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.

What the Islamic Community Center Controversy Teaches Me About Loving My Country

The controversy about the Manhattan Islamic community center - and protests against mosques in Wisconsin, Tennessee, and California - have made me consider what it means to love my country. I believe that the community center should be built. I believe that if it is built, it will proclaim America’s decency to the World. I believe that if it is not built, its absence will proclaim the present hollowness of our founding documents. I am dismayed to be in the minority on this. My beliefs on this issue run deep; and the present opposition to my beliefs disorients me, because it seems to cast aside what I thought were core American values. This compels me to consider my place in this country, and its place in me.


1. Love doesn’t judge.

I think the vast majority of Americans are wrong about the Islamic center, but I must live according to, "Judge not, lest you be judged." This is not something I say to sound pious. These words are part of me, because I am a profoundly flawed person, and I know it. This keeps me from clothing myself in costume superiority, even though on this issue I think that the majority is wrong and the minority of which I am a part is right. False pride mostly doesn’t come between my countrymen and countrywomen and me. Mostly.

2. Love sees the other point of view.

And the respect I have for my brother and sister Americans leads me to look for their point of view. I perceive people who have seen the World Trade Center Twin Towers collapse; the Pentagon stricken; the U.S.S. Cole bombed; embassies in Kenya and Tanzania bombed; and the Fort Hood shootings. All of these evil acts wasted American lives. And in addition there were attempted mass murders that failed only because of ineptitude combined with quick, alert responses: the shoe bomber; the underwear bomber; and the Times Square bomber.

These were all perpetrated or attempted to be perpetrated by extremist Muslims. For many of us, these atrocities and would-be atrocities are our only exposure to and knowledge of Muslims. Antipathy is natural. I comprehend the current hatred.

3. Love is humble.

My own double response is that Muslims are better than most people think, and that we Christians are worse than we sometimes acknowledge.

Although we are painfully familiar with our grievances against Muslims, we overlook the positive. The third-largest democracy in the World is tolerant, Muslim Indonesia. Turkey and Lebanon also are Muslim democracies. And like Christianity and Judaism, Islam is one of the great monotheistic religions. And like Christians and Jews, Muslims are "people of the book." Many Muslims are genuinely and reverently pious. Most of our Muslim neighbors peacefully work hard to support their beloved families. You don’t have to think that their religion is right to know that we have many things in common with our Muslim neighbors.

Islam knows extremism, but Christianity has known extremism, too. Christian Serbs committed "ethnic cleansing" against Bosnian Muslims, causing 200,000 deaths. The Christian church in Germany yielded to Naziism, and six million Jews were murdered by this Christian country. Southern States justified slavery by quoting the Bible, and countless sermons were preached in support of that evil institution. As Abraham Lincoln stated in his Second Inaugural Address: "Both [North and South] read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged." Lincoln knew a thing about love of country.

4. Love does not control.

Mature love does not control. This consoles me as I helplessly watch hatred and false rumors spread.

I watch woefully as politicians and media outlets provoke anti-Muslim feelings with anti-Muslim rhetoric. And given America’s recent traumas at the hands of Muslim extremists, they easily provoke hatred against a small, distrusted, and vulnerable minority in our midst, paying lip-service to freedom of religion while pissing on it.

I watch woefully as many of my neighbors get their information from persons and institutions committed to demagoguery, not informing. Based upon that demagoguery, people attribute far-fetched evil intent and chauvinistic motives to the would-be builders of the community center. I fret about our future if we embrace a culture of misinformation, which, as Timothy Egan points out, finds extreme expression in Holocaust-denying Iran.

But people are free to get their information from anywhere in the information marketplace. I accept that.

5. Finding reassurance that I love my country.

This discord gives proof that I love my country. I know that I love my country, because I brood about how to induce it, or any small part of it over which I have influence, to come around. This is a humble hope, because my influence is minuscule.

I know I love my country, because I watch with genuine despair as political predators awaken the worst in us, daring others to risk ruination of their careers by standing up for despised outsiders, these Muslims among us.

I have never had the privilege to marry, but I know that marriage isn’t a constant and perpetual swoon, at least for most married couples. At some point, it survives - if it survives - by commitment, like when "for better or for worse" becomes "for worse". I know I love my country because I am committed to it for better or for worse.

6. It’s not high minded; it’s what I owe America.

There will always be things that I don’t like about America. And sometimes, these things will break my heart. Love does that. But if I keep faith with my country in heartbreaking times, at least I have the satisfaction of knowing that I am repaying with loyalty the great privilege and blessing that were conferred upon me not because of my own particular merit, but only because I was lucky enough to born within these shores.