Here’s some irony for you: an article about Fred Phelps cheered me up today.
If you don’t know who Fred Phelps is, you can do a little Googling. If I were feeling really snarky, I would list some quotes from Phelp’s church to illustrate the beauty and majesty of religion, but I’d feel dirty linking to him, or his charmingly named site. I have in past described him as Fred “Wow, am I going to just stone cold cock-punch this guy if I ever meet him” Phelps, if that helps give you the gist of my impression of him.
So, given how much this guy epitomizes everything that’s wrong with religion, why would an article about him cheer me up? Well, it turns out that he’s a lot less of a force than I thought he was.
I’ve seen tons of articles about his church’s protests, and even videos produced by the church. (You did see the one where he takes on Stewart & Colbert, right?) This gave me the impression that the church was a fairly large organization with significant means.
Here’s what I read today:
Their actions are in the name of the Westboro Baptist Church, which numbers 71 and is headed by “Gramps”, preacher Fred Phelps. The church, which is based in Topeka, Kansas, mostly comprises his extended family.
There’s less than a hundred of them, and most of them are in his family. That’s even more risible than I thought, and much less scary. That’s the first thing that cheered me up.
Most of the piece is an interview with a journalist who spent three weeks with the “clan” working on a documentary.
Here’s some more tidbits:
Were there any other aspects of the family that intrigued you?
Louis: I first saw the family through reading about them and on their website but now, having met them, the most incongruous thing about them is how they look. What I mean is, for example, many of the women are these nice-looking young ladies whose beliefs are so old-fashioned in some ways so you’d think they’re kind of like the Amish or something and wear head dresses and long skirts and dirndls. Instead, they’re all wearing shorts and T-shirts. They’re all-American girls with long hair and good teeth and looking tanned and relaxed, playing volleyball and laughing and joking around and that is, for me, a totally new kind of experience. Dealing with these people with, like, Palaeolithic beliefs but hearing them coming from fresh-faced teenagers and women who you think you’d run into at the mall.
That bit is a little scary–I mean Fred looks like a demented, evil old man, but apparently that’s not true of his demonspawn. They could be among us right now!
However, here’s my favourite bit of the interview, including the second thing that cheered me up:
I think that the pastor is not a very nice person. I think he’s an angry person who’s twisted the Bible and picked and chosen verses that support his anger, that sort of justify his anger, and he’s instilled that in his children and they’ve passed it on to their children. Although the second and third generation are by and large quite nice people from what I saw, they still live under the influence of their Gramps.
It shows you what strange avenues the religious impulse can take you down. I think another part of the answer is that parts of the Christian Bible are pretty weird.
The third thing that pleased me, by the way, was reading that Phelps was arrested for hate speech in Canada
If you’re interested in the documentary you can go to the BBC site, or even more usefully, you can just go watch it on YouTube. It stops being funny when you see the children.
Oh, and you can check this out too.
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