Fred Phelps: Westboro Baptist Church Founder: 1929-2014
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Phelps
was born in Meridian, Mississippi, in a working class family, to a railroad
worker and housewife. He seems to have had a turbulent childhood, due to the
early death of his mother, being raised by an aunt and his father's subsequent
remarriage. For whatever reason, he was estranged from his family of origin as
long ago as the fifties. He was a Boy Scout and although qualifying for the
prestigious West Point military academy, he decided to become a fundamentalist
Methodist preacher, attending first fundamentalist Bob Jones "University" in the
late forties and then the Prarie Bible Institute in Alberta, Canada after he
dropped out of the latter. He didn't particularly like Pasadena Community
College, where he achieved his first tertiary qualification in 1951.
What
about Westboro Baptist Church? Originally, it was established as a branch of
Topeka's East Side Baptist Church in 1931. In 1954, Westboro Baptist Church
hired Phelps as a minister, but in 1955, soon after, Phelps broke all ties with
the East Side Baptist Church. Over the years, his offspring and extended family
have come to dominate the sect. Its activities are funded by lawsuits and
donations from church members and it receives no outside support
whatsoever.
In
1964, he graduated from Topeka's Washburn University with a law degree and
established the Phelps Chartered law firm in that city. Ironically for someone
who would later become a virulent opponent of LGBT rights, he was on the
positive side of African-American civil rights cases, taking frequent litigation
against racist and segregationist white business owners and rental accomodation
providers in the state. Indeed, he received awards from the Greater Kansas City
branch of Blacks in Government and Bonner County National Association for
Acceptance of Coloured People (NAACP) precisely for that reason.
In
1977, his life took a darker turn as he was examined and then disbarred by the
Kansas State
Board of Law Examiners for his
conduct
during a lawsuit against a court reporter named Carolene Brady. Brady had failed
to have a court transcript ready for Phelps on the day he asked for it; though
it did not affect the outcome of the case, he demanded $US22,000 damages from
her. Subsequently, in the
ensuing trial, Phelps called Brady to the stand, declared her a "hostile
witness" and then accused her of "promiscuity and perversion." According to the
state Kansas Supreme Court, he lost that case. He was found to have misled the
court on a matter of alleged non-existent affadavits and was struck off from
practising law in Kansas, although not in courts under federal US jurisdiction.
However, in 1985, several federal judges filed a further disciplinary action
against Phelps and two of his children, so he then agreed to stop practising in
federal courts as well in 1989.
In
theological terms, Phelps describes himself as a "Primitive Baptist", which
means that his church has a strong religious separatist orientation and refuses
to co-operate with others, even other fundamentalist churches, in trying to
convert people to fundamentalist religious beliefs. Phelps and his Westboro
Baptist Church also practise a set of beliefs known as the "Five Points" of
conservative Calvinist fundamentalist Protestantism. They include belief in the
"total depravity" of humanity; predetermined "elect" status for those that God
foreordains for "salvation;" 'limited atonement', which means that Christ died
to 'redeem" only this "elect;' irresistable grace, which means that
fundamentalist conversion of the eventual 'elect' is preordained; and
"perserverance of the saints", which means that the "elect" are "fated" to
continue in their path. Taken together, these beliefs may help explain the
pressure-cooker intensive cultist and sectarian subsequent behaviour of the late
Fred Phelps and his entourage of offspring, grandchildren and others within his
sect.
That
is, those children and grandchildren who didn't subsequently break away and flee
from the sect, subsequently accusing Phelps and other sect members of brutal
child battery under the guise of "discipline." Did
Phelps have anger management issues? He was charged with assault and battery in
1995, but the charges were dismissed due to anomalies involving prior pre-trial
preventative detention that was judged to be too excessive. Forty members remain
in the sect.
What about
Phelps' homophobia? According to Phelps, sect children were being harassed and
propositioned by pedophiles in Gage Park and in response, when the local council
didn't respond to complaints about their presence there, or adjacent gay
cruising grounds, the sect produced warning signs. Westboro Baptist's antigay
protest activity began there and escalated. In 2005, he engineered an attempt to
repeal Topeka's inclusive anti-discrimination civic ordinances through a
petition and civic referendum with several fellow traveller fundamentalist
churches- and failed.
He didn't
only hate LGBT people. Sickeningly, at a time when grieving parents and family
members were mourning their slain military personnel sons and daughters from the
Afghan and Iraqi War tragedies, Phelps and his sect began to picket funerals of
military personnel. One bereaved military family took retaliatory court action
against the sect but failed to have them stopped due to upheld "free speech"
defences; however disgusting and inhuman people might find such inappropriate
attacks on slain service personnel and their families, Phelps and his sect were
haranguing these individuals and their families on public land. However, as a
consequence of this disgusting abuse of grieving families at military funerals,
President Obama and individual US states such as Illinois, Indiana, Iowa,
Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan and Missouri have established
protest-free buffer zones around military and other cemeteries to prevent this
reprehensible behaviour. The American Civil Liberties Union defended his right
to free speech and thus far, the courts have upheld his right to picket military
funerals.
Unbelievably,
he tried to run for Democratic Party Governor of Kansas and Topeka Mayor in the
eighties and nineties, failing both times. Although he initially supported
former Democrat Presidential candidate Al Gore, he later turned against Gore,
Bill and Hilary Clinton when the latter senior US Democrat political figures
embraced LGBT rights. Perversely, he supported Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in
the late nineties, before the tyrant was deposed and executed after the US-led
invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2004. He also believed that current US
President Barack Obama is the Antichrist and that the end of the world was
therefore "imminent." In 2009, Phelps and daughter Shirley Phelps-Roper were
banned from entering Canada and the United Kingdom as risks to public order.
Several evangelical organisations supported the British government
decision.
In one
desperate publicity stunt after another, the Westboro Baptist sect then
harangued numerous individuals for non-compliance with its virulent brand of
homophobia, including some social conservatives such as former US President
Ronald Reagan and Fox News host Bill Reilly, as well as Princess Diana of Wales,
Sonny Bono, US Supreme Court Judge William Rehnquist, the Mormon Church, Heath
Ledger, gaybashing fatality Matthew Shepherd, Jews, Catholics, Muslims, Swedish
and Irish people. They have also regularly protested University of Kansas Law
School graduation ceremonies as well as the US Holocaust Memorial Mueseum,
Jewish Anti-Defamation League, and other organisations tangentially related to
LGBT rights.
Phelps cause of death appears to
be unknown at present. In March 2014, his estranged son Nathan reported that his
father had been excommunicated from the sect in August 2013 and was residing in
Topeka's Midland Hospice. Apparently, his daughter now runs the forty-member
sect, which still intends to continue its abhorrent activity with no respite
despite its founders death.
But can it? In the Christian Science Monitor (17.04.2014), Mark
Guarino questioned whether this would be the case. Although it seems to have
managed without him since August 2013 when he was deposed and "excommunicated"
as sect leader, might it encounter problems now that he has finally passed away?
According to Barry Crawford, a religious studies professor at Topeka's own
Washburn University, the sect might either disintegrate now, or else survive,
albeit in an even more reduced form than its current forty members.
Unfortunately, however, most of the sect now consists of Phelps remaining
children, their spouses and his grandchildren. It may be the case that his
remaining sect member male children are now church elders and directors after a
reported power struggle with his daughter, Shirley Phelps-Roper after Fred
Phelps advocated more thoughtful treatment of church members before he was
desposed and excommunicated.
Despite its notoriety, neither
Phelps nor his sect have attracted much serious academic analysis or interest.
There have been two contributions to general collections on US local "culture
war" animosities, only one within a religious studies journal and one
communication and media studies journal article. There are also broader
references to the aforementioned Snyder v
Phelps (2011) US Supreme Court decision, which upheld the late demagogue
and his circus' "right" to torment grieving US military families in the name of
"free speech." Finally, there is former sect member Lauren Drain's biographical
Banished: Surviving My Years in the Westboro
Baptist Church (2013).
Recommended:
Brian Britt: "Curses Left and Right: Hate Speech and the Biblical Tradition" Journal of the American Academy of Religion: 78:3: (2010): 633-661
Daniel Brouwer and Aaron
Hess: "Making Sense of 'God hates Fags' and 'Thank God for 9/11': A thematic
analysis of milbloggers responses to Reverend Fred Phelps and the Westboro
Baptist Church" Western Journal of
Communication: 71:1: January-March 2007: 69-90.
Gerhard Casper and Kathy
Sullivan: Snyder versus Phelps:
Bethseda: Proquest: 2011.
Lauren Drain: Banished: Surviving My Years in the Westboro Baptist
Church: New York: Grand Central: 2013
Mark Guarino: "Could Westboro
Baptist Church survive without founder Fred Phelps?|" Christian Science Monitor: 17.03.2014:
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Society/2014/0317/Could-Westboro-Baptist-Church-survive-without-founder-Fred-Phelps
Rick Musser: "Fred Phelps versus Topeka" in Elaine Sharp
(ed) Culture Wars and Local Politics:
Lawrence: University of Kansas Press: 1999.
