In sermons delivered in 1957, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke about love and about hate.
He said: “Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Hate destroys one’s sense of values and one’s objectivity. It causes people to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false and the false with the true.”
In another sermon, he concluded: “It is all a descending spiral, ultimately ending in destruction....Somebody must have sense enough and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate....And you do that by love.”
In one of my original songs is this lyric: “I have looked into eyes filled with hatred.”
It was during my years as rabbi of Temple Beth Sholom in Topeka, Kansas that I saw those hate-filled eyes.
In 1991, the the Westboro Baptist Church, a small, mostly family-based church led by the Rev. Fred Phelps, Sr., began its picketing campaign based in their belief that they alone were “God’s elect.” The initial messages on their signs and in fax/fliers they published were directed against the LGBTQ community. It didn’t take long for racism and antisemitism to enter into their hate-filled declarations.
Their daily pickets throughout the city challenged anyone who spoke out against them, reflected in their appearance near my congregation before our weekly Sabbath services. Eventually, they picketed events in distant locations, appearing at funerals of members of the armed services, claiming that those who had died represented a nation mired in what their church considered to be ungodliness.
They attended city council meetings en masse to speak out against anti-discrimination ordinances. I was among those who offered public comment in favor of the proposals at hand.
Over the last few years, two of the Phelps grandchildren have written accounts of their departure from the church and association with the family. Libby Phelps, in Girl on a Wire, and Megan Phelps-Roper, in Unfollow, told their stories about being members of the church and about how they exited a family/church system that came to oppress them.
In an interview by Riley Robinson in The Christian Science Monitor on October 10, 2019, Megan described how her presence on Twitter began to facilitate a change in her soul: “100% of people who came to my page were angry and hostile. But people could tell I was sincere about what I believed [then]. They started asking questions, and that changed the dynamics. Then I started asking them questions and they’d say something about their day or their pets or their children. On Twitter there was time and space to develop that rapport. It enabled me to empathize with the perspectives of other people. That was a huge part of my ability to challenge what I had been taught and then eventually walk away from it.”
She added: “If you can see...people [who harbor hateful views] ... as human beings and capable of change, there is hope. We should be willing to reach out...There’s so much power in seeing the possibility of change.”
Having seen these young women on the picket line, and then reading their personal stories, I was encouraged at their willingness to honestly recount their experiences and what made them change.
It truly gave me hope, and still does, that hatred can give way to connection, and even love. May it ever be so.
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