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Hello hello, hello and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about a church.
But this is no normal church.
Its name is the Westboro Baptist Church, and the not normally sensational BBC decided its members deserved the title of the most hated family in America.
So in today's episode we'll tell the story about where it came from, why it is so controversial and almost universally reviled, and learn about how some but not all of its members saw the light.
I should add as a little disclaimer that the reason this church is so controversial is because it holds some deeply offensive beliefs about homosexuality in particular.
And while I hope it is obvious that these are beliefs that I also find abhorrent and in no way endorse, I wanted to give you that little warning before we get into it.
Okay then, let's get started.
There is a brilliant British journalist you might have heard about called Louis Theroux.
He became something of a household name in the late 1990s after making a documentary series called Louis Theroux's Weird Weekends.
The premise was a simple one.
He would go and spend time with a group of people with unusual beliefs or hobbies, people who existed on the fringes of society.
The first episode was with TV evangelists born-again evangelical Christians and then he went on to visit people who believed in UFOs, people working in the porn industry survivalists wrestlers, black nationalists, white nationalists, bodybuilders and so on.
They were extremely popular from the get-go, and Theroux became known for his soft, non-judgmental style.
He was there as an observer, and he had a particular knack for making people feel comfortable.
He wasn't there to judge, no matter how odd or disagreeable someone's opinion was.
He wasn't there to tell someone that they were wrong or that they shouldn't do something.
He had a particular empathy that was rare with interviewers. and is still rare today.
He would spend time with drug addicts who were clearly on a road to self-destruction.
He spent time with Jimmy Savile, a man who would later be outed as one of the UK's most vicious paedophiles.
He spent time with neo-Nazis, fraudsters, westerners getting married to very young Thai girls.
And through all of this, he attempted to shine a light into the personal lives of these individuals.
And in 2007, he released an episode about the week he had spent with the Westboro Baptist Church.
The name given to the episode was The Most Hated Family in America.
It might sound like an extreme thing to say, especially coming from a mild-mannered Englishman working for the BBC.
But it was hard to dispute.
At that time, the members of the church, the Phelps family, spent their days protesting at the funerals of American soldiers who had been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
This was not an anti-war protest.
They weren't protesting against the government's decision to send American troops to war.
They weren't protesting against the individual soldiers who were fighting, or at least not directly.
They would stand by the side of the road opposite where the funerals were taking place and hold up signs saying things like God hates America, America is doomed or, most famously, God hates fags.
A fag is is a derogatory term in American English for a gay person.
And as a linguistic sidenote and cross-cultural curiosity, if you say fag in British English, it is slang for something very different.
It means cigarette.
But the Westboro Baptist Church was not on an anti-smoking crusade.
According to the Westboro Baptist Church, American soldiers were being killed in Iraq as a punishment for America's liberal attitude and society's growing tolerance towards homosexuality.
So the reaction of the Westboro Baptist Church, doing what it claimed was the Lord's work, was to stand outside the funerals of dead soldiers with these deeply offensive signs, singing songs and rejoicing in the deaths of their fellow Americans.
They rejoiced because, in their minds and according to their interpretation of the Bible, this was an act of God and everything God does is good.
Now we're not going to get into any theological discussions here, And I should add that this interpretation of the Bible has been soundly rejected by every other church as incorrect and as a deeply offensive misinterpretation of the scriptures.
And, as you might imagine, the presence of the Westboro Baptist Church outside these funerals, as families were trying to mourn their loved ones, was never appreciated.
People would roll down their car windows and hurl abuse at them.
Passers-by would stop to confront them, and those wanting to do things by the letter of the law might file claims against them or attempt to stop them from coming close to a funeral.
As a result, the members of this church, which really consists of one extended family and a few stragglers, a few hangers-on, were almost universally loathed.
It's not hard to understand why Louis Theroux thought they deserved the title of the most hated family in America or, as the Southern Poverty Law Center put it, arguably the most obnoxious and rabid hate group in America.
So where did all of this hate come from?
Well, at the center of it all was this extended family, the Phelps family.
The head of the family, a man called Fred Phelps, founded the Westboro Baptist Church in 1955 in Topeka, Kansas in the American Midwest.
He was a civil rights lawyer by training, which might seem like an odd starting point for someone who had gone to form his own hate organization.
It is especially odd, as he was a pretty successful and well-respected lawyer who received awards for his work against racial discrimination.
That was, before he was disbarred, forbidden from practising law due to his offensive beliefs.
And this belief really came down to one thing, a visceral hatred of gay people.
The entire religious doctrine that he preached was all about the supposed sin of homosexuality.
He would preach fiery sermons about how everyone was going to hell, not just gay people, but anyone who didn't recognise and protest the homosexualisation of America.
Every death, every natural disaster, every bad thing that happened in the world was, in his view, God's way of punishing the United States for its tolerance towards homosexuality.
And as is not uncommon in Southern Baptist churches, he frequently preached about Judgment Day, when Christ would come again and anyone who has ever lived would be judged by God.
Those who had lived a good life would be saved, and those who hadn't well, they would be subjected to eternal damnation.
And in Phelps's book.
By his teachings, only a very select group would not be condemned to eternal damnation.
Only he and his congregation, his followers.
Now, when he first formed the church, it wasn't quite so radical in its beliefs, but his fiery temper put regular churchgoers off, and his church was frequented essentially only by his family members.
Fortunately, at least in terms of filling up all the seats in the church.
He had a large family 13 children and around 50 grandchildren.
These children grew up in this completely isolated environment of extreme hate.
All they knew was the teachings of this powerful man, their father or grandfather, who drilled into them that everyone was going to hell and the only way to avoid this fate was by doing the Lord's work which, in his mind, was protesting things like funerals, going anywhere where they could attract the curious eyes of the media.
This started for good in the early 1990s, and has continued, well, until the present day.
More than 30 years of standing at funerals with offensive signs, rejoicing in in the deaths of strangers.
At first, their protests focused on events related to gay rights, claiming that natural disasters, terrorist attacks and even diseases like AIDS were divine punishment for America's growing tolerance of homosexuality.
They gained particular notoriety in 1998 for picketing the funeral of a young gay man called Matthew Shepard was brutally murdered in a hate crime.
So, while the family of this man and the country at large was coming to terms with the fact that this young man had been viciously killed for being gay, there was the Westboro Baptist Church standing outside his funeral, cheering and celebrating his death.
It is pretty horrible stuff indeed, but by the mid-2000s, their focus had expanded.
They began protesting the funerals of American soldiers, claiming that their deaths in war were also God's punishment for the country's sins.
This was what shocked so many people.
Even in a country deeply divided on politics and religion, the idea of protesting at a soldier's funeral was almost universally considered beyond the pale.
And yet, for the Phelps family, it wasn't just a protest.
It was a mission.
They weren't trying to win support.
They weren't looking to persuade people to join them.
In fact, they seemed to delight in how much people hated them.
Because in their worldview, The fact that they were hated was proof that they were doing God's work.
Fred Phelps often quoted a passage from the Bible John, chapter 15, verse 18, where Jesus tells his disciples if the world hates you, you know it has hated me before it hated you.
Now clearly, Fred Phelps was not the first, nor will he be the last person to have taken a section of a religious text and interpreted it in a way that has legitimized a deeply offensive action.
But it was this passage that he kept returning to that allowed him to explain to his family that what they were doing was right.
To them, the fact that they were so reviled and attacked wasn't evidence that they were wrong.
It was proof that they were righteous.
This mentality was what made them so difficult to deal with.
They weren't interested in discussion.
They didn't care about being hated.
And, if anything, they actively sought out ways to provoke as much outrage as possible, which was why they protested at high profile events that they knew the media would be at.
So when Louis Theroux arrived in 2007, He wasn't just visiting a strange little church.
He was stepping into a self-contained world, one where hatred was seen as a virtue, where children were raised to celebrate the suffering of others and where outsiders were seen as agents of Satan.
It made for pretty powerful viewing.
It's still available on a few streaming services and it's called The Most Hated Family in America, if you're interested in watching it for yourself.
There are some particularly difficult moments in the documentary where Louis talks to the children, some just three or four years old and others who are teenagers.
With the younger kids.
It was, of course, sad to see these tiny little things holding up these vile messages or repeating the same offensive lines as their parents, but he felt more sorrow than anger.
After all, you can't really be angry at a child that age.
They don't really understand what they're saying, they know nothing else.
And if they've grown up in that environment and that is what they've been told by everyone they have ever met of course that's what they will say.
But more interesting and challenging were his interactions with the teenage girls of the family.
These teenagers, particularly a pair of sisters called Megan and Grace Phelps Roper, were articulate, intelligent and, at least on the surface, utterly convinced of the beliefs they had been raised with.
Unlike the younger children, who simply repeated what they'd been taught, the teenagers were old enough to debate.
They quoted Bible verses, they had rehearsed arguments and they firmly believed that what they were doing was an act of love warning sinners before the day of judgment came.
What was especially striking was how normal they seemed.
In another life they might have been the kind of bright, confident young women who excelled at school, played sports or had wide social circles.
Instead, they spent their time standing on street corners holding signs that provoked rage, disgust and sometimes even violence from passers-by.
They talked about boys that they had struck up conversations with that in another life might have become friends, perhaps even boyfriends, but instead quickly retreated to admitting that these boys would burn in hell.
And that was actually a good thing, because this was the will of God.
And yet, despite their apparent confidence in front of the cameras, it seemed that somewhere beneath the surface there were seeds of doubt.
At one point in the documentary, Louis Theroux asks one of the teenagers Megan, if she ever wonders what life outside the church might be like.
She hesitates for a moment.
Then she smiles back at him and insists that she is completely committed to her faith.
But it seems that that hesitation was real, or at least was the sign of a little seed that was germinating.
Perhaps that seed might have been planted right there and then by Louis Theroux.
For just a few years later, these two articulate sisters, Megan and Grace Phelps Roper, the ones who had so vigorously defended the doctrine of the Westboro Baptist Church, left.
Now, like any cult, leaving the Westboro Baptist Church was not just a matter of walking out the door and saying thanks.
That was fun, but I've decided it's not for me anymore.
For those born into it, as these two were, the church was their entire world.
It wasn't just their place of worship.
It was their home, their school, their social life, and their family.
These girls' grandfather was the grand patriarch Fred Phelps, the man who had started it all, and their mother had taken over his duties as the day-to-day head of the church.
These girls weren't just leaving a church.
They were cutting themselves off from everything and everyone they had ever known.
In the case of Megan Phelps Roper, her transformation had taken place over the course of several years.
She later did a TED talk about it.
But long story short.
She was in charge of the church's social media accounts, from which she would normally viciously attack its critics.
After a while, however, people started to engage with her on a more friendly level.
Strangers on the internet started to point out inconsistencies in her argument, all while treating her with the respect that she had thought non-believers were incapable of.
Fast forward a few years and she came to the conclusion that perhaps the rest of the world wasn't evil and wasn't going to burn in hell.
And in 2012, she left the church behind.
Since then, she has gone on to become a vocal critic of it, as well as offered her unique perspective of what life was actually like as part of the most hated family in America.
And what has happened to the church since then, you might ask?
Well, the founder, patriarch and cult leader Fred Phelps died in 2014.
When his death was announced, Cars drove around the neighbourhood honking their horns in celebration.
This man, who had been a scourge, a black mark on the city of Topeka, was finally no more.
The tables had turned, and now it was his death that was being celebrated.
But, according to some reports, he may even have had a change of heart towards the end of his life.
In 2013, just a year before he died, Phelps was seen expressing support for a more compassionate approach.
Perhaps being gay wasn't the horrendous sin that he had spent his life claiming it was.
Perhaps, dare I say it, he might have had a tinge of regret for all the hate and anguish he had caused.
Even if this was the case, he had clearly done enough indoctrination of his kids and grandkids that they were firmly committed to the church's extreme doctrine.
Some former members have come forward to say that in the last few years of his life, Fred Phelps was actually excommunicated by his own family for showing too much sympathy towards outsiders.
This is not necessarily to say that he is deserving of great amounts of sympathy, having spent 60 years spewing hatred, but perhaps it is indicative that even the most ardent of beliefs can be changed.
And Megan and Grace Phelps-Roper weren't the only ones who left.
Over the years, dozens of other members have also escaped and given outsiders a peek into the day-to-day goings-on of this extremely offensive organisation.
However, despite losing a bunch of its members, the Westboro Baptist Church still exists today.
It remains a small, isolated group, still holding up offensive signs, still protesting funerals, still making headlines from time to time.
But its influence has faded.
Where once it shocked and outraged, now it is often dismissed as a sad relic of a hateful past, a fringe group clinging to extremism and just updating its signs to claim that, whatever is the latest natural disaster or global threat, from hurricanes to the COVID-19 pandemic, that this is the will of God.
The patriarch and man who started it all might be long gone.
But even without him, his descendants could still make a strong claim for the title of the most hated family in America.
Okay then, that is it for today's episode on the Westboro Baptist Church.
As always, I'd love to know what you thought about this episode.
Have you heard of the Westboro Baptist Church?
Have you seen the Louis III documentary on it or any of the other documentaries?
Are there organisations like this in your country?
I would love to know, so let's get this discussion started.
You can head right into our community forum, which is at communityleonardoenglishcom, and get chatting away to other curious minds.
You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
I'm Alistair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
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