Cult’s targeting of family funeral points to folly of speaking for God

By David McElroy · July 14, 2011

I don’t know of a better example of pure evil in the world today than the members of an insane religious cult in Kansas who claim to speak for God. For those of us who are Christians, though, it’s a warning that it’s easy to believe that our thoughts and judgments all come from God.

Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas, is widely known for picketing military funerals and protesting pretty much everything you can think of. Its members claim that “God hates fags.” (That’s even the name of the group’s website.) Every time something bad happens in this country, the group claims it’s evidence of God’s judgement of America. They picket funerals to bring attention to their claim that the deaths and disasters represent God’s hatred of a sinful America.

Today, this group announced that members would be picketing the funerals of the Teutenberg family (above), the members of which were killed in a plane crash last Saturday in rural Alabama. For the hate-filled details, see this press release (PDF) from the group. You really need to read it for yourself to get the full effect of how insane and how hateful these people are.

Why are they picketing the funerals of this family? It’s hard to say. The news release claims that the family was “…killed in a plane crash by an angry God for the sins of a wicked nation….” In other words, there’s nothing in particular about this family the group objects to. It was merely an excuse to draw attention to themselves and their claims.

As far as I’m concerned, the Westboro Baptist Church isn’t Baptist and it isn’t a church. It’s a nutty and hateful cult whose insane leader, Fred Phelps, has taken the hate in himself and indoctrinated mentally weak people into following him. (I’ve read before that most of the group’s membership is related to Phillips, but I can’t find the specifics right now.) The group isn’t affiliated with any recognized denominational group and certainly isn’t connected to any of the Baptist conventions.

It’s easy to look at these over-the-top hateful people and smugly feel good in knowing that we would never be like them. In many ways, that’s true. I’ll never picket a funeral. I’ll never say that God hates people. I’ll never act in the insane and hate-filled ways that the members of this group do.

But I judge people. I apply my standards of what people should be to others and think that God would judge them more severely than He would me. I sometimes have a mental “sin list” outlining which sins are the really bad ones (the ones other people do) and which sins are those that should be ignored (the “little ones” that I commit, of course). On a small scale, am I less guilty than the members of this cult of trying to speak for God?

As a Christian, I believe that God does condemn sin. I believe that human beings are hopelessly lost without salvation. But it’s not up to me to condemn and judge. It’s up to me to love people and pray that God will show them the error of their ways — just as I daily pray the same for myself. Sadly, for me, that includes not hating and judging the insane people of this cult. The same God who saved me — very flawed and continually broken again — can save people who are as filled with hate as they are.

I can’t find the quote right now, but I once heard talk radio host Ian Punnett say that for many people, God’s voice was just themselves with a deeper voice — and I’ve seen that over and over again in various people, including Fred Phillips, but also in people who are respectable Christians (and pastors) in my own life. We can and will disagree about how God feels about a wide variety of things, including things that are seemingly covered in scripture. And if you’re from another religion or if you’re an atheist, your entire framework for evaluating God or morality or the meaning of life is going to be entirely different from mine.

For now, though, I’m mostly concerned about the witness of myself and my fellow Christians. I believe we know the Truth. We know God — because He has revealed Himself to us in our hearts through scripture and through spirit. But we make a mockery of all of that when we go beyond what He actually says. We put ourselves in grave danger of His judgement when we dare to speak for Him in areas outside of the narrow places where there is complete clarity for us.

I’m confident that God has saved me. I’m confident that God can reveal Himself to anyone He wants to. I’m confident that God can change anyone. But I’m not arrogant enough to speak for Him. It’s a daily struggle to make sure that I don’t judge for Him, even in my own mind and heart.

I’m disgusted that the members of this Kansas cult will be at the Florida funeral of this family, but we as Christians need to look at our own judgmental spirits before we’re really worthy of condemning them without also condemning ourselves.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

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Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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