God Hates Fags: The Rhetorics of Religious Violence

1. The Language of National Security: A Queer Theory of Religious Language

1 The Language of National Security A Queer Theory of Religious Language The word “safety” brings us to the real meaning of the word “religious” as we use it. —JAMES BALDWIN1 Fighting Words The conservative, Christian speech against queers patrols American citizens . It achieves its force, in part, because religious language is thought to be a secure form of language. Its semantic security reveals something unique about religious rhetoric, at least in the United States: there’s something about Western religious language—mostly white Anglo Protestant Christian religious language—that makes one feel its importance for reasons well beyond the actual content the language communicates. According to the National Association of Evangelicals, the number 1 statement of faith is, “We believe the Bible to be inspired, the only infallible, authoritative Word of God.”2 One cannot challenge the feeling of this rhetoric’s absolute authority, which makes the “Word of God” seem full of important meaning that cannot be challenged. We really have no choice. Kenneth Burke’s crucial study of religious rhetoric, primarily Christian, argues that religious language is an “entitled” kind of language—a language that can lay claim to all sorts of meanings. “Imagine the ideal title of a book,” suggests Burke. “An ideal title would ‘sum up’ all the particulars of 22 the book. It would in a way ‘imply’ these particulars.”3 The Word of God acts as if it is a title, summing up whatever might be suggested by the title, mainly the contents of a book. Certain forms of religious rhetoric function as titles that are entitled to be very generic but still imply all the particulars that are not there—the religious word announces a story that one won’t necessarily hear. But by virtue of the title, we believe there is much behind the title; titles logically must have important words behind them. In fact, the Word of God’s force comes from its abbreviated utterance—it is strong because it can mean so much, but a “so much” that one might not even need to hear the rest of the story in order to be convinced by what the title suggests. We can consider religious rhetoric to be an abstract language that, because it is abstract, can guarantee—can be and carry the title on—almost any assertion one might have. Although fundamentalists and evangelicals purport never to be “reading too much” into scripture, we should be suspicious. The Bible is a massive and textually unstable document, which must be translated, implied, re- fined, interpreted, and applied in very ingenious ways all the time. But one cannot emphasize the rhetorical complexity; the Word of God is trumpeted to be simple and true. So in order to characterize the infallibility of the message, certain textual gestures are needed. The blessed assurance of God’s Word must be made to seem intact. Just think of the simple, quick citation of highly decontextualized passages from sacred scripture that will often underwrite the important meaning of the assertion we are supposed to believe. Westboro Baptist Church’s “Godhatesfags.com” Web site, for example , illustrates what must be emphasized to assure the authoritative, inerrant “nature” of God’s Word. In an effort to explicate their Web site’s name, they post the following list: 1. the absolute sovereignty of “GOD” in all matters whatsoever (e.g., Jeremiah 32:17, Isaiah 45:7, Amos 3:6, Proverbs 16:4, Matthew 19:26, Romans 9:11–24, Romans 11:33–36, etc.), 2. the doctrine of reprobation or God’s “HATE” involving eternal retriTHE LANGUAGE OF NATIONAL SECURITY 23 bution or the everlasting punishment of most of mankind in Hell forever (e.g., Leviticus 20:13, 23, Psalm 5:5, Psalm 11:5, Malachi 1:1– 3, Romans 9:11–13, Matthew 7:13, 23, John 12:39–40, 1 Peter 2:8, Jude 4, Revelation 13:8, 20:15, 21:27, etc.), and 3. the certainty that all impenitent sodomites (under the elegant metaphor of “FAGS” as the contraction of faggots, fueling the fires of God’s wrath) will inevitably go to Hell (e.g., Romans 1:18–32, 1 Corinthians 6:9–11, 1 Timothy 1:8–11, Jude 7, etc.).4 We should ignore, only for a moment, that number 2 does not make “HATE” plural so the outline of the three very important theological Words could correspond with the grammar of...