DOCUMENTARIES A GRATIS GLOBAL SERVICE
⌕ SEARCH GRATIS GLOBAL ↗
DOCUMENTARIES
Brainwashed by the Westboro Baptist Church
SOURCE: YOUTUBE · NO TRACKING UNTIL YOU PRESS PLAY · TROUBLE PLAYING? WATCH AT THE SOURCE ↗

Brainwashed by the Westboro Baptist Church

23 MIN · EN · STATUS: [ STREAMING ]
RATE THIS

The Westboro Baptist Church has built its public identity on picketing funerals with signs celebrating deaths as divine punishment for tolerating homosexuality, and VICE spends time inside the group to see how that belief gets passed down. More than a dozen members sit for interviews, including the Drains, a family connected to founder Fred Phelps by marriage rather than blood, who hand over seventeen years of home video showing birthdays, sermons, and children being coached to hold picket signs before they can read the words on them. The footage tracks families splitting apart as some members leave and others double down, and it lingers on kids repeating the church's slogans at protests, raising the question of how much of this is faith and how much is upbringing. The camera stays close and mostly quiet, letting members explain their reasoning about homosexuality, funerals, and God's judgment in their own words rather than through outside commentary, leaving viewers to weigh what they see against what they already believe about the church.