BANISHED
Surviving My Years in the Westboro Baptist Church
In the bestselling tradition of Escape and Stolen Innocence, the first look behind the curtains of the Westboro Baptist Church by a young woman cast out from the secretive cult.
Anyone who has watched the news in the past several years has seen coverage of the Westboro Baptist Church. They’ve made a name for themselves by picketing military and civilian funerals with shockingly offensive signs promoting their anti-gay, anti-Semitic, and anti-everything and everybody else agenda.
When Lauren Drain’s formerly liberal and secular father set out to produce a documentary about the WBC, his detached interest gradually evolved into fascination, and he moved his entire family to Kansas to join the church and live on their compound. Over the next seven years, Lauren fully assimilated their extreme beliefs, and traveled the country as an active and vocal picketer herself. But as she matured and began to challenge some of the church’s tenets, she was unceremoniously cast out from the church, and permanently cut off from her family and everyone else she knew and loved. Banished is the story of Lauren’s fight to find herself amidst dramatic changes in a world of extremists and a life in exile.
Lauren Drain lives in Connecticut, where she works as a cardiac nurse. Lisa Pulitzer is the co-author of several bestselling books, including Stolen Innocence.
When Lauren Drain’s formerly liberal and secular father set out to produce a documentary about the WBC, his detached interest gradually evolved into fascination, and he moved his entire family to Kansas to join the church and live on their compound. Over the next seven years, Lauren fully assimilated their extreme beliefs, and traveled the country as an active and vocal picketer herself. But as she matured and began to challenge some of the church’s tenets, she was unceremoniously cast out from the church, and permanently cut off from her family and everyone else she knew and loved. Banished is the story of Lauren’s fight to find herself amidst dramatic changes in a world of extremists and a life in exile.
Lauren Drain lives in Connecticut, where she works as a cardiac nurse. Lisa Pulitzer is the co-author of several bestselling books, including Stolen Innocence.