Louis Theroux - America's Most Hated Family In Crisis

Louis Theroux has paid another visit to the so-called "most hated family in America" and found his own image on one of their controversial placards.

I downloaded this last night and thought I'd review it (no spoilers).

It's much darker than the first programme.

Louis didn't appear to get to speak with Fred Phelps at all. He did however meet with some of the people who've left the church in the 3 years since his last documentary, a prospective new member, and several members of the congregation.

This time round he gets much closer to the real heart of their "thank God for smiting us" creed.

Shirley Phelps-Roper (as always) came across as someone who's just being rampantly homophobic for the sheer fun of it, but it's now much more obvious that most of the other church members live in a perpetual state of mortal terror - believing that any deviation from the Phelps creed, and any dissent of elder voices, will expel them from the Elect, send them straight to the hottest part of hell.

Some very odd inconsistencies in their beliefs were exposed and I got the impression those inconsistencies are now so obvious that everyone apart from the hardcore inner circle is beginning to see through it.

One girl got expelled by her own family after being photographed in a bikini, while another member of the church who did the exact same thing as her, wasn't expelled. Favoritism? Or was it the case that one parent wanted to be seen as closer to the inner circle, than another, and took an uncompromising stance purely to satisfy his ego?

The church also seems to accept that it's fine for some of the girls to maintain distance relationships with hellbound young guys from Europe and even take presents off them... but other church members prefer their children to shun anyone who doesn't sign up to their beliefs and any consorting with boys from outside the church is an absolute no-no.

On one hand they say those European media liberals are poisoned by their parents and therefore it's the parents who are to blame - on the other, when they throw one of their children out, the parents are regarded as being totally blameless.

One guy - Steve Drain, their media go-to guy - lived a very liberalised life before converting, but now there's no room for any errors in judgement in his family. His "transgressions" in his pre-WBC life make anything his estranged daughter got up to before he booted her out, look tame by comparison. Why was he so uncompromising himself when (on the face of it) the Church should've run a mile before letting him join it? I was actually surprised Louis didn't bring that up.

The strangest thing of all was that the congregation didn't seem to agree on how their ostracisation of the is supposed to work.

On one hand you have people who've happily ejected their kids and completely written them out of their lives for what are ostensibly minor infractions - on the basis that by doing so they're not so much losing a child so much as improving their chances of not burning in hell.

On the other hand some members of the congregation are clearly mourning the loss but nonetheless feel compelled to toe the party line and pretend they're happy.

Finally, they're all a bit inconsistent with their Rapture notions. On one hand they're talking about going to Jerusalem (where 144,000 Jews might apparently qualify to not burn in Hell) and waiting out the Apocalypse in some pink cave in Jordan, the next they're posting anti-Semitic videos which give the impression that the entire Christ-killing Jewish nation is hellbound, and that Hitler was doing God's work.

Apparently they think this kind of media output is going to convince a few Zionists that the WBC are on the right track...

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