Megan Phelps-Roper On Leaving The Westboro Baptist Church, AKA 'America's Most Hated Family'

The High Low

Society & Culture

4.8 • 9.6K Ratings

🗓️ 12 November 2019

⏱️ 86 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

We talk about rapper T.I.'s incredibly creepy confession that he gets his teenager daughter's hymen checked every year, what 'shitposting' really means and Emma Watson's re-naming of singledom as 'self-parternering'. And of course: there are some updates in the now legendary segment, Dolls Polls.

This week we have one of the most important and moving author specials we have ever had. Megan Phelps-Roper's memoir, Unfollow, charts her upbringing in the radical Westboro Baptist Church, a church in Kansas made famous by their shocking picketing of funerals, where they held up signs that read: God Hates Fags, and Pray For More Dead Soldiers. They were also the subject of two Louis Theroux documentaries, including the 2007, 'The Most Hated Family In America' - as WBC then became known. Megan left the church in 2012, aged 26, after her conversations with 'outsiders' on Twitter opened up an internal chasm in her faith.

We talk about radicalism, indoctrination, religion and how the ideology of a binary, black and white world, is not something specific to Westboro. It defines the time that we live in, too. And Megan describes the agony of leaving her family behind with her faith. "I left the church - but never you. And never will" she writes in her epigraph to her parents.

E-mail [email protected]

Tweet @thehighlowshow

Links

Unfollow, by Megan Phelps-Roper

Do Humankind's Best Days Lie Ahead? By Pinker, Ridley, De Botton and Gladwell

By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, by Elizabeth Smart

Emma Watson interviewed by Paris Lees for British Vogue www.vogue.co.uk/news/article/emma-watson-on-fame-activism-little-women

What is shitposting? By Sarah Manavis for The New Statesman https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/media/2019/11/what-is-shitposting-and-why-does-it-matter-bbc-brexitcast-laura-kuenssberg-got-it-wrong

Cruel Intentions, on Netflix

The Souvenir, on Amazon Prime

Black Woman, by Twayna Mayne on BBC Sounds www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07r9qy3

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Welcome to the High Low, the weekly current affairs and pop culture podcast brought to you by
0:19.5	Dolly Audit and Pandora Sykes.
0:22.3	And we've finished the High Low experience.
0:24.6	We are officially returned from tour.
0:26.6	It's a sign like we were doing one every night for 30 dates.
0:30.7	Not quite, but it felt it felt enough.
0:33.1	Look, we did four.
0:34.1	We did four.
0:35.1	We really enjoyed it as press sandwiches.
0:38.0	And for anyone that didn't go, what can you, what did we do?
0:42.0	How can you summarise what the High Low experience was about?
0:44.0	You said funny, when we got on stage for the first night of the barbacan, I think we realised
0:47.7	that it was just 90% smart.
0:51.3	It was smutty.
0:52.3	It was so smutty.
0:53.6	They love the smart.
0:56.2	Our audience cannot get enough.
0:58.5	Do you know what I've really learnt about our audience in the last couple of months?
1:02.0	They just love a body comment.
1:05.2	I think it's quite hard to make the high end of the High Low work on stage.
1:10.1	Be so boring.
1:11.2	So it would also be quite intense, I think.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The High Low, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of The High Low and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.