Fred Phelps Just Wants to Save Your Soul.
The real problem with the Westboro Baptist Church isn’t the message, it’s the source.
News began spreading the other day that Fred Phelps, founder of the Westboro Baptist Church, was dying. He is in hospice somewhere in his home state of Kansas, but information is minimal. We don’t know what he is dying of, how long he’s been there, or if, as his son Nathan suggested on Facebook, he’s been excommunicated from the Church that he founded. Unlike other pastors, though, Fred Phelps’ demise will be met with sighs of relief, perhaps even cries of hallelujah.
That certainly seems un-Christian, to cheer for the death of a man of the cloth, but Phelps and his church seem particularly deserving. For the few that aren’t aware of the Westboro Baptist Church and its heinous practices, they are the ones that hold up the “God Hates Fags” signs at funerals. They are the ones that protest Holocaust memorials. The ones that think that Barack Obama is the Anti-Christ.
That, to me, seems very Christian.
Fred Phelps just wants to get into heaven, preaching the word of Jesus, and living by the holy law just as best as he can. And he wants you to get in, too. He thinks he’s doing us all a favor by reminding us of God’s position on Homosexuality. What he’s really doing is exposing Christianity for the abomination it really is.
By way of a brief introduction, Fred Phelps became the pastor of the Westboro Baptist Church in 1955, at the age of twenty-six. It started as an expansion of the East Side Baptist Church, but he quickly split ties with the sister church. In mid-sixties, he became a lawyer, and opened his own law firm, Phelps Chartered, which was relatively successful. Phelps was later disbarred by the state of Kansas for misconduct, and agreed to stop practicing Federal Cases in the mid-eighties, ending his career entirely. What most people don’t know is that during this time he was fighting the Jim Crow laws of Kansas, and in this pursuit, he was very successful. As the Topeka Capital Journal noted in a 1994 article, he was awarded honors by African American organizations, including a local chapter of the NAACP.
This trivia (or trivial anecdote) often gets tossed out, as perhaps a saving grace for the pastor. If he fought for integration, he can’t be all bad, can he? Of course, later on in life, he turned out to be just as racist as homophobic. He sent out faxes labeling “a local black lawyer as an ‘INCOMPETENT BLACK WHORE’ and ‘BLACK TRASH.’” He could add these hateful messages to his infamous “God Hates Fags” that show up at his picket protests. These demonstrations started in the 90s, and quickly spread to the point that his church has claimed to have picketed in every state, mostly at the funerals of military service men and women and celebrities, though they have been known to exploit national tragedies.
And it is for these demonstrations that Phelps & co. has taken the most heat. His methods are so galling that laws have been enacted to prevent his church from getting too close to funeral routes. Large groups often come to picket their picketing. Motorcycle gangs create human walls and rev their engines so the Church can’t be heard. Even the KKK has protested the WBC. Yet, time and time again, Phelps or other representatives of the Westboro Baptist Church show up to picket. They come and express their Christian views, as is their First Amendment right.
But given the anti-Gay Marriage, homophobic, Christian coalition in this country, it comes as shock that they’ve experienced such a backlash. When you get right down to it, The Bible really does seem to tell us that “God Hates Fags.” It says so right there in Leviticus, along with dozens of other insane rules to live by. And according to the Gospels of Matthew 5:17, Jesus never meant to change any Old Testament rules, but to fulfill them. (I fully recommend reading Reza Aslan’s Zealot, for a look at Jesus as a historical person, which goes into much more detail about what Jesus thought his place was as a Jew.) Phelps is quite right in his assertion.
As a matter of fact, Christians have historically been against a vast array of people and things. Many of the same complaints made by Phelps about Gay marriage have been made by other sects about interracial marriage. This Tennessee pastor, seems to think that it’s ok to be against interracial marriage because he thinks black women are beautiful, just as long as they don’t marry white men. William Saletan at Slate draws the comparison that the recent rise in talk of Religious Freedom in discriminating against the LGBT community is similar to discriminating against interracial couples at Bob Jones University. The Bible is ripe with anti-interracial sentiment, often coming in the form of tribalism and xenophobia.
In the distant past, Martin Luther wrote anti-semitic essays like “The Jews and their Lies.” The Catholic church burned scientists at the stake, while exiling others, and attempting to hide scientific truth. More recently, Christians across the nation have been opposed to women’s rights to birth control and safe abortions. A Florida pastor has gone around burning Qurans. The Amish still shun technology, because of the idea that getting too attached here on Earth prevents them from seeing their purpose of getting into heaven. (These are just a few Christian examples, let alone other denominations that are full of their own barbaric hatreds.) All of these things flow from readings of the Bible, and are the works of Christians, so why all the anger and hatred towards Phelps? Is there a major difference between the hatred they espouse versus these other examples of hatred?
Well, no, of course not; hate is hate. Fred Phelps just wants to get to heaven the only way he knows how: through the teachings of the Bible. And this is true of those who found justification for their racism, sexism, or just plain hatred in that book. And while there are vast disagreements about the place of bigoted Christians in the modern world, they are a loud bunch. Louise Antony asked in an interview with Gary Gutting for the New York Times philosophy opinion blog, The Stone: “I’m puzzled why you are puzzled how rational people could disagree about the existence of God. Why not ask about disagreements among theists?” That is a good place to start a discussion on why all Christians’ don’t carry “God Hates Fags” signs or burn Qurans.
Antony continues that “ Jews and Muslims disagree with Christians about the divinity of Jesus; Protestants disagree with Catholics about the virginity of Mary; Protestants disagree with Protestants about predestination, infant baptism and the inerrancy of the Bible.” It seems that the Bible is a means to an end, and so much depends on finding justification in the many different readings of this one book. It is so plentiful in hatred and immoral behavior that it’s hard not to find some passage or another to support a personal bigotry in the form of religion amongst the moral and the good within. Christianity, in this particular focus, becomes not a religion, but a group of religions with a vast array of biases.
Even an Atheist could admit that not everything Jesus said could lead to bigotry. In fact, taken as a philosophy (a mutable set of principles), as opposed to a religion (an immutable set of principles), he said some highly moral things that still have value in this world. Yet, within the framework of the religion founded on his words, and the words of his people, you’re going to find people like Fred Phelps. And it’s the religiosity of the books that forces people to take them so seriously. Any books that take on followers of blind faith are bound to cause harm sooner or later (Ayn Rand outside of a religion is a good example of this). They’re bound to end up in the mouths of extremists. And it has been said of Phelps’ Westboro Baptist Church, that they are to Christianity what Al Qaeda is to Islam, purely a group of extremists not representative of a group.
Sadly, in this debate, it is hard not to sound like the guy that wants to censor all violent movies because a few people can’t handle them. But in reality, God is, as Bill Maher recently described him, a “Psychotic Mass Murderer,” and I agree with Maher in thinking that it’s hard to take morals from this kind of deity. But we’re in the minority. Throughout the world, the prevailing belief is that you need faith to be moral. The same world in which female degradation, sectarian wars, racism, xenophobia, and Phelps’ unique brand of homophobia exist.
We must look to the foundations of these extremists, and realize that they are rooted in Faith and Belief. No other part of human life has been responsible for so much hatred. After Fred Phelps is dead and gone, whether or not his church lives on, we will remember him not as a purely hateful man, but a hateful Christian who believed he was doing God’s work on Earth. That distinction is important. Without the Bible, he would not have his justification. Without his religion, he would not have his soapbox to stand on.
