God Hates

America is Doomed. God Hates Obama. Fags Doom Nations. Thank God for Dead Soldiers. All of these slogans are from signs held up at military funerals by members of the infamous Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas. In God Hates, the sociologist Rebecca Barrett-Fox gives us the first full-scale examination of Westboro, and it makes for fascinating and horrifying reading. She begins her study with an ethnography of the church, including a biography of the founding pastor, Fred Phelps, that makes use of interviews with church members to delineate Westboro's hyper-Calvinist theology and its understanding of the connection between individual sin (particularly, homosexuality) and national tragedy (particularly, the death of soldiers), a point that the church seeks to bring home with its picketing. In the final chapters the author places Westboro in the context of the religious Right. In this regard the one significant weakness of God Hates is the author's surprising failure to make use of the wealth of outstanding scholarship on evangelicalism and fundamentalism from over the past three decades. Not only would the book have been much stronger if it had been placed into conversation with this literature, but familiarity with this scholarship might have also alerted Barrett-Fox to the fact that Calvinism is enjoying a remarkable resurgence among American evangelicals, thus belying her claim that Westboro's Calvinism makes the church “an anachronism ... on the American religious landscape” and “offensive to the evangelicals who often otherwise share with Westboro Baptist Church condemnation of homosexuality” (pp. 66, 95

Calvinism · Christianity · Church History · Context (archaeology · Homosexuality · Political science · Scholarship · Sociology · Theology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Gender Studies · History · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies