It’s 2010 and I’m with members of Westboro Baptist, America’s most infamous anti-gay church, for four hours during one of many Sundays’ research for a book I’m writing. I arrive before the service to observe Westboro’s pickets of other Topeka churches. Outside St. Matthew’s Roman Catholic sanctuary, Westboro members hold signs proclaiming, “Priests Rape Boys.” At the LGBT-affirming Metropolitan Community Church, they switch to ones reading, “Your Pastor’s a Whore.”
Across the parking lot of the Catholic church, a woman hustles children out of a sedan. One tries to read the picket sign, but she steers him away before he can sound out “Pedophile Rape Pimp,” Westboro’s nickname for Catholic leaders, including the pope. A man slams the driver’s side door, glaring at the picketers, but they are unruffled. “It’s a sin,” says one. “Every dollar they put in the plate supports the world’s biggest pedophile machine.” As the family enters the church, the Westboro crew packs up, on schedule to head to its next target.
The kids drop their signs in the trunk of a Honda Odyssey, members’ automobile of choice. “We get a frequent-customer discount,” winks the driver, a mother of a couple vanfuls of children already, jokingly referencing Westboro’s birth-control prohibition. The group climbs in, some with headphones to drown out the honks and vulgarities of passers-by.
As one protest concludes, I ask a Westboro member in her late 50s, “Is this a successful picket?”
“When we’re preaching the word of God,” she gives the approved formulaic answer, “it’s always a success.”
Westboro is replete with paradoxes. It’s virulently anti-gay, yet the founding pastor, Fred Phelps, was a civil-rights litigator inspired by Brown v. Board. Women cannot speak in church but are fierce fighters on the picket line. Members truly believe that loving your neighbors means condemning them. The congregation of roughly 70 believes that war casualties are the result of a wrathful God punishing America for tolerating homosexuality. One moment, they might be picketing a military funeral with “God Hates Fags” signs. The next, they’ll be back in the van talking about school, pop culture, and what kind of sandwiches they’re going to get for lunch at Subway.
Helping to explain some of these tensions is the church’s hyper-Calvinism, which says God predestines not only everyone’s salvation or damnation but every single life event, both good (being part of Westboro) and bad (school shootings, cancer, hurricanes, 9/11).
After picketing on this particular Sunday, congregants regroup for their own service. By now, I am accustomed to the themes preached weekly: God’s sovereignty, our salvation entirely at His unquestionable will, and our inherent and total sinfulness. Our only hope is to be among the elect, and while this is unknowable, we can find solace that if God has brought us here, to Westboro Baptist, we might be part of that chosen flock.
The day’s sermon focuses on 2 Kings 2. The prophet Elisha heals a contaminated spring. Instead of expressing gratitude, a mob taunts him for his bald head. The story ends abruptly: Elisha “turned back, and looked on them, and cursed them in the name of the Lord,” then two “she-bears” emerge from the woods and kill 42 children in the mob. The point is clear: Westboro Baptists are doing God’s work, and He will brutally destroy those who oppose him, their gory deaths evidence of his sovereignty.
Implicit is the message that congregants who depart will likewise be killed. None of the youngsters seem as terrified as I would have been as a child. They appear reasonably confident that their obedience is a sign that they are elect. After the service, they rush the pulpit for hugs from “Gramps,” as all the children, even those unrelated, call Phelps (who died in 2014). The “littles” hug his knees or wait for compliments on their new church clothes. He inquires after their Bible memorization and school work.
We potluck in a yard shared by a group of houses all owned by Westboro members. Phelps is a native Mississippian, so I bring a favorite homemade Southern-style contribution. “Cornbread!” a woman exclaims delightedly. “It’s Jonathan Edwards’s mother’s recipe,” I deadpan. She freezes, unprepared for a joke about the author of “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” then cracks up. Later, she repeats the joke to others, who laugh harder than it warrants so that I feel welcome. They cut the cornbread into tiny squares so everyone can partake. A dozen people, including Phelps, tell me they like it.
As the meal concludes, a young woman leads us in singing “Happy Birthday” to those celebrating that month. The birthday boys and girls race off with goodie bags, friends following to see what is inside.
I am shaking the crumbs from my empty pan into the trash can when Shirley Phelps-Roper, Phelps’s daughter and the gatekeeper for my ethnographic study, asks how my work is going. I bring her up to speed and thank her for her patience as I learn the church’s theology.
I don’t mention how confounded I am by how church members can be hurtful one moment and generous the next, how they can justify their hateful, harmful words as love of neighbor, how I feel pained by their picketing but warmed by their hospitality.
“I hope,” I say, “I’ve not been too much trouble over these last months.” She assures me that, though I’m a researcher, I’m like everyone else, “a little lost lamb trying to find her way in the world.” It is such a sympathetic response that I am nearly undone by it.
How much good could these energetic believers do, I ask myself as I head home, if they treated everyone that way?
Rebecca Barrett-Fox is an assistant professor of sociology at Arkansas State University. She is the author of God Hates: Westboro Baptist Church, American Nationalism, and the Religious Right (University Press of Kansas, 2016).
