Fred Phelps, Coronavirus, and Me

“There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death.”
—Proverbs 14:12 (KJV)

Reverend Fred Phelps

Around the midpoint of his book Does Jesus Really Love Me?, gay Christian journalist Jeff Chu (now a seminarian) recounts meeting Reverend Fred Phelps, the notorious anti-gay activist preacher, in his Topeka, Kansas, office. On a shelf behind Phelps’ desk, in pride of place, Chu saw Phelps kept a plaque awarded to him by the Topeka NAACP. Early in his career, Phelps was a champion of racial rights and solidarity in Kansas.

This image has stayed with me for years, since reading Chu’s book. Throughout his career, Phelps embraced conflict; his particularly adversarial form of Christianity characterized his entire ministry. But early on, he embraced conflict on behalf of oppressed minorities, in a state historically riven between its urban, racially diverse eastern border, and its mostly white, rural, geographically vast west. He began his ministry uplifting the downtrodden.

What changed? I never met Phelps, never interacted with his congregation, so I’m reluctant to speculate. However, his congregation’s history includes an important note: Westboro Baptist Church began as a satellite campus of Topeka’s East Side Baptist Church, but quickly broke away. Westboro has continued without formal ties to any Baptist denomination, a solo traveler through a world its leadership regards as morally tainted.

Something happened in 1955. Fred Phelps suddenly decided he didn’t need other people. This means both organizational support and guidance, but also the religious instruction of other Christians. He decided to walk alone. Although he completed a law degree in 1964, and began working with the NAACP around that time, records indicate his courtroom behavior became increasingly hostile and belligerent, leading to his disbarment in 1977.

Phelps continued this pattern throughout his career. He started out collaborating with others, then became increasingly adversarial. Even his own congregation experienced this, and the Westboro board formally excommunicated their founding pastor in August of 2013, about seven months before he died. Phelps’ demand for righteousness gradually drove everyone away, even his own most loyal followers, piece by piece.

I’ve thought about Phelps recently, as isolation has become the standard behavior for Americans of all religious and political stripes. Trapped inside our houses, with only the company of our own thoughts and our most immediate nuclear family, many people find themselves going down roads they never anticipated: fighting with their spouses, turning into hoarders, and worse. Though the evidence is anecdotal, many Americans probably find themselves trapped in a spiral.

Like Phelps, many Christians have turned against their houses of religion and other allies: Oklahoma pastor Jakob Topper reports that about half of complaints pastors get today involve parishioners threatening to leave if the congregation doesn’t re-open, and the other half are parishioners threatening to leave if it does. Organized Christianity threatens to descend into a childish squabble over my feelings, not God’s work.

Nor is it exclusively religious. I’ve witnessed souls hurt and friendships ended over needless political fights, mostly conducted online. And I don’t mean fights between Trump supporters and the vote-em-out brigade; it’s mostly been between fellow Leftists, hurt and angered because somebody favors environment over labor rights, or whatever. As though, when facing the current administration, we could separate these issues from one another.

We’re all, like the young Phelps, unmoored now. The institutions that kept us stable, like work, volunteer organizations, and the arts, are indefinitely suspended or, in the case of schools, being run like something from a Hollywood dystopia. Only now are some Americans, including me, realizing how dependent we once were on our communities to shoulder the burden of our sanity. “Many hands make light work,” they say. I only now understand that.

Maybe that’s why so many people rebelled so quickly against quarantine procedures which many never actually honored. Even a very brief sojourn alone with their thoughts made them realize how badly they needed others. The wild, tempestuous, and frequently angry thoughts which, my friends report anecdotally, we’ve all suffered this year, proved too much for some to handle. Rather than stay trapped indoors, they turned that bottled wrath outward.

Americans are, perhaps, seeing our real identities exposed to ourselves, sometimes for the first time. The damaging power of loneliness forces us to admit we don’t like who we are, when forced to live by the way which seems right to ourselves. Isolation is destroying us, if the virus doesn’t kill us first, and there’s no cure for either.