At Home With Fred Phelps

[img_assist|nid=2698|title=|desc=|link=none|align=right|width=240|height=323]BBC News has an interesting interview with writer/reporter, Louis Theroux. Theroux spent three weeks with the Rev. Fred Phelps who runs the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka Kansas and organizes those incredibly vile pickets you often see at large LGBT events. The ones with signs reading "GOD HATES FAGS" or "AIDS is GOD's PUNISHMENT."

I've always been curious what sort of perverted minds would consider it their life mission to spew such ugly vitriol. The BBC interview with Theroux shines some light on the subject and so for me was worth reading.

Some basic facts about Phelps: He's the head of Westboro Baptist Church and the church's 71 members are mostly Phelps' extended family. (They all call him "Gramps"). Phelps has 13 children. Four of these kids "fell away", meaning they left the Church. Once anyone leaves they become ostracized by the rest of the family.

The BBC asked Theroux why he was motivated to spend three weeks with Fred Phelps and his family.

"What we're trying to do in this documentary is look at an activity that is so antisocial, so strange, so futile and at its worst, so cruel, and we're saying 'Why? Why do that?', especially when you seem to be, for the most part, kind and sensitive people. We're exploring what is cruelty, trying to explain how something that really does very often just amount to cruelty could be perpetuated and passed down in a family. Why would nice people do such horrible things?"

Theroux thinks he found an answer...

"I think that the pastor is not a very nice person. I think he's an angry person who's twisted the Bible and picked and chosen verses that support his anger, that sort of justify his anger, and he's instilled that in his children and they've passed it on to their children. Although the second and third generation are by and large quite nice people from what I saw, they still live under the influence of their Gramps.

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"It shows you what strange avenues the religious impulse can take you down. I think another part of the answer is that parts of the Christian Bible are pretty weird. There's a lot of weird stuff in there and when you take that and you add this angry, domineering kind of a father figure, which is Gramps, and you add that he has sort of separated them off from other people, other families and driven them to achieve a lot, and he was kind of a charismatic guy, and still is up to a point. He was a very verbal, very persuasive, an extremely compelling speaker. All these things added together combined to make a powerful influence."

Theroux's documentary, The Most Hated Family in America, airs in the UK on Sunday on BBC Two. No word yet on when or if it will be shown in the US.