Westboro Baptist on a Beautiful Spring Day

It was a perfect day for a demonstration.

Warm but not too warm, with a gentle breeze and little puffy clouds scudding lazily across an azure sky. As I arrived at Walt Whitman high school to counterprotest the Westboro Baptist folks, I realized that I was going to be pretty much by myself. The folks from my church and/or from my denomination who I thought might be able to make it...well...it didn't quite happen. And here I was with a little stack of signs. Ah well. I was happy to be out, and curious to see the Westboro show with my own eyes.

After shooting the breeze with some of the law enforcement folks who'd arrived to keep things in check, I settled in across the street from where the cultists were to protest. I struck up conversations with those around me, passing the time with a small cadre of folks from a nearby Unitarian congregation and a fellow from the neighborhood whose kids had attended the school.

The Westboro folks arrived exactly on time, four women and three little kids. Their hateful signs came out. Some painfully reworded hymns were sung. They looked...well...more than a little pathetic.

I began displaying my own signage, a mix of different Bible passages that reiterated the love ethic that is central to the Gospel. For a little while, there weren't many onlookers, and the single largest contingent was three dozen rather bemused cops. Then school let out, and several hundred kids poured over to the police line to have a look. Many were part of the organized counterdemonstration, but most were just curious.

I rotated my signs. I chatted with folks around me. I didn't do the Jesus-skeeving thing for a second. I wasn't pitching my church to anyone, or collecting names and numbers and gladhanding. I wasn't doing anything other than presenting what Jesus taught. I was just there to witness to that essential goodness. Nothing more.

Then one Whitman kid asked if they could have a sign. Then another. Finally, I managed to distribute pretty much all of them. There, courtesy of folks who were just volunteering on the spot, was a nice little wall of grace confronting Westboro. Only one part of that wall was me. The rest were folks who may or may not have been Christian, but who responded positively enough to the core message of the Gospel to be willing to use it to confront hatred.

I found that rather reassuring.

How Do I Hate Thee? Let Me Count The Ways

Westboro Baptist is unquestionably insane, but as I've spent a chunk of time going over their web presence in anticipation of their arrival in my neighborhood, I'm struck by a few things.

Their infamous signage, for one, is mostly remarkable for it's stark and iconic simplicity. It's a potent meld of basic primary colors and washes, coupled with brutishly simple messages that articulate their dark vision of the universe.

Second, as someone whose spent a small chunk of time recently trying to revamp the web presence of my own tiny little church, I can say that they've...well...got an impressive new media presence for a church their size. The Westboro website is clean and well designed. It gets right to the point, letting any visitors know in no uncertain terms that no matter who you are or where you're from, they hate you.

They've got an array of blogs, which express the viewpoints of a variety of different members of the extended Phelps family. Though each is somewhat different from the others, they all are remarkably good at staying on message. You've got current events related hate. There's a "Dear Abby"-esque hate-advice blog. There's a blog that angrily discusses their current schedule of hate-related picketing. Even more impressive, the folks at Westboro seem utterly committed to open-sourcing their material. Every page on their site boldly announces that there is no copyright on the text. Anyone can use it in any way they see fit. Why one would want to is beyond me, but I'm sure with some thought I could come up with some entertaining options.

As I've dug my way through their single-minded sea of festering bile, I've found myself wondering if it might be possible for a little church to become the Bizarro World Westboro Baptist. Could a congregation of 35-40 individuals be as intensely monomanaical in their expression of God's grace to the world as Westboro is in expressing their pathological hatred? Would it be possible for a small church to become as notoriously joyous as Westboro is notoriously horrid? Such a church would have to be more than a tiny bit insane, sure.

But it'd be a good sort of crazy.

The Cultic Echo Chamber

What amazes me most about Westboro Baptist is just how "successful" they've been by cult standards. Like most psychotically insular communities, they honestly don't care about convincing anyone of their position. Instead, the purpose of their demonstrations is to gather attention for themselves and affirm their sense of "chosenness."

Their sense of self-importance and of being a central player in some great cosmic struggle requires constant collective ego-massaging. As the communities into which they forcibly insert themselves recoil in horror at the cruelty and small-mindedness of their message, that recoiling is interpreted within Westboro as an affirmation of their righteousness. The whole world is evil. They are the righteous elect. From that perspective, every creatively multisyllabic curse shouted from a passing car is another sign they must be right. Every Holy Finger of Rebuking raised in their direction reassures them that only they know the truth, and everyone else is hell-bound.

By setting themselves in a consistently adversarial position against everyone who is not part of their incestuous fellowship, they strongly reinforce the bonds within their community. They share in the "hardship" that they themselves have created, and in doing so, they create a powerful and deeply internalized bond of shared suffering. They know they are pariahs. They embrace their "alienness," and rejoice in it.

The danger here, of course, is that the bonds of self-inflicted oppression that unite Westboro Baptist are not all that conceptually different than the bonds carefully nurtured in other corners of the Christian world.

The human beings who go from homeschool to youth group to Christian college to young adult ministries to family ministries are taught a deeply embedded sense of otherness. The world is evil. It does not understand us. So we close in on ourselves.

On one level, that's because a society reared on greed and onanistic self-obsession can't grasp the deep grace and love of Christ.

But it's not always the fault of the culture outside. Sometimes, the message can't be conveyed because unlike the apostles, we choose to express it in ways that mean nothing to folks who aren't part of the inner circle already. We see this in many threads of the evangelical community, like the "Way of the Master" scripted evangelism of Ray Comfort, where every person offended by his message of hell becomes an affirmation of his rightness.

That we're not all Westboro Baptist doesn't mean there aren't lessons to be learned from their example.

The Westboro Circus Is In Town

During the shared time for joys and concerns this last week, one of my young congregants shared that we're going to have a visitor in the neighborhood in late April. The good folks from Westboro Baptist are showing up for one of their demonstrations. Yes, it's the God Hates Fags "church." Right here! Less than a mile from my teensy little church!

They're here to demonstrate in front of our local high school, which they've targeted because it's named Walt Whitman High School. Beyond their likely being offended at the whole concept of poetry, they've chosen Whitman as a target for their endless fountain of bile because Walt Whitman most likely was gay or bisexual. That means, or so one of the blogs at Westboro puts it:

"The children that attend that high school are taught Rebellion Against God 101 every day in every way. "

I wonder if you can get college credit for that. I think you need to score a 4 or higher on the Rebellion Against God AP exam in Virginia, but I'm not quite sure about Maryland state universities.

As Fred Phelps and his clan continue their Quixotic assault on all things that they perceive as homosexual, I find myself feeling motivated to show up for a little counterwitness on the day they're in town. It's not that the Westboro Baptist Church represents any significant movement in Christianity. They don't. They're a tiny little cult, whose fundamental failure to understand the core of the Christian message radiates from them like fever-heat. They loves them some attention, and their "pickets" are more like an attention-seeking tantrum than a real protest.

Problem is, they've also become something of a poster child for folks with an axe to grind against Jesus people. "Look," they say, pointing at the signage. "This is what Christians believe! How could you be a part of such an evil thing?"

That's absurd, of course. Anyone who's bothered reading the Bible knows that this kind of hatred is utterly out of keeping with the foundational principles of Torah and the teachings and life of Jesus of Nazareth. But if you've already been put off by the intensely exclusive anti-gay, anti-"unbeliever," anti-science rhetoric of fundamentalism, it's easy to think that somehow Westboro represents what most Christians really believe.

So on Friday, April 24th, a little counter-witness seems both decent and in order.