Banished: Surviving My Years in the Westboro Baptist Church
You've likely heard of the Westboro Baptist Church. Perhaps you've seen their pickets on the news, the members holding signs with messages that are too offensive to copy here, protesting at events such as the funerals of soldiers, the 9-year old victim of the recent Tucson shooting, and Elizabeth...
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You've likely heard of the Westboro Baptist Church. Perhaps you've seen their pickets on the news, the members holding signs with messages that are too offensive to copy here, protesting at events such as the funerals of soldiers, the 9-year old victim of the recent Tucson shooting, and Elizabeth Edwards, all in front of their grieving families. The WBC is fervently anti-gay, anti-Semitic, and anti- practically everything and everyone. And they aren't going anywhere: in March, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of the WBC's right to picket funerals. Since no organized religion will claim affiliation with the WBC, it's perhaps more accurate to think of them as a cult. Lauren Drain was thrust into that cult at the age of 15, and then spat back out again seven years later. BANISHED is the first look inside the organization, as well as a fascinating story of adaptation and perseverance. Lauren spent her early years enjoying a normal life with her family in Florida. But when her formerly liberal and secular father set out to produce a documentary about the WBC, his detached interest gradually evolved into fascination, and he moved the entire family to Kansas to join the church and live on their compound. Over the next seven years, Lauren fully assimilated their extreme beliefs, and became a member of the church and an active and vocal picketer. But as she matured and began to challenge some of the church's tenets, she was unceremoniously cast out from the church and permanently cut off from her family and from everyone else she knew and loved. BANISHED is the story of Lauren's fight to find herself amidst dramatic changes in a world of extremists and a life in exile.
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Format: hardcover
ISBN:
9781455512423 (1455512427)
Publish date: March 5th 2013
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Pages no: 304
Edition language: English
Category:
Non Fiction,
Autobiography,
Memoir,
Biography,
Book Club,
Adult,
Religion,
Sociology,
Biography Memoir,
Abuse,
Cults
bookshelves: published-2013, spring-2015, autobiography-memoir, bullies, christian, doo-lally, foxtrotted-uniform, games-people-play, fundamentalism, moral-high-ground, nonfiction, north-americas, kansas, ouch, cults-societies-brotherhoods, religion, rid-the-world-of-tyrants, twats-in-real-life, wr...
I felt like I needed to take a long shower after finishing this book. I considered abandoning it several times as it continually made my skin crawl. It doesn't help that the "victim" of the book is very unlikeable. The title "Surviving My Years in the Westboro Baptist Church" suggests that Lauren Dr...
This was an interesting book. The writing itself was not that good, but that did not detract from the experience of reading this. I think Drain needed to write this, for herself: to vent, to rationalize, and it was a form of therapy for her. I respect that narrative. I will say one thing about the ...
I picked this book up largely because I was hoping to learn why the WBC pickets military funerals, funerals of victims of violent tragedies, and other assorted events entirely unrelated to their core message of "god hates gay people." I did not learn this. Instead, I learned that the WBC will pick...
The book focuses a lot on her time in the WBC community rather than her recovery from it. The last twenty pages (if that) are devoted to Drain's life after she has been banished. I wish there was more of that than of the inner scandals of the Phelps family. While I did find it interesting (yet not s...