Neenah Public Library

Banished, a memoir : surviving my years in the Westboro Baptist Church, Lauren Drain with Lisa Pulitzer

eng

technical information on music

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autobiography

Banished

digital audio book

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823928819

Lauren Drain with Lisa Pulitzer

a memoir : surviving my years in the Westboro Baptist Church

At only fourteen years old, Lauren had her world turned upside down when her father moved the entire family to Kansas to join the church and live on "the block," the Westborocompound in downtown Topeka. There, Lauren found a new community offering both a warm welcome and a complex set of rules and regulations, including curbs on her teenage freedom and punishments meted out unjustly. The WBC's modus operandi is its aggressive and vitriolic campaigns against anyone and everyone it deems immoral or sinful--the U.S. Military, the Catholic Church,homosexuals, and more. Over the next seven years, Lauren would try to assimilate theirextreme beliefs wholeheartedly. She traveled the country as an active and vocal picketer herself, spouting the church's message of hate at public events as well as at military and civilian funerals with shockingly offensive signs promoting their agenda. But as she matured and began to question and bristle against some of the church's tenets, she was unceremoniously cast out, and permanently cut off from the family she so dearly loved and the only community she had.This is the story of one young woman's journey into and out of a world of extremists, and of building a positive new life out of the ashes of her old one

adult

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