And twitter did something that caused her to doubt those Strict Church leaders that they are simple and fallible and to feel confident so thats the question she was left with. After a digital joust she started to wonder if they had a point and then changed messages. [applause] good evening everyone thank you for being here tonight. I grew up in a very tight knit family in kansas on the third of 11 children, three girls and a boys we lived on a treelined street with dozens of other kids and surrounding houses. Just across the backyard was a church we attended every sunday my moms family was vocally talented and they often gave me chills their passionate praises to god for his mercy and grace echoing off my ears. I grow proud of my family my grandfather was a wellknown civil rights activist and a lawyer who won awards from civil Rights Groups for go my family had suffered for that work with constant vandalism in the physical attacks on his Elementary School age children but that never persuade them from the commitment to Racial Justice that the new era of my familys legacy began and i will tell you about that now. I didnt understand what was going on at first is like it appeared one day as a force of nature. My mothers family was a wellknown and polarizing presence but it started at gage park it didnt look like a park to me there were no swings or slides or jungle gyms just when the busy intersection my grandfather would drive the big red pickup and the rest consisting of my aunts and uncles and cousins and siblings to follow in a caravan of vehicles. Is still a few months shy of kindergarten but i was surprised how we strain is some were compared to the leader watch your kids. Gage park was a popular Meeting Place for gay men. In hindsight the protest were bound to be intensely negative reaction especially because our message went further as an oldschool baptist was determined to represent the scriptural position on homosexuality and took the attacks on the Gay Community as a whole blaming them for the aids epidemic and that they deserve the Death Penalty. Many letters including those from one of my aunts to say was distorted by god because of their homosexuality and declared aids to be a disease for which the homosexuals take the sole blame and that should be avenged upon while spreading the disease of the homosexual this lgbt people were, morris acceptable that was just to outrage most leaders and managed to do the same with greater economy. To expose the gay aids pulley they are worthy of death that would become the most message this would mystify me for years of that religious education i was receiving at home i was five years old and i didnt understand why anybody would reject our message or why they would draw counter protesters. I was scared of them at first young punks and disease probably got aids the bible for bad girls to cut her hair but some came out bright red and blue and purple koolaid hair. And metal interfaces others had their head shaved others by long black hair that hung in greasy strands 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 wasnt fair i thought because we were just trying to protect ourselves from them but i held my breath whenever i walked by them so wouldnt 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 . Thats 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 couldnt leave before Moms 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 didnt 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 didnt 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 yearold 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 emails 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 im 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 selfharm 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 im 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 dont consider myself a christian any more. I am not religious although its 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 im 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 shouldnt 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, im not sure. I dont think there is a monolith or a church or set of beliefs. Everybody potentially has valuable things to contribute to a conversation so i dont 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 dont 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 doesnt 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 its 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 dont 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 dont 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 im 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 couldnt 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 dont want that kind of hatefulness and you dont 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 dont 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 cogni