God Hates

I must confess that when I was first invited to review God Hates: Westboro Baptist Church, American Nationalism, and the Religious Right, by Rebecca Barrett-Fox, I wondered why anyone would want to read an entire book about a fringe movement with only 70 members. With all the media attention Westboro Baptist Church (WBC) attracts, didn’t I already know everything I needed to know? But, of course, we sociologists know better, as there is indeed value in studying the religious fringe, a lesson we learned well from Lofland and Stark (“Becoming a World Saver,” 1965), Kanter (Commitment and Community: Communes and Utopias in Sociological Perspective, 1972), and many others since. Westboro identifies itself as a Primitive Baptist Church, although no other Primitive Baptist Church recognizes its claim. Primitive Baptists trace their beginnings to a 1820s split between Arminian Baptists (which today includes Southern Baptists and American Baptists) and the more conservative Calvinist Baptists. These historic links to hyper-Calvinism, and specifically to the Calvinist doctrine of predestination, become relevant when one considers Westboro’s theology on sexuality, and specifically homosexuality. Here, we learn the origins of the “God Hates Fags” protests that have made Westboro so infamous. God does not hate people because they are gay, but rather “they are gay because God hates them” (73). God has essentially given up on some, and their “homosexuality becomes the evidence, not the cause, of God’s damnation” (74). Nothing can change their fate, as they are beyond saving. Westboro, therefore, is not hoping to change homosexuals. Westboro protests and pickets to draw attention to a hyper-Calvinist God who, they believe, uses national tragedies to rebuke and punish a nation that has become far too accepting of homosexuality.

Calvinism · Damnation · Homosexuality · Nationalism · Political science · Politics · Predestination · Sociology · Theology · Gender Studies · Law · Philosophy · Religion and Society Interactions · Religious studies