now during the week while members of congress are in their districts due to the coronavirus outbreak. tonight we focus on history. first musician tim macgraw and biographer john meacham discuss history through song and then wilfrid mcclay on his book land of hope: a history in america and later eric at least america for americans looks atprejudice towards immigrants through american history. enjoy books tv now and over the weekend on c-span2 . >> hello. my name is connor moran, director of the wisconsin book festival. thank you for being here tonight. i believe this was the seventh of eight events in this room and it is the 30th out of 32 events just today and the third day of the wisconsin book festival so thank you somuch. evi've seen many of you all day . i couldn't be more pleased to be introducing megan phelps-roper for her book on followed. we were talking in the back, her discussion of life in a religious community, doubt, how you decide to leave or to

stay and how you defend yourself in those contexts is one of those conversations that we need to be having so muchmore as a culture. i think it opens up so many doors for people . megan is herself a writer and activist. she left the westboro baptist church in 2012 and isan educator on topics related to extremism and communication across ideological lines. at the age of five megan began protesting homosexuality and other vices alongside fellow members of the westboro baptist church into beaconkansas. the church was founded by her grandfather and consisted almost entirely of her extended family . the group gained notoriety for its pickets at military funerals and celebrations of death and tragedy . as the church's twitter spokesman megan was one of the few thatinteracted with the outside world . and twitter did something for. maybe we can applaud it it caused her to begin doubting the strict church

leaders and their message it humans are sinful and fallible how can the church itself be so confident is a question she was left with. after her digital jousts with critics she start started to wonder if they had a point and began exchanging messages with a man who helped her change her life and i'm here to welcome her, megan phelps-roper. [applause] >> good evening everyone and thank you for being here tonight. my name is megan phelps-roper and i grew up in a very tightknit family intobeacon kansas . i am the third of 11 children , three girls and eight boys and we lived on a tree-lined street with dozens of relatives in the surrounding houses. just across our backyard was the church we attended every sunday where my grandfather had been the only pastor since itsinception in the 1950s . my mom's family was vocally challenging and in the hymns that rang out gave me chills. their passionate praises to god for his mercy and grace echoing off the low ceilings and into my welcoming years.

i grew up crowd of my family. father had been a well-known gcivil rights activist, a lawyer from the 1960s to the 1980s and had won awards from civil rights groups like the naacp. my family had suffered from that work, not just the constant vandalism but physical attacks on my elementary school age children but that never sway them from their commitment to racial justice . >> .. but in my memory the picketing in the beginning started at gage park. it didn't look like a park. there were no swings or slides or jungle gyms.

just an open field the separated the place where report from the busy intersection of tenth st. n gage boulevard. as pastor of the title westboro baptist church my grandfather would drive the big red pickup build was cited bit and the rest of the church consisting almost entirely of my aunts and uncles, parents, grandparents and siblings would follow in a caravan of vehicles. i couldn't readn the messages since i i was still a few monts shy of kindergarten but when i saw photos as a teenager i was surprised by how small and restrain restraint summer compared to what came later. watch your kids, days in restrooms. gage park was a popular meeting place for gay men. in hindsight our protest were about to elicit an intensely negative reaction especially because our message went far beyond the call for the cleanup of gage park. gramps was an old-school baptist and was determined to represent the scriptural position on homosexuality. he left immediately into attacks on the dignity as a whole lending them for the aids

epidemic in proclaiming they deserve the death penalty. the topeka capital journal published westboro but excluding one side by oneet of my aunts comparing the treaded to sodom and gomorrah, cities destroyed by god because of their sin regarding homosexuality. she declared age to be a disease for which a homosexual must take the sole blame, and insisted the eight victims to be avenged upon those guilty of introducing and gleefully spreading the deadly disease, the homosexual. even during an area which disapproval lgbt people were more, and socially acceptable it took only for short senses might at to make claims scandals enough to outreach most readers and our site managed to the same with even greater economy.t militant gays spread eight, days are worthy of death. soon enough what would become her most intimateea message, has fags. the community response to protests would mystify me for

years thanks to a good born in the religious education of us sitting at home. i was five years old when the picketing began and didn't understand what anyone would reject our message, let alone what our protest would draw counter protesters. they came at the weekend to begin and i was scared at first. young punks and disease probably got aids, gramps would say. the bible for bad girls to cut her hair but some of the women came out with cropped main colored bright reds and blues and purples, kool-aid here. and with metal interfaces. -- in their faces. like my dad tall and skinny and those running shorts in that style combat boots on their feet and flannel shirts around their waist coming in an angry mob. and try to surround our group

of those who made a human barrier between us and them. sometimes they were cops in handcuffs sometimes we were in them which wasn't fair i thought because we were just trying to protect ourselves from them but i held my breath whenever i walked by them so wouldn't catch made them awful people. they urge drivers to honk and yell they threw eggs in beer and pepsi bottles filled with urine. sometimes they would abandon my cousins and i would scuttle away behind mom or aunt would stand behind us or them from behind my sign and watch them approach to bellow and spit our bodies and our hair. are parents kept a safe how

dare they? that's my mom. what made them think they could do this to us? but my grandfather had a different perspective it was proof that god was with us. from the age of five into my early twenties i join protests across the country almost daily they quickly expanded beyond the gay community to include everyone that literally was not part of our church the only true church on the landscape that we were so confident in our own understanding not only are right but our duty to judge others we protested funerals assisting the deceased were in hell celebrating their death even though the mourners were only a short distance away i was told this is what god instructed us to warn the fellow man so we saw the

preaching as of compassion this was the only hope for a doomed world. in 2009 i took that message to twitter to reach more people but what i found is those people had reached me instead so a group of individuals began to ask questions and pour over our beliefs they had internal inconsistencies they gently and respectfully challenged me. i was baffled when i saw the contradiction. how could this be this unquestionable word of god? the fact we could be wrong that was the beginning of the end of that doctrine.

so then i made the agonizing decision to leave the church i be cut off from the only community had ever belong to i will lose my lifelong home on that street along with everyone and every one important in my life and left with the role they spent my entire life demonizing and antagonizing. so now i just made the decision to leave and discussed it with my younger sister grace who also felt the need to leave so we were trying to figure out what to do next. >> making the decision to leave was yet another impossible question. and? grace nor i had an answer we couldn't leave before mom's birthday and what about their anniversary? it would ruin everything right at this moment and those are things we cannot bear to leave

without. that we would forever lose access to once we left. family recipes? movies and old photos? maybe we just wait a little while longer. was partly a stalling tactic thinking that a change would occur but at the first prospect of losing everyone we were painfully aware there was so much we didn't know about her parents lives in her grandmother what did we know before westborough? we had begun interviewing her almost immediately we went across the backyard to the we would find them upstairs in the church library at 86 she was so quiet and gentle because of the deep curve in her spine she would buy on her

bed and grace would lie next to her on the foot of the bed and me at the head we would take turns asking questions and i would try not to show the site of losing her this tsunami of guilt progress started to record everything. the sounds of our monthly birthday parties, bible study, my mother story about my siblings and me when we were young. inside the van on picket trips and my little brothers. even if they eventually left. all their little boy voices would be gone. an endless stream of photos of a family kickball game. getting ready to walk to school in the morning. my parents holding hands. my family visit to kansas

city. milkshake parties and walks to the parks of my nieces and nephews. and a trip for snow cones. in those months every joyful experience that left grace and me in tears gasping for breath. trying to remember what it was like before all of this what it was like to be happy with the inescapable offense of that excruciating death of everyone we loved i began obsessively taking notes to chronicle every moment and terrified of losing a single one as if clinging to these memories might alleviate the agony as recording at all could keep it from my grasp. nice things said during hugs. how she could always count on me to smell good.

on how my curls in his face made it difficult to breathe. how mom didn't mind being smothered by them. dad and how he loves it when he finishes sentences. the name that my brother had given me as a tall there when he cannot pronounce mine. we are very fortunate to have you as a daughter but i wrote it down before he could regret that and take it back. and take down the photos of me that hung on the walls or repurpose my bedroom or spend the rest of his life he racing me from his memory as much as possible. we began packing her things in boxes we had labels like shoes or books i numbered mine meticulously cataloging every single one i took each piece of jewelry i owned into a tiny white envelope with the date and occasion that i received it if i forgot a detail i

copied 63 dvds which of home movies watching scene overseen it all the while i knew what would happen when we left i do the heartbreak they would feel and betrayal i felt it when my brother josh left eight years earlier a poorest loan - - a postmortem that went on for years we racked our brains looking for every sign of duplicity and we had trans for one transformer horror into rage know we were disgusted how could he? what monster would pretend to be one of us knowing all the while he was going to abandon us forever? it did not think of us to occur to his devastation we cannot see his terror or despair or desperation it was so much easier to cast him as a villain that he was a selfish jerk who only wanted to pursue his own lust he could not imagine the 19 -year-old boy could have a legitimate reason to leave the

only church today or consider anything truly was wrong with us. that we would all look back just as i had. they would see me interviewing graham in cleaning out my bedroom and all the text messages and e-mails i had sent because they would remember my tears and refusal to tweet how i could ever have looked them in the eye. they will understand they wanted to tell them everything and i tried so hard to keep them. that i was begging for change but i wanted to stay. >> shortly after that grace and i left the church and were separated from our family just as we knew we would be paragraph or so that i had to run away and hide forever but i thought everything i had done that was the only way i could survive.

but almost immediately i connected with people who help me to see things differently who invited me to work for change to help dismantle the arguments i spent my life defending and repair some of the damage i did when i was part of the church. in the nearly seven years i left i have made amends with the communities they used to target. i have been shown incredible grace by those communities and i'm so grateful to have had the opportunity to turn a largely destructive life into meaningful healing for so many people. people who raise me from birth to condemn others and those that were trapped in those to have meaningful conversations against ideological divide and most importantly to experience

that hateful message of westborough first hamper after a book came out i received a message from the man who when westborough was at its peak was terrified and struggling with the sexuality he said he concerned consumed might churches content almost as a way of self-harm and will be reading your book and here you eloquently dismantle the arguments felt like closure. messages like this remind me as extra nearly painful as it has been the things that i did to others who were vulnerable in the most devastating moments of my life but there is real value in owning our mistakes and finding ways to turn them into forces for good. thank you for being here tonight i'm happy to answer questions. [applause]

>> you still consider yourself christian and how do you worship? there so much clear that there is so much love in your family but i wonder with those social struggles there are so many division between society and the conservative church is there any place you feel that your church has something to say to the culture? >> the first part of your question i don't consider myself a christian any more. i am not religious although it's funny to me how much or how many religious ideals are that i learned from religion i still carry with me. i gave a talk that details

what those people on twitter did for me how they turned this acrimonious conversation taking place on twitter and turned that around into meaningful dialogue and as i'm writing up a very close attention to everything i wrote in that talk i wanted to say exactly what i meant and nothing more and nothing less so i finally finished after weeks of working on it i close my laptop and realize the last of my argument was that jesus said love your enemies. there are a lot of things in the bible i have not been able to find a good explanation for. some of the things that i believe that we spent so much time memorizing bible verses. i found much better ways to say those but there are still too many. i shouldn't say ever but i

think coming from a place where i felt so certain about everything i am very skeptical of ever coming to a place where i say now this is the answer. and then the second question, i'm not sure. i don't think there is a monolith or a church or set of beliefs. everybody potentially has valuable things to contribute to a conversation so i don't think we should exclude anybody from that. it seems a little broad. sorry. does that answer your question? [laughter] >> thank you so much for your courage to leave and to write this book.

thank you for that. [applause] >> thank you. >> i was also wondering do you think your parents might ever read this book? >> i do believe they will if they have not already. westborough ml with x members is to pretend we don't exist or acknowledge the things we say or do publicly. the exception to that is when something gets attention forgot to mention that ted talk i gave a couple years ago they were tweeting about it in leading up to the publication of the book there were tweets saying things like i was an antichrist. i do believe they will read it. i wrote the book for so many reasons and one of them i gave breadcrumbs for my family and those still in the church to

detail exactly why i stopped believing and how i came to see the destructiveness. i have written in a way hopefully they in their current position that it can be a bridge from where they are to where i am now. and even if it doesn't cause them to read it, i do hope it causes them to reconsider some things and then i write at the end how the church has moderated its positions in some important ways but there is still a long way to go for i hope i help in that progress. >> i have two alone - - i

brothers that not with my sister anymore people react differently so in the church you think x members as a monolith. that they are all on the same page so people have different experiences in the church a different families. so there is a lot of support it's not nearly the club that the church envisions. >> in those responses that you attracted on twitter the importance of the reason of their arguments but you also talked about the strong sense of community in the pull to your family.

as you work with those who work on late monday - - leaving who work on extremism can you talk about the interplay of reason and community? >> i really glad you brought up the community aspect because i come from a family of lawyers. they are very intelligent and analytical and it seems like a very closed system because as long as you accept the basic premise that the bible is the literal word of god and the only true interpretation than everything else seems to follow for the most part. so it was very important for me to experience on twitter and have conversations with

people to find those internal inconsistencies and contradictions. i don't think i could have left without that. but that emotional aspect is the community aspect. was talking to an anthropologist last year who defined shame as the feeling when we violated the norms of our community. for a long time from mother teresa and princess diana died my church celebrated. anyone they identified was sinful it was a joyous occasion if they passed away. [laughter] well mother teresa was catholic. [laughter] and princess diana was an adulterous. i knew nothing about them other than those facts so they were condemned to hell forever. so this is how i was trained

to respond to that i was just modeling the behavior around me so when 9/11 rolled around my little reaction was to say out loud awesome. i never felt ashamed of that because that was my community but i got on twitter in 2009 it was to - - shocking these people i was interacting with the vast majority were very hostile the fact that there was a group that i was trying to come to know over time there were things that made it unique in my experience. so the fact it was very limited at 140 characters that made me feel safe my interactions with outsiders were always at arms length

because it was so limited i was never aware of feelings being in danger if i was in a physical space. it stopped me from using casual insults. my family would throw them around all the time. there was a space for it on twitter and when i did include those the conversation devolved into you don't you will - - no me so i stopped using them because it did not communicate our core message. so all these things happening on twitter to know people over time and developing a rapport , it affected me in ways i did not anticipate and i missed it until now i'm on twitter this is a few months after i had gotten on and i saw how people responded and sharing memories

of her passing away. at a birthday party actually was one of the monthly birthday parties at the church surrounded by people i was sad well and murphy died and the celebration started but then it got worse. remember a famine in somalia. i felt i was becoming part of this community and started to feel ashamed i couldn't feel ashamed until i was part of another community. i just want to reason that it was essential but so was this other piece so the tendency of humans is to see people that they are irredeemably evil if you isolate them because they

thank you are evil so we don't want that kind of hatefulness and you don't want to convince other people to join them so have that language as much as we can for whatever individual has for the patients to feel safe enough to engage with people like that more likely we are to change hearts and minds. people say that this is unique somehow. may be in particular with the specific things they do but i don't think my reaction was anything other than completely human and there are many other examples of other nationalist

like david duke was his godfather who left the movement after engaging with jewish people. and darrell davis is a black jazz musician who convinced 200 members of the kkk to abandon the movement. there is a lot of examples of the strategies being powerful with that community aspect. the person that you demonized shows you is not who you thought they were and it has his cognitive dissidents that actually does cause people to change their views. >> see you cap people at distance on twitter when you first got on their and responding to all these different things, did you have guidelines or free will with what you are allowed to do was

there some way looking over your shoulder when you were discussing what was being said? what was the interaction within your family and the guidelines that they had that you were given free will? >> i was 23 at the time i was still at home my desk was 5 feet away from my mother's so i guide on twitter after i read an article on cnn. i was the only one on twitter for a year or year and a half. i would always read my post in front of my mother initially

but then i saw that as a way of communicating with people that did not require distortion. so i try to explain but that is not what i said. [laughter] so yes so i would reach out to people directly so it's something that i would do i be cooking and dinner and my iphone the one hand or standing in the picket line constantly answering questions from people even from the picket line and as a family of lawyers who taught me these arguments that i had been taught from the time i was tiny and i had the answer if i didn't have an answer i go the older people they would give

me the answer. they would give me chapter and verse to explain a position. so again this is why i felt very safe because we have all the answers. this is the truth of god and it is unquestionable and i had never ever had the feeling of being bested so when i came to this point and had these conversations came from a jewish man named david he was asking me questions for a year i started off attacking him he responded very negative at first then he started to ask questions i started to ask in response my purpose was to better counter his arguments but in the midst of that extreme nuances he finds this internal inconsistency i was

flabbergasted literally. i had 20 years of an answer so i started to approach the question at my mother and in hindsight you can see on their faces they would reiterate the verse that justified the position but not the contradiction. it was mind blowing. so occasionally i would have people would say that she pulls up her phone in the tweets and say there's something wrong with that i basically said that's one

reason - - one response in the twitter handle as long as there wasn't that many spaces left but for the most part after a while i was trusted and i felt safe doing it. since i left i've heard that things are a little more tightened up in that way. >> hearing about your grandfather antiracism work was very fascinating. can you tell me anymore about him quick. >> i go into a lot of detail in the book he went and moved the same day as brown v board of education and took that as a sign from god he should go to law school so for him some

people look at that work that he did against lgbtq people and their rights and there was no tension because he saw those positions to be from stricture as quality under the law those to the stranger because god has made the one blood on the earth that god never said it was an abomination to be black or female but these protected classes with antidiscrimination laws but he would say that being gay homosexuality is defined by conduct but abominable conduct. ungodly conduct.

so for him this is what the bible says so this is what we find in the bible so it is unquestionable. >> but that's the reason he went to law school. >> even before that he went to a school at university and left because they excluded black people. which is amazing because he grew up in the deep south and did not go along with it. >> i glanced at your wikipedia bio before i came here i think it said you went to university

was that before or after twitter quick so how could you avoid the students in the academic life prior to that? unless it was online. >> washburn was before twitter and it was definitely is not you will look for or find intellectual freedom because it's a mile and a half from my house and we protested there every week at least it was one of the earlier targets. we spent as little time there as possible. and we went to public school also before that.

so people wonder how could you be exposed? we read secular books and listened to secular music there were very few restrictions on what we could consume. people would say how did those things not influence you? the best analogy i have come up with is before you are ever exposed to any ungodly ideas or portrayal, you understand , you are taught in detail why they are wrong. it's like being inoculated against those ideas before you are ever exposed so you memorize those chapters and verses why they are wrong and take you to hell so when you see them as not see something to emulate but you shrug it off like or. criminal.

adulterer. whore. we didn't believe in evolution but if it came up we would just parrot the answers had besought that way. we can do that. that is fine. but we don't have to believe it. >> i i heard you speak on the radio yesterday. you got on the subject of how this country is very polarized politically, , and to think we l probably have relatives or friends who are the other side of thehe goals and we can't communicate. and i think think you went over five steps it's possible to get over the gulf. .

>> that is the ted talk that i mentioned it's what those people did for me on twitter and those steps have a lot of power to bridge the divide so literally stealing the best ideas from the people on twitter but those four points do not assume bad intent because if you assume they are evil or delusional that you stop listening to them or hear where they come from and if you don't know what they believe it's difficult for you to find a way to reach them. and the second was to ask questions and asking questions is a way to signal they are being heard so that makes

people more heard and it's like you give them permission of exactly how i experience that with those people on twitter. the third point is to stay calm with these intense ideas that you both feel strongly about it can feel like an attack people have a deeply held value so it can be very difficult but this is one of the ways that online communication can be powerful because you have a moment and could take time and step back where you feel you have to respond immediately. you can stop and consider what words you will choose to communicate your ideas and decide not to respond and then

the fourth stop that may seem obvious but if you believe something strongly the reason behind it should be obvious to any well-intentioned person. and then to defend it so those i mentioned in the talk and now the fifth to be patient because people don't change in an instant eventually it is an instant but it takes time and it is a deeply held belief to

hear that first contradiction so the first thing i said to the jewish in that moment you want me to say that activity is okay and i won't do it. and then to acknowledge we saw the contradiction. and then to see how immediately following that conversation things started to change for me and challenge things i was taught by the elders in the church in the ways i never had before. all because of that little bit of doubt and it takes time to unravel. be patient. >> i was raised roman catholic

and lost faith because of the contradictions so if you are willing to share specifically so what was the first night like when you left? >> yes. but the jewish guy cap asking for our picket sign calling for the death penalty for gay people. that is the punishment called for in the book of leviticus if it's good enough for god then it is good for us but we

said we are not casting stones we are preaching the word and he points out the obvious but your calling for the government to cast stones so what does that mean? and that set me back on my heels and then said and what about your mom? didn't she have a child out of wedlock and is a data sin that deserves the death penalty? anytime anybody brought up that we would say the standard of god is not sinlessness but it is repentance. she's okay and doesn't deserve these punishments because she repented and acknowledges it was wrong but if she had been killed that my family would

not exist she would not have had the opportunity to repent or be forgiven so this is a realization all my god. the arguments we had they seem to sound right but the inherent contradiction was there the whole time i miss that how did i miss that? like it does not compute. that was one of them one of them that really blew my mind that at westborough their protesting the embodiment of compassion the definition of what it means to love thy neighbor to forgive them when you see them sitting you're the only hope to offer to change to turn around to avoid the certain destruction. so we claim to love our neighbor but then on the other side there came a point in our ministry we were praying for people to die for god to curse people that was aust so

scripture lead derived where they prayed for the enemy's children to be fatherless in the wives to be widowed clearly calling for the death and to curse him on his enemies not realizing of course the direct contradiction of the new testament where jesus said love your enemies pray for them and then the apostle paul says bless them that persecute you. bless and curse not. you are specifically said not to curse. when i came to that realization i literally felt like i was deranged. how could i so strongly and passionately believed both of these things at the same time? in hindsight i have learned a little bit about psychology since i left.

[laughter] its way our brains compartmentalize the information. they're both from the bible so it was unreal. >> my sister and i stayed in the home of my wonderful friend who was both of our high school english teacher who was really wonderful they let us stay in their basement the first night he would hurt me if i told you not to follow him on twitter. [laughter] but he stayed up with us for a couple of hours per i thought he would leave us to our despair but he stayed up with us and that was so important

to finally out loud more in our family what was happening in just the whole fact that her whole lives had been to figure out. he was absolutely wonderful. >> thank you so much for your talk it has been interesting and inspiring. what are some things you have done to make amends with the community from the past? >> of course financially contributing to different group groups. that feels important. i have spent a long time volunteering in these communities. the 12th month after i left the church i spent follow volunteering at the jewish federation that was a huge target of the church but i

spent a lot of time with law enforcement trying to find ways to use those experiences to help people that are working on hate crimes and the radicalization and terrorism. said basically any opportunity that i have to help people. eventually my sister and i want to start a nonprofit at some point and suggested we call it the westborough foundation. [laughter] and i really love that idea because part of the reason i kept my name is to change the legacy of that name so i love the people here westborough not think of protesting funerals or celebrating tragedy but people who are there to help people when they suffer for that that was a wonderful plan on his par part. >> where do you get your

strongest sense of family now? so just asking for advice that you can impart on us while engaging with people with whom we strongly disagree at a time that politics stresses us out we just lose the energy on this important topic so what about self-care in a healthy way? >> i can't remember if i said this but i married one of the people i met from twitter. [laughter] that's a whole part of the story. we have a one -year-old daughter now. actually she just took her first step right back there. [applause] [laughter] that my husband's family is

incredible. he has a brother with three children and and then his parents also live. we live in south dakota. his parents lived nearby and they are just, it amazes me i met my husband on twitter and i feel like o we fit so perfectly together and it's wonderful. also the fact i love his family so much and it just happens both of his parents worked in mental health. that was just like -- just a really wonderful gift but they are incredibly supportive, and having my daughter obviously something that has made me, i think about my mom all the time. not that i didn't think about it all the time but even more intense. so not having her around to talk to her about everything and share things with, like having my husband's mom is a wonderfully supportive and such a warm and wonderful person. i'm super grateful for that.

and now i've forgotten your second question. oh yes, being able to engage when you're tired. i would say, like not even i can do it every time. when you encounter someone in times it's not in need of the argument at that point or to be able to reach out. i still reach out to my family and i do it anytime i feel moved to come whicho is pretty regularly. there are moments where i feel like i want to and i just, i i just can't. it's too painful. this is one of those thinks it's not like you leave and then things get better. this is a continual thing. the rejection is constant,t, active. sometimes it's just too painful and not even i can do it all the time. but it's just being aware that it's an option i think is important because i think it seems like there such a sense of hopelessness now, like there's

no point of even trying. just even moving away from that in small ways a although that t the time. and again those four steps i mentioned are absolutely skills. they are things that take time to develop and to implement in your own life. it takes time and it takes effort, and so in whatever ways that you can, don't assume that the small things are not worth doing because it's not like those people on twitter, it wasn't that i was talking to them all every day. it was just little things along the way. the fact there were multiple, i think that helped, but ultimately it was just a few people over time willing to engage. just to be willing to see all these things as opportunities and don't feel liketh it's an obligation to do it every single time. you will very quickly get overwhelmed and just say i can't

i'm done. [inaudible] -- neutral are you addressing a specific argument? >> when i am addressing my family, sometimes it's just to tell them things that are happening in my life. more often it is making some kind of argument, like it depends, right? for a while it was about the specific contradiction about praying for bad things happen to people. that's one of the things that exchange since i left. initially when i first made the argument and brought at those passages from the new testament and said, i made one other analogy too say, like for instance, david had multiple wives. we don't take that as an example. why? because it contradicts what jesus and paul said about marriage. why would we take this example

of them praying for his injuries interested i would with other specific commands from the new testament not to do that? initially they just double down, andd then about eight months after thatnd my dad gave the sermon about that passage, love your enemies. i don't think i ever heard a sermon about that verse in my entire life before then. shortly after that they stopped. every week there was this lady would go out on fridays that would list all of the soldiers who had died that we come and if it'd been 15 of them it would take thank god for 15 dead soldiers. we pray for 15,000 more. that line, the second mind about praying for more disappeared from those news releases. i know they can be reached and i know there are arguments to be made even from the own perspectiven that would help thm

continue to moderate and to step back away from some of the sport extreme ideas. anytime i see that come anytime i see an opportunity, like i have an aunt who tweets, again, they stepped away from praying for bad things happen to people and they say they don't celebrate the bad things that happen to people, but then i have an aunt who will tweet terrible, or do a retweet was a bad thing that has happened, and only, of the tweets as ha. it's like seeing this kind of things, you can see the old spirit still there and just reminded them, that's not right, that's not biblical, that's not scriptural. i guess it anytime i see it, still keep an eye on twitter feeds especially and see what things canan i say to help them change for the better. >> i wonder if you have heard of the book escaping the rabbit hole? it's written by a person who

made a reasonable amount of money in the internet business and decided he could retire early and spent most of the time debunking things like chemtrails and various conspiracy theories, alien abductions and so on. the conclusion of his book, which very much parallels yours is, be nice to people, aspirations, -- as question couldn't be patient. i think you guys have a lot in, if you got together. >> i haven't but i will add that to myy to be relist. so thank you for that. no, i had not know that but it makes me happy to hear anytime somebody takes those positions,, like cannot believe it's hopeless to community with people like that, that conspiracy thinking is also again, it could be really hard to get through to people with those ideas, but c like you sai, communicating, asking questions and taking the time to reach out to them, that can change things. thank you for that. i will look into that.

>> i think we're done. thank you. [applause] >> the u.s. senate returns today at two p.m. eastern for what escape to be a pro forma session. however, the house and senate this we cope to pass coronavirus relief legislation including more funding for small businesses, hospitals and testing. talks continue on a larger relief package for cox to prove as early as monday, may 4 due to the coronavirus pandemic. watch live coverage of the house on c-span. you can see the senate on c-span2. >> tonight on "the communicators" president and ceo of the national association of broadcasters, gordon smith, one

of broadcasters are responding to the coronavirus outbreak. is interviewed by jonathan make, communications daily executive editor. >> what are the precautions and different steps that your members are taking right now, whether it's internally, work from home as you mentioned at the association of whether it's changes are making programming and such? >> what's really interesting is that broadcasters are also people but live in their local communities and their trying to be good citizens, and while my members, for example, abc or cbs previously or fox, they are heeding the warnings coming from the cdc and the white house about ways that we can participate in reducing the spread of the virus. so they are pulling resources, they are pulling crews that go out and sharing in ways that you normally don't expect competitors to be doing, but

certainly ways that are lawful and actually very important right now. >> watch "the communicators" tonight at 8 p.m. eastern on c-span2. >> you are watch a special edition of booktv airing now during the week while members of congress are in their districts due to the coronavirus outbreak. tonight we focus on history. .. joint book tv now and over the weekend on c-span2. >> thank you for being here today, it's a heckuva book. i really enjoyed it. it's a gripping story and well