God Hates: Westboro Baptist Church, American Nationalism, and the Religious Right by Rebecca Barrett-Fox (review)

Rebecca Barrett-Fox's God Hates is the first book-length treatment of Westboro Baptist Church (WBC), the small, Primitive Baptist congregation founded by Fred Phelps in Topeka, Kansas, infamous for picketing military funerals in protest of US society's tolerance of homosexuality. The book has two main goals. The first is to explain why WBC engages in such deplorable public activities by describing the theological and cultural contexts of its antigay agenda. The second is to demonstrate that WBC's pickets distract the media and the public from the equally antigay political projects of the Religious Right, making the latter's agenda seem respectfully dignified in comparison, and showing that the lives of soldiers are valued more highly than those of gay men and women. The result is a provocative and insightful book that scholars of religion, social movements, and political culture will find worth reading.

Conducting fieldwork among a group like WBC must have been a daunting task. This makes it especially remarkable that Barrett-Fox has dived so deeply into the group's history, culture, and political theology without treating its roughly 70 members as pariahs. It is not that she hesitates to call them hateful people: she does. But to her immense credit, she explains their agenda gradually and with the appropriate scholarly reflection, allowing WBC's members to explain their theology and the actions that it inspires them to take in their own terms. While many academics would be loath to listen to more than a few words uttered by the members of such a group, Barrett-Fox treats them as research participants worthy of being taken seriously. Her diligence in doing so has allowed her to write a thorough but critical account of WBC's history, theology, and politics that surely involved more than the usual challenges of ethnographic work. I cannot overstate how strongly she should be commended for having overcome the serious personal and methodological challenges involved in such a project.

The analysis is driven by two main questions: Why does WBC espouse such hateful views, and what can its reception by the media, politicians, and conservative Christians tell us about the entanglement of antigay politics, American nationalism, and the Religious Right? WBC was founded in 1956, long before it began picketing funerals, and its members believe that God hates not only homosexuals, but all humans other than the few he has chosen for salvation. Thus, the title is not just a shortened version of WBC's most notorious slogan, "God hates fags," but a succinct encapsulation of its double-predestinarian theology, which asserts that God has chosen not only the elect, but also the damned, and passionately hates the latter for reasons knowable only to him. This hyper-Calvinism views all people as dirty, miserable beings with no ability to influence their potential salvation. Barrett-Fox skillfully shows how WBC's particular form of antigay activism emerges from the view that homosexuality is not a moral sickness, as many members of the Religious Right believe, but a curse that God bestows on those he hates the most. This is why WBC sees America's tolerance of homosexuality as a grave affront to God's will that invites wrath and fury upon the nation, which God delivers by killing soldiers.

Yet WBC's condemnation of American society has not always drawn the ire of the media or elected officials, nor always been renounced by leaders of the Religious Right. It was not until the Westboro Baptists began picketing military funerals that they came in for sustained criticism from the media, politicians, and more mainstream conservative Christians. This shows, Barrett-Fox argues, that the public's vehement denunciations of WBC's pickets have less to do with its antigay message than with its choice to disrupt the sacred veneration of the fallen soldier-hero, a ritual celebration of the heteronormative masculinity and patriotism that religious nationalism venerates...