Home » Episodes » Louis Theroux Specials: Surviving America’s Most Hated Family (BBC Two Sunday 24 September 2023)

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Louis Theroux Specials: Surviving America’s Most Hated Family (BBC Two Sunday 24 September 2023)

Published

3 months ago

September 23, 2023

Louis Theroux Specials: Surviving America’s Most Hated Family airs Sunday 24 September 2023 on BBC Two.

What is this episode about

Louis Theroux returns to Kansas to spend time with the Westboro Baptist Church, a controversial Christian ministry that has picketed military funerals and other high-profile events for years with deliberately provocative and homophobic placards. It has been thirteen years since Theroux first encountered the group.

Louis first discovered the indoctrination programme run by the church’s founder and leader, Pastor Fred Phelps, or Gramps, in 2006. He did so again in 2011. But since his death in 2014, the church has gone through a major transformation that threatens to break apart the once-close-knit family community and makes them question their relevance in Trump’s America, where outrageous statements are par for the course. The church has been hit by a number of high-profile family defections, including Pastor Phelps’s granddaughter Megan, who is now Westboro’s most prominent critic, and by a series of allegations about Pastor Phelps’s final days, including rumours of mental illness and his excommunication. Even with all the trouble, the church has been able to draw in new members like Bradford native Mathias Holroyd, who finds Westboro’s fiery rhetoric to be just what he needs to feel more at home in contemporary Britain.

Louis delves deep into the weird and unpleasant world of Westboro to discover the ripple effects of the loss of the patriarch of a family-based hate group. He also learns that even those who have escaped Westboro’s iron grip aren’t safe from the doctrine of divine hate that Pastor Phelps preaches.