With his two previous "Most Hated Family" documentaries, the British-American journalist Louis Theroux has done as much as anyone in the past dozen years to raise the profile of the Westboro Baptist Church.
Earlier this month the BBC aired "Surviving America's Most Hated Family," Theroux's third and latest film on the tiny Topeka, Kan., church that for years gained attention through its street preaching against gays and lesbians, Jews, Catholics, evangelicals, the U.S. military and others.
What brought Theroux back this time is his apparent curiosity about how the church has changed since the 2014 death of its founder, Fred Phelps Sr. For decades, Phelps was an intimidating, Bible-thumping, headlines-grabbing provocateur, and it's easy to imagine that Phelps' decline — when I interviewed him in 2010, he was already in poor health — and his eventual demise could have destabilized the church.
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