ABC News 20/20 June 4, 2010
Raised to Hate: Kids of Westboro Baptist Church
Coached by His Dad, 7-Year-Old Says 'Gays, Fags, Hundreds ... of Jews' Are Bound for Hell
By GLENN RUPPEL, KELSEY MYERS and EAMON MCNIFF
Boaz Drain, a seven-year-old from Topeka, Kan., and his six-year-old sister Faith are the picture of typical American children, chock full of energy, fun and imagination. They watch movies like "Shrek" and enjoy playing with the standards like "Star Wars" light sabers and ray guns.
Yet ABC News' Chris Cuomo was shocked to hear some of the things Bo told him when he visited the Drain family recently.
"I don't think you'll go to heaven, I think you'll go to hell," Bo told Cuomo, adding those who were destined for eternal damnation included "gays, fags, hundreds and hundreds of Jews," among a wide swath of other people that Bo has been taught since birth were hated by God and bound for Hell.
Bo's family belongs to the infamous Westboro Baptist Church, led by Pastor Fred Phelps. Members believe the Bible is the literal law of God, and the penalty for violating the rules and lessons put forth in the scriptures is eternal damnation.
Westboro, based out of Topeka, Kan., spreads the message that because the United States condones homosexuality, abortion and divorce, all Americans are going to hell. It's a message they hammer home to their children from birth.
"He [God] only loves his elect that obey and he doesn't love the people that don't obey," Bo told Cuomo.
While his father, Steve Drain, stood nearby and occasionally coached his son on the beliefs of the church, Bo went into the ideology he said he firmly believes in.
"You get destroyed and you get put in hell. Hell is like a burning place where it can never be stopped, burning, and it can burn millions of people every day," Bo said about homosexuals.
Bo also considers "enablers" of homosexuality, including all citizens of the United States, to be destined for hell.
Steve and Luci Drain have four children -- Bo, Faith, 19-year-old Taylor Drain and 24-year-old Lauren Drain. Steve Drain was filming a documentary on Fred Phelps and the church in 2000 and came to accept the church's beliefs, uprooting his family from Florida and moving them across the street from Westboro's compound in Topeka.
The Children of Westboro
Most of Westboro's 70 or so congregants are Phelps' family and relatives living in or near the church compound. Their children often can be found playing in the backyard together before joining the parents in their daily task of picketing the streets.
Westboro members made national headlines in 1998 when they arrived at the funeral of Matthew Shepard of Wyoming. Shepard was beaten to death by two men because he was gay and the church held signs proclaiming Shepard was in hell because of his sexuality.
Aside from daily pickets in Topeka, the children of Westboro accompany their parents across the country, arriving at funerals and other events holding signs against the country, gays, other religions and specific public figures -- damning them all to hell, proclaiming God hates anyone not in line and praising God for taking lives.
Church members insist they actually love everybody, and that is why they and their kids picket events. They say they are warning everyone of God's anger in hopes people will change their ways. However, that message often riles up crowds and can put the church's members and their young children in danger.
"We've had knives or guns waved at us, and lots of violent angry people," Lauren Drain told Cuomo.
A particular target of the church is fallen soldiers, according to Steve Drain, who said the church arrives at the funerals to let families know their loved ones are in hell because they fought for a supposedly damned country.
"Military people mostly do the nastiest stuff ... and they, like, let their kids be raped and stuff like that," Bo said when asked why he thought members of the military were going to hell.
His dad, however, clarified their beliefs off camera.
"Remember what we all say: No God fearing man or woman would lift a finger fighting for a country awashed in sin like this," Steve Drain said to his son.
Church Produces Music Videos to Propagate Beliefs
The message is reinforced to Bo and his sisters every night when they sit at home and go over Phelps' fire and brimstone-filled sermons. Steve Drain also has cast the children in the wide variety of music videos the church produces that lampoon popular music and ideas, with their own beliefs on every topic imaginable.
The children of the Westboro Baptist Church can be seen singing enthusiastically to the tune of songs like "Santa Claus is Coming to Town," saying instead, "Santa Claus will take you to hell," as well as the Beatles classic "Hey Jude" ("Hey, Evil Reprobate Jew").
One video features little Faith Drain, with bright blue eyes and blond hair, smiling brightly through a verse of "God Hates the World," that her parents are proud to say they taught her.
"How many people teach their daughter to gyrate and do some Britney Spears song?" Steve Drain said. "I'm teaching my daughter what the scripture says."
"And the scripture says if you don't obey the Lord, your God, you're going to hell," Luci Drain added.
Estranged Daughter: 'They Sing Lullabies About People Going to Hell'
According to their oldest daughter, Lauren Drain, the songs and the pickets and the constant lessons on Phelps' sermons are all part of the church's constant indoctrination.
"They sing lullabies about people going to hell," she told Chris Cuomo in an exclusive interview. "I remember I did that with Faith, and I was teaching her songs and stuff. I was trying to please my parents."
As Lauren Drain reached her 20s however, she said she began to question the gospel she was surrounded by, questions that quickly drew the ire of her follow congregants.
"I saw some hypocrisy, and I mentioned them and they hated it," she said. "You're not supposed to question anything."
Lauren Drain said her natural curiosity drew rebukes from Pastor Fred Phelps.
Eventually, she said, when she was 21 the members voted her out of the church and out of her home, including her own parents.
"My dad didn't cry, my sister didn't cry, my mom cried, she said. "I'm bawling and like out of my mind, you know, and they're laughing. I'm telling them I'm sorry. I'm telling them I'll do anything, what is it going to take, when can I come back."
But her pleas fell on deaf ears, and the same night she was voted out she said her family sent her to stay at a hotel and cut off all communication.
A week later, Lauren Drain returned home to pick up her belongings and said she found that her youngest sister Faith already had been taught to hate her.
"I was gone a week, came back to get my stuff, and my little 3-year-old sister told me, 'You don't live here anymore.' Mocking me," Lauren Drain said. "I raised her from the time she was born. I used to watch her every day. And a week later, she is happy I'm gone."
A Family Divided Over Message of God
Lauren Drain said it was very hard to come to terms with what had happened to her. She has tried to move on and start a new life, working as a nurse over a thousand miles away.
It's been three years, and she still greatly misses her family and yearns for contact. But she said she could never go back to her former life. After struggling with her beliefs, she now rejects the hate she was taught by the Westboro Baptist Church. She hopes her siblings one day can make the choice she did. If they do, they too likely would be cast out.
"The people who are spiritually bound to one another because of a shared fear of the Lord, that's really your family," Steve Drain said.
Drain said if Bo decided he wanted to stop believing, he'd simply say goodbye to him and be done with it.
So far, Bo and his sisters are keeping in line. Bo said he doesn't play with other children at school who are not in the church, although it can be hard. And he seems, at least at his young age, firmly planted in his church.
"I'm preaching and I'm going with this church, and that's what the church says. I'm going to go with that my entire life," Bo said.
As for the daughter they have lost, Steve and Luci Drain said they don't miss her and don't think they would ever allow her back.
"Why would I miss her?" Steve Drain asked.
"She chose a life that is contrary to the Scriptures. She chose that life," Luci Drain said.
The daughter they now say is bound for hell seems to be the only one still talking about love.
Lauren Drain said she wishes she could speak to her younger brother and sisters, to tell them she loves them and that the hate they spread is not the true message of God.
"I miss them and I love them and I really care about them, and God doesn't hate everyone. God has mercy on people, God forgives people," Lauren Drain said she'd tell her siblings.
As for her parents, she said that, no matter what, she still loves them.
"There are horrible things I went through, and I don't hate them," she said. "I forgive them. They're my parents. How can I not love them?"
This article was found at:
http://abcnews.go.com/2020/raised-hate-kids-westboro-baptist-church/story?id=10809348
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Notorious pastor's atheist son speaks out at Reason Rally
ReplyDeleteBy Kim Geiger, Los Angeles Times March 24, 2012
Reporting from Washington
In what has been billed as “the largest secular event in world history,” athiests will gather in Washington D.C. today to rally in support of secularism.
The event, known as the Reason Rally, also will feature a collision of estranged family members. Nate Phelps, the atheist son of Westboro Baptist Church Pastor Fred Phelps, will address the crowd as his father’s church pickets the event in protest.
The Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kan., has become infamous for using military funerals as a backdrop to promote an anti-gay, anti-military message. The church believes that the United States is too tolerant of sin and that the death of American soldiers is God’s punishment.
The church was sued by the father of Lance Cpl. Matthew A. Snyder – a Marine killed in Iraq – after it staged a protest at Snyder’s funeral with signs such as “Thank God for dead soldiers” and “God hates fags.” In a controversial ruling last March, the Supreme Court said that the church’s speech was protected and therefore it could not be sued for the offensive protest.
Nate Phelps is one of 13 children of Fred Phelps. A professed atheist, he is among four of Phelps’ children who have defected from the church. When Nate Phelps, who has not had contact with much of his family for decades, learned that the church planned to picket the Reason Rally, he decided to counter the protest by speaking out at the event.
In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Phelps discussed his childhood, the day he left the church, and his views on religion and free speech.
LAT: What was your religious training like growing up?
Phelps: The actual theology is called Calvinism. And at the centerpiece of Calvinism is this idea of absolute predestination, that God is the one that picks the saved, as opposed to us making that decision for ourselves. And it was, you know, the environment was such that whatever our father defined as the doctrines of the Bible was what we were required to believe. So there really wasn’t any choice in the matter.
I don’t know, I guess that’s probably it, in a thumbnail.
Have you always been an atheist or was it a personal journey that led you to your beliefs?
Well, no, I haven’t always been an atheist. You know, growing up in that environment, atheism was a frightening proposition. And, you know, everything pushed us in the direction of looking for – and I think at the age of 14 or 15, I actually declared myself saved, which was the necessary process for being in that church, and was baptized.
I will say that I always had questions centered around the behavior of my father and the ideas that he espoused there. But it wasn’t until years after I left, and I would say probably only the last five or six years, that I have been willing to finally let go of the idea of a god. So it’s been a journey.
How did you get along with your father as a child? And was he aware of your beliefs, or did you keep it to yourself?
It was not an option to openly discuss any doubts which you might have. It wasn’t safe, physically or otherwise, to even consider such a thing.
So I learned early on to keep my thoughts to myself. And, you know, plus there was a component, you know, we heard regularly that we were just dumb kids and didn’t have any idea what we were talking about. So that played a part in the amount of validity that I gave those thoughts.
As far as the relationship with my father, the best way I could describe it was I was afraid of him from very early on. That never really changed, growing up. But it never got to the point where it was a sense of having a, you know, father like you might imagine that was an educator, a helper, you know, that kind of father figure. So he was always the disciplinarian and a threat in my mind.
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ReplyDeleteWhen did you leave the church?
I left on the night of my 18th birthday, literally at the stroke of midnight.
I bought an old car, used car from one of the people that worked at the high school, and I packed all my stuff up without anybody knowing about it. And on that night, when everybody was asleep, I went out and got the car and put it in the driveway and loaded the trunk with my boxes and then went back in the house and waited at the bottom of the stairs, watched the clock go up to midnight, and I left.
Where did you go?
The first three nights, I had a friend who was the manager of a gas station near the high school I went to, and he gave me a key to the front door and I slept in the bathroom of the gas station for the first three nights.
And then my brother’s girlfriend’s mother found out about it and she offered me a room in her house. So I went from there and then eventually getting a job and getting my own place.
When did you end up in California?
That was actually like five years later.
I went to work for a law office in the Kansas City area and then I later went to St. Louis, went to work for a printing company there that my brother was working at. And we eventually came back to the Kansas City area and started a printing company that would eventually bring us out to Southern California, where we opened eight different stores out there.
There are a couple of them (still around), but they’re owned by someone else now. I lived in California for 25 years.
Was that an older brother, the brother who had already left?
Yeah. That was Mark.
And how many years did he leave before you left?
I seem to recall – I think that I was 16 when he left, so he would have been 19 or 20. So it was a couple years before I left, that he left.
He was – Mark was, he was kind of the, in everybody’s mind, he was the one who was going to follow in my father’s footsteps. As it turned out, he had just figured out that that was the way that he was going to survive that environment, was by being, you know, his father’s yes man.
So he was still around when he was 19. I think he might have even been pushing 20. And his girlfriend, who had found favor with my father and was attending church regularly and was on the path to being accepted there, came to church one Sunday night and found my father upstairs beating my older sister. And everybody thought – some of the other church members were already there, and we were all just kind of standing around out in the auditorium while all of this screaming and yelling was going on upstairs. And Lueva (sp), who was Mark’s girlfriend, was – she was just freaked out by it. She was like, why isn’t anybody doing anything? And then they got upset at her for even suggesting such a thing.
So she turned around and marched out and Mark chased her and she basically said I’m not going to raise a child in this kind of environment and forced him to choose between her or that situation.
So that’s what drove Mark away.
How do you feel you are treated, as an atheist?
I mean, the general attitude amongst the Christian community is, as it has been for centuries now, that if you don’t believe in god, that you are the enemy and there’s something morally degenerate about you.
And you know, that attitude’s been around for a long time. It’s not going to go away. But I think if we’re ever going to change it, just like some of the other misperceptions throughout our history, we have to be honest about it and try to have dialogue with people. And eventually, that perception will change because it’s not based in facts.
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ReplyDeleteWhat is your family’s view of evolution?
They are young Earthers. They believe the world is 6,000, 10,000 years old. And that evolution is nonsense. At least that’s what they believed when I was growing up there.
I don’t know how it’s possible to hold to that belief after as much information that’s come out.
Have you had any contact with the families of people whose funerals have been picketed by the church?
I had some email conversations back and forth with – I can’t remember his first name now, but the gentleman who sued my family in Snyder vs. Phelps. He and I talked back and forth.
I have had scores of emails from people who have had to deal with the presence in their town, not necessarily family members, but community members, talking about how upsetting it was for them to be there with the protests. But a lot of that, hundreds of emails, if not thousands, from young gay people who are trying to come to terms with the message that they’re hearing.
And so I’ve gotten tons of that over the last couple years.
What do you tell those people?
I just, you know, apologize, for one. And I try to express to them that that attitude isn’t consistently out there, and that, in my opinion, it’s not accurate. What else can I say?
Sometimes I get very specific questions asked about theology, and I’ll answer it as honestly as I can as far as what I believe today.
What are your thoughts on the recent debate over birth control and abortion?
I have changed my attitude about that a lot over the years. I started out in favor of abortion rights just because my father was against it. But that wasn’t a good reason.
I guess the bottom line for me is while I couldn’t condone it for myself, I feel very strongly that that is a individual personal decision for each woman to make for themselves, and that the government has no business being involved in it. And it’s frightening to see how quickly and destructively we’ve moved back that direction.
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ReplyDeleteDo you agree with the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Snyder vs. Phelps case?
No. But I think I need to explain that a little bit.
A lot of people out there believe that the Supreme Court ruled that they have a right to picket at funerals. And that simply isn’t true. In fact, Chief Justice Roberts, who wrote the majority opinion, very specifically in that opinion said that they were not addressing that question because they didn’t need to, that they were only looking at the details of the Snyder case and that their First Amendment rights prevailed over that idea of intentional infliction of emotional distress. But they deliberately avoided challenging those forty-some state and federal laws that are on the books right now.
So, that question hasn’t been answered yet by the Supreme Court. That’s one thing I would want to say.
The other thing I would want to say is that I think that it is a false dichotomy for Americans to see this as an either-or question, that either they have the free speech rights or they don’t. I think that we can find – because, in my opinion, the right to bury our loved ones in peace is one that we have lived with as long as humans have been around, just because it doesn’t appear in the Constitution doesn’t mean that we don’t have that right or haven’t behaved with that right.
So I see it as a question of competing rights. And I think that the idea that we could limit the place and time for people to express their free speech, in this instance, is legitimate.
We can still have a robust, healthy right to free speech in America and give people the time and place and proper decorum for burying their loved ones.
What do you think is the greatest misperception about atheists?
Well, the most common misperception is that to deny God is to deny a system of morality or to abandon a system of morality. And the fact is the vast majority of atheists – first of all, atheism is … it’s simply a rejection of the idea of a god. But most atheists embrace a humanist ideology…. Square at the center of that ideology is the idea that we treat humans with kindness and respect.
So there most definitely is a moral system inherent in the conclusions that atheists draw.
http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-q-a-nate-phelps-20120324,0,4407066.story
TODDLER'S AIN'T NO HOMOS SONG Puts Church on Lockdown Pastor Gets Death Threats
ReplyDeleteTMZ May 30, 2012
Members of an Indiana church say they've been flooded with death threats since video of a 3-year-old proudly singing, "Ain't no homos gonna make it to heaven" ... was posted on the Internet.
Multiple members of the Apostolic Truth Tabernacle Church in Greensburg, Indiana tell TMZ the church office has been getting harassing calls and the pastor has received death threats at his home. They also say a prayer meeting scheduled for this evening at church had to be moved to a secret location.
We're told they are looking into increasing security, but for now the congregation is handling it ... taking turns watching over the church.
One member says Pastor Jeff Sangl is extremely worried about his safety -- and this morning he and his wife left for vacation without telling anyone where they were going.
Despite the threats, all the members we spoke to have no regrets about the song getting posted online -- in fact one said, "The people who are upset just don't read the word of God. If we don't teach the children the truth early they will never learn."
As for the thunderous applause after the hate-filled song -- we're told, "Of course we applauded a child who is singing a song about God."
http://www.tmz.com/2012/05/30/indiana-toddler-church-song-aint-no-homos-death-threats/
see video at: http://www.tmz.com/2012/05/30/indiana-toddler-church-song-no-homos-heaven/
This video is nuts -- an Indiana toddler took the mic at his church recently, and sang a hate-filled anti-gay song ... with the lyrics, "Ain't no homos gonna make it to heaven" ... and the crowd went WILD.
The video was reportedly recorded at the Apostolic Truth Tabernacle in Greensburg, Indiana -- featuring a young boy on the altar, barely old enough to walk, singing a song he was obviously spoon fed.
It's pretty hard to make out the words -- so here are the lyrics ...
"The Bible’s right, somebody’s wrong.
The Bible’s right, somebody’s wrong.
Romans one, twenty six and twenty seven;
Ain’t no homos gonna make it to Heaven."
The congregation erupts in thunderous applause after the song.
FYI, here's Romans 1:26-27 -- "Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error."
It's the latest video to hit the web showing rampant homophobia in America's churches -- starting with a North Carolina pastor advocating beating the gay out of your child ... and another NC pastor talking about fencing up gay people and letting them die out.
see: Pastor Sean Harris -- Beat the Gay Out of Your Kid! http://www.tmz.com/videos/0_xf12hm61
N.C. Pastor Charles Worley: "Put Gays And Lesbians In Electrified Pen To Kill Them Off" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2839yEazcs
Westboro Baptist Church Member Libby Alvarez Escapes, Lives Life of Freedom
ReplyDeleteBy Ashley Davis, Opposing Views, January 28, 2013
One member of the "hate cult" Westboro Baptist Church has successfully escaped. She insists her life has completely changed for the better since leaving.
Libby Phelps Alvarez, 29, is the granddaughter of Fred Waldron Phelps, Sr., the founder and pastor of WBC. The group is known for their extreme ideologies, especially against gay and Jewish people.
It was only four years ago that Alvarez was protesting at Obama's inauguration, taking part in anti-gay and anti-semitic protests, trapped in the US, and unable to get a haircut or wear a bikini.
Now, Alvarez has found freedom. But it was difficult to leave her family behind, especially her cousin.
"That first year, there would be days it would hit me really hard," she said.
She decided to leave when the church confronted her about a bikini she wore during a family vacation. Instead of apologizing and asking for forgiveness from the church members, which is what she was "supposed" to do, she fled.
Her brother, Josh, also left the church two years before she did.
Alvarez only had a car and a little bit of money when she left. Thanks to her boss, she was able to save up money to get her own apartment as she stayed in her house for four months.
Though she lives a completely different life now, she is only 30 minutes away from where she was raised in Kansas. She lives with her husband, Logan, in Lawrence.
She has traveled the world with him and done all of the things she's always wanted to do but couldn't because of the strict church.
She had her first haircut in 25 years, got her ears pierced, and went outside the US, all things that are forbidden by WBC.
Alvarez met Logan when she ran into him while shopping. He was a former physical therapy patient and also a member of the church. Logan bought her flowers and took her on a date. She told him that if he wanted, she would run away with him.
After four months, he proposed and they started living their life of freedom.
"No one is allowed to leave the country while at WBC," Alvarez wrote on her Facebook. The two have been to England, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Italy, Switzerland and France since leaving the church.
Once she escaped a radio host in Kansas interviewed her about her time at WBC. She said the craziest thing they made her do was "pray for people to die."
Westboro Baptist Church is known for its funeral protests and picketing at public events which are likely to get them media attention.
They also protest Judaism. Their website states: "The only true Jews are Christians. The rest of the people who claim to be Jews aren't, and they are nothing more than typical, impenitent sinners…the vast majority of Jews support fags."
Alvarez said leaving her cousin was the hardest, who was her best friend and confidante. She will never see her again unless she leaves the church.
"I would take her to Covent Garden in England for ice cream and tea in London," Alvarez imagined. "And there was a place in Germany, the Hofbrauhaus, it's really famous, thre's a brass band. And I know that Megan would love going on The Tube in England."
http://www.opposingviews.com/i/religion/religion-society/westboro-baptist-church-member-libby-alvarez-escapes-lives-life-freedom
Westboro Baptist Church Members Escape Cult & Their Insider Confessions Will Shock You! (VIDEO)
ReplyDeleteby Jeanne Sager The Stir February 7, 2013
Ever wondered what goes through the heads of the members of the Westboro Baptist Church? You know, the Kansas-based group that regularly threatens to picket the funerals of soldiers and innocent children, most recently those of the precious babies killed inside Sandy Hook Elementary School? You're about to find out!
Two granddaughters of Westboro's most vocal hatemonger, Fred Phelps, have escaped the cult. Now Megan Phelps-Roper and sister Grace Phelps-Roper are speaking out, along with Libby Phelps Alvarez, another of Phelps' granddaughters who escaped the clutches of the hate group several years ago. So what do we know now about this crazy group?
Thanks to the Today show and reporter Jeff Chu (who broke the story of the Phelps-Roper girls' escape), here are some of their biggest revelations:
1. They pray for people to die. Pretty much the opposite of what you'd expect from a "church," Alvarez says she did not join in but was around while members actively prayed for death.
2. They hate soldiers because of gays. The protests of military funerals happen because the WBC claims that American soldiers are "fighting for a nation that supports homosexuality," Alvarez told Today.
3. WBC followers aren't allowed to trust their own feelings. As Megan Phelps-Roper told Chu, "All that’s trustworthy is the Bible. And if you have a feeling or a thought that’s against the church’s interpretations of the Bible, then it’s a feeling or a thought against God himself.”
4. Women are forbidden to get haircuts or pierce their ears, and their heads must remain covered in church.
5. They are obsessed with pop culture. In a statement released by Megan and Grace about their decision to leave the church, they quote Batman, and then explain that's common at WBC because the "sentiments they express are readily identifiable by the masses -- and shifting their meaning is as easy as giving them new context."
Are you surprised by any of these revelations?
Take a look at how Libby Phelps Alvarez has tried to move on since escaping the Westboro Baptist Church:
http://thestir.cafemom.com/in_the_news/150838/westboro_baptist_church_members_escape
Damsel, Arise: A Westboro Scion Leaves Her Church
ReplyDeleteby Jeff Chu, medium.com February 6, 2013
Just after 11 last Sunday morning at Old First Reformed Church in Brooklyn, the Rev. Dr. Daniel Meeter is starting the Sunday service as he always does. He runs through the opening salutation and the collect for the day, and then he welcomes everyone to church as he always does, introducing Old First “as a community of Jesus in Park Slope where we welcome people of every race, ethnicity and orientation to love God and love our neighbors as ourselves.”
The congregation—some eighty strong on this sunny but cold February morning—is the usual mix of Park Slope churchgoing types: a smattering of journalists, a few artists, a handful of old ladies, some rambunctious children. But in the back row of the tin-ceilinged, wood-floored hall, there’s a visitor. It is Megan Phelps-Roper’s first time not only at Old First but also at any church not called Westboro Baptist. Yes, that Westboro Baptist, the Topeka, Kansas, congregation that has become famous (or infamous, depending on your viewpoint) for its strident views on sin (and the abundance of it in modern America), salvation (and the prospective lack of it), and sexuality (we’re bad, in far more colorful terms).
For nearly all of her twenty-seven years, Megan believed it: believed what her grandfather Fred Phelps preached from the pulpit; believed what her dad Brent and her mom Shirley taught during the family’s daily Bible studies; believed (mostly) what it said on those signs that have made Westboro disproportionately influential in American life—“God hates fags”; “God hates your idols”; “God hates America.”
Megan was the one who pioneered the use of social media at Westboro, becoming the first in her family to go on Twitter. Effervescent and effusive, she gave hundreds of interviews, charming journalists from all over the world. Organized and proactive, she, for a time, even had responsibility for keeping track of the congregation’s protest schedule. She was such a Westboro fixture that the Kansas City Star touted her—improbably, as it turns out, because a woman could never have such a role at the church—as a future leader of the congregation.
Then, in November, she left.
___
I first met Megan in the summer of 2011, when I went to Topeka to spend a few days with the Westboro folks for my book project. During that visit, we talked about faith, we talked about church, we talked about marriage (and Megan’s feeling that, given the prospects, it would require no small amount of divine intervention in her case), and we talked about Harry Potter (for the record, she’s a fan). She seemed so sure in her beliefs, that I could not have imagined that some fifteen months later, we’d be having a conversation in which she tearfully told me that she was no longer with her family or with the church.
Mostly, the tears have subsided—“in public, anyway,” she says one afternoon, as we sit in a Tribeca café. “I still cry a lot.” Forget what you know of the church. Just imagine what it is like to walk away from everything you have ever known. Consider how traumatic it would be to know that your family is never supposed to speak to you again. Think of how hard it would be to have a fortress of faith built around you, and to have to dismantle it yourself, brick by brick, examining each one and deciding whether there’s something worth keeping or whether it’s not as solid as you thought it was.
As we talk, Megan repeatedly emphasizes how much she loves those she has left behind. “I don’t want to hurt them,” she says. “I don’t want to hurt them.”
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Her departure has hurt them already—she knew it would—yet there was no way she could stay. “My doubts started with a conversation I had with David Abitbol,” she says. Megan met David, an Israeli web developer who’s part of the team behind the blog Jewlicious, on Twitter. “I would ask him questions about Judaism, and he would ask me questions about church doctrine. One day, he asked a specific question about one of our signs—‘Death Penalty for Fags’—and I was arguing for the church’s position, that it was a Levitical punishment and as completely appropriate now as it was then. He said, ‘But Jesus said’—and I thought it was funny he was quoting Jesus—‘Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.’ And then he connected it to another member of the church who had done something that, according to the Old Testament, was also punishable by death. I realized that if the death penalty was instituted for any sin, you completely cut off the opportunity to repent. And that’s what Jesus was talking about.”
ReplyDeleteTo some, this story might seem simple—even overly so. But we all have moments of epiphany, when things that are plate-glass clear to others but opaque to us suddenly become apparent. This was, for Megan, one of those moments, and this window led to another and another and another. Over the subsequent weeks and months, “I tried to put it aside. I decided I wasn’t going to hold that sign, ‘Death Penalty for Fags.’” (She had, for the most part, preferred the gentler, much less offensive “Mourn for Your Sins” or “God Hates Your Idols” anyway.)
What “seemed like a small thing at the time,” she says, snowballed. She started to question another Westboro sign, “Fags can’t repent.” “It seemed misleading and dishonest. Anybody can repent if God gives them repentance, according to the church. But this one thing—it gives the impression that homosexuality is an unforgivable sin,” she says. “It didn’t make sense. It seemed a wrong message for us to be sending. It’s like saying, ‘You’re doomed! Bye!’ and gives no hope for salvation.”
She kept trying to conquer the doubts. Westboro teaches that one cannot trust his or her feelings. They’re unreliable. Human nature “is inherently sinful and inherently completely sinful,” Megan explains. “All that’s trustworthy is the Bible. And if you have a feeling or a thought that’s against the church’s interpretations of the Bible, then it’s a feeling or a thought against God himself.”
This, of course, assumes that the church’s teachings and God’s feelings are one and the same. And this, of course, assumes that the church’s interpretation of the Bible is infallible, that this much-debated document handed down over the centuries has, in 2013, been processed and understood correctly only by a small band of believers in Topeka. “Now?” Megan says. “That sounds crazy to me.”
In December, she went to a public library in Lawrence, Kansas. She was looking through books on philosophy and religion, and it struck her that people had devoted their entire lives to studying these questions of how to live and what is right and wrong. “The idea that only WBC had the right answer seemed crazy,” she says. “It just seemed impossible.”
___
The act of leaving Westboro is as weird as the church itself. Sometimes it’s described as a shunning process, but that’s not entirely apt. It is, in the eyes of the remaining members, a sort of death, but it’s a gentle one, because the carcass isn’t just dumped or ignored. One church member, who has lost two of his kids to the outside world, told me that he still loved them and that he set them up as best they could with what they’d need to start their new lives—some money, some household goods, even a car.
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Megan didn’t leave alone; her sister Grace decided to go with her. They stayed just one night in Topeka. Then, after returning to their family home to retrieve some things they’d not packed the night before—“it was so weird and horrible to ring the doorbell,” Megan says—they left town.
ReplyDeleteThey decided to disappear for a while, and found rooms in a house in a tiny Midwestern town. They needed space—to think, to read, to imagine what had previously been unimaginable. Their lives had largely been scripted, and “now that we’re writing our own script, everything seems a lot more tenuous,” Megan says. “We needed to think about what we believe. We need to figure out what we want to do next. I never imagined leaving, ever, so I never thought about doing anything different. I have no idea what kind of work I want to do, or where to live. How do people decide these things?”
Once a constant Tweeter, she hasn’t posted anything online since October. “I don’t know what I believe, so I don’t know what to say,” she explains. “I haven’t been ready to talk about any of this.” She’s only doing so now, and briefly, because, she says, “I was so proactive before and vocal about the church. My name means something now to others that it doesn’t mean to me. I want people to know that it’s not now how it was.”
But how is it going to be? She’s still not sure. They’ve been trying new things; one of their housemates made sushi one night, the first time Megan tasted raw fish (“yum!”). They read a lot—“I liked ‘The Sun Also Rises.’ There was a quote that was perfect for where we were: ‘Wonderful how one loses track of the days up here in the mountains.’ And you know what else I loved about it? I could be completely mistaken about what the book means, but where the book began and where it ended was the same. It makes your problems seem like small things. It gives you perspective—well, it gave me perspective, that my problems in the grand scheme of things are not as horrible or monstrous as they seem.” They talk to each other for hours each day, about religion, about God, about the Bible, about the future, about how to treat people, about “what’s right and what’s wrong—capital R and capital W.”
That raises the question of regrets and amends, for things they’ve said and signs they’ve held and judgments they’ve passed. “I definitely regret hurting people,” she says. “That was never our intention. We thought we were doing good. We thought it was the only way to do good. And that’s what I’ve always wanted.”
That’s not how the message was received. “I think I’ve known that for a long time, and I would talk to people about how I knew the message was hurtful,” Megan says. “But I believed it couldn’t matter what people felt. It mattered that this was what God wanted.”
___
In the fifth chapter of the Gospel of Mark, Jesus resuscitates a girl who is believed to be dead, commanding her, according to the King James Version that is favored at Westboro, “Damsel, arise.” The verse has long been a favorite of Megan’s, and it has taken on new and special meaning since her departure from the church.
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Now that she has arisen, what does Megan Phelps-Roper think God wants her to do? She smiles and puts her hands on her cheeks as I ask the question. She laughs, but it’s a weird laugh—hollow, a little nervous.
ReplyDelete“I have no idea,” she says. “I mean, I have almost no idea. I know I want to do good for people. And I want to treat people well. And it’s nice that I can do that now in a way that they see as good too. How exactly do you accomplish that? I’m not sure.”
Over lunch, we had talked about so many big questions: Predestination. Hell. The Bible. Sin. Big things and small about how “church” is done at Old First versus what she grew up with at Westboro. The Bible verses were the same—there were readings on Sunday from Jeremiah, from I Corinthians (on love), and from the Gospel of Luke. She knew one of the hymns, “Holy, Holy, Holy,” and during the singing, “that was when I felt most at home.” But she was struck that the congregation had a role beyond singing hymns, and noted that she’d never before been in a church where women’s heads were not covered. “It just felt really different. I didn’t think it was bad,” she says with a shrug. “It’s literally so very different that it is hard to compare them.”
At times, there’s something about the way she unpacks these observations and answers my questions that makes her seem much younger than her twenty-seven years. There’s an innocence, almost a naivete. But how else would it be? How else could it be, given the boundaries that have always marked the hours of her life?
Now that those boundaries are gone, “I’m trying to figure out which ones were good and smart, and which ones shouldn’t be there anymore,” she says. “I don’t feel confident at all in my beliefs about God. That’s definitely scary. But I don’t believe anymore that God hates almost all of mankind. I don’t think that, if you do everything else in your life right and you happen to be gay, you’re automatically going to hell. I don’t believe anymore that WBC has a monopoly on truth.”
She hopes to emerge from this season “with a better understanding of the world and how I fit into it,” she says, “and how I can be an influence for good.” This all sounds lovely and rainbows and unicorns, but really? You may believe it or you may not, but Megan won’t budge on this—and a trace of the characteristic Westboro stubbornness that I experienced in Topeka resurfaces. She is emphatic: “It’s true! I wanted to do good! I thought I was. And that wish hasn’t changed.”
When I push her to articulate what she wants for herself, she reminisces about an interview, in her Westboro days, in which a journalist asked her what she wanted her legacy to be. “I had only a few seconds to think while my mom answered the same question,” Megan says. “And then I said: ‘That I treated people right.’ That’s still true.”
Thank God for second chances.
—-
Read a statement from Megan and Grace https://medium.com/reporters-notebook/d63ecca43e35
I first met Megan and Grace in the summer of 2011, when I visited Westboro Baptist Church. Read more about that visit here. https://medium.com/reporters-notebook/d63ecca43e35
Banished: Lauren Drain on Growing Up in the Westboro Baptist Church
ReplyDeleteLauren Drain spent her teenage years in the infamous Westboro Baptist Church before being kicked out and disowned by her family. Now she’s writing about it.
by David Sessions, The Daily Beast March 5, 2013
When 21-year-old Lauren Drain found herself in a shabby apartment in a rough part of Topeka, abandoned by her family, her mind couldn’t accept what had happened. “I truly thought my banishment would only last for a month or so,” she writes. Only when she happened upon her father in public and he refused to acknowledge her did she begin to understand that she has been completely and permanently disowned for running afoul of her church's whims.
Seven years earlier, Drain’s family had moved across the country to join the Westboro Baptist Church, the Topeka-based cult known for its “God Hates Fags” signs and picketing the funerals of fallen U.S. soldiers. Until then, Drain had a more ordinary teenage experience: excelling in school sports, more excited by boys than religion. She was skeptical, even hostile to her father’s growing obsession with Westboro, especially when it drove him to pull her out of high school and place her under “house arrest” when he discovered her budding relationship with a classmate. But eager to make peace, she attended her first protest, where she was impressed by the confidence, passion, and encyclopedic knowledge of world affairs exhibited by the Westboro girls her age. “There was something to it,” she writes. “We moved people to ask us lots of questions, even if they screamed those questions at us. This meant we had some access to knowledge that they didn’t.”
Drain quickly become friends with Megan Phelps-Roper, a few years older and then the evident heir to the small, independent church founded by her grandfather, Fred Phelps, in 1955. The church has about 40 members, most of them also members of his extended family. The 83-year-old patriarch preaches a mutant, virulently homophobic fire-and-brimstone breed of hyper-Calvinism that insists God has chosen only a few elect Christians (mostly Phelpses) and hates the rest of the world with a burning passion. Members see it as their duty to inform the rest of us of our impending damnation, not to convert the damned but to ensure their own salvation. To effectively spread that warning, they show up at sensitive events like the funerals of U.S. soldiers and victims of the Sandy Hook massacre, and 9/11 memorials to attract media attention with outrageously offensive signs and slogans.
As Drain went through high school, the church’s behavior-policing regime felt increasingly oppressive and bizarre to her, and she saw herself being singled out despite her best efforts to please the Phelps family. Finally, after her own family discovered she’d been chatting online with a young man from Connecticut and informed the church, she was formally banished. “There is no hope,” her father said at a church meeting to decide her fate. “I am done with her!”
Every fundamentalist movement has deserters, but Drain found herself in a less common position: that of the young believer thrown out into the world against her will. Banished: Surviving My Years in the Westboro Baptist Church co-authored with writer Lisa Pulitzer, is her account of her years growing up with “America’s most hated family,” as one British filmmaker labeled them. The book offers a straightforward retelling of the facts, but it provides important insights into how fundamentalist movements attract and reprogram eager seekers, and the psychological effort required for survivors to adapt to life outside their reality-distortion field.
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The book is, in a way, a story about her father, an outspokenly atheist rebel who married a Catholic girl and pulled her away from her religious family. Steve Drain was energetic and intellectual, but careened between passions, sometimes putting his family in difficult situations. He stayed in graduate school long past the end of his funding, racking up debt that would crush the Drains for decades. After briefly coming under the influence of a local fundamentalist, he reverted to his rebel ways, playing rock music and drinking with his buddies at the Drains’ home. After he finally graduated with his MFA and moved his family back to Florida for a job at the Home Shopping Network, he began work on an investigative documentary of Westboro he called Hatemongers.
ReplyDeleteDrain’s description of her father fits a common profile of potential fundamentalist: a “lost soul” in search of a grand explanation, with a thirst for life and a bottomless appetite for higher learning. “I don’t know if he had a clue what he wanted to do, but he told me he was seeking some type of truth,” Drain writes. “He took some philosophy, some civilization, and some religions courses—all of the subjects he chose had a spiritual or metaphysical bent.” Like many fundamentalist Christians in the U.S., his path to religious extremism began with a searching intellect and a sense that America’s consumer society didn’t have satisfying answers to the deepest questions about how one should live.
But despite what Drain describes as her father’s winning charm and his earnest searching, he had a chilling dark side: obsessive and controlling, he hit her, shoved her, and called her a “whore” for talking to a boy she liked. The violence preceded his involvement with Westboro, and seemed to have more to do with his panic about controlling his family than his religious ideology. He was so abusive that one day, terrified, Drain called Child Protective Services on the family’s cordless phone from the front yard. “I just needed my father to know I was serious about defending myself from his physical bullying, and I was reaching my breaking point,” she writes. When her father found out, he forced her to call back and tell CPS she had been lying, and no one from the agency followed up. Drain was pulled out of high school and forbidden from leaving the family’s house in Florida. Though her mother occasionally pleaded with her father to stop berating her, she almost always kept quiet or accused Drain of bringing on the abuse with her rebellion.
The Phelps family, too, manifested a paradoxical blend of intellectual curiosity and abusive behavior-policing. In many ways, they cut against the common understanding of fundamentalists as Bible-reading bumpkins who’ve never seen the inside of a secular classroom. Fred Phelps and several of his children have law degrees and run the successful Phelps-Chartered law firm in Topeka. In Drain’s account, Phelps’s daughter Shirley Phelps-Roper, who has become the de facto leader of Westboro, comes off as a veritable superwoman who somehow works at the firm, manages virtually all the church’s accounting and media relations, micromanages members’ lives, parents 11 children, and always made time to counsel Drain when her own parents were too distant to notice her. Phelps-Roper’s children, including Drain’s close friend, Megan, made the highest grades at their public high school in Topeka, and were generally acknowledged to be more literate in history and politics than most adults.
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But these impressive achievements serve a sinister purpose. Phelps-Roper uses her energy as an administrator and parent to keep tight control over Westboro members, especially her children, who follow her example in loudly denouncing “fags” and “fag enablers” like Tyra Banks. Though Drain seems grateful for the genuine concern and guidance Phelps-Roper extended to her, it’s difficult to take even a glance at her Phelps-Roper’s Twitter feeds without getting nauseous.
ReplyDeleteWhile Drain doesn’t exactly provide a satisfying reason why Westboro’s extremism appealed to her formerly atheist father, it’s clear that he was enamored with Phelps-Roper and driven by an overwhelming desire to impress her. Almost immediately after making contact, his critical documentary began to transform into pro-Westboro propaganda, described on YouTube as “showing the lighter, more funny side of this very unusual cult.” In many right-wing Christian movements, the energy and confidence of people like Phelps-Roper provide a powerful sense of identity, of self-definition against the surrounding culture that can be intoxicating. Inside Westboro, Phelps-Roper’s seeming omnipresence in church members’ lives helps create a bond that is both communal and intellectual: members forge intense relationships debating doctrine, admonishing one another on how to live, and building up each other’s defenses against the outside world.
Unlike in many other cults, young Westboro members aren’t isolated from the world. They all attend public schools and have nearly uncensored access to television. They’re all on Twitter. Westboro adults use every profanity in the book in everyday conversation. Somehow, even amid the rush of hormones and social pressures of high school, most of their teens don’t break away. But Drain’s book hints at a sociological crisis that could be breaking the church apart: the lack of church-approved partners for Westboro’s upcoming young adults, most of whom are too closely related to marry one another. (Drain’s family is one of very few in the church not related to the Phelpses.) Sensing the younger generation’s alarm, Westboro leaders have spun out increasingly bizarre edicts on relationships, including, Drain writes, a blanket condemnation of marriage.
It may be sex, as well as growing doubts about the harsh regime inside Westboro, that’s motivating young members closer and closer to the center to defect. Four of Fred Phelps's 13 children had previously left the church, as did Shirley’s son, Josh, who met a girl at his job at Sears. On February 6, just before the release of Drain’s book, Megan Phelps-Roper, now 27, and her 19-year-old sister Grace, announced that they, too, had made their escape. Like Drain, who is now engaged and works as a nurse in Connecticut, they expressed regret and sorrow for having been a part of Westboro’s hate. But they face the overwhelming task of building a new identity, entirely cut off from the world they’ve known.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/03/05/banished-lauren-drain-on-growing-up-in-the-westboro-baptist-church.html
Lauren Drain, Former Westboro Baptist Member, Says Group 'Brainwashed' And 'Manipulated' Her
ReplyDeleteHuffington Post March 6, 2013
Brainwashed. Manipulated. Controlled.
Those are the words former Westboro Baptist Church (WBC) member Lauren Drain used to describe her time as part of the controversial organization during an interview Monday on "Piers Morgan Tonight."
Drain, now 27, was thrown out of the WBC at the age of 22. She has recently written a memoir about her experiences.
On Monday, Drain told Morgan about the control WBC members wield, especially over children in the group.
"They control what you believe, what you say, what you do, what friends you have," Drain said. "They say everyone on the outside's evil. And they don't allow any outside influence at all."
WBC members claim to speak for God, Drain said, which is how they dismiss outsiders who criticize the group for its virulently hateful rhetoric.
"It's unfortunate and it's atrocity, the things that they do and say -- horrible things they do and say," Drain told Morgan. "But yeah, they claim that they're speaking for God."
In her book, Drain writes that she ultimately began to question some of the group's core teachings, which she believed contradicted God's message. That's when the group, as well as her entire family, cast her out forever.
But Drain still has three siblings "still stuck" inside the church, and that's what still scares and saddens her.
"They have no opportunity to see any type of outside influence, any type of other perspective on God, any other type of knowledge of a good life or good people," Drain told Morgan. "They have no idea there is happiness, and life and forgiveness on the outside."
Since leaving the WBC, Drain has worked to distance herself from the group's stigma. She's appeared in a NOH8 campaign ad and participated in candid Reddit Ask Me Anything.
Perhaps spurred on by Drain's example, two other former members, Megan Phelps-Roper and her younger sister, Grace, publicly announced in February that they had fled the church. They also apologized for their actions.
see video at: http://cnn.com/video/?/video/us/2013/03/05/pmt-drain-ex-member-westboro-baptist-church.cnn
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/06/lauren-drain-westboro-baptist-brainwashed-piers-morgan_n_2823093.html