I’ll never be a tenth the expert on cults that my late wife was, but you can’t be married to someone for almost 20 years without learning something about their passions. I could almost taste a cult at Dove World Outreach Center, where they plan to burn Korans.  I began looking to see if there was evidence to support my gut feeling. What I never expected to find was a link to the Westboro Baptist Church, Fred Phelps’ cult masquerading as a church. The people of GodHatesFags.com that protest at military funerals around the country.

Religions tend to look alike to outsiders. This makes it far too easy to conflate Islamists with fundamentalist Muslims, and both of those with Muslims who live in the modern age as modern people and don’t try to blow us up or shoot us, and don’t mutilate their daughters’ genitals or murder them for smiling at a boy. In our still fresh pain we forget, and judge all by the actions of a certain subset. But while we’re forgetting those differences we can also forget that Christianity can look silly from the outside, and that differences that are vital to us can’t even be seen from where outsiders sit. The actions of a few can be attributed to many. That the few aren’t even Christians as we understand it makes no difference, especially to those looking for a reason to mock us.

This leads us to the Dove World Outreach Center, the church that is planning to burn Korans on 9/11. From the beginning something felt wrong. Burning any book, holy or not, strikes me as a Bad Thing, and burning someone’s holy book is no more an act of bridge building than building a large not-a-mosque-that-is-not-at-ground-zero. Then there’s the church itself. 50 members on 20 acres that are worth more than a million and a half dollars, a charismatic church not affiliated with any denomination, and a pastor who takes no prisoners. If someone were writing about such a church in a vacuum the 20 acres, church building, ministry for women, and outbuildings would be called a “compound.” But if you have a political agenda and are willing to smear conservative Christians to further that agenda then such hints of a cult can be ignored.

Dove World Outreach Center and Westboro Baptist Church protesters together.

Cults tend to be very upfront about the bulk of their beliefs. There are some special bits of knowledge that you will only gain on the inside, and some of those insider tidbits can be nasty indeed, but mostly they’ll gladly tell you what they believe, and why you should believe it. Once that meant selling cassettes and getting newsletter subscriptions if you were a small operation. These days it means a web site, Facebook, your own You Tube channel, and podcasts for both your sermons and something called “The Braveheart Show.” You even have your own Blog, and that’s where I found the smoking gun:

On Sunday April 18, Westboro Baptist Church came to Gainesville. One of their stops was a liberal “Open doors, open hearts, open minds,” church near us, so we took part of our Sunday Service time and went as a church to stand with them.

The full blog post pulled up last night, but seems hard to get to today, possibly because of blog traffic. The Google cache is here. Is the opening paragraph out of context? You judge:

We have also learned that when you speak out about what God hates, you will be hated. We do not agree with all of Westboro’s methods, but we admire their determination to find radical ways to preach the truth of the Bible, as we do. Most churches and Pastors in America try to stand on neutral ground. They are lost, weak and sick and need to repent.

Dove World’s Facebook page had this to say about the joint protest:

Today was a historical day! People who did not know each other with nothing in common but the word of God marching in unity and putting the kingdom first, ahead of everything else! What can be more important than saving people from hell? We must stand on the truth, the word of God instead on finding reasons why we cannot be in unity! Yes we can! We can obey God and save people from going to hell!

They also posted 104 pictures of the joint Dove World Outreach Center/Westboro Baptist Church rally.

The Independent Florida Alligator, a student-owned paper at the University of Florida, listed the itinerary for the Westboro/Dove protest:

Westboro Baptist Church began its Gainesville tour at the Trinity United Methodist Church, followed by a stop at the UF Hillel. They then went across town to Queen of Peace Catholic Church before rounding out the day at St. Augustine Catholic Church.

Phelps-Roper, whose father, Fred, is the pastor of Westboro Baptist Church, said the city is made up of rebels against God who are sprinting toward destruction.

Methodists, Jews, and Catholics. I guess since Westboro only had one day they left the Muslims for the locals from the Dove Center. After all, their pastor wrote the book on the subject.

Related posts: (automatically generated)

1. Will Muslims Permit Jews to Pray in the Dome of the Rock?
2. The Internet Remembers Everything