The Acme of Christian Witness

In Search of a New Poster-Child

The Westboro Baptist Church has become villainous in the mind's eye of many, if not most.  Here, apparently, must be a serious threat to the realm.  Westboro is a modern day megachurch albeit with the grand total of 40 members.  Yes, you read that right.  Forty members--most of which are related to one man, its recently deceased founder, Fred Phelps  It is what we Christians refer to as congregation standing firmly on the lunatic fringe.  

But for some reason it is front and centre--a major concern--for the chattering classes, the Commentariat and the media. Just Google Westboro to gain some appreciation of its notoriety.  It's claim to ignominy is its public protests against homosexuals and homosexuality and any other public issue that can be remotely connected to homosexual promotion, even when drawn by a very, very long bow.  What an impact forty misguided febrile people have had. 

It is true that the Christian Church has always had its wacky outliers.
  Things like that happen in a fallen world.  After all, right from the very beginning there was a chap called Cain who sought to go into the presence of God with an offering and act of worship which God rejected and for which He had no regard.  This so incensed the hate filled heart of Cain that he murdered his brother out of spite, envy, and hatred.  We think of Simon Magus who sought to buy the power and presence of the Holy Spirit, forever after memorialised in the neologism, simony.  Time does not permit recounting the exploits of legions of charlatans, pretenders, hucksters of relics, snake handlers, leg-lengtheners, and other curiosities--suffice it to say that the Church has always had wacky outliers.  The Westboro Baptist Church is just one such. 

Yet the fascination and hunger for what this group is up to implies that it represents the heart and soul of the Christian faith.  Which leads to an hypothesis that its notoriety is actually a creation of the Commentariat and the media.  Westboro is notorious, but its scandalous brand has been forged and nurtured by the media in some pathetic attempt to slur Christians and to impute guilt by association to the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ. 

Which is to allege that the media and the Commentariat need Westboro for their narrative about Christians and the Christian faith.  The way the Commentariat would have us all understand Westboro is that it represents the vanguard of the Church and of Christians.  They are proclaiming what all Christians really believe and practice in their closets--hatred for mankind.  The ancient Roman interdictions against Christian were right on the money: these misanthropes have always been haters of the human race.  Thus, Westboro congregants have been made the poster boys for Christendom.  All forty of them.  The rest of the Christians skulk in their closets, but we, the cognoscenti, the erudite, and the media talking heads, we see them as they really are.  And Westboro is the peep hole into their dirty, hate-filled, dark, back room closets. 

How else can one understand the prurient fascination and lionising (in a negative sense) of these descendants of Cain?   Like Falstaff, they are useful to make a point. 

But now the founder has died, the group appears to be on the verge of splintering apart.  What then?  To whom will the media turn to portray the pop conception of Christianity?  They risk needing a new poster-child.  To whom and to what will they turn?  End timers?  Snake handlers?  No doubt they will find someone who would do the job creditably.