Ok, WBC - what’s the deal? Are they a real church? Are they actually Baptist? What exactly are they trying to do?
They picket everybody, including other churches, and generally go out of their way to be the biggest assholes they can be. Under what doctrine are they justifying their behaviour?
I really don’t get the point they’re trying to make - anyone explain it to me?
They’re trying to provoke people and/or local governments into doing something they can sue over. They have no other agenda.
Did they start out as a normal church, and get taken over?
There’s some really interesting information in this link: Addicted to Hate.
Phelps created the church, which consists of mostly his children and grandchildren (and whoever they manage to rope into the cult).
Phelps preaches a theology in which God is not a god of love, but a god of hate. God hates, literally, the earth and everyone on it. For some reason, this pleases Phelps and his followers.
Phelps has been disavowed by the regular Baptist overseeing bodies (I’m not sure what they’re called - conventions?).
For information about the Westboro Baptist Church’s motives, I suggest Lemur866’s posts on this board. [post=13337765]This one[/post] seems to be the most recent, and a good enough explanation.
ETA: The Hamster King here also as an important point. Many of the Phelps children are lawyers, and extremely litigous. It’s one of their main sources of revenue.
Watch Louis Theroux’s show about them. The first part is: - YouTube.
It lays it all out.
They are a real church at least in the sense of having a building. They call themselves an “Old School (or, Primitive) Baptist Church” (quoting from their web page). I recall reading that one or more Baptist church organizations have disavowed any recognition of WBC, but after some quick googling I couldn’t find a cite, so take that with a grain of salt.
