Religion Sociologist Christine Woodman offers a step-by-step guide for defeating Westboro Baptist Church – and it’s not what you think.
Editor’s note: This post was originally published in August, after the Sikh temple shootings. Because of recent news of the shootings in Newtown Connecticut, we wanted to once again share Ms. Woodman’s advice regarding how best to make Westboro go away – which is, essentially, to ignore them.
As someone who studies the sociology of religion, I have to admit that I am often jealous of those in the “hard sciences” who get to cure diseases and create cars that run on hydrogen. Sciences like chemistry, physics, medicine and psychology are making the world better in very concrete ways. Meanwhile, our work is pretty much theoretical stuff that even policy wonks have a hard time digesting.
Then two days ago as I was slogging through yet more piles of PDF’s filled with charts and data, I heard the horrible news about the shooting at the Sikh temple, and the truly ugly twitter response issued by Westboro Baptist. That is when it hit me: sociology of religion can do something about as important as finding a cure for the common cold. We know what makes religious groups succeed, and more importantly we know what makes them die. That’s right folks, we can help you shut down Westboro Baptist and end all of their truly despicable behavior.
Think of us as infectious disease specialists. We can give a diagnosis, explain how the infection is spread, and recommend a course of treatment that should be highly effective. But ultimately implementing the cure is up to us as a society. If we behave like so many people with strep throat have done and stop taking the treatment as soon as we are feeling better, the infection will return with a vengeance.
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For those of you who just want the prescription so that you can be on your way, I’ll offer that in the next paragraph. But for those of you who want a diagnosis, to understand how the infection spreads, why Westboro is such a dangerous bug and why the treatment is likely to work, I will go into that in the next section.
Here is the prescription: take two pills of apathy and never call them in the morning. We have to stop caring, stop listening, stop following their tweets and stop reacting in any way shape or form when they do horrible things. But this course of treatment must be applied religiously, if you will forgive the expression.
We must insist on a total media blackout. If a news outlet reports on Westboro, we must deluge the outlet with calls, emails and twitters demanding that they never mention Westboro again. We must refrain from blogging, Tweeting or Facebooking and when our friends do it, we must remind them that shunning is a more effective method of social control than armed soldiers.
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We must insist on a total media blackout. If a news outlet reports on Westboro, we must deluge the outlet with calls, emails and twitters demanding that they never mention Westboro again. We must refrain from blogging, Tweeting or Facebooking and when our friends do it, we must remind them that shunning is a more effective method of social control than armed soldiers. The way that we as a society have been responding to Westboro is like pouring Miracle Grow on kudzu. By paying attention to all of their horrible stunts we have been doing everything possible to ensure their success.
President Obama said that we would protect the funerals and graves of soldiers as “sacred ground.” We need to refer to the law not as a measure against Westboro but as a way of honoring fallen soldiers and their loved ones. Westboro will undoubtedly challenge the law in the Supreme Court, but we need not ever mention the church or what it does when discussing the case. We can simply ask if religious free speech should be allowed in every place including the places we hold sacred.
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Now that I have given you my prescription, let me explain why it is necessary, how it will work and why. But before we begin that discussion of the religious marketplace in America, I feel that I should clarify what it means when Westboro calls itself a Baptist church.
To start with, there are no requirements a church must meet to call itself Baptist. Calling your church Baptist is like calling your restaurant a Pizzeria. The food/religion police are not going to come around and shut down your restaurant/church if you are serving Chinese food or teaching what most Baptists would consider heresy. So asking other Baptists to hold Westboro accountable or damning all Baptists based on the actions of Westboro is again, like asking other pizzerias in a town to shut down or swearing off all pizzerias because of the one who did not serve pizza at all.
If you really want to know who is to blame for Westboro Baptists, we have to go back to those pesky framers of the Constitution who gave us all freedom of religion. What that means, in economic language, is that they created a free market for religion. We can think of each religion as a firm, competing for its share of a religious market. Some of the firms, like the Catholic church, are gigantic multi-national firms with franchises in every burg. Then there are mega-firms like Joel Osteeen’s church. They don’t have franchises, but they dominate the market in their local area. For mom-and-pop firms who are not a franchise and are located in an area like Topeka, the religious marketplace is a hard-knock life.
Small firms have three choices: they can stagnate, in which case their pastor had better have a day job and the church can expect to die as its founding members age. They can hire a charismatic pastor. Unfortunately for Westboro, Fred Phelps is about as charismatic as the proverbial old man yelling at kids to get off his lawn. Their third option is to have a very strict religion that creates a great deal of tension with society so that the few members a small firm has will devote themselves almost entirely to the church.
It would make sense that people would be more devoted to religions which are popular, exude compassion and forgiveness and do not have a lot of strict rules for their members. But sociologists Rodney Stark and Roger Finke found the exact opposite to be true. The stricter a church is on its members, the more it condemns outsiders and the more contentious its relationship is with society, the more dedicated its members will be. If Felps chilled out, his church would survive a year, two at the most. Certainly it would not generate enough income to make him a full-time pastor. More importantly, if society simply refuses to be contentious with an extremist religious group it will often simply wither.
The way that the law of supply and demand works in the religious marketplace is that the more controversial and contentious a religion is, the more attractive it is to the followers who are most likely to be devout. The more mainstream and ubiquitous a religion is the less people will be devoted. There are few Anglican extremists for a reason. England has a relatively open religious market, but it also has a state religion. People just stop giving a damn when a religion becomes sanctioned but not mandated.
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What makes Westboro so unusual is that they broke out of the relatively small religious marketplace of Topeka and figured out how to carve a niche for themselves in the national religious market. They did this by committing outrageous acts that would garner media attention. While this has not made them grow in terms of numbers, their little band of forty now works almost exclusively for the church. In essence, they have forty full-time employees.
To put that in perspective, the average mega-church in America has right around 4000 people who regularly attend and 40 full time employees. That is a ratio of 100 for every 1 full-time staff person for mega-churches. Talk about downsizing; Phelps has figured out how to have all of the human resources of a church with thousands of members without having to actually minister to all those people.
They have created such an extremely contentious relationship with society that they have actually set a new ceiling for the religious market in the United States. In other words, they are creating hate-inflation.
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So, why is it important to make sure that Phelps’ little firm goes out of business? It is important because they are setting the ceiling in terms of cost for the religious marketplace. They have created such an extremely contentious relationship with society that they have actually set a new ceiling for the religious market in the United States. In other words, they are creating hate-inflation. For other firms to compete they have to have a relationship with society at least within shooting distance of Westboro. And that is how we end up with pastors trying to burn the Quran for media attention.
Stark and Finke figured out that the religious marketplace follows a bell-curve. On one end are the very conservative and contentious firms and on the other end are the very liberal. Most religious firms will fall in that big middle area. So when we get firms like Westboro who keep moving the ceiling further and further into contention with society, the entire religious marketplace is dragged along behind it. Churches now have to declare that they are being persecuted by the government in order to even remain competitive.
A good first step to bringing down the level of contention between the Christian Right and liberals is to shut down the firm of Westboro Baptist and other similar small firms who are creating this inflation. We do that by cutting off their supply of the one thing they need: conflict with society. We stop feeding the kudzu of religious extremism the Miracle Grow of outrage. Shunning—not fighting—is how we win.
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Editor’s note: Despite the massive availability of photographs of Westboro members and their horrifying hate-filled protest signs, we have made a conscious choice not to reproduce those images, messages or the faces of Westboro’s members in this post.
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Lead image of a church steeple courtesy of Shutterstock
Its like you read my mind! You appear to know
a lot about this, like you wrote the book in it or something.
I think that you could do with some pics to drive the message home a little bit, but instead of that, this is great blog.
A great read. I will certainly be back., http://goo.gl/dVucqo
I see that it’s being reported, Anonymous have taken Westboro’s website off line again. Link
It seems that there has been concern that Westboro may be intending to attend funerals for kids killed in Connecticut. The announcement can be read on this Twitter feed.
They have also been releasing personal info about westboro church members into the wild.
WBC loves to hate SO SO many things and people. They even hate survivors of Childhood Sexual Abuse.
If you confront one of them in their natural setting (or with their teeth in your fist), ask them where in the New Testament it says anything about “man enforcing God’s laws, wishes or even man-made god-laws.”
There is no such passage.
I think this well-intentioned article misses a few key points, some of which other commentators have noticed: 1. “Just ignore them” is impossible. We can’t get everyone on board with that goal, so, no matter what, when WBC shows up, people will stare, scream, honk, and holler. And even if people don’t show a response, they still notice–which is all WBC needs. 2. Church members don’t do this for the attention. These are overwhelming smart, capable people who could, if they wanted, get attention in other ways. (For example, Fred Phelps already had a profile in the KS State Historical… Read more »
Michael. You miss the point. While I’m not against ignoring them, the problem is that ignoring them is meaningless. They can’t be ignored if they show up and make a fuss. Ignoring them in between is meaningless. It’s like pretending skunks don’t exist means one will never take up residence under your back porch. Go ahead. Make your day. The dancing population is a fallback for the Phelps’ crowd. It’s all they can say when they get beat. What you don’t realize is that they’re not a church. They’re a business and they make money by provoking others to attack… Read more »
Went to a military funeral today. The WBs had a permit to demonstrate and the word got out. In addition to the folks in the church–which I didn’t enter–I figure there were about 3500-5000 people along the three mile route from the church to the cemetery. Approximately 600 bikes from the Patriot Guard Riders and other clubs. A cop said the WBs had some hotel rooms in the area, and there was a suspicion one had been checking out the cemetery. But, as he said, it’s possible the human shield–which was how the folks characterized themselves–intimidated them. One biker told… Read more »
ROFLMAO! You figure you had 3,500 people, at least, to oppose . . . what? a dozen? . . . And you think you defeated them? The presence of so may serves only to indicate that the number of decent people in U.S. society is much greater than the proportion of extremist assholes. But that many people showing up also shows how much power WSB has to make the population dance to its tune. Phelps’s daughter said as much the first time there was a counter-protest against them, years ago; and that was before state legislatures started drafting funeral protest… Read more »
Well, well, well. The Weasely Bastards are going to show up about seven miles from here. Well, well, well.
The family have recruited about three thousand locals to act as a human shield to protect the funeral and the family.
See if I can find some time.
Peter. Military families know about the Patriot Guard Riders. They show up at no charge and will handle WB or other issues without making a fuss. They have a web site and are responsive.
Seen them twice in the last fourteen months. Fortunately, no WB guys showed up. I hear the PGR will sit on outraged family members, too, but that’s just a rumor.
“Think of us as infectious disease specialists. We can give a diagnosis, explain how the infection is spread, and recommend a course of treatment that should be highly effective.” Well that’s a pretty horrible view of religion. 🙁 Keep in mind that the Sikhs who’s temple was gunned down also harbour this “infectious disease.” I like the idea of a media blackout on the WBC, but, being realistic, it’s not going to make them go away. They love the attention and the lawsuits but they were doing that stuff for a long time before they rose to international attention and… Read more »
I should have been more clear. Religion is not an infectious disease. Hate is.
It’s an excellent suggestion, and I’m confident that it will enjoy the same success that “ignore the troll” always produces in online forums.
Hey!
That SOMETIMES works. Maybe not as often as we’d like, but it does work when scrupulously followed.
I’m curious how ignoring them will in any way help those already trapped within Westboro. I’m also curious what your suggestion is regarding public acknowledgement of those who do eventually, somehow, manage to escape from that kind of insular, abusive family, like Nate Phelps (if you haven’t heard his story before, I recommend his episode of Living After Faith).
I’m curious how ignoring them will in any way help those already trapped within Westboro.” Westboro have features of both a cult and also a complex and highly dysfunctional Domestic Abuse environment. The fact that they are so fixated around family and t is so hard for none family to join is about control of reality. they thrice on controversy and are Arational – that is not irrational – they actually lack an rational ability to tap into and activate. Irrational means acting without using rational faculties – Arational identifies that such rational faculties are dead, paralysed or have been… Read more »
Fantastic piece.
Hard to imagine just ignoring them when they’re protesting a funeral of someone who died in combat, but I think we do need a massive media blackout on them.
It always amazes me that they can find more than 10 people who would carry signs that say “Thank God for (insert horrific tragedy here)”
Michael. There was some talk on a radio show out of WI this morning glancingly discussing whether our laws and constitution allow for proactive measures against guys like the shooter in WI. The answer is no, and the same goes for involuntary commitment. When shrinks call conservatism a mental illness and somebody writes a book about the republican brain and you connect it to Adorno, you can damn’ well bet nobody with an IQ over twelve is going to let guys like you decide who gets hauled in proactively. You will note, I say parenthetically, that the republicans are for… Read more »
Richard: Your response is a typica right-wing anti-intellectualist screed of lies and misperception. Neither Psychiatrists nor Chris Mooney call conservatism a mental illnes; a point which Mooney stresses in his book. And which I take as an indication that you haven’t read it and couldn’t interpret it properly to save your life. Kindly point out to me where I call for locking up people before they commit crimes. Such actions are called for by right-wing extremists. You know, people like Charles L. Worley of Providence Road Baptist Church in Maiden, N.C., who preached about putting homosexuals into a concentration camp… Read more »
Michael. I could, really, get quotes about conservatism being a mental illness. But it would make absolutely no difference to you. I note you misrepresented what I said. The “church of Phelps” you said includes a lot of nutcases. My point is that they differ in many ways and that means the church of Phelps must be a big tent. IOW, the church of Phelps and the nutcases aren’t connected, Phelps being a pretty small tent. Said nothing about locking anybody up. But you pretended I did. Did you think anybody at all would buy that supposition? Wow. Well, it’s… Read more »
Richard. > I could, really, get quotes about conservatism being a mental illness. And I can get quotes saying the same thing about liberalism. But neither of us will find any about either mindset from any reputable mental health professionals. > The “church of Phelps” you said includes a lot of nutcases. My point is that they differ in > many ways and that means the church of Phelps must be a big tent. Ah. A metaphor. > IOW, the church of Phelps and the nutcases aren’t connected, Phelps being a > pretty small tent. Phelps’s tent is the size… Read more »
The extended church of Phelps includes” . . . anyone with an internet connection and sympathetic prejudices You have an internet connection. So you’re a threat. How about Walter Williams’ essay, “White Girl Bleed A Lot”. Refers to another kind of violence. “Kill Whitey”. Mean anything to you? Nidal Hasan. If I recall correctly, the feds have him talking to Awlaki–the late–and not Phelps. You have more info on that? Feds miss something? Was Phelps a big deal at the time of the Paducah shooting? Columbine? Does Phelps do anything but harass funerals? The Bath school massacre? Without Phelps, you… Read more »
You raise an interesting question about a possible correlation. I am going to be leaving the field of sociological research at the end of my current project and returning to the work of advocacy. But I will be happy to pass it along to others in my field.
A large section in “When the Center Is on Fire” By Diane Harriford and Becky Thompson applies Durkheim’s work on suicide to basically suicidal acts of mass violence in our society. It may be an interesting starting point or tangent, depending on how you approach this question theoretically.
I’d be very interested to see what other information you can find in this area. Thanks for the great article!
> So when we get firms like Westboro who keep moving the ceiling further and further into > contention with society, the entire religious marketplace is dragged along behind it. There has been talk about the mass shootings going on in the U.S. since Columbine, at least. Most recently of course Aurora, and now the Sikh temple in Milwaukee. When the news broke about Aurora, one media critic pointed out that the way the media was covering the story was going to guarantee another mass shooting in a matter of a few weeks. This critic made the point that while… Read more »
Now I’m wondering if Aurora and Milwaukee weren’t perpetrated by congregants of the extended church of Phelps. Might there be a correlation?
YES!
Ms. Woodman. > It would make sense that people would be more devoted to religions which are > popular, exude compassion and forgiveness and do not have a lot of strict rules > for their members. But sociologists Rodney Stark and Roger Finke found the exact > opposite to be true. The stricter a church is on its members, the more it condemns > outsiders and the more contentious its relationship is with society, the more > dedicated its members will be. Doesn’t the above statement describe a condition that occurs in families being abused by a parent, as well;… Read more »
Cults thrive by Manipulating B.I.T.E – Behaviour, Information, Thinking and Emotions – so do parents who abuse children, domestically abusive partners the same. Abusers all too often build Cults around themselves. The observation may be new to you, but not to everyone.
It isn’t just WBC that are trolling society here. There are a host of ‘offence trolls’ who wish to publicize as widely as they can all of the offensive things that WBC do as a means of dismissing Christians/religious people/opponents of SSM/etc. These individuals have a vested interest in giving WBC as large a profile as possible and have a symbiotic relationship with them. We also have to recognize the trolling of such people for what it is. This means that the next time someone on Twitter or Facebook links something that is merely designed to spread outrage against liberals/Republicans/Christians/atheists… Read more »
Or you could call the Patriot Guard Riders. Those guys are good. Seen them at a couple of funerals for relations. Ditto the local folks. The WB might find a county truck parked behind their vehicles at the motel and nobody knows where the keys are. Traffic offense: Plenty of those. Thing is, WB is not a church in the sense of a religious enterprise. They support themselves by provoking assault, and suing. They can be shunned from now ’til doomsday and not change the results when they show up at a funeral. But if their effort is stopped cold–by… Read more »
Richard it is not often that I would ever believe that corporate sabotage and industrial espionage have a place in a good man’s world … and then once in a while you just have to reassess. P^)