Westboro Baptist Church Hellraises at Elizabeth Taylor's Funeral

As everybody has heard by now, Elizabeth Taylor passed away last week. Immediately following the news of her passing, Westboro Baptist Church spokesperson and legal advisor Margie Phelps began tweeting that the church would be protesting the funeral, as they have done not only to funerals of war heroes but also to other celebrities. According to the Huffington Post one of the things Margie tweeted was, “No RIP Elizabeth Taylor who spent her life in adultery and enabling proud fags. They cuss her in hell today.” Apparently Margie did not feel it was appropriate for Elizabeth Taylor to support AIDs research and stand up support of the gay population. I wish I could say this is simply a marginal group with too much time on their hands. Unfortunately, this is far from the case, as most mainstream Christians, although not so blatantly slanderous, think and act in ways that show they stand alongside the Westboro Baptist Church, if not physically, in the spirit.

I have begun frequenting ChristianForums recently and have found my worst fears realized: many of the posters at the site write things that, when reading between the lines, sound similar to the espousings of the Wesboro group. As a matter of fact, one poster has proved my thesis by pointing to Jesus’ judgmental and critical interactions with the religious leaders in the Bible as justification for his judgment and criticism towards homosexuals and those who have had abortions. No matter how much I explained the category mistake he was making, he could not see the error. Jesus criticized and condemned the religious leaders because they were in a position to know that the Torah (the Jewish Scriptures which was the sacred text at the time) was meant to promote “justice and mercy and faith” (Matthew 23:23), and yet they used it to oppress people and condemn them. One of Jesus’ harshest criticisms of the religious leaders was that they “lock people out of the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 23:13). His criticisms were against the religious leaders and no one else. His criticism was not against those perceived as sinners, his criticism was against those perceived as “righteous” because of their poor treatment of those perceived as sinners. So to use Jesus’ interactions with the religious leaders to justify our interactions with those perceived as sinners is a total category mistake.

What groups like the Westboro Baptist Church are doing is acting like the religious leaders of Jesus’ day by locking people out of the kingdom of heaven by condemning them for their homosexuality, for having had abortions, for saying they do not believe in a hell, and so on. Christians are too busy criticizing that we do not even realize we are doing the exact same thing the religious leaders were doing that Jesus criticized them for: “[crossing] sea and land to make a single convert…[looking] righteous to others, but inside are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness…[tying] up heavy burdens, hard to bear…but they themselves are unwilling to lift a finger to move them…” (Matthew 23). This chapter in Matthew is a good read because it gives us an accurate picture of why Jesus criticized the religious leaders: it was because they continually condemned others, acting perfect themselves, and excluded people from the kingdom of heaven.

In Matthew 12:7, Jesus responds to the religious leaders’ criticism of him and his disciples for breaking the Sabbath by saying, “But if you had known what this means, ‘I desire mercy and not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the guiltless,” quoting Hosea 6:6 (some versions say ‘compassion’ as opposed to ‘mercy’). Jesus came to bring mercy, where everyone else wanted to bring condemnation. As Christians, we strive to have compassion for people, being empathetic to their situation, and showing them the love and acceptance that the world so often hesitates to give. Jesus’ revolutionary message was that forgiveness is here, and the restoration to wholeness can once again be achieved through him. Let us strive more to bring the love of Jesus to people through a more caring, more compassionate attitude.
Blessings,
-Brandon