TOPEKA, Kan. (ABP) — An independent Baptist church best known for picketing military funerals with placards proclaiming “God hates fags” and “God hates America” is going global.
Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kan. — whose 75-member congregation is composed almost entirely of the extended family of Pastor Fred Phelps — has posted a five-minute video on YouTube titled “God Hates the World.” It parodies “We Are the World,” a charity single written by Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie and performed by a host of celebrities to raise money for famine relief in Africa in 1985.
In the church’s version, the chorus goes like this:
“God hates the world, and all her people.
You, everyone, face a fiery day for your proud sinning.
It’s too late to change His mind; you lived out your vain lives
Storing up God’s wrath for all eternity.”
Shirley Phelps-Roper protests a military funeral in Smyrna, Tenn., in 2005
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A new website, GodHatestheWorld.com, one of several spun off from the original GodHatesFags.com, includes an interactive global map that breaks down country-by-country reasons Phelps and Westboro say God is holding a grudge is against them.
The website says the popular reading of John 3:16 — “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life” — is wrong and is misleading people into believing that God loves everyone on Earth.
The church teaches that “world” in the text refers to “the world of believers,” those for whom Jesus died. It says not everyone can be saved, but only the “elect,” those who have been predestined for eternal life.
Phelps, a disbarred lawyer educated at Bob Jones University, has led the church since 1955. According to his Web bio, Phelps was ordained as a Southern Baptist minister in 1947, but the church isn’t affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention.
The church claims to have conducted more than 40,000 peaceful protests, starting with a 1991 demonstration at a Topeka park allegedly frequented by homosexuals. The group gained national prominence in 1998, when it picketed the funeral of Matthew Shepard, a gay University of Wyoming student whose 1998 murder brought national attention to the issue of hate crimes.
Members of the church went largely unnoticed by the general public as long as they demonstrated mainly at performances of The Laramie Project, a play based on Shepard’s life, and religious groups, including the SBC.
That changed in 2005, when church members started showing up at funerals of fallen American soldiers and proclaiming that casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan are the result of God’s wrath against America for tolerating homosexuality. A number of states responded with laws regulating protests near funerals.
The church was ordered to pay $10.9 million in damages after losing a lawsuit filed by the father of a fallen Marine whose funeral members had picketed in 2006. A judge later reduced the amount to $5 million.
The Supreme Court recently ruled in the church’s favor by refusing to consider an appeal of a court order barring Missouri from enforcing a law restricting protests near funerals.
Recently scheduled protests include the July 23 funeral of former CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite. While Cronkite’s popularity won him the nickname “most trusted man in America,” Westboro Baptist says it was on his watch that the country began to embrace the homosexual “agenda.”
“Walter Cronkite is now in hell,” says a flier on the church website. “And that’s the way it is.”
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Bob Allen is senior writer for Associated Baptist Press.