The Westboro Baptist Church is a dangerous and frightening organization. It is a church, yes, but it is also a hate group of terrifying vitriol and venom. The founder of the Church, Fred Phelps, is a disbarred attorney, and is also banned from ever entering the United Kingdom. He has helped his Church to implement some of the most horrible hate slogans imaginable, including such phrases as “God Hates F**s”, “Thank God for Dead Soldiers”, “America is Doomed” and “Priests Rape Boys”. The Church’s signs are offensive and garish, and the Church has often staged pickets of funerals for homosexual victims of hate crimes. The Westboro Baptist Church is almost like something out of a nightmare.
There has been ample resistance to the Church in the past, from any number of gay or equal rights groups, and even from some Jewish groups and some Christian groups. After all, the Church does say that all non-Christian religions are going to hell, right alongside all non-Protestant Christian churches, and all Protestant churches that do not oppose homosexuality with as much fervor as is evidenced by the Westboro Baptist Church.
Opposition to the Church will take a new form soon, however, thanks to the efforts of one Kevin Smith. Smith, a well-known director and writer responsible for such movies as Clerks, Mallrats, and Dogma, penned a script in 2007 for a film called Red State, which was supposed to be a horror movie inspired by the Westboro Baptist Church and its offensive practices. Just recently, the film was given the green light.
Smith has admitted that the movie about the Church is not a traditional kind of horror movie, with a monster or a killer stalking victims and murdering. Instead, the horror he is intending to invoke is of a much more creeping, seeping kind. It is the horror of seeing a madman in a position of power, and seeing him turn minds to his cause. Even beyond that, it is the horror of seeing that the culture in which we live supports the kind of monstrosity that the Church embodies.
Red State’s style of horror seems particularly suited to attacking the nightmare that is the Westboro Baptist Church, and if nothing else, making its existence more evident to the public. The Westboro Baptist Church is protected by the right to free speech, but this does not mean that it should be allowed to send its voice into America without any opposition. Red State will hopefully present to the American public the horror of the Church and it’s practices, and will increase overall awareness of the Church’s despicable actions. With any luck, after Red State has arrived in theatres, the Westboro Baptist Church will find itself opposed by a unified front of disgusted activists, capable of presenting the kind of countermovement that is so often necessary in removing a corruptive influence like the Church. Those of other Christian churches will likely find themselves as offended as Jewish people, as Muslims, as atheists, as any who see the movie and realize that manipulative, hateful darkness like that of the Church does exist, and needs to be combated.