Will the Real Baptists Please Stand Up?

Hate: if you don’t mind the bad press, it’s a great way to get noticed. And for the Westboro Baptist Church, it’s a godsend.

Notorious for sniffing out public tragedy and exploiting it in the name of a God so vindictive he makes the Old Testament look like a Disney movie, Westboro members feed on the sadness of human beings. They fuel themselves with our tears. Led by megalomaniac Fred Phelps, the WBC travels the country to picket the deaths of soldiers and gay youths, pinning all of America’s misfortunes on homosexuals, Catholics, Jews, the internet, breakfast, sandals-with-socks, and anyone spewing the lies of compassion and reason. Earthquake? Blame the Jews. IEDs in Afghanistan? There must be too many gay people. Hurricane Armageddon? Yep, gay Jews.

Not surprisingly, like a seesaw of insanity, the more repulsive their antics are the higher the media attention soars. Cameras capture every smirking 10 year-old in a “GodHatesFags.com” t-shirt, and the church’s own bloated perception of itself and its mission grows in proportion to its international infamy. And as this attention grows, so does the church’s name. From there the associations start to come all too easy: Westboro. Baptist. Church. Bigotry. Hate. Evil.

While this is great for the WBC and its quest to become the most despised group in America, not everyone shares their lobotomized spirituality. Baptists, like the members of most denominations, vary widely on what they believe, let alone what they scream out to news cameras during public protests. There is no hierarchical authority in Baptism, so there is no concrete system of beliefs. But aside from the most basics tenets of Baptist faith, there is one thing all Baptist churches (even the folks at Westboro) have in common: their name.

Which leads me to one simple question …

WHERE ARE ALL THE REAL BAPTISTS? Where are all the regular, level-headed Baptists furious that the WBC has hijacked their name? The WBC has less than 100 members, while 50 million people in the U.S. identify themselves as Baptist. I somehow doubt that all those 50 million people agree with the WBC that President Obama is the Antichrist, Santa Claus is Satan, and that the late Elizabeth Edwards is now burning in hell “due to her blasphemous, baby-killing, fag-marriage-supporting sins.”

It’s incomprehensible that a religion — an institution organized to express belief in a higher power, to bring solace to the lonely, hope to those in despair and faith to those lost in meaninglessness — can stand to share the same name as a group that thrives on expressing the exact opposite.

But that’s a fact of equivocation. Taken from a purely non-sectarian branding perspective, when two wholly different things are called the same thing, it’s only natural for them to be confused with each other. So you would think with the Christian emphasis on proselytizing and conversion and all, someone would be trying hard to convince me not all Baptists are venomous, hateful Doomsdayers. Americans are not known for being all that knowledgeable about other religions, so it’s not too hard to imagine people seeing the word Baptist and assuming it means, well, Baptist.

(While the WBC is not recognized by any major Baptist association, the only official denunciation of the church by other Baptists I could find is buried in aPDF that’s short enough to fit in a couple of tweets.)

Of course, there’s no trademarking the words Baptist, Christian, Muslim or whatever else people want to call themselves, so there will always be extremists who use a religion’s banner to spread a doctrine of intolerance. Right now though, hate is speaking louder than hope. And unless Baptists want the WBC’s antics to drown out their presence in the spiritual world, they should speak up.