"Pray Not for this People for Their Good": Westboro Baptist Church, the Religious Right, and American Nationalism

Abstract

Westboro Baptist Church, a small Topeka, Kansas-based church pastored by Fred Phelps, came to national attention for members' pickets of the funerals of gay people but has prompted continued public outrage because of pickets at the funerals of deceased military servicemen and women and at scenes of national tragedy, where they preach a message that God is destroying America because of the nation's sexual sins. Drawing from extensive field research at Westboro Baptist Church services and pickets, this dissertation provides an ethnography and history of the church. Rhetorical and visual analyses of church-produced artifacts, including sermons, signs, websites, and reports, provide data for an explanation of church theology and a timeline of anti-gay activism. The dissertation places the theology and activism of Westboro Baptist Church in the context of American religious history and suggests that Westboro Baptist Church's message of national doom that reflects a strand of thought that has always been present in American religion. Using radical flank theory, the dissertation examines Westboro Baptist Church in the context of the contemporary Religious Right, noting how the offensive message and in-your-face tactics of Westboro Baptist Church serve as a foil to the "compassion" of the Religious Right, centering and softening the Religious Right's anti-gay theology, which similarly argues that sexual sins damn a nation, and its anti-gay political activism. The dissertation concludes by examining legal aspects of Westboro Baptist Church funeral pickets and argues that public outrage in response to pickets at the funerals of fallen servicemen and women reveals a willingness to trade civil liberties for civility, an impulse to celebrate all fallen servicemen and women as straight and Christian, and a valuing of the lives of presumably straight servicemen and women as more deserving of dignity than the lives of gay men and women, trends that are more threatening to democracy, the dissertation, argues, than are the uncivil pickets of Westboro Baptists.