Banished : surviving my years in the Westboro Baptist Church

Summary: Lauren Drain's childhood seemed average American, but when her liberal-minded father set out to film a documentary about the audacious and cultish hate group, the Westboro Baptist Church, he found himself seduced. At 14, Lauren was moved with her family to Kansas to live in the Westboro compound. 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 their extreme beliefs. She traveled the country as an active and vocal picketer, spouting the church's message of hate at public events, 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 her family. BANISHED 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. --