Making Sense - Sam Harris - October 08, 2019


#171 — Escaping a Christian Cult

Hosted by
Sam Harris
#170 — The Great Uncoupling #172 — Among the Deplorables

Episode Stats


Length

41 minutes

Words per minute

177.56

Word count

7,444

Sentence count

—

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

12

sentences flagged

Hate speech

8

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Megan Phelps-Roper is a writer and former member of the Westboro Baptist Church who left in 2012 and is now an educator on topics related to extremism and communication across ideological lines. She also has a new book, Unollow, a memoir of loving and leaving the church. In this episode, we discuss her time in the church, what it was like to be a member, and what it's like to leave. We also discuss the history of the church and its impact on the LGBTQ community, as well as some of the controversy surrounding the church's anti-gay and anti-proseudosist policies. Finally, we answer a question from a listener on the topic of gay conversion therapy, and answer some questions solicited by the internet. I hope you enjoy this episode of the podcast as much as I enjoyed writing it. Make sense of it! -Sam Harris Thank you so much for listening to the Making Sense Podcast, and for supporting the making sense podcast. Please don't forget to subscribe to the show and share it on your socials! You'll get a discount on future episodes of the show if you do so! I don't want you miss out on the show because I'll be paying attention to the quality of the quality and quantity of the content you receive from the show. My apologies for the show, and I do not want you to miss any future episodes, I want to make sure you won't miss any new episodes. - Sam harris . Thanks for the inconvenience, making sense! - making sense? -- - Sam Harris -- I'm making sense -- and I'll make sense? -- and not miss any more than that? -- Thank you? -- "Make sense" -- -- not yet? -- I'll get back on the podcast? -- please let me know what you think of it? -- or do you agree with it? ? -- or don't miss the show? -- it's not enough? -- you'll be making sense, right? -- so you can be sure you'll have a chance to know that you'll hear about it, or you'll know that it's better than that you're making sense in the future? -- not better than you'll get the right way to understand what you can do that? -- enough of that, will you know? -- thank you? - I'll know you'll understand that?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 welcome to the making sense podcast this is sam harris okay very short intro today
00:00:23.500 just two things reminding supporters of the show to subscribe to the private rss feed
00:00:31.420 please go to my website log in preferably on mobile and go to the subscriber content page
00:00:40.440 where you can push a button for your favorite podcasting app and get the private feed then
00:00:46.300 you should be seeing this show appear in your podcatcher with a red making sense icon not
00:00:53.440 a black one and then you will not miss any content because a few things are changing and i don't want
00:01:00.340 you to fall through the cracks sorry for the inconvenience and finally with regards to my
00:01:06.920 previous podcast with andrew mcafee whose book is more from less many of you love that podcast
00:01:13.380 and i just want to let you know that his book is now available this week publishing on tuesday
00:01:20.040 the 8th of october and now for today's guest who also has a book publishing this week my guest
00:01:28.980 today is megan phelps roper megan is an amazing woman she's been on the podcast before her book
00:01:36.820 is unfollow a memoir of loving and leaving the westboro baptist church and megan is a writer
00:01:43.880 and uh formerly a member of the westboro baptist church which she left in 2012 and she's now an
00:01:51.300 educator on topics related to extremism and communication across ideological lines as you'll
00:01:57.900 hear she's very well placed to do that and really just an amazingly resilient and wise and
00:02:05.240 together person given her background that is no small miracle so without further delay i bring you
00:02:13.940 megan phelps roper
00:02:15.140 i am here with megan phelps roper megan thanks for coming back on the podcast it's really good to be
00:02:25.000 back so uh you have been really busy the last time we spoke on the podcast you just had a twitter
00:02:34.320 feed if i'm not mistaken and now you have a daughter first and most important but you also
00:02:39.260 have a book and uh i think a movie that will be based on the book you you've been you've been very
00:02:45.240 busy yeah there's been a lot going on it's kind of it's kind of funny for a long time i felt like
00:02:51.100 everything i was doing was really reactive you know somebody was asking me to come speak somewhere
00:02:56.160 or you know talk about westboro and my life and everything and then when it came time to write this
00:03:02.540 book this was the first thing that i actually had to say i want to do this and then to and that was a
00:03:08.320 little bit and i think i think we talked about that a little bit last time just that feeling of
00:03:13.280 you know not wanting to having spent my entire life telling people how to live to now say okay you
00:03:19.840 guys now i have it all figured out and let me tell you what the answers are now right right so
00:03:25.040 obviously that's not the tone i take in the book and that's not the tone i take in real life
00:03:28.680 but definitely it's kind of a little bit of a mental hurdle to to get over yeah yeah well it's
00:03:34.880 certainly quite a task to decide to sit down and write a book as well and and um you've written
00:03:41.180 really a wonderful one to read and i think our conversation will not do the book justice
00:03:47.380 deliberately i just want people to read it the book is unfollow and it's your your memoir and your
00:03:53.400 account of leaving the westboro baptist church and on the last podcast we we spoke you know a fair
00:04:01.640 amount about your life and what it was like to be in the church i think we should recapitulate a little
00:04:06.980 bit of that just so people have a sense of what's going on here but you know then we'll move on to
00:04:12.620 some other topics and also i got questions solicited from twitter which i want to cover sure i guess look
00:04:19.900 i think you have to tell people who don't know and and that will be some significant percentage of
00:04:24.700 people i think just what is the westboro baptist church and how did it start the westboro baptist
00:04:32.400 church is a group of about 70 to 80 people and it's made up almost entirely of my extended family
00:04:39.920 and they have become really well known in the past it's been almost 30 years now since they started
00:04:46.800 this picketing ministry they would go we would go starting from the time i was five years old
00:04:53.380 in 1991 and protest it started with the lgbtq community and then and then just expanded from
00:05:01.680 there until it included literally everyone outside of our church everyone outside was a legitimate
00:05:06.820 target for our protests the things that they're probably most well known for are again their their
00:05:12.500 protests of the lgbtq community and then also military funerals the funerals of aids victims and
00:05:19.020 anybody that they considered sinners which again is literally everyone so and anybody that got any
00:05:25.280 kind of attention was especially was a target yeah so people have seen pictures of kids and and you
00:05:32.960 were one of those kids holding signs at military funerals and just you know in protest over
00:05:39.820 whatever basketball games and just in random places and the signs the juxtaposition of the
00:05:46.880 kids and the signage is what has been so shocking about this church i mean you know the the classic sign 0.95
00:05:54.060 is god hates fags give me some of the other signs that were most offensive to military families and
00:06:00.720 and others thank god for september 11 thank god for dead soldiers those those especially were 0.95
00:06:06.800 really offensive to a lot of people and then there were ones like pray for more dead soldiers
00:06:11.940 and pray for more dead kids and those ultimately were they became a huge problem for me and i'm i'm happy
00:06:20.760 to say now that you know for you know in the in the time after i left the church i started you know
00:06:26.580 making art you know reaching out to my family and making these arguments to them generally from a
00:06:32.560 scriptural perspective so even though i am no longer a believer i don't believe in the you know
00:06:37.560 the infallibility of the bible i still make arguments to my family from the scriptures because i know that
00:06:44.540 that will be what they find most compelling and so i started to say i'm happy to say that since i left
00:06:49.880 and started making those arguments they they no longer hold those signs and of course i always have
00:06:55.740 to joke that you know not praying for people to die is kind of a low bar you know when it comes to
00:07:01.360 human decency but for westboro it was a huge shift in their position and so that's for me that's a
00:07:06.820 really hopeful sign that just like i was reached they can still be reached that's interesting so i
00:07:12.780 wasn't aware that they had modified their message to that degree because i saw the the louis theroux
00:07:18.280 documentary the the more recent one which we'll talk about so you're saying that they they still
00:07:24.420 hold the the homophobic signs but they don't hold the ones celebrating the deaths of soldiers and
00:07:30.680 children i think they still have the thank god signs because for them that's absolutely still
00:07:36.580 a scriptural you know because they believe in predestination that is a scriptural proposition
00:07:40.380 that you are supposed to thank god for all of his judgments because they are by definition
00:07:45.540 righteous so i think this the thank god signs are still there but the praying for more dead praying
00:07:52.140 for more curses on their enemies those ones are the ones that have that are not part of their
00:07:56.720 repertoire anymore so your grandfather started the church and and what was his background i mean how
00:08:03.300 did he how did he get his revelation or his commitment to a an unusually doctrinaire version
00:08:10.120 of christianity i think he grew up methodist it wasn't it didn't seem like they were particularly
00:08:15.880 or especially religious but then he graduated high school at 16 and got a principal appointment to
00:08:23.260 west point military academy and but he had to wait until he was 17 you know in order to you know
00:08:30.600 matriculate and so in that time between when he graduated and and when he could actually enroll
00:08:35.740 he got saved at a tent revival meeting in the south and he thought it was he thought he needed to become a
00:08:44.280 preacher and so that's what he did so for a while he was a traveling preacher he went to a a few
00:08:49.620 different uh he went to bob jones university which at that time was in tennessee and then also
00:08:55.360 to pray bible institute in in canada and and so he started this religious education and then
00:09:03.580 either he got to topeka you know as a as a traveling preacher he got to topeka kansas
00:09:08.900 and he was preaching at this church called east side baptist and they liked his preaching so much
00:09:16.360 that they asked him to stay in topeka and you know settle down and become the pastor of the
00:09:22.880 westboro baptist church on the other side of town and but how do you think he became more hardcore than
00:09:28.620 anyone within a thousand miles what was that path like for him you know some of this of course is is
00:09:35.680 conjecture it just seems like he had such confidence in his own thinking he was extremely intelligent
00:09:41.480 you know he graduated high school at the top of his class and but it just seemed to like over time
00:09:48.120 and especially once he became the pastor of his own church it just seems like he he had such a sense
00:09:53.880 of certainty that the bible was the literal and infallible word of god and that his understanding
00:09:59.600 of it was necessarily the the truth you know the only righteous view of it he didn't believe in
00:10:06.380 interpretation which is you know it's a that's kind of a feature of groups like westboro they don't
00:10:12.140 believe in interpretation even while they are necessarily interpreting you know they're they
00:10:17.380 have to figure out how to apply these principles to their lives and but yeah they don't believe in it
00:10:23.540 so so they just think that just the the literal understanding as as from their perspective is the truth
00:10:31.160 and and the unquestionable truth so it seems like you know with grams it was just that that sense of
00:10:36.380 certainty that you know made him so sure that everyone else was wrong and that everyone needed
00:10:41.980 to bow to his understanding of it yeah and so and so then he essentially indoctrinated the whole family
00:10:50.220 i mean he didn't have a family yet i suppose and then he started having many children and many
00:10:55.340 grandchildren and you all became the church right yeah so most of the church it's it's about 80 percent
00:11:02.080 80 85 percent is my is my extended family and even now the few outsiders who have joined the church the
00:11:09.620 very few outsiders when you especially when you consider how much attention westboro has gotten
00:11:13.700 the few outsiders who have joined many of them have married into the family as well so you know of
00:11:19.460 this if you saw louis most recent documentary two of my siblings are now engaged to a family that had
00:11:27.460 you know a father had joined with four children three of those four are now either married or engaged
00:11:33.220 and i think the oldest is just in their early 20s yeah and there's a crazy story of the first
00:11:38.140 documentarian who who came from the outside world to cover the church wound up joining it is he is he
00:11:43.880 still a member of the church he is he's one of the elders actually he wasn't the first documentarian
00:11:48.560 who came but he he is the first one who came and stayed right right he he really went native
00:11:54.140 amazing so and from my i mean from my you know perspective he had this you know many of the same
00:12:00.540 features you know just psychologically as gramps you know that that idea of there being one standard
00:12:06.880 that's a really compelling idea that there is one standard that it is a divine and unquestionable
00:12:12.160 standard and that that my judgment has to be followed you know in all things like that's for a lot of
00:12:18.500 people that's that can be really especially especially people with large egos which i believe is
00:12:24.240 absolutely true of both that documentarian you mentioned and and my grandfather well it's also
00:12:29.720 it is the path to perfect clarity right i mean if you're just going to eschew any ambiguity or any
00:12:37.400 burden of of multiple readings and you're just going to find the most literal one possible in every case
00:12:44.500 was that the the algorithm that you guys used as far as rendering interpretations that were not
00:12:51.260 considered interpretations just be as literal as possible in every case basically i mean that was that
00:12:57.820 was definitely definitely a feature of how we read the bible it's kind of funny because i also feel
00:13:02.940 like you know we we tended to choose the most strict interpretation so for instance there was an expositor
00:13:09.360 that we would read a lot named john gill and you know when it came to certain aspects of the new
00:13:15.920 testament you know we're in cases like um you know divorce and remarriage westbrook sees that as
00:13:21.220 always that is always you know forbidden by god because jesus and you know in luke 16 says
00:13:27.980 if you divorce your wife and marry another then that's adultery and if you marry a woman who's been put 0.99
00:13:33.180 away from her husband then that's adultery so it seems like very clear but there are other verses that
00:13:37.860 kind of seem to moderate that position and john gill you know took the more lenient stance and
00:13:43.460 in that case we thought john gill was a heretic so even the people that we looked to for a lot of
00:13:49.480 guidance you know became heretics if they weren't as hardline as we were and the other interesting fact
00:13:55.140 about your grandfather that became an interesting fact about the whole family is that basically
00:13:59.940 everyone became a lawyer right or so many of you became lawyers and there's a family legal firm
00:14:07.640 that you must have had clients that were not religious maniacs so how did all that work
00:14:13.740 yeah no we there i would say most of the clients of phelps chartered are they're not related to us
00:14:20.700 they don't share any kind of ideology with us but my family has a reputation of being good at their jobs
00:14:27.840 not you know overcharging and i feel like it was very similar to the way it was in school people just
00:14:33.700 kind of generally compartmentalize who we are at work or at school versus who we are on the picket
00:14:39.900 line and so yeah i mean there were we had clients that were you know part of the lgbt community so
00:14:45.800 like there was wow there was a couple i remember every time they sent in a payment they were it was a
00:14:50.440 lesbian couple they they wrote on both the check and the envelope with the check they would put the 0.99
00:14:55.600 two female symbols like interlocked and i just thought that was very funny just this this
00:15:00.760 you know that's gonna work yeah but yeah where did the the emphasis on protest come from i mean this
00:15:10.620 is not the usual way that people try to spread their brand of christianity or any other faith how
00:15:17.200 is it that you guys spent so much time with all the kids in tow on the sidewalk with signs well it
00:15:24.700 didn't start with picketing you know there was about a two-year period from you know because i
00:15:30.280 mentioned i think last time the the incident that sparked the picketing at this yes at this local
00:15:36.120 park and so from the time of that you know that incident to when we actually picked up the first
00:15:42.060 picket sign was about two years and in that time my grandfather was going to city council meetings
00:15:47.500 and writing letters to the you know mayor and such and trying to and the park commissioners and trying
00:15:52.140 to figure out how to clean up gage park because it's this this ongoing problem right so to remind 0.93
00:15:58.140 people there was there was a park where gay men were were having sex in the bushes essentially 0.72
00:16:05.820 and i assume all of that's true right this was not your grandfather's malignant not making this up 0.62
00:16:12.700 right no he wasn't making it up i mean he wasn't making up that it was a there was a pickup spot
00:16:17.160 i think once the picketing started and once once he saw the kind of attention that that he could get
00:16:23.820 from that kind of activity that became you know just it just became this something that he couldn't
00:16:30.620 turn away from and even i remember at a certain point after we'd been i was in middle school so we
00:16:35.900 would have been picketing for you know nearly 10 years by then you started when you were five
00:16:40.840 yeah so just before i started kindergarten i started picketing well so yeah so i remember being in middle
00:16:46.980 school and uh and it became it was like a discussion they were having with a newspaper a local
00:16:53.520 newspaper about possibly like like basically if we give you a column a column a weekly column in the
00:16:59.860 newspaper will you stop picketing because if your goal is to reach people you know this is this could
00:17:05.040 be a possible you know this could be a way of doing that and and i remember first being aghast that we
00:17:12.160 would even consider this like it just it didn't occur to me that you know and then of course everybody
00:17:18.140 else in the church seemed to come to the same conclusion like this was not this was not an
00:17:21.960 option like our place is you know there's these phrases from the bible without the camp like we are
00:17:27.040 outside of mainstream society we are not inside talking to these people we are outside because they
00:17:32.400 have cast us out because they have abhorred god and his message and so therefore they abhor us
00:17:37.740 yeah well there's something self-fulfilling about that kind of persecution complex once you tell
00:17:46.140 yourselves a vivid enough story of how separate you are from the rest of human society and all that that
00:17:56.740 entails and you begin to act on that perception as you did you then as if by magic or some perverse
00:18:07.200 irony begin to attract all the hatred that seems to confirm your status as everlasting outsiders 1.00
00:18:15.860 and so your experience be you write about this in the book but your experience even as a young child
00:18:21.860 standing on the sidewalk picketing was the experience of just reaping a kind of an infinite amount of
00:18:30.380 hatred from the rest of society and i can only imagine that experience confirms the sense that
00:18:38.400 you know these people are are irretrievably lost and destined for hell yeah absolutely and i think it
00:18:45.260 was those very human dynamics that kind of pushed us further and further to the extreme as time went on
00:18:51.580 you know because there are passages you know the things that that led us to be praying for our enemies to
00:18:59.160 die and for god to do horrible things to them like that that didn't happen overnight that was that was
00:19:04.980 kind of a i mean in some ways it did happen overnight because it was a sudden shift in doctrine
00:19:09.280 but the theology and the mental state that got us there definitely developed over time and so you know as
00:19:17.340 we're as time goes on you know and the the louder we get the more angry the response gets the more
00:19:24.060 hostile that response gets and so then you can't help but even though we work and this is where you
00:19:30.300 know i i write about this in the book like that moment where it finally hits me that i that i am
00:19:36.180 believing these two completely contradictory things at the same time i'm holding them in my mind together
00:19:42.780 at the same time but never in the same moment so it's this the sense that you know our stated goal
00:19:49.600 for picketing the reason we were out there was the fulfillment of the commandment to love thy neighbor
00:19:55.620 as thyself it's the idea that you go and rebuke your neighbor when you see him sinning because you
00:20:00.880 know that the consequences of that sin is death and curses from god in this life and then hell in the
00:20:07.860 next so ostensibly we're out there because we love these people and we we need to go and warn them
00:20:14.080 and yet because of those dynamics on the picket line we it just pushed us further and further to
00:20:21.040 the to the extreme of we stopped thinking of them in as our neighbors and people that we loved and that
00:20:27.180 we needed to go and preach this to as their only hope for salvation and started thinking of them as
00:20:33.540 these people who are irredeemably lost and hellbound and cursed by god and so now we need to pray for god
00:20:42.580 so we would be demanding we would be standing out there demanding that people repent and we hold
00:20:47.620 these signs repent or perish and then we go in our prayers as we as we arrive to the picket and as we
00:20:53.840 leave the picket for god to preserve them in their sins so it's this again this completely contradictory
00:21:00.680 ideas that i i was simply unaware of at the time i can't remember if we talked about this last time but
00:21:06.700 i think i think i think we must not have because you know you started to read on the podcast the end
00:21:12.700 of faith and you you got to that the part you kind of paused and told the story of about being in paris
00:21:19.460 with your wife and both at the same time trying to avoid the american embassy and then also trying to
00:21:27.680 get a room at a hotel next to the american embassy yeah and i think it just has to do with you know the
00:21:32.780 way that our you know minds process information like in certain contexts and we have you know
00:21:38.100 different we compartmentalize and so we we can hold these completely contradictory ideas at the same time
00:21:44.360 we're just and then when they finally meet when we finally become aware of them we i i don't i think
00:21:49.740 i don't know i can't remember what you said about it but i literally felt insane how could i have
00:21:54.600 believed both of these things at the same time and and the the phrase preserve them in their sin
00:22:00.060 that is that is to say you're praying that god keep them in ignorance so that they merit the the pain
00:22:07.600 of hell or is or does this have some other meaning no yeah that's exactly right that's a theme in in
00:22:14.900 islam as well that's you you encounter this a lot in the quran that you know if god had wanted to 0.98
00:22:21.660 illuminate them and give them faith he would have so you know the fact that the unbelievers are uh blind 1.00
00:22:28.880 to the truth is something that god intends you know you know it's really it's a kind of a perverse
00:22:34.340 vision of a a psychological experiment that's never really honestly run and it's it's not like anyone
00:22:40.700 outside the faith ever had a chance when you when you actually look at the details and this is
00:22:45.980 considered a good thing right and that's actually something that i mean i still currently you know when
00:22:50.820 i i will be reading my family's tweets sometimes and they're written from a perspective
00:22:56.660 perspective of you know as if it were possible for these people whoever that they're accusing and you
00:23:04.220 know demanding repentance from as if it were possible for them to repent even while believing
00:23:09.800 in predestination right or that that things that anything that they have done could have been otherwise
00:23:15.560 they don't believe that it could have been otherwise because it happened it must have happened
00:23:20.600 exactly as god set it up to happen so it's always very funny when they're when they when they try to
00:23:26.980 do that it's like but you don't you don't believe that you don't actually believe that it's possible and
00:23:31.440 yet you are working yourself up into a frenzy of rage getting mad at these people and upset with them
00:23:37.020 for you know for taking the wrong path and for having done these things that you know westboro
00:23:42.300 imagines will lead them to hell and yet from your own perspective from your own theology it could not have been
00:23:48.980 otherwise and so that like that was something that i i also kind of would skim over you know in my own
00:23:56.120 mind when i was still with westboro and mostly people didn't bring it to our attention and so now
00:24:00.880 sometimes it just becomes i just have to say something because it's it is so i don't know it's
00:24:07.780 like at some point like can't you you hope at some point that they will be able to step back long enough
00:24:13.520 to realize that this doesn't make sense yeah it's interesting to see the footage of these protests
00:24:20.800 because there's something it almost has a kind of trolling feel to it i mean i know that you guys
00:24:28.760 believed what you said you believed and but so that was on some level a sincere communication but
00:24:35.600 it's playful enough and kind of arch enough that it just seems like you're also sort of trolling i mean
00:24:43.700 can you explain what how that impression is coming across yeah so i mean it was always very important
00:24:49.940 for us to be happy on the picket line and just generally like we we had to be happy to show that
00:24:56.500 we were content with our lot right that god had given us this ministry and we needed to to be joyful
00:25:02.380 about it even when it was difficult and so that that's kind of just a big part of just the church
00:25:08.600 culture i mean it's just so arresting to see a little girl of any age beaming you know the good
00:25:16.940 vibes of childhood while holding in each hand a sign you know damning people to hell yeah i mean it's
00:25:24.260 just i mean that that's why it does have a perhaps trolling is the wrong framework but it's something
00:25:29.520 not straightforward about the communication it's just a it is a kind of goof that on some level is
00:25:36.800 very high stakes and perverse because you know you know viewed from the outside what's happening here
00:25:42.880 is really a kind of child abuse i mean we have a child you know i.e. you and your siblings in a
00:25:50.360 situation where you're you've been you know truly deprived of you know real world information and
00:25:57.360 have been indoctrinated into this kind of malicious and paranoid worldview and now you're being put to 0.98
00:26:03.640 work to spread it and yet you're this happy little thing in a parka with a god hates fag sign and it's 0.97
00:26:10.800 just it's just such a mind stopper yeah i mean i think you know when people people look at groups 0.93
00:26:17.420 like westboro they see them generally as very like uneducated backwards unhappy people who are just 0.96
00:26:25.900 looking for something you know to be mad about and they have found it in whatever the gay community 1.00
00:26:31.640 or people committing fornication or whatever like so you you see them as just and so there is
00:26:37.160 definitely part of that you know part of the reason it was so important that we show our happiness on the
00:26:42.100 picket line is is to thwart that image and also you know there's there's this bible passage that my mom
00:26:47.260 would quote all the time about how this is the love of god that you keep his commandments
00:26:52.400 and that his commandments are not grievous to you so if god's commandments if it's grievous to you to
00:26:59.360 follow his commandments then clearly you're not one of god's elect you're not one of his people
00:27:03.520 because even if you follow the letter of the law and your spirit isn't in it your heart isn't in it
00:27:10.320 and you're not joyful about it then that's that is unacceptable service to god so i feel like there's
00:27:17.060 there's a whole lot of you know and the fact that we were so happy as part of what and that
00:27:21.640 that dichotomy that you described the juxtaposition between the extremely serious you know negative
00:27:28.560 message and the happiness of the people proclaiming it that was part of what you know got so much
00:27:34.580 attention for the church and were you having religious experiences that you interpreted as
00:27:41.820 confirmation of your faith i mean what was it like apart from just announcing it on the sidewalk and
00:27:49.100 dealing with the the blowback i mean every day we were you know reading the bible memorizing bible
00:27:55.200 verses and and talking about what was happening in the world in light of westborough's understanding
00:28:00.180 of the scriptures for me i mean i i never felt like god was like talking to me or something you know
00:28:06.800 that that wasn't how i experienced religion i experienced it as this very rigid set of rules
00:28:13.340 that it was literally only possible to follow if god was giving you the right kind of heart to
00:28:20.820 to want to do it i experienced religion as as fear you know initially especially as a kid
00:28:28.700 because there was so much yeah fear of hell exactly and and what god would do to you if you stepped out
00:28:34.580 of line i got baptized when i was 13 i had tried to get baptized a little earlier than that a few
00:28:40.560 years earlier but apparently one of my aunts thought i wasn't serious so that closed down that discussion
00:28:46.000 oh see so in that church you you can't get baptized before you demonstrate that you're actually serious
00:28:53.420 in some ideological way yes exactly they do not believe in infant baptism i actually i saw on twitter
00:28:59.820 one of the questions that that your tweet about this are doing this podcast elicited one of the
00:29:04.740 questions was what was one of the funniest things that you thought was a sin at the church you know
00:29:10.100 now looking back and i think one of the funniest things that i i wrote about this in the book was
00:29:14.560 when i look back at my grandfather gave a sermon about infant baptism and without any sense of
00:29:20.760 hyperbole whatsoever he compared that act of sprinkling some water and saying a few words you know
00:29:27.760 about this infant and and their hopes that they go to heaven or whatever and they're washed in the
00:29:33.100 blood of jesus like he compared that to literally burning the child alive and sacrificed to a pagan god
00:29:39.100 and that was exactly and when i look back at that now that's a little extreme yeah yeah but but yeah so
00:29:45.720 they do not believe in infant baptism at all so you have to you have to demonstrate an orderly walk
00:29:51.340 you have to talk to all of the members of the church and so they say like if there's this
00:29:56.920 question can any forbid water so is there any reason that anybody in the church has that you should
00:30:02.780 not be baptized as long as the answer is no then then you can be baptized so you know kids as young
00:30:09.940 as like i think six seven eight have been baptized at westborough well it's a much stronger
00:30:16.620 ceremony i mean it's it sounds like it has just far more import to it i mean there's obviously no
00:30:25.740 content on the the infant side where when you're getting baptized and you can't even speak a human
00:30:32.660 language and so this is the real thing if you are demonstrating you have sufficient commitment to the
00:30:39.200 to the creed that's that's where you actually transition to something significant so
00:30:44.520 you were so you got baptized at 13 but so so the experience where that was going from sorry you
00:30:51.600 you asked a question but i i've forgotten what it was that led me there yeah it was just whether
00:30:56.240 you were having religious experience of any kind and interpreting anything in the world apart from
00:31:02.960 the the harassment you were getting from the outside as confirmation of the truth of your faith
00:31:08.820 yeah i mean obviously that the interaction with outsiders and how much they hated it you know
00:31:14.520 especially given all those passages in the new testament where jesus is saying if you follow me
00:31:19.320 the world is going to hate you yeah you know blessed are ye when men shall hate you and revile you and
00:31:24.820 persecute you for my name's sake for so did their fathers to the prophets so we saw ourselves in that 1.00
00:31:31.480 you know in that line of righteous people who had who had delivered the word of god to a world that
00:31:37.240 that despised them and it that so there's no question that was a huge part of it but you know
00:31:42.700 just because of how you know everything in the church you know this this extraordinary amount of
00:31:49.480 love and support that you get as a church member as long as you are a member in good standing all of
00:31:55.060 those you know i felt enveloped in the love of god you know by those things and because they teach you
00:32:02.760 you know your own worthlessness from such a young age that you are of yourself you have nothing
00:32:08.440 that god didn't give you and and that you know of your you know any any part of you you know that's
00:32:15.260 you like that's that's all corrupt and and and you know there's this passage talks about their
00:32:21.260 righteousness is as filthy rags right so it's just you you are taught from such a young age that you
00:32:26.340 are nothing and that you have nothing and that all things come from god and so you know the sense
00:32:33.020 that the idea that you could have this really wonderful family and people who loved and cared
00:32:40.020 about you and showed you that in innumerable ways you know all of that felt like a wonderful gift from
00:32:47.120 god you know i i felt the same way singing in church on sundays you know all these songs that talk
00:32:52.820 about how worthless you are as a human being and how graceful god is and how merciful to have taken
00:32:58.440 any pity on you and given you you know any good thing that just tells you how what a wonderful god 0.99
00:33:04.060 he is and how generous because clearly you are too worthless to deserve any of this on your own 0.53
00:33:08.720 yeah well it really is a complex picture because you know at first glance from outside again this just 0.90
00:33:16.380 seems like pure misfortune i mean you were unlucky to be born to the people you were born to
00:33:22.300 and insulated from sort of a normal happy life in the modern world and you're very lucky to have
00:33:31.900 gotten out and i i would certainly sign off on the on that final claim but your experience of being in
00:33:40.420 your family and being your your mother's daughter and your father's daughter uh and even your grandfather's
00:33:46.460 granddaughter is far more complex than that and i mean you are clearly a remarkable person and you
00:33:54.000 you got some gifts from this ordeal as well i mean just how do you view your childhood and
00:34:01.580 and what you got from this experience you know i i think about this a lot now because i now that i am a
00:34:09.460 mother and and the kinds of things that i want you know there are so many aspects of my upbringing that
00:34:16.880 i want to give my daughter and you know i think i talked about this i think i talked about this last
00:34:23.240 time i definitely wrote about it in the book and it's something that was really powerful to me this
00:34:28.260 moment where it was just a few months after i left and i was you know at the shabbat table of
00:34:34.560 this rabbi that i had protested you know a few years earlier with this you know your rabbi is a
00:34:39.980 whore sign being held by my sister and david abbott ball who he was the one who invited me there and he 0.83
00:34:47.560 had he was the one who made that first point on twitter that first allowed me to in my own mind
00:34:54.060 challenge westborough's teachings so as i'm sitting there with him just a few months after i left and
00:34:59.200 feeling like a complete betrayer that there was i had you know completely i walked away from
00:35:05.840 from my family and everyone i loved and having betrayed everything that i stood for and and i just
00:35:13.760 felt so overcome with guilt and shame and and and you know in that moment for david what he said was
00:35:22.480 you know in a lot of ways leaving westborough baptist church was the most westborough baptist church
00:35:28.080 thing you could have done they're the ones he what he told me and my sister he said you are your
00:35:33.060 parents children they're the ones that taught you to stand up for what you believe in no matter what
00:35:37.980 it cost you they just never imagined you'd be standing up to them and that was the first time i realized
00:35:44.000 that i because i basically had accepted westborough's framing of the whole situation you know that i had
00:35:52.560 walked away from my family that i had rejected all these people that i loved and you know being able
00:35:58.820 to start to see it with nuance and to realize no i didn't walk away from my family i walked away from
00:36:05.280 the church i walked away from the ideology that i saw had come to see as extremely destructive not just
00:36:12.340 for the people that the church targeted but for the church itself and all of its members and then
00:36:17.500 and then also to to look and look back and realize that there was so much of my upbringing that was
00:36:24.040 really wonderful i mean it's the idea of and and of course you know you have to also keep in mind all
00:36:31.300 of the destructive parts of it like it's not like i'm i'm not trying to take away from the
00:36:36.220 destructiveness of it or or the pain that we cause so many other people but to to look back and see this
00:36:42.480 this idea of you know that we were motivated by you know at least initially by this desire to
00:36:49.060 love our neighbor right that we as a group of 70 to 80 people could be so dedicated and so active that
00:36:57.220 we could get that much you know attention for our cause and it's not just attention right it's it's
00:37:03.580 this idea of dedicating yourself to something and sacrificing for it in such a way that you you can
00:37:11.040 accomplish the objectives that you set out to so like that kind of you know perseverance and the
00:37:16.660 diligence the hard work that went into that the very you know spending so much time trying to get
00:37:25.060 to the bottom of a thing and examining it from so many different angles so obviously i think you know
00:37:30.720 now a lot of the things that we spent a lot of time on were not good but the process itself is
00:37:37.120 something that i absolutely still want to emulate if that makes sense yeah so you mentioned twitter
00:37:43.680 a couple of times and you are really if anyone is a social media success story it is you because
00:37:51.120 twitter was your way out of this and you then met your husband on twitter tell me why twitter is a good
00:37:59.280 thing for one person on this earth so i mean for me twitter yes twitter was the way out that was
00:38:08.100 another question that somebody asked in response to your tweet yesterday was it was about do you think
00:38:14.100 you would still be part of westboro if not for twitter and i have every reason to believe that i would
00:38:20.300 be because even though you know and i write i write about this in the book this whole process of
00:38:25.440 this group of you know older men in the church kind of taking over as the you know becoming the elders
00:38:31.920 like taking over as this you know this church leadership role and and a bunch of other things that
00:38:37.240 happened that helped me see that we were doing wrong but i just i have every reason to believe that
00:38:43.200 without those conversations on twitter without having come to the realization that we could be wrong
00:38:50.960 about something before that conversation with david abbott ball you know where he points out this
00:38:56.340 internal contradiction in our theology before that i always felt like i had the answer to everything
00:39:03.120 there was not you know we spent hours hours hundreds thousands of hours on the picket line
00:39:09.860 talking to people about these doctrines and westboro's theology and you know there wasn't a person outside of
00:39:16.520 our church who agreed with it all and so we're constantly being challenged by it and you know
00:39:21.660 doing that from the time i was five years old and you know by the time i'm you know in my mid-20s on
00:39:28.420 twitter the feeling that we had an answer for everything that the doctrine was airtight you mentioned that
00:39:34.280 my family is full of lawyers and that's they're extremely intelligent analytical people and we spent a lot of
00:39:39.680 time memorizing the evidence aka the bible so that that we always were ready to give an answer to the
00:39:46.400 people who asked these questions so i had so much faith in the church and their understanding of
00:39:52.820 the bible their interpretation of how the world worked and i've mentioned all this the sense that
00:39:59.040 you have of yourself as being just this depraved human being and and you know that bible verse about
00:40:05.380 how you can't trust your heart the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked and who can
00:40:11.200 know it so having that be your framework and then having this this group of people who it feels like
00:40:18.120 this divine unquestionable institution until that came into question for me because of those
00:40:25.700 conversations on twitter anytime something didn't quite make sense i always assumed that the problem
00:40:32.400 was in me that the error was in my own thinking or because i had some kind of depraved heart or satan
00:40:38.620 was whispering in my ear you know those this is the framework i was dealing with yeah i mean that is
00:40:43.780 the way any religion or cult hermetically seals itself against criticism from the outside i mean so
00:40:51.020 so any point that seems unanswerable or you know any blow that seems to land can be reinterpreted as
00:40:58.440 you know your own fallibility you can't trust your own intuitions here who can understand god's ways
00:41:05.440 or that you know you're actually in dialogue with and being tempted by satan or some you know divine
00:41:12.800 adversary yep and that that was if not for twitter i just have i have every reason to believe that i
00:41:20.680 would have continued to do the same thing i had always done so what was the moment on twitter where
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