Pastor Fred Phelps: ‘An angry, bigoted man who thrived on conflict’
Pastor Fred Phelps is gone, called to glory if you believe the teachings of his hate-spewing ministry, the Westboro Baptist Church. To me it seems more likely that his remains are mouldering away somewhere, obeying the laws of physics and biology. But, either way, it seems an appropriate moment to reflect on the man and his legacy.
I had some history with “Gramps”, as his family and followers liked to call him. I made two documentaries about his church for the BBC: The Most Hated Family In America in 2006 and America’s Most Hated Family in Crisis in 2010. In all, I suppose I spent about a month with the members of the WBC, trying to figure out what induces them to dedicate their every spare moment – when they aren’t holding down respectable jobs as lawyers, correctional officers or salespeople in their hometown of Topeka, Kansas – to flying around the country, standing as close to funeral-goers as they are legally allowed and waving hate-filled placards with slogans such as “Thank God for Dead Soldiers”, “Fags Eat Poop”, and, of course, “God Hates Fags”. They became notorious for picketing the funerals of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the WBC teachings, the soldiers were being punished for fighting for a nation doomed in the eyes of God for its tolerance of homosexuality.
The WBC has tended to be a family affair, overwhelmingly made up of Gramps’ lineal descendants and their spouses. They live in suburban Topeka, in a collection of houses with connected gardens, which they call Zion. Gramps was the prime mover behind the practices of the church. He founded it when the idea of abominating sodomites was mainstream in American Christian circles. In some respects, it was the times that changed, leaving the WBC behind in their dogged adherence to old-style fire-and-brimstone Bible-thumping. But it’s also the case that homosexuality seems to have been an obsession with Pastor Phelps.
According to legend, the WBC inaugurated their anti-gay pickets when a Topeka park became a cruising ground in the 1980s. The Phelps decided to make signs and demonstrate against the practice. The WBC doctrine evolved into a belief that the whole of America was fallen and damned in God’s eyes, as was anyone who fought under the US flag – or, indeed, who wasn’t a member of the Westboro Baptist Church. We are all either “fags” or “fag enablers” – you, me, Desmond Tutu, Princess Di, Donald Rumsfeld, Billy Graham, Liz Taylor – though possibly not Robert Mugabe: Gramps had a soft spot for him. An eternity in hell is the fate of anyone who doesn’t get baptised into the WBC and travel the country waving hate-filled placards at political events, colleges and places associated – even in the most tortuously oblique way – with tolerance of homosexuality.
While I was with them, they had a regular local picket of a hardware store that sold Swedish vacuum cleaners. The Swedish government had imprisoned a pastor for homophobic preaching, and for the WBC that made the store a legitimate target for a ritualised Biblical smackdown. For the newcomer, these pickets were bizarre, not simply because of the venom of the signs, but also because they clashed with the banality of the family interaction. For the Phelpses, it was another day at the office – there was a water-cooler ambience of chit-chat. Meanwhile, everyone, even the youngest child, was carrying placards saying: “Thank God for 9/11”, “Your Pastor is a Whore” and “Fag Sweden”.
There is no question that their caravan of religious bigotry has made life miserable for thousands of people, many of them vulnerable mourners hoping to pay tribute to recently departed loved ones. Among their proposed picketing targets was the funeral of young Amish children who had been shot by a deranged gunman. In the tortured logic of the WBC, those kids died because their parents weren’t out holding pickets denouncing homosexuality. In the end, the WBC called off the event only after they were promised airtime on a local radio station, effectively holding the community to ransom.
But the WBC also made life miserable for themselves and inflicted a distorted and poisonous view of the world on the youngest members of their own family, holding over their heads the threat that any deviation or failure of commitment (not going to a picket or socialising with outsiders) would result in a lifetime of banishment. Ex-members – of whom there are quite a few – can have no contact with the church.
I’m proud to say he took against me from the moment we met. I asked him how many children he had. He disliked this question – I think he found me trivial. The interview was cut short. Over subsequent days, we continued filming but I hardly saw him. I had the feeling he was hiding from me. We eventually crossed paths again, in church one Sunday after his sermon on the subject of America’s coming tribulations, in which he bellowed: “You’re going to eat your babies!” One-to-one, Gramps still had the remnants of a folksy, plainspoken charm, but underneath was a bitter contempt for humanity in general and me specifically. I asked him how he could possibly know that the WBC members were the only people bound for heaven. “I can’t talk to you – you’re just too dumb,” he said. It seemed that I was a hellbound sinner. Well, at least I was in good company.
I’ve heard people speculate that Phelps had repressed gay leanings or that perhaps he was sexually assaulted when he was young, leading to a lasting animosity to homosexuality. Personally, I doubt it. I think there may be a small clue to his mindset in his having attended West Point military academy: I suspect he hated it there and had a lasting dislike of the military, which partly explains the picketing of funerals. But there may be no simple explanation for his behaviour. He was just an angry, bigoted man who thrived on conflict. There are credible reports from his disaffected offspring (four of his 13 children left the church) that he was physically abusive to his wife, Marge; he was violent to his children and had an intermittent problem with pills. He was also a lawyer and won some civil-rights cases, receiving an award from the NAACP. But he liked going against the grain.
It has been reported that Pastor Phelps had been “excommunicated” from his own church before he died (probably this doesn’t mean much more than being prevented from preaching; I doubt he was out wandering the streets). In 2010 I heard a similar rumour. Then, the word was that Gramps was panicking about a multimillion-dollar lawsuit brought against the church by the family of a dead soldier whose funeral they had picketed. (The WBC won the case on appeal.) The rest of the church viewed Gramps’ failure of nerve as evidence of lack of faith in God’s plan and they put him on the naughty pew for a time-out.
The truth is, despite being its founder and main preacher, Gramps had been a marginal figure within the WBC for some years. When I made my documentaries, the dominant force was Fred’s daughter, Shirley Phelps-Roper, a gifted organiser who could sling religious obloquy while holding four separate placards and wearing a bandana with a message of religious hate – in a different context, it would have been impressive. In fact, underneath her programming, and despite all the pain she inflicted in the name of her religion, she is basically a kind person.
Where the WBC goes from here is anybody’s guess. I haven’t been following its doings as closely in recent years. Evidently they have attracted new members from outside the family. A few years ago there was news that a US marine and his family had been baptised into the church. Just as striking was the report that a British man had moved to Topeka from England, joined the church and married Jael Phelps. A few weeks ago I found a photo on Twitter of Jael at a picket holding a tiny baby. In its abundant procreation, the family has a guaranteed supply of future recruits.
I don’t expect huge changes with Gramps’ death. The church has always operated according to the dynamics of a large family rather than a cult. Cults don’t typically excommunicate their charismatic leaders. Families do: they put their ageing parents in a granny annex and take away the keys to the car. Maybe, as with other families, the bereavement will bring them together. In another context, that might be a comforting thought. In this case one rather wishes that the second generation would continue to feud and fragment – and perhaps in the process moderate their way of thinking and get in touch with some of the apostate children they no longer see.
The more chilling thought is a backward-looking one, of how one man’s legacy is likely to continue. Gramps’ offspring, and their offspring, have been raised to believe that abuse is kindness. The natural bonds of family have been braided into this twisted thinking so that children who love their parents and siblings can’t separate those feelings from their sense of obligation to the church and its creed. And when they leave they also take with them the nagging guilt and fear that haven’t just lost a family: they have lost their only chance of salvation.
Louis Theroux’s LA Stories, Sundays, 9pm, BBC2
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/24/pastor-fred-phelps-westboro-baptist-church-louis-theroux?CMP=ema_632
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Qr Sects, LGBT
Stuart Edser: None of us understands what happens after we leave this world; how it works, does it change, what happens to consciousness, who goes where, is there any sense of this world, any sense of time and space etc etc. What happens now to Fred Phelps? I am comfortable leaving all that with God because we can never know this side of the curtain. Of course we have faith and hope, but not noetic certainty.
However, one thing does spring to mind for me regarding this article and that is the interface of religion and the state.
In the US and here in Australia, we have secular government that governs for the good of the people and their safety. Religion has no power to enact legislation or to rule the lives of our citizens. And government stays out of the life of how people worship and interact with the Divine. However, in the case of cults, and Westboro Baptist IS a cult, I think there is a good case to be made for the intrusion of the secular government into the life of the cult where children are concerned.
Where young children are indoctrinated into hatred, as in the case of Westboroa Baptist, or into deviant sexual practices as in other cases, I think there is legitimate cause for forceful interrogation of adults and segregated questioning of minors with the powers of removal if it can be established that children’s lives are in danger or their futures are being destroyed.
Young children in the Westboro case can only live in ghettos of other Westbororites, must spend their entire lives at church meetings indoctrinated by hatred of others, can never enjoy the the basics that other children take for granted, can never enjoy special times like outings and holidays etc, can never ‘leave’ the church or mix with non-church members. Such indoctrination and coerced lifestyle are in my opinion abusive. Cults are a grotesque parody of spirituality. They hurt people profoundly and destroy the happiness of members and their families and friends. Cults are a blight on society. I have little patience with them when I see the profound distress they cause. In my own post on this cult since Phelps’ death, I posted a number of little kids holding up their hateful and hate-filled placards. It is heart-breaking to see this. Modern pluralist societies should not be so tolerant of this particular form of child abuse.
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A Portrait of Hate: Fred Phelps 1929-2014
Well Fred Phelps is dead.ÂÂ
He was born in 1929, so he made 84.ÂÂ
It is almost impossible to describe this man, such was his life, such is his legacy. Probably the closest single word as epithet would be ‘tyrant’ or perhaps ‘hatemonger’. A man so full of bitterness and bile that he twisted and contorted his entire extended family into a parody and turned them into willing acolytes in the cult that is the Westboro Baptist Church, obeying the old patriarch to the letter. Until very recently, he ruled the cult as impassioned religious demagogue but also as tyrant. The Louis Theroux 2007 BBC documentary ‘The Most Hated Family in America’ showed all too well the fear of Phelps that was held by the family members. His tyranny was rampant and so, not much questioning, not much dissent occurred in Westboro Baptist.
Their ‘church’ has been rejected by the Baptists and other Protestant denominations as has Phelps himself for his extremist views. On only a few occasions, one or two family members have left the cult and have been rejected by them ever since. The evil perpetrated in this man’s name at so many levels is astounding and is a monument to the obsession, opprobrium and resolve of Phelps to do all in his power to militate against gay people and more latterly, the whole of America, including its dead soldiers and the military in general, for accepting gay people.
So why? How did it come to this?
Phelps was not a stupid man. He had graduated from law school. He was also given to obsessiveness and retribution for perceived hurt. He had worked as a lawyer in his earlier career, but presaging the turmoil that would surround his adult life, he was disbarred in 1977 in telling circumstances.
The Wikipedia entry for his disbarment states:
“A formal complaint was filed against Phelps on November 8, 1977, by the Kansas State Board of Law Examiners for his conduct during a lawsuit against a court reporter named Carolene Brady. Brady had failed to have a court transcript ready for Phelps on the day he asked for it; though it did not affect the outcome of the case for which Phelps had requested the transcript, Phelps still requested $22,000 in damages from her. In the ensuing trial, Phelps called Brady to the stand, declared her a hostile witness, and then cross-examined her for nearly a week, during which he accused her of being a “slut”, tried to introduce testimony from former boyfriends whom Phelps wanted to subpoena, and accused her of a variety of perverse sexual acts, ultimately reducing her to tears on the stand. The trial became an exhibition of a personal vendetta by Phelps against Carolene Brady. His examination was replete with repetition, badgering, innuendo, belligerence, irrelevant and immaterial matter, evidencing only a desire to hurt and destroy the defendant. The jury verdict didn’t stop the onslaught of Phelps. He was not satisfied with the hurt, pain, and damage he had visited on Carolene Brady†(Wikipedia).
While being trained in the profession of the law, Phelps was not of the calibre to be able to examine intensively and extensively. In other words, he was smart enough, but he was no genius. And his personality traits coalesced with some little intelligence as to make him an impossible and unreasonable opponent.
“A little learning is a dangerous thing;   drink deep, or taste not the Pierian springâ€Â
(Alexander Pope, Essay on Criticism, 1709).
Pope’s famous couplet is apposite to Fred Phelps most surely. His wit took him to Bible College where he was eventually ordained into a Southern Baptist church and his personality took him to extreme Calvinism where he thought of himself as a Primitive Baptist (not that they accepted him either). I have always found Calvin pretty hard to swallow and have rejected his most famous of theological positions: unconditional election and limited atonement; the first holding that God has chosen a certain elect to be saved, their own lives being irrelevant to God’s decision, while others are not to be saved; while the second holds that Christ died for these elect only and not for anyone else. The God portrayed by these theologies comes off as a pretty unsavoury character, hugely partial, biased and indifferent to the lost eternity of those not in the elect which is most of humanity if you think about what Jesus said, ‘narrow is the gate and few there be that find it’. The pure Calvinist God is monstrous and couldn’t match it with the weakest of human fathers. Phelps was utterly and completely attracted to this portrayal of a ruthless God like a moth to a flame. This imago dei matched his own skewed retributive and belligerent personality. In the Westboro Baptist cult otherwise known as the ‘God hates fags church’, Phelps fashioned God after his own image.
Fred Phelps’ behaviour is legendary or more accurately infamous. I do not need to go into the picketing of funerals of gay people and of fatally wounded American soldiers. I do not have to go into the hate speech and vile invective of their website. If you believed that, then God hates everything and everyone, every nation, every person not of the Phelps persuasion. It is a theology of grotesquery, a twisted parody of the Judaeo-Christian God-figure where God is portrayed as a furious, rage-filled, retributive, violent, castigating, aggressive, vengeful deity. “Can you preach the Bible without preaching the hatred of God?†Phelps asked in a 2006 interview with The Associated Press. “The answer is absolutely not”. The Theroux documentary was challenging to watch as the members of the cult when speaking of God came across as being absolutely terrified of him. And their fear of God was what they preached and protested.
“God hates fags.†“God is your enemy.†“God hates you.†“USA = fag nation.†“Fags die God laughs.†“Thank God for maimed soldiers.â€Â “Pray for more dead soldiers.†“Thank God for dead soldiers.†“Thank God for IEDs.†“God killed your sons.†“Thank God for 9/11.â€Â
A man of impenetrable hatred preaching a god of fury, rage, retribution, judgement and tyranny and indoctrinating his family to do the same; adults and children alike. It is not conceptually possible to get further away from the relational God whose essence is love that Jesus told us of if you purposely tried.
What do we do with Phelps’ death? Well, whether we are Christian or not, I believe we should be better and bigger than Phelps and his family ever were. We should not picket his funeral if he has one. We should not dance on his grave. We should not delight in the demise of another human being. If we do call ourselves followers of Jesus, then we need to leave Phelps to God and not return hatred for hatred.
It is hard to imagine anyone being so unempathic, so blind to the suffering he caused others. But psychologists do talk about a trait called psychopathy that is identified in people who do not have the ability to empathise. Most people usually think immediately of serial killers when we use this term, but serial killers are only the extreme version of psychopathy. Many people are known to exhibit strong traits of psychopathy, eg., some bosses and narcissists come to mind. It is often associated with either narcissistic or anti-social personality disorder. It would not surprise me to learn that Phelps might have been in one of these categories, such was his lack of empathy.
As such, I think he deserves our pity. Please do not misperceive my meaning here. I do not feel sorry for Fred Phelps. And I certainly do not endorse his life. But I do wonder whether this was a tormented soul. Was Phelps narcissistic? Did he have a personality disorder? Did he have homosexual inclinations himself and used Freudian reaction formation as a defence against it? We will never know. But we do know that Fred Phelps was not a happy man nor a man in peace. I am comfortable leaving him to whatever comes next for those of his ilk. He leaves a dreadful and terrible legacy of twisted religious bile behind him and a family probably forever destroyed.
There is one final point I wish to make. It has been a strong theme through the whole BGBC Blog. I want to point out that Fred Phelps was a fundamentalist extremist. But he used mainstream Christian doctrine and well-known Bible verses to spread his filth. Where we are convinced that we have the truth and everyone else is heretical; where we hold that our version of God is correct and all others are in error; where we say what is right and what is wrong; where we focus on one tenet of thought and neglect all others; where we ignore science and human reason; where we pronounce judgement on our fellow human beings guided by our own teachings; where we split God’s beautiful creation into the saved and unsaved, the elect and non-elect, the washed and the great unwashed; where we put dogma ahead of people; where we give blind allegiance to texts written in the ancient world; where we place the letter of the law before the spirit of the law; where we follow a primitive tribalism over an inclusivity of the family of humanity, then any of us potentially could become another Fred Phelps.
Fundamentalism misses the point of spirituality entirely. It is a parody of authentic spiritual life. It is pharisaic and misguided. In its most tribal forms, it is cruel and even cultic. It is a diminution of the human spirit and an attempt to give borders to the divine, to put God in a box.
Fred Phelps might have been one of a kind and to be sure, he was. But there is a lesson here. The road away from Jesus – his life, his example, his teachings, his non-violence, his preparedness to forgive, his willingness to love, his desire to be with those most struggling, his willingness to die to show a better way – leads only to law, judgment, exclusion, arrogance and domination; the stuff of fundamentalist religion. People suffer under the yoke of fundamentalism because the focus of fundamentalism is not people; it is conformity. Jesus’ focus was always the people. Fred Phelps was an exemplar of the most extreme forms of fundamentalism and should be discussed in the same arena as Jim Jones, Shoko Ashara, David Koresh, L. Ron Hubbard and other cultists of their ilk. When you look at Fred Phelps, you see a neon-lit example of how fundamentalism can easily tip over into cultism. For those of us who call ourselves Christian, we need always to be vigilant that we follow in Jesus’ footsteps and to eschew once and for all religious arrogance.
Vale Fred Phelps. In truth, the world will not be poorer for your passing.
Pax et Amor – Stuart Edser
http://beinggaybeingchristian.blogspot.com.au/2014/03/a-portrait-of-hate-fred-phelps-1929-2014.html?spref=fb
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‘Heartbreaking’ Undercover Doctor: Cure Me, I’m Gay outrages TV viewers
TV viewers have branded Undercover Doctor: Cure Me, I’m Gay ‘heartbreaking and disgusting’.
Embarrassing Bodies’ Dr Christian Jessen went undercover in the Channel 4 documentary to expose bogus therapies which claim to ‘cure’ people of homosexuality.
Jessen, who is openly gay, tried out a variety of controversial methods in the UK and US including aversion therapy, gay rehab and right brain therapy.
His findings enraged TV viewers with ImSoBloginThis posting: ‘Watching undercover Doctor cure me, I’m gay! Utterly heartbreaking and disgusting to think this still happens. *inserts anger* Seriously!!’
MINDSEY said: ‘Maybe instead of gay rehab, there should be homophobia rehab.’
Meg__OHalloran wrote: ‘the fact that people seek to cure homosexuality as if its a disease sickens me.’
jadedeyesx posted: ‘I really don’t know whether to laugh or cry.’
CityOfPercico added: ‘#curemeimgay instead of this they should be ‘curing’ their own stupidity.’
‘Heartbreaking’ Undercover Doctor: Cure Me, I’m Gay outrages TV viewers
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