Phelps Counter-Rallies and Tolerance Fads

Back from some time away due to sickness and a conference. Now I'm on the long, slow climb back to being caught up. Part of the catching up process involves re-establishing my habit of regular postings. Thus--

It seems none other than the Rev. Fred "God Hates Fags" Phelps will be protesting here in my own town soon. A local high school is doing The Laramie Project, Tectonic Theatre's documentary play about the aftermath of Matthew Shepard's murder. The play itself features an extended scene that references Phelps's protest of Shepard's funeral and of the trial of his killers. One of the characters (based, of course, on a real person) responds to Phelps's protest by staging a counter-protest of people dressed as angels. As Phelps and his crew yell anti-gay invectives, the angels stand in front of him and raise their wings, blocking him from the funeral (or from the cameras).

Since then, Phelps and his Westboro Baptist church regularly choose to protest various productions of the play, which in turn inspires large counter-protests along the lines of those represented. Given that Laramie Project has become something of a high school staple (low tech requirements, large cast, easy-to-prove liberal credentials), Phelps is rarely at a loss for some site to protest, and communities are rarely at a loss for occasions to prove how liberal they are in response.

Don't get me wrong. I think it can be admirable to organize and stage a counter-protest. I've participated in some counter-protests against him myself. Certainly Phelps's message merits a counter-statement...

...or does it? Something about the formula of "Phelps comes/counter-protest staged" makes my alarms go off.

His ministry depends upon people at least seeing his bright neon signs. As I've written before, he's not so interested in creating converts; his hyper-Calvinism leads him to see most everyone else as hopelessly non-predestined anyway. Phelps's demonstrations function more as God's pointing finger of judgment, a conduit of divine disapproval for the nation's refusal to impose the death penalty on homosexuals. (One wonders if they believe in positive reinforcement, traveling to Uganda, perhaps, to praise legislators there for considering a death penalty measure for homosexual acts).

But, as just about anyone who's seen Phelps in person knows, the Westboro presence is generally anticlimactic. There's generally a handful of protesters, like a smallish family on vacation, waving their admittedly eye-catching signs. It's sort of pathetic, really--so pathetic that I wonder honestly whether they would continue at all were it not for the fact that their well-publicized presence guarantees a massive counter-reaction from the community.

More disturbingly, and with all due respect for the good intentions of the organizers: what is the point of the communal counter-reaction? It certainly won't convince Phelps et al. that their cause is hopeless or wrong-headed. Quite the contrary--the more resistance they inspire, the more the Phelps crew become convinced of the meaningfulness of their action. Doesn't the counter-reaction itself give Phelps just what he wants, i.e., proof that his righteous condemnation is making waves with the heathen? Could it be that the automatic counter-reactions by communities that Phelps visits have the unintended side-effect of encouraging Phelps to continue?

The stronger argument for counter-protests, of course, is that they aren't for Phelps's benefit but for the community's. A strong counter-rally against Phelps demonstrates to that community that his level of intolerance is, well, intolerable. I suppose that community audience has a number of sub-divisions. There's the GLBT sub-community, for whom their community's gesture of support could be a meaningful counter-message to Phelps's "God Hates Fags" rhetoric. I can see, also, how a communal counter-rally could encourage connection and mutual awareness within the left-liberal-activist sections of that community. I could even see how the occasion of a rally in contrast to Phelp's message might push some otherwise stand-offish (or apathetic) "moderate" folk to make an active choice. The rally re-casts Phelps's visit into an either-or melodrama, forcing the audience of the community to take sides.

But if I might play devil's advocate: speaking as a GLBT member of my community, it's nice that my city wants to rally to say that, at the end of the day, gay people shouldn't be called fags and given the death penalty. But I would hope that my community thinks that in any case. More directly, there's lots of ways I can think of for my community to express support for me that I'd rather see happen than a one-time counter-rally against a fire-and-brimstone caricature like Phelps. How about a non-discrimination policy? How about domestic partner benefits? How about health care for GLBT couples? (how about health care for everybody, come to think of it)?

I'm sorry, but I'm incredulous toward the notion that my civic community has my back, as demonstrated by a one-off reaction to the cartoon-level intolerance of Phelps, when that same community fails consistently to enact the day-today recognitions of equality that would make a material difference in my life and in the lives of other GLBT people.

That, I think, is the danger of Phelps and Westboro--not that they will actually inspire people to adopt their wacko beliefs but that they give people who otherwise do little or nothing for GLBT people a chance to acquire pro-tolerance credentials simply by standing up and saying, "You know, it's wrong to call those people fags and say they should all die and burn in hell." Phelps makes tolerance easy, a matter of standing up against him. If tolerance within a pluralized democracy means anything beyond beautiful phrases, surely it means an ongoing work of standing up for the rights and equality of people unlike you.

Now, if a counter-Phelps rally represents for some people a first step toward a broader perspective on what tolerance means--then super. But the danger I fear is that Phelps can just as easily be an occasion to participate in a facile fad of tolerance chic.

More soon,

JF

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

Reprobation and the Hatred of God

It's odd to think of fundamentalist pastors like Fred Phelps (of "God Hates Fags" fame) and Steven Anderson (of "Why I Hate Barack Obama" fame) as stabilizing influences, but that has been their effect on me as I study conservative evangelicalism. To explore why, I'll need to pinpoint where Phelps and Anderson (and others like them) depart from most other evangelicals.

Of course, as many scholars have noted (D. G. Hart most effectively), evangelicalism lacks a clear nucleus and a clear outer boundary. Setting up hard-and-fast lines between evangelicals and fundamentalists is practically impossible and theoretically ill-advised. Nevertheless, conservative evangelicals often use Phelps (and, I predict, Anderson to a lesser extent) as foils against which they portray their beliefs as sensible, loving, and mainstream. I want today to locate where and how evangelicals themselves tend to discriminate between themselves and fundamentalism.

As I wrote yesterday, Phelps and Anderson themselves differ markedly from each other on several points of theology and practice. Phelps is hyper-Calvinist and disinterested in winning converts; his church's colorful and offensive protests are meant to condemn, not to convert. Anderson, on the other hand, refuses to align with formal theological traditions, be they Calvinist, Arminian, or dispensational. And while his sermons often feature fire-breathing rhetoric (like the aforementioned "Why I Hate..." that made national headlines), Anderson is a devoted evangelist who values soul-winning as a central component of any legitimate church.

What they share, however, is the utter certainty that they have a deadlock on the Words of God literally and plainly presented in the Bible. Moreover, their readings of scripture lead them to the unpopular conclusion that God is in fact not (or not primarily) a God of love but a God of hate. Where other preachers or scholars will contextualize verses like the imprecatory Psalms (e.g., Psalm 58: "Break their teeth, oh God, in their mouths..."), Phelps and Anderson build whole theologies upon instances of God's wrath, God's violence, God's delight in the sufferings of others, and so on.

To be sure, both men define God's hatred not as a human pettiness or prejudice (both in different ways distance themselves from racist fundamentalist organizations like the KKK) but as a natural and rational consequence of God's righteous perfection. Being God, being the very definition and essence of Good, God will of course be intolerant of--hate--evil. All humans are by virtue of their being human, imperfect. Yet God in God's mercy (Anderson is more apt to say love than Phelps) sent Christ as sacrifice to atone for the sins of imperfect humanity. Humans--at least the elect of those humans--can by that grace believe in Christ and avoid God's wrath. Those who die without so believing are hopelessly subject to the holy, righteous fire of God's anger.

So far, so orthodox, as far as most conservative evangelicals are concerned. God hates sin but loves humanity enough to die on the cross. No disagreement there. Anderson and Phelps diverge from the majority of evangelicals, however, in their words about those humans who while still alive stray irrevocably beyond the ambit of God's grace: the reprobate. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, wrote about "going on to perfection," suggesting that Christians can in this mortal life achieve a kind of heavenly state of holiness. Phelps's and Anderson's reprobation functions as a kind of a perfection in reverse, a going-on-to-perdition. Those who proudly reject God or commit blasphemy against the Holy Spirit by declaring the works of God as evil or sinful--God in essence gives up on these people, withdrawing from them all hope of salvation, all sense of right and wrong, hardening their hearts and condemning them to their sinful, violent lusts. Such people are not only unsaved but permanently unsaved.

Here Phelps and Anderson leave much of mainstream evangelicalism. Most evangelicals would be uneasy with the suggestion that any human is beyond saving. Stories of the redemptive power of God for even the worst, vilest offender filled the messages I heard as a Southern Baptist. These and other stories relied on the idea that Christ died "while we were yet sinners"--while we were shaking our fists in the face of God. Our human rebellion did not, could not, overpower the saving grace of Christ. My Baptist tradition in particular affirmed the legitimacy of "deathbed conversions," where even the foulest man or woman could be saved if they truly believed in the last moments of their mortal lives (look, for instance, at the thief on the cross next to Jesus to whom Christ said "Truly you will be with me in Paradise").

If pressed, some evangelicals (particularly those in Calvinist traditions, where reprobation is a well-established doctrine) will admit that perhaps God does sometimes "harden the heart" of people. But even they would urge caution about thinking we can know for sure just who such reprobates were, holding out the hope that even those we think are reprobates may yet turn to Christ. Whether any particular person is an actual reprobate is beyond human knowledge. In other words, regardless of our impressions, we as Christians are to love others by reaching out to them, urging them to turn to Christ (and perhaps to repent).

Phelps and Anderson would not disagree. Phelps and his church maintain that their "Thank God for AIDS" or "Matt Shepard Burning in Hell" displays are acts of love, presenting people with the hard truth about how life really is. Anderson would maintain the same: if he didn't love people, he asks rhetorically, why would he spend hours going door-to-door winning souls in the hot Phoenix sun?

Nevertheless, Anderson and Phelps strongly affirm that reprobates exist and that they can be identified as such. Rebrobates, note, are not merely vile people; Saul was a vile person prior to the road to Damascus. Reprobates are a particular kind of vile defined by an arrogant rejection of God. Once such reprobates are so identified, Phelps and Anderson claim it is wrong for Christians to love them as one loves other unsaved people.

For both pastors, homosexuals clearly represent a case of reprobation. They are people--no, not people, but less-than-humans-- who despise God and for whom (quid pro quo) God has nothing but hatred. The people of God can therefore have no other attitude towards GLBT people than utter animosity. Phelps and Anderson do not advocate personal violence toward gays (again, unlike militant white supremacist groups), but they would certainly support harsh sanctions against homosexuals, up to and including the death penalty. For to them, gays and lesbians (and bisexuals and the transgendered) are not merely non-heterosexual; GLBT people are vicious enemies, consciously dedicated to the corruption and destruction of all that is Godly and wholesome, particularly children.

It's in this sure identification of reprobates and in the endorsement of attitudes of hatred toward them ("Thank God for AIDS," "Break his teeth") that Anderson and Phelps depart from mainstream evangelicalism. Evangelicals themselves typically use examples like Phelps to qualify their own stances against gays (or pro-choice forces, feminists, liberals, etc.). We resist, they say, but do not hate. We hate the sin, they say, but love the sinner. Phelps and Anderson both declare such a nuanced view as unBiblical and unChristian.

And on their own terms, Phelps and Anderson make a better, more coherent case than many of the conservative evangelicals who would be embarrassed by them.

More tomorrow,

JF

Gays, Steven Anderson, and Fred Phelps

Why, if the Rev. Steven Anderson espouses such an overtly hateful message, do I bother listening to hour after hour of his sermons? I use hateful in a technical sense--Anderson himself claims divine hatred of reprobate evildoers as an intrinsic characteristic of God. It is only an act of love, Pastor Anderson says, for him to point out the truth that God does not love everyone. God delights in the suffering of the evil, a group that for Anderson includes (but is not limited to) serial killers, child rapists, abortionists, and homosexuals.

In fact, it was Anderson's particular fixation on homosexuals ("queers," as he often likes to refer to us) that first drew me to him. His sermons popped up on my iTunes as I searched for anti-gay preaching. And there in one of his many sermons that mention homosexuals was a version of his take on reprobation. Reading Romans 1 literally (and in the King James Version), Anderson notes that such people began not as people with an erotic attraction to the same sex but as apostates, people pridefully turned away from God. As punishment for their apostasy, God gives them up to sinful, beastial desires, i.e., homosexuality.

Thus, in stark contrast to most conservative evangelical stances on homosexuality, Anderson defines gay people (and lesbians) in terms of the list of evils outlined in Romans 1:29-31: "Being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity; whisperers, backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, without understanding, covenantbreakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful." In other words, Anderson argues that scripture "proves" that anyone who is homosexual is effectively an antisocial, anti-God, lying, merciless murderer. He has proudly claimed the label "homophobic." Who wouldn't, he asks, be frightened of such psychopaths? Gays are for Anderson the reprobates par excellence.

This hard-line stance seems to link him to another infamous anti-gay pastor, the Rev. Fred Phelps of Westboro Baptist Church, known for his congregation's high-visibility protests of funerals of AIDS victims and Iraqi war veterans (among others) and for their central motto, "God Hates Fags." I have written about Phelps's particular brand of anti-gay rhetoric elsewhere. Phelps shares with Anderson a theology of reprobation. Like Anderson, Phelps views homosexuals ("fags" is his preferred term) as lower than animals and worthy of the death penalty. All of his church's actions against members of the military (e.g., "Thank God for 9-11" signs at war veterans' funerals) are motivated from his conviction that God is punishing the USA, that God in fact hates the USA, chiefly though not exclusively for refusing to apply the death penalty to homosexuals. Again like Anderson, Phelps repudiates any vigilantism. Indeed, his congregation is scrupulously law-abiding, knowing local, state, and federal free speech codes backwards and forwards.

Despite their similarities, however, it would be a mistake to lump Anderson and Phelps into the same theological basket. Unlike Anderson, Phelps subscribes to a kind of hyper-Calvinism in which God loves only the Elect (mainly: Phelps and the members of his church), hating with a holy hatred everyone else. He and his crew call on sinners to repent, which Anderson considers heretical (repentance not being for Anderson a part of the salvific process).

Most importantly however, Phelps and his congregation are simply not interested in the efficacy of their demonstrations, if by efficacy you mean winning converts to Christ. Drawing again on his strict interpretation of Calvinist doctrine, Phelps views salvation as entirely the work of Christ. The elect have already been chosen and have already been saved. They and they alone will repent of their sins and believe on Christ, and they will do so regardless of what Phelps and his followers do. Evangelism as such is a nonstarter with them. Their demonstrations aren't interested in winning converts; they are instead God's finger of accusation, pointing toward a world that has in its reprobation rejected God.

Anderson, as I've noted, rejects Calvinism as an extra-Biblical (and therefore evil) doctrine. He and his church devote nearly all of their resources to evangelistic outreach, knocking on doors and spreading the gospel systematically. Unlike Phelps, Anderson is passionately interested in winning souls. When soul-winning, he exchanges his fire-breathing rhetoric for a calm, friendly demeanor. The church services and Bible studies in which he waxes theological are not themselves evangelical instruments aimed at the unsaved. Church is meant primarily for the faithful, to help them grow and become more well-equipped as disciples.

It is most likely that Anderson and Phelps would, if made aware of each other, find deep fault with each others' theologies even as they share a strikingly anti-gay stance. I am fascinated, however, by how these two pastors in different ways live into the doctrine of Biblical inerrancy.

More tomorrow,

JF