God Hates: Westboro Baptist Church, American Nationalism, and

God Hates: Westboro Baptist Church, American Nationalism, and the Religious Right

The congregants thanked God that they werenâ€™t like all those hopeless people outside the church, bound for hell. So the Westboro Baptist Churchâ€™s Sunday service began, and Rebecca Barrett-Fox, a curious observer, wondered why anyone would seek spiritual sustenance through other peopleâ€™s damnation. It is a question that piques many a witness to Westboroâ€™s more visible activityâ€”the â€œGOD HATES FAGSâ€ picketing of funerals. In God Hates, sociologist Barrett-Fox takes us behind the scenes of Topekaâ€™s Westboro Baptist Church. The first full ethnography of this infamous presence on Americaâ€™s Religious Right, her book situates the churchâ€™s story in the context of American religious historyâ€”and reveals as much about the uneasy state of Christian practice in our day as it does about the workings of the Westboro Church and Fred Phelps, its founder.

God Hates traces WBCâ€™s theological beliefs to a brand of hyper-Calvinist thought reaching back to the Puritansâ€”an extreme Calvinism, emphasizing predestination, that has proven as off-putting as Westboroâ€™s actions, even for other Baptists. And yet, in examining Westboroâ€™s role in conservative politics and its contentious relationship with other fundamentalist activist groups, Barrett-Fox reveals how the churchâ€™s message of national doom in fact reflects beliefs at the core of much of the Religious Rightâ€™s rhetoric. Westboroâ€™s aggressively offensive public activities actually serve to soften the anti-gay theology of more mainstream conservative religious activism. With an eye to the churchâ€™s protest at military funerals, she also considers why the public has responded so differently to these than to Westboro's anti-LGBT picketing.

With its history of Westboro Baptist Church and its founder, and its profiles of defectors, this book offers a complex, close-up view of a phenomenon on the fringes of American Christianityâ€”and a broader, disturbing view of the mainstream theology it at once masks and reflects.
Country USA
Brand University Press of Kansas
Manufacturer University Press of Kansas
Binding Hardcover
ReleaseDate 2016-05-25
UnitCount 1
EANs 9780700622658

Country	USA
Brand	University Press of Kansas
Manufacturer	University Press of Kansas
Binding	Hardcover
ReleaseDate	2016-05-25
UnitCount	1
EANs	9780700622658

God Hates: Westboro Baptist Church, American Nationalism, and the Religious Right

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