Day 33: Don't Hate

Total Mileage: 3,107

Song of the Day: “Freddie Please” (Derek Webb)- an extra special thanks to Keri LaBrant for sharing this song with me!

Okay, I know I'm going a little out of order, but I wanted to go ahead and get this written and posted before diving back into the Resurrection worship stuff.  I'm about halfway between Kansas City and Pueblo, CO, and along the way this morning, I stopped at a rather infamous church.  After all, there was a picture I needed to take, but I'll get to that part of the story later.

Disclaimers:

This post uses pictures of the Westboro protesters leaving their signs intact (meaning the three-letter F-word is still in play).  There aren't many pictures of Westboro and its members that don't feature that word prominently, so I apologize in advance for the offense it causes.  It is a disgraceful word that is inappropriate for any setting.

I also found myself in kind of a disturbing place with the concept of child protesters.  This issue strikes a very deep chord with me for personal reasons involving a youth camp I attended in the seventh grade.  I never had to hold up a sign or anything that extreme, but I am still well aware of how insidious political rhetoric can be in a youth setting, and I know firsthand how easily pressure from authority figures and peers can curtail a child or teen's ability to think and speak freely.  If you have also had personal experiences with this dilemma and prefer not to discuss it, I strongly urge you to skip over the latter half of this post or just disregard this post entirely.  Although, please, know that you're not the only one wrestling with it, and I welcome conversations on the topic.

I’m going to assume that anyone reading this is already familiar with the Westboro Baptist Church’s campaign against homosexuality, and if not, there are some great documentaries out there, and even Wikipedia has a pretty decent summary.  The popular backlash against this church has been incredible, and a lot of people have jumped on the Westboro-bashing bandwagon over the past few years (probably the funniest being the parody site Eastboro Baptist and its “God hates everyone except for us” platform).  Believe it or not, I don’t want to be one of these Westboro-bashers.  Sure, I’ll rail against their beliefs, but there’s a line that I think we’re in danger of crossing, so I’m going to go ahead and lay down a blanket aphorism:

Christians shouldn’t even hate the haters.

My list of grievances with Westboro is pretty lengthy.  Their theology and their incredibly selective readings of the Bible are flat out wrong.  They are cruel people, and their actions are totally indefensible.  I do not condone anything they have ever said or done because I do not agree with anything they have ever said or done.  It’s one thing to disapprove of homosexuality based on the Bible; it is quite another to give all of Christendom a bad reputation by protesting the funerals of America’s fallen heroes and plaguing those sacred occasions with hate speech.  Even the KKK has said that Westboro’s actions are too hateful.  As a Christian who identifies with the Baptist Church, I am personally insulted by everything that this group has done because, thanks to their actions, I constantly have to tell people, “No, we’re not like those Baptists.”  Christianity is about love, and this group proudly declares that they are based in hate.  It’s right there on their websites, but you can google them for yourselves because I refuse to post those links.  They tell us that God hates the world, while John 3:16 tells us plainly that God loves it.  God loves it so much that Jesus came to live among us for a time, a life and death which were freely given as a sign of love for all Creation.  Jesus’s earthly presence was the most beautiful marriage proposal in all of history, a promise that the Church would someday be wed to Christ for all eternity.  God doesn’t hate.  God only loves.  God is love.

But if you’re reading this, you probably already know all that.  I haven’t said anything new.  The above argument fits right in with the usual Christian arguments against Westboro, so here’s something that doesn’t get said enough:

Christians are not allowed to hate Westboro Baptist Church.  If we hate them, we’re giving in to revenge rather than showing love, and the Bible’s pretty clear on showing love-- it’s a nonnegotiable.

The Bible calls on us to love our enemies, showing them patience, kindness, and forgiveness, and this particular group just happens to be --to use the Rob Bellism-- “Extra Grace Required.”  I went to Westboro today and looked around the outside of their church, taking some pictures in the process.  I had looked ahead on their website and saw that they would be picketing in Oklahoma City on the day of my visit, so I didn’t try to set up any sort of interview.  Still, I believe that a church sends a pretty strong message through architectural choices, so I learned a lot just by walking around.

As I was getting dressed this morning, I realized that I only had two more clean shirts in the backpack that I had brought into the Wetzels’ house.  Not wanting to go out to my car, I had to make a judgment call.  One of them was a Duke shirt.  Hmm . . . you know, this might be one of those times where the Duke affiliation would be more harmful than helpful.  What if there were protesters outside?  Would they even dream of talking to someone from such a bastion of liberal theology?  (Incidentally, Duke definitely isn’t a bastion of liberal theology.  We’re pretty middle-of-the-road really.)  Also, what if some sort of incident happened while I was at Westboro?  I don’t think the Duke admissions office would be too thrilled with that sort of publicity-- a Duke shirt appearing outside America’s most infamous church on the nightly news.  Hmm . . . too bad I don’t own a Wake Forest shirt.  (Stephen Cook, that was for you.)  Anyway, I decided to go with something a little more neutral, something that would show that I was a divinity student but wouldn’t get my school into any sort of trouble.  I think I picked the perfect shirt:

Duke Divinity Cokesbury sells these for $10.  Quite possibly my favorite t-shirt ever.

Driving through Topeka, it felt like more of a small town than I had expected.  Sure, Topeka has a few big buildings, but as I drove past locally-owned restaurants, the historic courthouse, and the cheerfully meandering pedestrians for whom time --and traffic-- seemed to stand still, my immediate thought was, “This seems like the sort of fun little town that would be famous for its pie.”  Actually, it’s probably most famous for the historic Brown vs. Board of Education case in 1954, a case which Wake County, NC, residents are thinking about a lot these days as the county debates whether or not to do away with their historically innovative diversity policy in favor of a “neighborhood school” model that represents a serious step backward.  I don’t think I could do justice to an issue this important with a tangent in a blog post about Westboro, so if you’re curious about this debate, check out the Great Schools in Wake website.  Back to Topeka . . .

Topeka does have a few lower income areas, but my GPS was taking me past houses that ranged from the comfortably quaint to the borderline-mansion, all of them giving off the feeling of small town safety.  Before I knew it, the GPS said in its typical Australian accent, “Arriving at 3701 12th Street on left.”  Wait, really?  No way.  I was in the middle of a really nice neighborhood.  I half expected see Beaver Cleaver heading home from school at any minute.  Somehow, I had imagined Westboro to be some rundown, barbwire-enshrined citadel in the middle of a sketchy part of town, but a sketchy part of town this was not.  I looked to my left and saw it there: a rather charming larger house.  Well, it would have been charming had it not been for the giant “God hates America” banner across its façade.  The upside-down American flags and “Fags doom nations” sign didn’t really help either.  And then there was that fence.  Not to mention the signs warning of security cameras.  You know, it’s not often that I see a church with a “no trespassing” sign.  The curtains were drawn on every window.  I didn’t try the gates or the door; after all, I knew they were out of town, and I didn’t want to set off the alarm (of which a nearby sign warned me).  I’ve visited over a half dozen churches so far this summer, all of them designed to invite people in.  This was the first house of worship I had seen that was designed to keep people out.  The design of the building simply confirmed what I already knew: Westboro isn’t out to invite people into their fellowship.  They’re not looking to convert people.  They see their ministry as being one exclusively of prophecy: telling the world that it is doomed.

There was no one around.  Absolutely no one.  No protesters.  No people coming in and out of the house.  No one.  There were cars here and there, but the tree-lined streets felt abandoned.  I reached into the backseat of my car and pulled out my hastily-scrawled sign.  I whipped out my camera and set it on the trunk of my car, using the timer so that I could run across to the church and pose.  No one saw me because no one was there.  My little one-man protest would go totally unnoticed by Westboro, but given the heat they take every day from all across the internet, I would’ve been a drop in the ocean of criticism anyway.  I thought my sign was pretty appropriate too.

I put my camera back in the car, stowed my sign in the trunk and just stared at the house for a second, letting my thoughts wander.

It was a nice house.  Apparently, the Phelps family has some serious money to afford a place like that.  There was even a little basketball court inside that I could see through the fence.  I found myself thinking: “Who plays on that?”  At first, I laughed at the mental image of the elderly, cowboy hat-wearing Phelps running up and doing a layup, but then I flashed back to the pictures I’ve seen online of the Westboro members’ children holding up picket signs, and I shuddered.  These children seemed like they were being denied their childhood, being dragged from protest to protest by their families, but at least they had a place to play basketball.  Okay, so maybe, in that moment, I hated Westboro.  In fact, I hated them a lot.  No issue is important enough to dupe kids into being crusaders.  It’s just not fair to them.  In fact, it’s inhuman.  I shook it off and tried to forgive the adult church members, but even as I write this, I’m fuming.

The Bible teaches us to forgive our enemies.  It’s one of the most important tasks we have as Christians and also one of the most difficult.  We are called to be a people who dismiss our hatred, filling our hearts instead with love.  It would be easy to rail against Westboro, but instead, what can we do to love this community?  Perhaps, by showing them love, we can communicate to those children (and their parents too) that there’s a good world outside the walls of their church.  Perhaps that’s where the hope really lies.  Those kids could easily grow up knowing only hatred and being greeted with it in return, so it’s up to us to break that cycle.  We have to love the Westboro Baptist Church.  They’re depending on us.

We aren’t called to be haters.  Hating Westboro Baptist is just as much a sin as hating gay people, and believe me, I’m still struggling on the not-hating-Westboro front.  Still, we can’t give in to the popular trend of hating on Westboro.  I know it’s fun.  I know it gives us that special little high that comes from righteous indignation, but it’s still wrong.  They are misguided and hateful people, and that’s all the more reason that we need to love on them.  Bring them donuts at a protest (preferably while wearing a “straight but not narrow” t-shirt).  Bombard them with letters that say, “I disagree with everything you stand for, but you are still God’s creatures, so I love you.”  They’re probably not going to turn around and start loving the world.  They’re probably not going to stop with their vicious and sacrilegious protesting.  They probably won’t even give you a thank you.  But think about it:

Does a Christian hating Westboro really send that different a message to the world than Westboro hating homosexuality?

Rethink your rhetoric about this group.  Frankly, I think Derek Webb went a little too far in the clip I included earlier.  It’s good to publicly disagree with them.  It’s good to decry them.   It’s good to repeat that God loves the whole world and doesn’t play favorites.  But we can never ever say that God hates the Westboro Baptist Church, because we have to send them a message that is stronger than hate.

We have to remind them that God loves them, and we, as Christians, love them too.

Especially the kids.

Peace and Blessings,

Tom