obviously completely understandable. It would make perfect sense.