In Defense of Outrage: Westboro Baptist Church

Westboro Baptist Church pickets funerals of fallen American soldiers. They proclaim that soldiers’ deaths are God’s revenge for America’s toleration of homosexuality. They celebrate these deaths as a triumph of the Lord.

On Westboro Baptist Church’s website, I listened to an hour-long sermon by its pastor, Rev. Fred Phelps. He holds himself out as prophetic in the mold of Jeremiah.

He is wrong. For reasons I might go into in a later post, it is clear that Rev. Phelps is self-deceived.

But though he is no prophet, he is like a prophet; he does prophetic things.

To explain: a prophet is not like smooth jazz. He does not calm jangled nerves. He does not sooth agitated spirits. He does not assuage raging souls. He jangles, agitates, and rages against injustice, iniquity, and impiety. He puts the fright on people who have turned their backs on God.

I am rereading the Book of Jeremiah. Here’s a little history. Abraham’s descendants divided into two kingdoms: Israel and Judah. Both sinned against God. God caused Israel to be conquered and its people to be sent into exile. Judah lasted longer than Israel, but it suffered the same fate. After 70 years, God gathered many of his exiled people to resurrect their kingdom.

But before they were exiled, and before they were re-gathered, they were conquered. When the king of Babylon laid siege to Jerusalem, King Zedekiah sent an emissary to Jeremiah to ask if God would intervene with a miracle to save the king and the city. Jeremiah said this:

I will take Zedekiah king of Judah, his courtiers and the people, all in this city who survive pestilence, sword, and famine, and hand them over to Nebuchadrezzar the king of Babylon, to their enemies and those who would kill them. He shall put them to the sword and shall show no pity, no mercy or compassion. (Jer. 21:7(NEB).)

God spoke to Jeremiah and instructed him:

I will compel men to eat the flesh of their sons and their daughters; they shall devour one another’s flesh in the dire straits to which their enemies and those who would kill them will reduce them in the siege. Then you must shatter the jar before the eyes of the men who have come with you and say to them, These are the words of the LORD of Hosts: Thus will I shatter this people and this city as one shatters an earthen vessel so that it cannot be mended, and they shall be buried in Topheth because there is no room elsewhere to bury them. (Jer. 19:9-11 (NEB).)

A career of saying uncomfortable things like this made Jeremiah unpopular and the object of conspiracies.

That was Jeremiah. Let me be clear: when Pastor Phelps’s lips move, I don’t hear God speaking. But make no mistake: prophets outrage. "The prophet is an iconoclast, challenging the apparently holy, revered, and awesome. Beliefs cherished as certainties, institutions endowed with supreme sanctity, he exposes as scandalous pretensions." (Abraham J. Heschel, The Prophets (Perennial Classics).)

Certainly, fallen soldiers and their families are close to our hearts. A piece of us is buried with the soldiers; a part of us stands with their families and friends grieving beside the graves. I won’t say that a true prophet would choose Westboro Baptist Church’s scourge to lash America. But he or she might expose another cherished institution and would similarly provoke outrage.

So we must not get carried away with our outrage against Rev. Phelps and his congregation. Outrageous as they are, they might be prophets. And even if they are not, as is more than likely, our action toward them would set a precedent for disposing of real prophets, should real prophets arise among us.

The genius of our Constitution is that it shelters the genuine and the fake, the prophet and the fraud, the insightful and the foolish. It shelters the fake, the fraud, and the foolish to protect the genuine, the prophetic and the insightful. For a long time, judges have not trusted judges to determine what speech nourishes and what speech taints. They have followed Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.’s admonition that "[T]he best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market."

I agree with Holmes. I think most people do.

So in the court case now pending, I hope the Supreme Court does the right thing and extends a Constitutional safety ladder to this troublesome congregation and its leader.  It matters to me, by the way, that Westboro Baptist Church's protest in this case was out of sight and out of earshot of the funeral.

For brevity, what I have written simplifies Constitutional law, and it simplifies the prophetic mission. In addition to discomfiting, prophets instruct and offer hope. I am practiced in the law, but I am re-limbering my theological muscles after a long hiatus. But I think I mostly got it right.


Note:

I have provided in the text a link to Amazon.com for Heschel's book The Prophets.  I did this for your convenience.  If you want to buy the book, great.  But it really doesn't matter to me where you get it.