The Westboro Baptist Church is sounding more and more like the Satanic Temple.
It used to be easier to tell them apart. One was an evil anti-Christian religious group that worshipped the devil while promoting a gospel of hate, and the other one called itself the “Satanic Temple.”
But lately the litigious protesters of Westboro Baptist have gotten so over the top that they’ve come to serve as a parody and rebuttal of their own message — the sort of thing best executed these days by Lucien Greaves and his merry band of nominally “Satanic” pranksters.
Consider, for example, Westboro’s protest earlier this month at the National Weather Service offices in Norman, Oklahoma:
The Westboro Baptist Church appeared at the National Weather Center in Norman on Thursday morning, protesting meteorology, weather science as well as homosexuality.
According to the church’s picket schedule, the theme of the protest was its stance on meteorology and the science of weather in relation to God’s will.
We are winding down the affairs of this earth and in the wrapping up of the affairs of this life there must be some truth. You enjoy the blessings of God when you look at nature, but you refuse to see what is in front of you, or to give God the glory for it! Instead you pawn off His judgments to your great god mother nature. It will not go well for you in the day of judgment when you stand before your God and have no explanation for serving the creature rather than the creator. For that is what you do when you turn to idols. Who sends the earthquakes? Who sends the fires? Who sends the hurricanes? You are powerless to stop any of it, as you are powerless to stop the God who sent them. Wake up! Repent while you can or Perish like those before you. Obey today!
This is kind of brilliant. I wish I’d thought of this.
By striking this pose as the lonely righteous defenders of a biblical stance on meteorology, the folks from Westboro shine a spotlight on just how arbitrarily selective so many of the things commonly described as a “biblical stance” really are.
Many have observed the vast difference between the way white fundamentalists and evangelicals here in America respond to meteorology and the way they respond to biological evolution. Evolution is rejected and denounced as a threat to the “biblical” ideology of young-Earth creationism, but even the most leaden literalists don’t blink an eye when the local weather reporter tells them that a low pressure system in the region could bring rain tomorrow. Meteorologists usually get a pass, with no challenge perceived and no challenge offered back to their understanding of the science of weather — even though that science contradicts numerous unambiguous statements in the Bible attributing the weather to God.
“Praise the Lord from the earth,” Psalm 148 says, “Fire, and hail; snow, and vapours; stormy wind fulfilling his word.”
Job 37:5-6 is more detailed:
God thundereth marvellously with his voice; great things doeth he, which we cannot comprehend. For he saith to the snow, Be thou on the earth; likewise to the small rain, and to the great rain of his strength.
In the following chapter of Job, it is the voice of God which says:
Have you entered the storehouses of the snow,
or have you seen the storehouses of the hail,
which I have reserved for the time of trouble,
for the day of battle and war?
It’s also God speaking in Deuteronomy 11:14 “I will give you the rain of your land in his due season, the first rain and the latter rain.” And it’s Jesus himself talking about God in Matthew 5: “Your Father which is in heaven … sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.”
(Steve Wiggins has written a book about this biblical meteorology: Weathering the Psalms: A Meteorotheological Survey.)
From Genesis to Revelation, this is how the Bible talks about the weather — as something directly controlled and orchestrated by God. Rain and snow were things God kept in reserve until loosing them upon the world. And every day, actively, God was involved in making the sun to rise, the wind to blow, and the rain to fall.
For many centuries, then, this was how Christians thought about the weather. And if you’d asked Christians, back then, why they thought this was how weather worked, they would’ve said it was because of the Bible, because this was a clear, recurring “biblical teaching.” (And most Christians would’ve believed that even though most Christians back then didn’t have Bibles.)
Eventually, though, we humans figured out a lot more about how weather works. We started learning and discovering all the stuff that we now refer to as meteorology. And Christians, almost unanimously, decided that this was how weather works. Subsequently, we started thinking of all those verses above and the dozens of other passages like them differently. We came to read them differently — understanding them in a way that no longer seemed to contradict what we’ve learned about meteorology.
And all of that happened without any controversy or crisis of faith, without any of the high drama like the trials of Galileo or John Scopes, and without meteorological denialism becoming a tribal hallmark for fundamentalist Christians fearful of modern science. No professor is in danger of getting kicked out of Wheaton or Liberty University or even Bob Jones for saying they believe in low pressure systems.
Our imagined “biblical stance” on meteorology changed in exactly the way that, for many American Christians, our “biblical stance” on biology never did. We Christians easily, almost imperceptibly, changed the way we understood all those Bible passages about the weather. But for many American Christians, doing the very same thing with all those Bible passages about the origins of life is portrayed as a grave and dangerous sin.
And the same American Christians who refuse to change their understanding of those creation passages also cling to their imagined “biblical stance” on human sexuality, rejecting everything humanity has learned about that subject just as emphatically as they reject all that we’ve learned about evolution.
Anything having to do with human sexuality — in particular, with the reality, humanity and dignity of LGBT people — has thus become, like evolution, a cultural hallmark that signals either loyalty to or a rejection of the Bible itself.
This is why that bizarre non-sequitur in the report above on the Westboro Baptist protest isn’t actually a non-sequitur at all. The protesters gathered at the National Weather Service to protest meteorology and weather science, it says. And then, “… as well as homosexuality.” It’s all the same thing, really — and not just for the fringe nutters of Westboro Baptist. It’s all the same thing for the vast majority of “mainstream” white evangelical Christians in America. It’s a defense of the Bible and of the way they insist everyone must read the Bible lest it cease to be “authoritative.”
Civil equality for LGBT people must be opposed because of the Bible. The teaching of evolution in schools must be opposed because of the Bible. And the National Weather Service must be opposed because of the Bible.
That last one might seem like a deviation from the prior two, but the logic is exactly the same. Westboro is warning their fellow Christians not to abandon “biblical teaching” on human sexuality the same way that earlier generations recklessly abandoned “biblical teaching” about the weather.
I don’t think the Westboro folks intended this protest to be a kind of performance art designed to highlight the cognitive dissonance of their fellow Christians. But if that had been their intent, I don’t think they’d have had to change any of what they did.
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