Though I'd Rather Not Mention It
Jim Hickman
A few weeks ago my wife was having lunch with a Jewish friend. As the friend was sitting down, she said, “Have you read that the Westboro Baptist Church is going to demonstrate at a school in Hilliard?” My wife said she had heard about it on the radio that morning. Her friend then added, “As soon as I heard, I thought every Baptist church is going to be lumped together with these people.”
I’d like to think this woman is not alone in recognizing that not all Baptists are the same. Just in case, though, I’d like to visit the issue for non-Baptists and offer some questions to some fellow Baptists.
You don’t have to be a church historian or a linguist, for that matter, to see how “Baptist” is related to “baptism.” When the Baptists first appeared—think early seventeenth century—most Christians practiced infant baptism. The Baptists, as critics dubbed them, insisted the only proper (i.e. Biblical) subjects of baptism were those who had made a conscious decision to place their faith in Christ. Baptists call this “believers’ baptism.” Baptists, of course, aren’t the only group that practices believers’ baptism but we had first-dibs on the nickname.
While the Westboro Baptist Church would practice believers’ baptism, it is another characteristic of Baptist churches that is more instructive for understanding the Kansas congregation. Baptist churches are passionately independent, unreservedly autonomous. Most would argue that no authority outside the congregation can define or delimit their beliefs and practices.
Baptist churches don’t so much belong to a denomination as they cooperate with other churches “of like faith and order,” as they often say. Usually, the cooperation is amiable and considered to be essential to doing effective practical ministry in the world. For example, the Southern Baptist Convention was formed, in part, because its founders believed the work of missions could be better accomplished if churches cooperated, sharing resources, both financial and human.
Most Baptist churches possess such a cooperative attitude and are associated with some kind of organization or denomination. In or near Worthington there are four Baptist churches: one is part of the Southern Baptist Convention, another is associated with the American Baptist Churches, another is part of the General Association of Regular Baptists, and the fourth is what is called an independent Baptist church. Independent churches are among the churches that hesitate to link themselves too closely to any other church—since they cannot know what aberrant teaching or practice that church may sanction. I suspect the Westboro Baptist Church is such a church, a church that prefers to stand alone, not part of any denomination or confederation. Obviously protected from civil authorities by the First Amendment, the Westboro Baptists can also protest at funerals, malign homosexuals, and put words in God’s mouth with no fear of any ecclesiastical authority rescinding their privilege to call themselves Baptist.
Thus, the fact that the Westboro Baptist Church is a “Baptist” church does not mean it is representative of all Baptist churches. We Baptists have known this all along. Now you do.
Having made this point, I’d like to raise some questions I, as a Baptist, have about the behavior of the Westboro Baptists.
We Baptists like to believe our churches were born of the desire to recapture the Biblical way of doing church. Our forebears searched the Scripture and concluded the baptism of believers by immersion was the appropriate way to initiate a new Christian into the church. (Other Christian groups are equally convinced they are following Biblical patterns but that’s for the church historians to debate.) My point is, Baptists generally set great store on attempting to follow the Bible in what they do as churches.
With this in mind, I have some questions I’d like to ask the Westboro Baptists. If you, like most Baptists, seek to follow the New Testament church:
-Why do you focus so exclusively on homosexual behavior when the Bible never condemns homosexual behavior in isolation from other examples of human fallenness? Or, have I missed your protests at schools harboring those who are gossips, envious, liars, or hypocrites? Have you never noticed that all of these are condemned in Paul’s famous essay on sin in his Letter to the Romans?
-Why do you treat with such disdain those for whom Christ died? Does your behavior ever inspire Christ’s enemies to label you, much as they labeled him, “friends of sinners?”
-Why does your church engage in behavior nowhere found in the New Testament? Don’t you remember Jesus eating with sinners, rather than alienating them? Can you picture Paul using lurid slogans and harsh catchphrases rather than reasoned arguments when presenting the cause of Christ?
-Why does your church disrespect soldiers when the Bible tells us that the state (and its military) does God’s work in the world by keeping order and assuring justice? How often do you recall those soldiers whose funerals you disrupt died to preserve your freedom to disrupt their funerals?
-Why, for that matter, does your church disrupt funerals when Christians are commanded to “mourn with those who mourn?” Have you noticed that when Jesus attended a funeral he brought hope and life, but you only bring judgment and despair?
If you can’t answer these questions without a lot of verbal gymnastics, maybe it’s time you ask yourself if Jesus would carry that sign of yours. I wonder, do you remember this story?
Jesus and his disciples visited a village that refused to hear him. James and John asked, “Master, do you want us to call a bolt of lightning down out of the sky and incinerate them?”
Jesus met James and John’s proposal with a rebuke. One ancient writer pictured Jesus adding something like, “You are completely clueless about the kind of people you’re supposed to be. You’ve lost sight of what I’m about and, consequently, you’ve lost sight of what you’re supposed to be about.”
Now, let me offer a final word to the rest of you. Whenever I hear of the Westboro Baptist Church I wonder if there might be some way the folks at my church could copyright the name “Baptist,” so we could decide who could use it. No, that’s a lie. I want to copyright it so I can decide who can use it. That’s not going to happen but at least you can remember not all Baptists are the same.
