Preaching A Gospel Of Hate

Fred Phelps, Pastor of the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kan., is the subject of "Fall From Grace," which airs on Showtime tonight. I don't know if you will enjoy watching this 70-minute documentary, but I'm pretty sure Mr. Phelps will. He is a man with an unquenchable desire for attention, and he gets his fill of it here. The fact that the attention is entirely disparaging is unlikely to bother him one bit.

"Fall From Grace" was directed by 23-year-old K. Ryan Jones, who began making the film while a student at the University of Kansas, outside of which Mr. Phelps and his tiny but energetic band of followers regularly stage demonstrations on the one subject in the universe which interests them — the evils of homosexuality, which they hold accountable for every ill in the world. Holding aloft brightly colored placards, the Phelps brigade claims to have picketed more than 22,000 events in the last 15 years, including, most notoriously, the funerals of American soldiers killed in Iraq. (One family of a fallen soldier recently received close to $11 million in damages.) The demonstrators look like ordinary middle-class Americans, but the message they bear is one of pure, single-minded hatred. The slogans on the placards include such phrases as "God Hates Fags," "Thank God for IEDs," "Thank God for Dead Soldiers," and "Thank God for 9/11" — suggesting that America is being punished for its tolerance of homosexuality.

Like Alexandra Pelosi's recent foray into mainstream Christian fundamentalism, the HBO documentary "Friends of God," Mr. Jones's film begins with images of blue skies, roadside crosses, and religious billboards ("One Nation Under Me — God"). On the soundtrack, we also hear female voices singing a piano-driven hymn: "Come now, God of all / Hear us when we call / Help us one and all…."

Before long we are in the presence of Mr. Phelps himself, a rail-thin man in his 70s hunched in an office wearing a garish red tracksuit top. He has sparse hair, milky eyes, and bunion-sized cheekbones in a gaunt face that is more skull than skin, as if its owner secretly longed for the grave. Arguing that it is the preacher's job to denounce homosexuality, Mr. Phelps recites that old standby, Leviticus: "Thou shalt not lie with mankind as with womankind; it is an abomination." If America would only heed these words, he claims, the nation would be "fixed." He does not appear to advocate violence, merely to welcome misfortune — whether in the form of devastating hurricanes or dead soldiers — as satisfying examples of God's wrath over the homosexual "takeover" of America.

The extent of Mr. Phelps's misanthropy is extraordinary ("I'm thankful for all [Americans] who get killed in Iraq," he says. "I just wish it would not just be 2,000, but 2 million"), and it is shared by most of his 13 children, as well as his numerous young grandchildren. In an extraordinary scene, some of the children spout his message while frolicking in the sunshine by a huge outdoor swimming pool. "We need to preach to them fags that the Lord is going to kill them," offers one boy, obviously too young to have any idea what he's talking about. Another child explains why it's such a pleasure to join in the Westboro church's anti-gay demonstrations: "It's serving the Lord, that's what's fun about it. And plus, you get to preach out on the streets." A girl on a swing is asked if there's a placard she particularly likes holding during the demonstrations. "Yeah," she answers. "God Hates Fags."

Mr. Jones also interviews many of Mr. Phelps's middle-aged offspring, most of whom are as chillingly committed to the cause as he is. Indeed, one adult son, Timothy, warns that when his father dies, the Westboro Baptist Church will amp up its rhetoric to a degree his father couldn't dream of. Four of Mr. Phelps's children have fled the madness, however, and two agreed to be interviewed over the phone. "I despise my father," says Nate, a renegade son who claims to have been beaten and abused growing up. A daughter, Dartha, says, "I don't judge him, because he's sick. He's a victim of his dark ego, his carnal mind."

Mr. Phelps certainly appears to be deeply sick, and listening as he nurtures his animus with fluent verbal tirades in his office is a bit like watching a documentary from an alternate universe about an obscure and wicked little man named Adolf Hitler who hates Jews with a passion but has virtually no followers. As one critic says, "Fred Phelps is indeed a minister, but the only people who go to his church are his immediate family."

In that sense, "Fall From Grace" is overblown. Mr. Jones tries to broaden the film's scope, hinting at a complicity among born-again Christians by showcasing two anti-gay quotes echoing Mr. Phelps's words from the Reverend Jerry Falwell and the Reverend Pat Robertson, but really it's a bit of a stretch. Mr. Phelps is not a harbinger of anti-gay pogroms. At one point in the film, Fox News's Sean Hannity says to a follower of Mr. Phelps, "You are as nutty and mean and cruel as anyone I've ever had on this program," while Fox's Julie Banderas practically goes ballistic with rage during another interview.

To flesh out his film, Mr. Jones milks a long and increasingly maudlin interview out of Kelly Frantz, the widow of a soldier whose funeral was picketed, and obsessively photographs clusters of the anti-gay placards, sometimes against an arty black background, as if they were poisonous flowers or designer lollipops laced with cyanide. After a while, it almost feels as if he is subconsciously underscoring Mr. Phelps's message. "GodHatesAmerica.com" reads the banner slung over the side of the Westboro Baptist Church, and it's not hard to discern that Mr. Jones dislikes large chunks of it himself.

Opponents of Mr. Phelps are interviewed at length, from Topeka attorney Pedro Irigonegaray, who knew the pastor when he was a lawyer (he was disbarred in 1979), to Topeka's mayor, Bill Bunen, and the Biblical scholar Warren Carter, who argues that the homosexuality condemned in the Hebrew Bible is what we would today think of as pederasty rather than a consensual homosexual relationship. For that reason, Mr. Carter reasons, Mr. Phelps's beloved Leviticus no longer applies.

President Bush recently signed into law a decree banning the Phelps family and their ilk from coming within 500 yards of a military funeral. Why he didn't make it 5 miles, I don't know. If he had, a good part of the problem they cause would have been solved. As it is, it's left to army veterans on Harley Davidsons — it's one of the best scenes in the film — to drown out the protestors' anti-gay and anti-American chants by gunning their bikes to a deafening roar and spewing exhaust into their faces. Occasionally, pollution does have its uses.

bbernhard@earthlink. net