I grew up in the Westboro Baptist Church. Here's why I left | Megan Phelps-Roper

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4.1 • 11.9K Ratings

🗓️ 24 September 2018

⏱️ 15 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What’s it like to grow up within a group of people who exult in demonizing ... everyone else? Megan Phelps-Roper shares details of life inside America’s most controversial church and describes how conversations on Twitter were key to her decision to leave it. In this extraordinary talk, she shares her personal experience of extreme polarization, along with some sharp ways we can learn to successfully engage across ideological lines.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to a special archive presentation of TED Talks Daily.
0:04.9	This TED Talk features writer and activist Megan Phelps Roper, recorded live at TEDNYC, 2017.
0:13.7	I was a blue-eyed, chubby-cheeked five-year-old when I joined my family on the picket line for the first time.
0:20.7	My mom made me leave my dolls in the minivan.
0:23.8	I'd stand on a street corner in the heavy Kansas humidity,
0:27.2	surrounded by a few dozen relatives,
0:29.6	with my tiny fists clutching a sign that I couldn't read yet.
0:33.9	Gays are worthy of death.
0:36.2	This was the beginning.
0:42.3	Our protests soon became a daily occurrence and an international phenomenon, and as a member of Westboro Baptist Church,
0:44.3	I became a fixture on picket lines across the country.
0:47.3	The end of my anti-gay picketing career,
0:50.3	and life as I knew it, came 20 years later,
0:53.3	triggered in part by strangers on Twitter
0:56.0	who showed me the power of engaging the other.
1:00.0	In my home, life was framed as an epic spiritual battle
1:03.0	between good and evil.
1:05.0	The good was my church and its members,
1:08.0	and the evil was everyone else.
1:11.0	My church's antics were such that we were constantly at odds with the world,
1:14.9	and that reinforced our otherness on a daily basis.
1:18.6	Make a difference between the unclean and the clean, the verse says.
	...

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