The People Who Left Wesboro Baptist Church
Whenever a documentary is made of the Westboro Baptist Church (WBC), it always focuses on the church members, and hardly ever on people who have left the church. This is probably because those who did leave don’t want to talk about their experiences, but a journalist by the name of Trevor Melanson was astonished to discover that his taxi driver was none other than Nate Phelps, the son of Fred Phelps, and brother to Shirley Phelps-Roper.
An interview took place afterwards, and many things were revealed about how children are brought up in the Phelps household, which included regular beatings.
The mattock, a close cousin of the pickaxe, is used to dig through tough, earthy surfaces—it loosens soil, breaks rock, and tears through knotted grass. Its handle is a three-foot wooden shaft, twice the density of a baseball bat and its dual-sided iron head is comprised of a chisel and a pick. It was Pastor Fred Phelps’s weapon of choice when beating his children according to his son, Nate Phelps.
“The Bible says ‘spare the rod, spoil the child,’” explained Nate, “and he would be screaming that out as he was beating us.” One Christmas night, Pastor Phelps hit Nate over 200 times with a mattock’s handle, swinging it like a baseball player.
Nate left the household when he was 18, before returning 3 years later, and then leaving again when it became too much. What is uplifting about this story is how even those brought up in such harsh conditions can come to the side of rationality.
Nate agrees with prominent atheist and scientist Richard Dawkins, who has said that religion can be “real child abuse.”
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“The threat of eternal Hell is an extreme example of mental abuse,” Dawkins says on his website, “just as violent sodomy is an extreme example of physical abuse.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” asserted Nate. “In so many different ways we have abused children with religion over the centuries.”
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“I do declare myself an atheist now,” affirmed Nate, “although I’m willing to admit that there’s stuff in life that I’m not real clear on yet.”
Although Nate still lives with anxiety caused by his childhood suffering, he has a strong positive outlook for the future, saying “I just want peace. I want to not wake up fearful every morning”.
The full story can be read here, as well as the comments (the first is by Shirley Phelps-Roper and is a laugh). In other WBC news, it seems a non-existent being hates Barack Obama:
