God Hates

The congregants thanked God that they werent like all those hopeless people outside the church, bound for hell. So the Westboro Baptist Churchs Sunday service began, and Rebecca Barrett-Fox, a curious observer, wondered why anyone would seek spiritual sustenance through other peoples damnation. It is a question that piques many a witness to Westboros more visible activitythe GOD HATES FAGS picketing of funerals. In God Hates, sociologist Barrett-Fox takes us behind the scenes of Topekas Westboro Baptist Church. The first full ethnography of this infamous presence on Americas Religious Right, her book situates the churchs story in the context of American religious historyand reveals as much about the uneasy state of Christian practice in our day as it does about the workings of the Westboro Church and Fred Phelps, its founder.God Hates traces WBCs theological beliefs to a brand of hyper-Calvinist thought reaching back to the Puritansan extreme Calvinism, emphasizing predestination, that has proven as off-putting as Westboros actions, even for other Baptists. And yet, in examining Westboros role in conservative politics and its contentious relationship with other fundamentalist activist groups, Barrett-Fox reveals how the churchs message of national doom in fact reflects beliefs at the core of much of the Religious Rights rhetoric. Westboros aggressively offensive public activities actually serve to soften the anti-gay theology of more mainstream conservative religious activism. With an eye to the churchs protest at military funerals, she also considers why the public has responded so differently to these than to Westboros anti-LGBT picketing. With its history of Westboro Baptist Church and its founder, and its profiles of defectors, this book offers a complex, close-up view of a phenomenon on the fringes of American Christianityand a broader, disturbing view of the mainstream theology it at once masks and reflects.