This Man Is The Future of Westboro Baptist Church

Steve Drain was Fred Phelps’s closest disciple inside Kansas’s rabidly anti-gay Westboro Baptist. But did he orchestrate the excommunication of the church’s late founder?

A man of about 48 sits in front of an orange and blue ‘80s school portrait-style backdrop, offering tips on how to tell whether your church is “a stronghold for fags and the majesty the devil himself.” His doughy brow furrows as he drawls in a southern accent, “If your pastor preaches that God loves everyone, you should run as fast as you can from that vile place. This is the granddaddy of all lies belched forth from the bowels of hell.”

This is Steve Drain, the future of the Westboro Baptist Church.

Last week, Fred Phelps’ son posted on Facebook that his father, the longtime head of the notoriously venomous Westboro Baptist Church—famous for protesting military and other high-profile funerals and events with neon “God Hate Fags” signs—was “now on the edge of death at Midland Hospice house in Topeka.” Despite Drain’s attempts to downplay the severity of Phelps’s condition, it was reported Tuesday that the 84-year-old Phelps had passed away.

Most intriguing about Nate Phelps’s Facebook post was not the news that an octogenarian’s health was failing, but that Fred Phelps Sr., who founded the hatemongering church in 1955 and turned his progeny into some of the loudest and most despised people in America, had been excommunicated last summer.

Nate, 55, ran away from the church at age 18 and is now an LGBT advocate working for a non-profit that promotes secular society in Calgary, Alberta. He’s been shunned by his family for 37 years, he says, but has been updated on the goings-on inside the church from two nieces and a nephew who broke away more recently and still live in the Topeka area. From what he understands, Nate tells me, there was an orchestrated shift in power within the church over the past two years. The once loosely, almost democratically structured congregation came under the control of an eight-man board of elders, Nate says. During this time, more of an emphasis was placed on Bible passages highlighting female inferiority—part of the effort, Nate says, to remove his sister Shirley Phelps-Roper from her role as the church’s spokeswoman and, in Fred Phelps’ later years, as its de facto leader.

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