Download Banished: Surviving My Years in the Westboro Baptist Church AudioBook Free
You've likely heard about the Westboro Baptist Chapel. Perhaps you've seen their pickets on the news headlines, the members positioning signs with text messages that are too unpleasant to replicate here, protesting at happenings including the funerals of military, the 9-year-old sufferer of the recent Tucson shooting, and Elizabeth Edwards, all in front of their grieving households. The WBC is fervently anti-gay, anti-Semitic, and anti- practically everything and everyone. Plus they aren't going anywhere: In March, the U.S. Supreme Courtroom ruled and only the WBC's right to picket funerals. Since no planned 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 age 15, and then spat again out again seven years later. Banished is the first look inside the business, and a fascinating story of adaptation and perseverance. Lauren put in her early on years enjoying a normal life with her family in Florida. But when her previously liberal and secular daddy set out to create a documentary about the WBC, his detached interest gradually advanced into fascination, and he changed the entire family to Kansas to become listed on the cathedral and live on their compound. Over the next seven years, Lauren fully assimilated their extreme values, and joined up with the cathedral and a dynamic and vocal picketer. But as she matured and started out to challenge some of the church's tenets, she was unceremoniously cast out from the church and forever cut off from her family and from everyone else she realized and loved. Banished is the story of Lauren's battle to find herself amidst dramatic changes in a world of extremists and a life in exile.
