More Inerrant Than Thou

My claim from yesterday: fundamentalist pastors like Steven Anderson and Fred Phelps operate from a more coherent hermeneutic base than many other conservative evangelicals. What do I mean?

As I've written about in this week's posts, Anderson and Phelps each represent examples of an overtly hate-ful theology, arguing that God does not love everyone and that in fact God's hatred of particular people--reprobates--is an essential feature of who God is. Both men base their theologies on the plain words of scripture, pointing out that the Bible, when taken whole and literally, simply does not support the popular myth of an all-loving God. Because God does not love reprobates, because God in fact despises reprobates, so too are Christians supposed to hate such people.

Now, conservative evangelicals for the most part repudiate Phelps as a hatemonger, casting their own stances against, for instance, gay and lesbian people not hatred of humans but as a disapproval of an action. Love the sinner, hate the sin. Again, such not-quite-fundamentalist evangelicals typically base their stances in this (and other) areas on the plain truths expressed in the Bible. Such evangelicals often foreground the solid Biblical foundation on which they stand when criticizing more liberal varieties of Christianity that do not consider homosexuality to be sinful (or which ordain women, or which use higher criticism, or which value social justice as part of the Christian mission, and so on).

Such liberals, goes the critique, always begin by calling into question the plain words of scripture, re-interpreting or "contextualizing" (scare quotes theirs) particular verses to mean less than or the opposite of what the plain English (or plain Greek) means. Liberals then begin to suggest that some parts of scripture are more human in origin than divine in origin, leading them to discard or marginalize particular sections in favor of others. For Bible-believing (in the sense of inerrantist) evangelicals, once a person sees the Bible as less than the complete, literal, cohesive, and inerrant Words of God, the downward slope becomes ever steeper and slipperier, curving downward into the abyss of apostasy. Evangelicals derive a great deal of their populist, common-sense ethos from the plain-and-simple premise that the Bible is either wholly reliable in every aspect or wholly false.

Here's where Phelps and Anderson come in. Judged from the standard of who reveres the Bible as inerrant more, evangelicals hold the high ground when debating liberals. But when distancing themselves from Phelps's and Anderson's acidic rhetoric ("God Hates Fags" for Phelps, "I pray that Obama dies and goes to hell" for Anderson), the situation gets reversed. Phelps and Anderson themselves make the argument that theirs is the more clearly supported stance.

And they're correct. That numerous scriptures speak of God's extremely negative emotions or violent actions toward living human beings is undeniable. "Break their teeth, oh God, in their mouths" isn't a verse that Steven Anderson just made up. Fred Phelps can and does draw on a host of scriptures that speak of the hatred of God. I have yet to encounter an evangelical treatment of Phelps, Anderson, or someone like them that even attempts to out-Bible the fundamentalists.

I frankly doubt it can be done. If the sole and most important criterion for Christian belief is the literal, plain-sense, non-historicized words of scripture (in King James English), then Phelps's and Anderson's different doctrines of hate clearly enjoy the superior support. It is they who can (and do) criticize evangelicals for ignoring or prioritizing different parts of scripture evangelicals find inconvenient: "Let me introduce you: this is the Bible," Anderson loves to say to his flock. ''Christian? Meet the Bible. Bible? Meet the Christian." Anderson doesn't say it's wrong to love people like Barack Obama; the Bible does. Any argument to insert context or nuance into Anderson's interpretation constitutes a tampering-with-Scripture just as blasphemous as that of the gay-apologetic liberals.

Ditto with Phelps. Think what you will of Phelps and his tiny Westboro Baptist Church's theology, but I have to respect the fact that they are more dedicated to fleshing out, justifying, and realizing their understanding of what God wants than most Christians are--heck they're more dedicated than most believers of any cause or faith are. I think the common dismissal of Phelps and his followers as homophobic or obsessively hateful misses the mark. Purely reactive hatred is a powerful but short-lived emotion. It encourages violent outbursts, not long-term, year-after-year projects. Phelps and his crew have gone beyond mere bigotry; theirs is a life discipline of hate similar to a nun's life discipline of chastity or poverty. In interviews and documentaries, members of the Phelps congregation are generally quite calm, even when discussing the filthy practices of the sodomites and the fools that support them. What they say may seem crazy, but how they say it is not. They are dispassionate, objective, and even clinical about their beliefs and demonstrations. They are True Believers in the imperative of divine hate, not fair-weather haters.

I describe them thus to contrast them further with most other conservative evangelicals who find themselves pressed into rendering an opinion on this or that culture war issue. Confronted with the notion of a female pastor or a gay member of church, for instance, the average conservative evangelical will likely register opposition based on their understanding of the Bible's literal words. Confronted with the spectacle of Phelp's "Thank God For AIDS" or "Fags Burn In Hell" signs (or with the soundbyte of Anderson asking God to make Michelle Obama a widow), however, that same evangelical will castigate such acts as un-Christian and un-Biblical.

Anderson and especially Phelps, however, are much better versed in justifying their stances via reference to the Bible than evangelicals in general are in criticizing them using that same criterion. And that's one of the major weaknesses of a doctrine of strict inerrancy: there's always someone whose theology is both more inerrant and more repellent than yours.

More tomorrow,

JF