witnesses and i keep thinking that jehovah witness knock on a lot of doors and most people shut the door and few people open them. people grow up in a neighborhood in its almost like why are the opening the door and are you any closer to figure out why they open the door? >> it's a great question. a lot of it is about timing so for example, a lot of the young men wind up in the most far-flung places ideologically are young men who, at the time they interacted with a recruiter or propagandist or older man who wanted to mentor them into a criminal network they were going through some sort of trauma. they lost their mom or their sister or their had a falling out with their parents but something that made them particularly distraught and vulnerable to someone selling them on a utopia, some vision of a perfect world. in terms of who can open the door sometimes it's about what happened to you that day. do you need a friend that they? then you open the door and maybe the jehovah witness is the friend you need at the moment and hopefully let's be clear jehovah witnesses are not promoting in

and together, they join the jehovah's witnesses, an austere christian sect that demands strict rules of behavior. their daughter lizz is now in her late 20s. what was it like growing up as the only child in the melgar family? >> you know, i always had a lot of love and attention. i think i might've taken that for granted as a teenager when, you know, you go through your rebellious years. >> reporter: lizz's cousin marissa remembers looking up to them as role models when she went to visit. >> sandy and jim were just very loving towards each other, respectful. you could just tell they always had each other's back. they were always helping each other out. i liked watching them together. >> reporter: as daughter lizz grew up, she became especially close to her mom, sandy. what was her personality like, in general? >> she's just very caring and loving and nurturing. she was also a lot of fun. she knew how to joke around, tell a good joke. you know, i just felt like she was the embodiment of a mother, just the kind of person that you would picture when you think of that word. she was just

you open the door and the jehovah's witness might have something you need in that moment. they are not promoting an ideology they are just using the analogy way to people open the door and i think a lot of it is about things that are hard to standardize. a lot of it is about the personal circumstances. i generally think they don't work because of how localized in specific these issues are like if you want to push back against radicalization a lot of it is about the relationships that exist in the communities and what you see when someone opens the door to they have the support that on the other side. >> how you conclude is building up to having more youth leaders and communities working with young people especially young men. i'm going to ask about that, but i have to ask about black wives matter. >> that is a part of the book that i probably received the most push back on a. they are a radical group and they would self identify. i suppose that is in the eye of the beholder and they also think of themselves as being radical in a good way. the people who support them if are

the cults were usually like christian scientists, jehovah's witnesses and mormons. those three groups often got grouped together as cults. really on the grounds of gender and sexuality issues, more than any other i do believe, conservative mormons and conservative protestants and catholics were able to realign politically and lower those walls between them and really become more accepting of each other as, you know, brothers and sisters at the christian faith. and that happened again on the progressive side as well. so these issues, in my mind, have been really critical for these shifting definitions of what it means to be christian. so thanks for the question. >> actually, let me follow up with one more question because you asked me a question. i did not properly respond, but i think it leads into this next question, which is every change that you have described in your book and frankly i think we could say most changes throughout human history involving sexuality have involved humans having sex with other humans. >> well, that's true. >> yeah, right. and i'm a big