When Hate Met Its Match

How the Westboro Baptist Church Got Peacefully Torched

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

It’s Easter Sunday. Twenty years ago almost to the day, a cadre of true believers from the notorious Westboro Baptist Church visited New Paltz NY, uninvited. Their visit is worth remembering, either as a harbinger of dire things to come, or as a communal act of resistence.

They stood on opposite sides of Main Street, distanced by four narrow lanes and a million miles.

On one side, nine strangers, related by blood, marriage and impermeable belief, shouted unholy accusations to people who stood in a cold, misty rain across the street from the New Paltz (NY) United Methodist Church.

“God hates fags!”

“God hates America!”

“You’re degenerate filth!”

The Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kan. had just begun the first of eight hate-fueled protests in what they see as godless New Paltz.

Across Main Street, scores of locals, friends, acquaintances, strangers and news people stood in quiet astonishment as the sons and daughters and grandchildren of Pastor Fred Phelps sang their songs of hatred and spoke their words of apocalyptic prophecy.

The stunned silence from that side of the street didn’t last long. As Shirley Phelps-Roper began singing “God Hates America,” the crowd picked up the tune and the cue, returning lyric fire by singing the original lyrics of “God Bless America.” It was a pattern that held throughout the morning-long protests.

The battle had been joined. The Internet war of words that had begun in the wake of Mayor Jason West’s solemnizing 25 gay marriages in February had come to a place the protesters called Sodom and the counter-protesters called home. The protesters’ numbers never changed; the counter-protesters’ ranks surged into the hundreds as they followed the protesters throughout the morning.

It was a battle whose contours were sharp and clean and unchallenged by either side: on one side stood a wrathful God who was said to hate the sinner as well as the sin; on the other side stood a forgiving God, a God of love.

Yesterday was Palm Sunday, a joyous day commemorating Christ’s entry into Jerusalem. Yesterday, in the churches of New Paltz, that message of joy took a profound beating at the hands of protesters whose fury was delivered on the heads of young and old alike.

In the end, both sides claimed victory, one side more convincingly than the other.

Shirley Phelps-Roper is one of Fred Phelps’ 13 children. She’d brought along her daughter, Grace, 11, and 5-year-old son, Noah. It was Noah’s first out-of-state protest, something his mother has been doing for 14 years.

The group was not out to win converts, she said. The minuscule size of their Kansas congregation (about a hundred, 10 members fewer than the number of police on standby for yesterday’s protest) reflected nothing. They were in town not merely to protest but to prophesy, in the bald and belligerent language of Old Testament prophets.

Their God is an angry God, the God who, they believe, struck down the World Trade Center as a warning of things to come. One of their placards read “Thank God for 9/11”

“Hey Mom, that man over there is wearing a dress,” said Noah of a man across the street was wearing what appeared to be a kilt. Another man was “scary” and “looked ugly” because he was wearing lipstick, the boy said.

“Sometimes little people can tell the truth so clearly,” Noah’s mom told a reporter.

A chorus of “A Mighty Fortress is Our God” had begun to swell from the church. Phelps-Roper shook her head in disgust.

“They don’t have a clue. Their God has the power of a peanut.”

After about 20 minutes, the protesters were off to another church, and then to Village Hall, where one of the targets of their anger tried to find common ground.

Nyack Mayor John Shields is suing in court for the right to marry his gay partner. He took special pains to speak with Phelps-Roper outside Village Hall, where the first solemnizations had been performed.

“I always look for places of agreement,” he said.

Afterward, he felt he’d found four of those places: respect for the First Amendment, the need for equal rights, opposition to President George Bush and the right to peaceful demonstrations.

Phelps-Roper summarized their conversation differently: “I believe in serving God and you believe in serving yourself.”

That was all right, Shields later said. “She’s entitled to speak what she thinks.”

Later still, Shields said it wasn’t what she said that upset him most but the contempt with which she handled an American flag, which she dragged on the ground and occasionally stood on.

George Trigg, a white-bearded member of St. Andrews Episcopal Church, noticed the group’s treatment of the flag too as he entered the church. He politely asked the protesters to “get the flag off the ground.” Charles Hockenbarger refused, calling the flag a “filthy thing.” If Trigg was disturbed by the ferocity of the reply he received, he didn’t show it, choosing instead to nod and without further comment make his way into the church.

The protest was winding down in front of Gilded Otter Brewing Co., which had named two local brews in honor of the mayor’s gay-marriage ceremonies.

“Apparently God hates beer,” quipped onlooker Steve Masson.

It had been a productive morning, said Margie Phelps.

“It was a good dialogue,” she said. “Anytime important issues are raised, it’s a good idea.”

A little while later, New Paltz resident Jeff Salt stood outside St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church, the last stop on the protesters’ itinerary, and tried to summarize the morning’s events.

The community had met the voice of hate with “one voice of goodness and love,” he said. There was a new sense of unity and tolerance in the air, he said.

At 12:30 p.m., one of the protesters declared, “This was your lucky day,” and without further explanation, left the church grounds with the rest of her clan. The crowd applauded their departure.

But anyone who witnessed what had happened beforehand outside the Reformed Church of New Paltz knew the protests had been effectively over for more than two hours.

It was here that the battle was won.

The protesters began by shouting a litany of profane slogans whose outrageousness had already been destroyed by their numbing familiarity.

No sooner had he been denounced as an agent of Satan than the Rev. Howard Major left the church stairs and walked across Huguenot Street to the church’s Sunday School. Within minutes, children ranging in age from kindergarten to high school followed their pastor back across the street and into the stately church. They were carrying palm fronds; some had been fashioned into the shape of the cross.

“Dead weeds!” protester Charles Hockenbarger screamed at the children, describing the palm fronds.

“Hosanna,” sang the children, who paid their strange visitors no attention. They walked briskly through the cold rain and the heat of the protesters’ words, their eyes downcast or pinned to the back of the person in front of them.

“Jesus is coming,” they sang. One of their number pulled a homemade wooden donkey on wheels, a reminder of the simple beast Christ chose to enter Jerusalem on that day.

The children race-walked across the oldest street in America, the oldest street in a town that had been founded centuries ago by settlers fleeing religious intolerance.

The children moved quickly into what one of the protesters had just called “an unclean whorehouse.”

Some in the crowd cheered the children as they passed before them, dressed in their Sunday best. Some of the children hid smiles behind clasped hands.

“Hosanna in the highest!” sang the children.

It was a song for which the visitors had no answer.