Sorting Out Phelps

It’s been a few days since Fred Phelps died, and I still can’t sort out my feelings. I don’t know whether to throw a party and dance on his grave, thanking God for finally ridding us of that pernicious hate-monger or whether to cry with compassion for his family and sorrow that in this life he never saw the face of the God who is Love.

Students of Siena College counter a Westboro Baptist
Church demonstration in Albany, N.Y. on Mar.  6 2009
PHOTO CREDIT:  Sebastien Barre
Used under Creative Commons License

I can only imagine that his life was fuelled not by the living waters of grace, hope and forgiveness but by anger, resentment and fear and so he made a god in his own image - a god who hates fags. He represented the hatefully distorted face of Christianity to such an extreme that he made the average right-wing bigot look moderate. I am glad that he is gone and I hope that with his passing, his family church the Westboro Baptist Church will lose steam and go quietly into the night. But that which he represented is still among us. Hatred and prejudice have many faces. They are alive and well in the hearts of liberals as well as conservatives. They are alive and well wherever people feel misrepresented, overlooked and impotent as well as in places where people feel more powerful and better than the average Joe.

Forgiveness and gentleness are the marks of God’s people, which doesn’t mean that we need to be doormats, but that even as we resist the evil that enslaves us and our society, we do so with a peaceful, creative non-violent resistance that emulates the example of Christ. 

I hope that when Fred Phelps arrived at the pearly gates, St Peter met him dressed in drag and all the angels wore their best gender-bending outfits and waved rainbow flags. And I hope that even as he discovered that he was wrong and that God loves fags and queers, he also found that God loves very mis-guided Westboro Baptists too. And I hope that he found true repentance and finds a way, even from beyond the grave, to right some of the wrongs he perpetrated and perpetuated.

Back here on the earthly plane, it will not do our souls any good to harbor anger and resentment, so here is a blessing for Fred Phelps, taken from "For the Dying" by John O’Donahue.

May your spirit feel

the surge of true delight

when the veil of the visible

is raised, and you glimpse again

the living faces

of departed family and friends.

May there be some beautiful surprise 

waiting for you inside death,

something you never knew or felt,

which with one simple touch

absolves you of all loneliness and loss,

as you quicken within the embrace

for which your soul was eternally made.

May your heart be speechless

at the sight of the truth

of all your belief had hoped,

your heart breathless

in the light and lightness

where each and every thing

is at last its true self,

within that serene  belonging

that dwells beside us

on other side

of what we see.

The Rev. Dr. Caroline Hall is the President of Integrity, author of  A Thorn in the Flesh: How Gay Sexuality is Changing the Episcopal Church, and Priest-in-Charge at St. Benedict's: Los Osos in the Diocese of El Camino Real.

Damsel, Arise - Walking Away from Westboro

During the 2010 Believe Out Loud Power Summit, Social Movement Theorist Beth Zemsky taught us a powerful lesson about our fellow Christians who oppose our views on LGBT inclusion, marriage equality and related issues.

Whether or not they articulate it, or are even conscious of it, Zemsky says there is a subtext to how they interact with us:  "I learned what I know about people like you from people I loved and trusted."  She asserts that much of the resistance people have towards evolving their thinking about LGBT issues stems from one fact: it forces them to confront the possibility that -- if the people and institutions they relied on for their understanding of one issue are flawed -- they might have to question everything else they learned from those sources.  This is naturally quite traumatizing and can cause people to cling to ideas and prejudices that their hearts and minds might otherwise reject.

A rather extreme example of this dichotomy made the news this week when it came to light that two granddaughters of Westboro Baptist Church founder Fred Phelps had left the notoriously anti-gay organization and -- after secluding themselves for several months -- were now beginning to speak about their story.

Megan and Grace Phelps-Roper moved from the family's compound in Topeka, Ks., this past fall and eventually settled in Brooklyn's Park Slope neighborhood.  In a lengthy interview with author Jeff Chu, Megan describes how it felt to walk away from everything she'd ever known.    Once active in the church (she was the first WBC member to tweet, something for which her mother Shirley has become notorious), she began having trouble rationalizing the absolutist views of the church (made up almost entirely of Phelps' descendents) with her own evolving understanding of God and the world.  Eventually she reached a point where she could no longer participate.

As with everything else, leaving WBC is absolute and final. While she harbors no ill will towards her congregation and family, Megan is coming to grips with the idea of life without them.  She has not lost her faith, however; she and Grace spend many hours talking about God, and sorting out a belief system for themselves after it had been dictated to them for so long.

Megan and Grace released the following statement.