Fred Phelps: An American prophet of God's hate

By Jim Lewis

Religion News Service

TOPEKA, Kan. - Pastor Fred Phelps is preaching about God's hate, bent over a Bible printed in large letters for failing eyes. Hate for sinners - adulterers, divorcees, Bob Dole, Mister Rogers, Billy Graham and, especially, gays and lesbians.

The 74-year-old preacher sits at a table in his church office, a utilitarian, paneled room bathed in harsh fluorescent light, poring over pages marked with yellow highlighter. Intense blue eyes searching the Old Testament for verses that prove God hates, not loves.

Love? That's a story that "kissy-poo ministers" tell misguided parishioners so they'll stuff the collection box on Sunday, Phelps insists.

"You're not going to get nowhere with that slop that `God loves you,'" he scoffs in a deep Southern drawl. "That's a diabolical lie from hell without biblical warrant."

His God is wrathful, punishing, willing to pitch humanity into fiery damnation for its sins, particularly for homosexuality, he says. To Phelps, homosexuality is the greatest threat to society: The "militant fag agenda" is being forced onto society by "fags" and "dykes" and all those who believe in tolerance, he says.

For years, Phelps has waged war against homosexuality from his independent Kansas church. He has faxed vitriolic news releases to churches, ambassadors, the media, private citizens - anyone who he thinks is in need of his preaching - declaring God's hate for wayward celebrities, politicians, religions, states and countries, everyone from Cher to Canada.

Phelps and the small congregation of his Westboro Baptist Church - mostly his children, grandchildren and in-laws - took his preaching to the streets about 13 years ago, condemning homosexuality from the sidewalks around Gage Park, a partly wooded park in Topeka where Phelps claimed gay men were having sex at night.

Phelps drew national attention in 1998 when he picketed the funeral of Matthew Shepard, a college student who was slain for being gay. Phelps became the country's best-known gay-basher, appearing in Rolling Stone and The Washington Post, and on television's "20/20" and "The Ricki Lake Show." George magazine named him one of its "20 Most Fascinating Men in Politics" in 1999.

Phelps' fire-and-brimstone take on the Bible is "a very myopic view," says Jeffrey Siker, chairman of the theology department at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. "There's a segment of the Christian tradition that has emphasized the wrath of God, but the majority of the Christian tradition sees that as a dangerous tactic and basically bad theology."

Not Phelps. He insists that hate "is not an evil passion," and his pickets are an act of love. He compares himself to a doctor who has the courage to tell his patient that he's dying of cancer instead of hiding it from him.

"The way to prove you love thy neighbor is to warn them they're committing sin," Phelps says. "I'm the only one who loves the fags."

The symbols that dominate the sanctuary of Phelps' Westboro Baptist Church are not crucifixes, but picket signs condemning gays.

They sit on the altar, leaning on easels that stand alongside a grand piano and a podium. Red, green and yellow, one depicting two cartoon dogs, each wearing earrings, vomiting into each other's mouths. "Fags Wed," it reads.

About 25 pews line the narrow sanctuary, sitting on a rose-colored carpet. Phelps opened the church on a Sunday in 1955, and has preached in it ever since.

Phelps and his wife, Margie, live upstairs. Outside, the English Tudor architecture is partially hidden by a banner, stretched across the front, that advertises one of Phelps' Web sites: Godhatesamerica.com. On a pole in the yard, the American and Canadian flags fly upside down - the international sign of distress, Phelps says.

"I no longer have any love for the country," he says. "Too far gone."

The church sits in a middle-class neighborhood of frame houses. Phelps' family - nine of his 13 children are church members - lives in all but one of the homes in the church's block, and wooden fences that run between the buildings form a kind of compound. Inside, there's a swimming pool and a running track.

The church probably survives on tithes from the family, says Mark Potok, a spokesman for the Southern Poverty Law Center, a hate-group watchdog in Alabama.

"Everybody in this church works," Phelps says, "so everybody has money. I don't want anybody to mistake us for those money-grabbers like Jerry Falwell and Graham, giving the notion that you can buy salvation."

Phelps was accepted to West Point when he was 16, but he never made it there. The summer after his high school graduation, he attended a revival in his hometown of Meridian, Miss. As the minister delivered a fire-and-brimstone sermon, Phelps experienced an epiphany: He had to preach. "Old-time preachers call it an impulse on the heart," Phelps says.

"It sobers you up and focuses your thoughts 24/7, as they say nowadays, and makes everything else relatively insignificant," he says. "There wasn't any question, hasn't been any question. That's what I was supposed to do - preach."

Phelps left home to study the Bible, and was ordained at the age of 17.

He met Margie in Phoenix while working as an evangelist at her church. One day, after a church meeting, he drove her home in his Ford, and told her to open the glove compartment. She found a diamond ring. He proposed to her in the car.

The Phelpses moved to Topeka in 1954, and nine years after opening his church, Fred Phelps earned a law degree from Topeka's Washburn University. He worked as a civil rights lawyer, and received an award from the NAACP after defending two black men who were searched by police at a party.

But he was disbarred in 1989 after nine federal judges signed a complaint against him that charged he made false accusations against them, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. By then, Phelps had filed about 400 lawsuits, mostly in federal court, including a suit against President Reagan for sending an ambassador to the Vatican.

Fred Phelps takes on everyone, conservative or liberal.

He calls Bob Dole, a Kansas Republican, a "whoremonger" because Dole divorced his previous wife to marry Elizabeth Dole.

He criticizes the late Fred Rogers, host of "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood," for failing to warn children that sodomy is a sin. "He needs to be preached to, but he's dead now," Phelps says.

He condemns Billy Graham, once a friend of Phelps while the two attended Bob Jones University, a conservative school of theology, for forsaking his fiery preaching about hell for more moderate "psycho-babble." "I wrote him the other day saying we're going to picket his funeral," Phelps says.

His pickets are so common that they've become part of the daily cityscape - rain, snow or shine.

On a cold March morning, Margie Phelps is standing in a relentless rain at a Lutheran church, wrapped in a Dallas Cowboys jacket and clutching an oversized umbrella. A band of pickets, covered in wet ponchos, stands on the sidewalk.

Rotten weather. But the protest at the modern stone and glass church must go on, Margie Phelps says. "They bury fags here," she says.

Phelps spends most of his time reading religious texts, especially a 350-year-old, two-volume treatise on the book of Job that he bought from a Chicago preacher for $800. His life is consumed with preaching and the Bible, he says. He can recite verses by heart.

"There's something wonderfully liberating, especially when you're 74, in the notion that you're 100 percent right," he says.