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Letter from America

A little walk on the wild side

To be accorded the accolade of ‘first class nut’ by none other than Jerry Falwell is no small achievement. Yet that is a relatively mild epithet for the extremely controversial Fred Phelps. Phelps is the pastor of Westborough Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas.

The church is primarily (some say exclusively) made up of his children and grandchildren. It resides in a protected ‘compound’ (with an Olympic size swimming pool for baptisms — it is said filled in either after one of the family almost drowned, or when their tax exempt status became problematic).

At any rate, Phelps is definitely a walk on the wild side of the American religious scene. His main ministry appears to be picketing funerals and other events of public attention in order to spread such edifying banners as ‘God hates America’. The web page for the organisation, in fact, is called http://www.godhatesfags.com (fag being anti-homosexual American street slang for gay). In Phelps’s view, the Christian leaders in America are insufficiently proclaiming hell. America needs a message of hate. One of the members of the church was beaten up for holding a banner declaring ‘Thank God for September 11th’. Phelps even has a picture of a young homosexual man who was murdered with flames flickering over his face, a counter underneath recording number of days in hell.

The Phelps defenders (yes, I suppose there must be some) would say that such passages as Romans 1 support him. Yet it would behoove us also to read Romans 2 where it begins, ‘You, therefore, have no excuse, you who pass judgment on someone else, for at whatever point you judge the other, you are condemning yourself, because you who pass judgment do the same things.’ Paul’s point in Romans 1 is not to single out homosexuality but to lead us gradually to his conclusion in 3.10, ‘There is no one righteous, not even one’. Besides, even chapter 1 concludes not with the headline grabbing ‘sins’ but with disobedience to parents, and being senseless, faithless, heartless and ruthless. In addition, while, of course, Phelps is right that God does judge sinners and that there is a hell, Jesus explicitly taught us that we would know his disciples by the love they have for one another (John 13.35). As abrasive as Jesus could be towards Pharisees, no ministry can rightly be called Christian that has as its dominant tenor hate.

Going too far

I doubt many readers of EN need convincing that Phelps sounds barmy. I bring it to our attention not to confirm the British in their suspicions of the snake-handling edges to American Christianity, but to wonder whether the straw man of Phelps serves at least as a stark reminder of the importance of balance in biblical teaching.

Evangelicals have at times slipped too far to the left (witness the notorious Student Christian Movement confrontation with CICCU); we could also slip too far to the right.

We are unlikely to be attracted to anyone who carries pictures of Billy Graham with 666 superimposed on his face. But we do need to make sure that our zeal for truth is matched with love. Was this not the missing requirement for the church at Ephesus? Did they not have everything except this one crucial missing ingredient (Revelation 2.4)?

The other problem with Phelps and his ilk is what he does to the rest of us. Phelps has become sufficiently well known to generate three parody web sites (http://www.godhatesfigs.com, http://www.godhatesglobes.com, http://www.godhatesshrimps.com). It’s hard enough to get a hearing for a biblically responsible view of sexual orientation without him muddying the waters. And what about trying to give a sensitive, compelling, yet thoroughly faithful account of hell with Phelps’s little cartoon pictures of flames in someone’s mind.

As a pastor and as a Christian I need to urge non-Christians to repentance, but I need to do it like Jesus. He sat down with a woman who had been sexually immoral and offered her the water of life. He dismissed the attackers of a woman caught in adultery. He did tell her to ‘go and sin no more’. He certainly never told her he hated her.

If we are to defeat the spirit behind religious hatred laws and the like, which limit (potentially) the religious freedom of preaching the gospel faithfully, we need champion a kind of proclamation whose message of hell is fuelled with tears not terror and whose heart is soft not hard. We need to walk in the way of truth and love.

Josh Moody,
New Haven