TOPEKA, Kan. — On the final night of Fred Phelps’s life, as he lay dying in hospice care here, two of his daughters and several of his grandchildren lined a sidewalk in front of an upscale grocery store in Kansas City, Mo., 60 miles to the east, and sang.
They were holding signs, of course — “America Is Doomed,” “Same Sex Marriage Dooms Nations” and “Repent or Perish” were among the milder mottoes — and shouting their tolerate-gays-and-face-damnation gospel to the young adults waiting Wednesday night for a concert at the theater across the street. But they smiled widest after hitting the play button on an iPod, hooked up to a large yellow boombox, and belting out scolding lyrics set to the tunes of “Royals,” “Let It Go” and other pop songs.
They had no way of knowing that Mr. Phelps, the founding pastor of Westboro Baptist Church and their onetime spiritual leader, was in his final hours, but they also made it clear that they would go on without him.
“What you fail to understand is that the church of the Lord Jesus Christ is not about any human,” said Rachel Phelps Hockenbarger, a picketer and one of Mr. Phelps’s 13 children. “God does not need any of us.”
But many of the church’s closest observers are not so sanguine about its future.
Even as the church Mr. Phelps founded — about 70 people, most of them related to him by blood or marriage — maintains a furious pace of public picketing, it has been overtaken by a rapidly changing social and political landscape. The United States, despite dire warnings from Westboro that tolerance of homosexuality is provoking God’s wrath, has become increasingly supportive of gay rights. More and more, Westboro’s antigay demonstrations generate not only pushback but also mockery. Even worse for the church, they are often ignored.
The stability of the church itself is at issue. There have been indications of infighting; four of Mr. Phelps’s children, as well as several of his more than 50 grandchildren, have broken with the tight-knit clan over its tactics and beliefs. Some have claimed that he was physically abusive, while others have said they regret the hurt their actions have caused.
One of Mr. Phelps’s estranged sons, Nate Phelps, wrote in a Facebook post last weekend that his father had been excommunicated by his own church, and then told The Topeka Capital-Journal that the rift had been caused when the church elected eight men as a new board of elders, edging aside Mr. Phelps’s daughter Shirley Phelps-Roper, who had been the church’s primary spokeswoman.
Thomas Witt, a longtime critic of the church as executive director of the Kansas Equality Coalition, a gay rights group, said: “It’s a pretty opaque place, but what trickles out of there has led a lot of people to understand that as Fred’s health has been declining, there hasn’t been anybody to keep a handle on interfamily or intrafamily disputes. And I think you’re going to see that accelerate.”
Even the Phelpses’ own neighborhood — most of the family members live in a small, fenced-in compound around the church, with an upside-down American flag and signs warning of impending doom — is changing.
Advertisement
“I’ve watched more and more members leave the church, and have watched it deteriorate,” said Davis Hammet, a 23-year-old from Florida who, with other members of a small organization called Planting Peace, last year moved into the gray house across the street from the Phelps compound in Topeka, painted it in rainbow colors, surrounded it with rainbow flags and moved in. Now he greets members of the Phelps family as they take out the trash, and has even invited them over — an invitation they have declined.
“We want to dismantle this hate group by overwhelming them with love,” Mr. Hammet said.
The Phelpses deny any turmoil at the church. They say it is moving forward with its eight male pastors; Shirley Phelps-Roper said that she had never been more than a picketer, and that she welcomed help from the pastors in dealing with the news media.
No comments:
Post a Comment