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Former member of Westboro Baptist Church reveals why he left
Former member of Westboro Baptist Church reveals why he left
Q: What did you do after you escaped from your family?
Nate: The first three nights after I ran away, I slept in the bathroom of a gas station near the high school I attended (Topeka West). From there, my brother's (Mark) mother-in-law offered me a room at her home. Very little I miss. It was so destructive and took years to undue. I have talked about the sense of security and belonging I can recall feeling from time to time when we were having church services on Sunday evenings. Something about being tucked in that building that's half buried and feeling like we're the only one's that god loves...it's hard to articulate.
Q: Do you think your dad is a bad guy or just ill-informed?
Nate: I think my father is a hateful person first. The religious beliefs gave him a forum and permission to be cruel to the world.
Q: Are members submitted to any form of abuse as punishment for 'sinning'?
Nate: When I was growing up there it was a very violent environment. It wasn't constant, but it was often enough and unpredictable enough to be very destructive. It is my opinion that this is the primary reason my siblings stay there and parrot my old man's theology.
Q: What was the nature of the violence?
Nate: [My father] would grab us by the arms, lift us up and drive his knee into our stomach. He would beat us with his fists on our face and body. He would kick us. He would spit in our face. He would beat us from our lower back down to behind our knees with a mattock handle, often splitting the skin and causing bleeding.
Q: How do you feel about the rest of your family that obviously decided not to leave the church? Are you at all as resentful towards them as the rest of the general population?
Nate: I despise the harm they are doing. I get emails and messages constantly from young people who have read and seen their message. Many of them are terrified. On top of that this whole hate thing adds immensely to the social idea that gays are lesser citizens or humans. This idea is what some people use to do harm to these people. I hold my father and siblings responsible for this harm.
Q: What made you become an atheist exactly? Was it in the back of your head for some time?
Nate: spent years searching for god. I attended an Evangelical Free Church and Chuck Smith Jr's church out in southern California. I read and questioned top leaders in the church out there and was constantly frustrated with the lack of answers.
It was a long process but I think I could point to 9/11 and when I read Michael Shermer's "The Science of Good & Evil" as the key turning points for me.
Watching people respond to an act of blind faith that killed 3,000 humans by turning to their blind faith...it made no sense to me. I remember thinking at the time that the mechanism of faith could very well be one of the greatest risks to the survival of mankind. I'm sure that's gonna piss some people off.
Q: Do you ever regret leaving? You have a family now, do you feel like they're missing part of who you are by not knowing your parents?
Nate: I don't regret leaving... I never perceived an option. I honestly think I would have died there. My knee jerk reaction when my children get too close to that situation is to warn them away. It freaks me out to imagine them getting pulled in.
Read more: http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/327045#ixzz1yQKFeOo1
Tags: Baptist, Church, Former, Westboro, he, left, member, of, reveals, why
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by doone on -
Nate: I think my father is a hateful person first. The religious beliefs gave him a forum and permission to be cruel to the world.
Another reason why the hate in the Bible and other books cannot be ignored - it is used by the haters to justify their hate.
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Permalink Reply by Adriana on -
As a matter of fact, religion has possibly been the most effective justification the haters have for the hate, because society, instead of finding religion repellent, find it attractive. Hate is thus disguised as wisdom, and sometimes even as love.
I'm so happy for Nate Phelps, that he could escape and that he did not become like his father.
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Permalink Reply by Adriana on
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I have a legal question: the way Nate describes his father would beat his children, is totally child abuse, very, very violent. Is that not punishable by law in that state?
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Permalink Reply by doone on
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The abuse would have to be proven in court and maybe no one wants to get involved - let me check. FromABC News
What's not well known, Nate Phelps told us, is the brutality and abuse that he says Fred Phelps inflicted upon his own family.
Phelps said his father would beat his young children with a barber's strap.
"He used it so frequently that the ends of it frayed, so you had this kind of cat o'nine tails whipping around, and it would open the flesh on the other side of the hip," said Nate Phelps. "So it was doing that kind of damage."
As the kids got older, Phelps said, his father would beat them with the handle of a mattock, a farm tool similar to a pickax.
"It's about four feet long and it's a solid, long, heavy piece of wood," said Phelps. "He would go down the back of the legs and up to the lower back, and when he was really angry and raging he would use it to hit you with the arms. On one occasion I can remember being hit with it in the head and it split my scalp.
"And his fists... there were times that he would be raging, and he would spit into his fists. He would be completely out of control and it could sometimes last for an hour. Going back and forth between physical violence and screaming Bible verses and berating the child."
Westboro Church Responds to Abuse Allegations
We contacted the Phelps family at the compound where they live in Topeka, but Fred Phelps would not comment.
So we asked Fred Phelps' daughter, Shirley Phelps-Roper, a lawyer who serves as the church spokeswoman, about her brother Nate's allegations.
"He spanked [Nate], he spanked all of his children," Phelps-Roper said of her father. "Sometimes with a strap, until you got so big. A strap on a kid who is 12 or 13 years old?"
We asked whether it was true that Fred Phelps used a strap first and then a wooden handle.
"Exactly," said Phelps-Roper, "...and let's be sure we call it what it was, a paddle."
Not even their mother -- now 84 -- avoided physical abuse ... or the fury of Fred Phelps, according to Nate Phelps. He claims that his father beat his mother.
Phelps-Roper said her brother was lying.
What a cesspool of a man = the reason or reasons are listed here
http://www.rslevinson.com/gaylesissues/features/collect/phelps/bl_p...
For the moment, however, it had gone beyond the pastor's control. Police detectives investigated the matter, and it was filed as juvenile abuse cases #13119 and #13120. Jonathon and Nate were assigned a court- appointed lawyer, as a guardian-ad-litem, to protect their interests. The assistant county attorney took charge of the cases, and juvenile officers were assigned to the boys.
In his motion to dismiss, the ever-resourceful Phelps filed a pontifically sobering sermon on the value of strict discipline and corporal punishment in a good Christian upbringing. "When he beat us, he told us if it became a legal case, we'd pay hell," says Nate. "And we believed him. At that time, there was nothing we wanted to see more than those charges dropped. When the guardian ad litem came to interview us, we lied through our teeth."
Principals involved in the case speculate the boys' statements, along with superiors' reluctance to tangle with the litigious pastor, caused the charges to be dropped. The last reason is not academic speculation. The Capital-Journal has learned through several sources that the Topeka Police Department's attitude toward the Phelps' family in the '70s and '80s was hands off-this guy's more trouble than it's worth'.
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