According to Rebecca Barrett-Fox, whose book—God Hates: Westboro Baptist Church, American Nationalism, and the Religious Right (2016)—places the WBC’s message within the broader context of the religious far-right in the United States, this church not only preaches that “God hates the nonelect,” and thus that the “message of salvation should not be offered to the nonelect,”22 but also that God is “punishing America for its tolerance of homosexuality.”23 It is in terms of this extreme system of beliefs that the WBC understands life in America: their vociferous attacks on members of the LGBTQ community—as well as against Jews, Muslims, other Christian denominations, American soldiers, and politicians—stemming from their contemptuous approach to the so-called nonelect. The WBC congregation regularly pickets the funerals of soldiers killed in combat, as well as those of gay men who have died from AIDS, using explicit, colorful protest signs which have in the past included statements such as: “Thank God for Dead Soldiers”; “Fags Doom Nations”; “9–11 Gift from God”; “Your Rabbi is a Whore”; and “God Hates the World.” Such protests and proclamations are a part of the WBC’s daily operations, and Phelps-Roper describes how—at five years old—she “joined” her “family on the picket line for the first time,” with her “tiny fists clutching a sign” that she “couldn’t read yet: ‘Gays are Worthy of Death.’”24 Guided by their fundamentalist religious beliefs, the WBC exhibits a staunchly dogmatic worldview, one which is not only radically intolerant of persons and peoples who fail to conform to their organization’s narrow, prejudicial interpretation of the Bible, but also one that is defined by its rigid “us” versus “them” understanding of societal relations.
This view of the world shapes the entirety of the WBC’s ideological framework, and it informs the sense of inimicality that characterizes this small but vocal community of Americans. Discussing the views of her former church in a 2015 interview, Phelps-Roper stated that the WBC fostered an in-group/out-group mindset, one that serves as the frame through which this organization sees the world:
It [was] so strong—“us” versus “them.” There [was] no middle ground. That was something again that was also drummed into us. You are either a Jacob or an Esau [. . .] they were twins in the scriptures, and God loved Jacob and hated Esau. This was before they were even born, God loved Jacob and hated Esau, and so, you’re either a Jacob or an Esau, and if you are a Jacob, you want nothing to do with the world. The Book of John talks about [how] friendship with the world is enmity with God. “Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world.”25 So, it was very important, this “us”/“them” [. . .] and that definitely solidified this identity.26
A self-proclaimed “Jacob,” the WBC views itself as the community of faith chosen by God to enter into the Kingdom of Heaven, and that all those who do not share their perspective are akin to an “Esau”: the nonelect progenitor of Israel’s early biblical enemy, Edom.27 In her recent book, Unfollow: A Journey from Hatred to Hope, Leaving the Westboro Baptist Church (2019), Phelps-Roper describes her family’s conflictual relationship with the world as “the quarrel of the covenant,” which is to say, the “never-ending struggle of the good guys against the bad,” or the “eternal conflict between the righteous and the wicked.”28 Channeling a thoroughly Schmittian understanding of “the political,” whereby the “specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy,”29 the WBC’s self-identification as a “Jacob” puts them at odds with the other peoples of the world: enemies with whom “friendship” is impossible and the possibilities of cultivating a commonly held, political “middle ground” are limited. Pitted against all who exist beyond the theological confines of their church, then, the members of the WBC bring to life an ideological disdain for the world, as well as the “things” in it, and they embody a distinctly anti-world worldview that alienates them from the people who comprise the broader sociopolitical community within which they live, move, and act.
In this sense, when Phelps-Roper speaks about her life as a “Jacob,” as well as the period during which she went about leaving the WBC and becoming an “Esau,” it is evident that her personal experience of cultivating a renewed relationship with those persons and peoples whom she once treated with contempt required her to overcome an extreme state of alienation from the “world.” Though it is difficult to pinpoint precisely how Phelps-Roper and the members of her former church define their usage of the term “world,” a word which can be interpreted in an assortment of different ways depending on the biblical text and translation used, I focus here specifically on how this expression pertains to “the political,” thereby employing it in notably Arendtian terms as that which corresponds to the “space for politics.” Given the extent to which the Westboro Baptists’ ideology and activism maintain a rigid us/them conceptualization of “the political,” Phelps-Roper’s story of forsaking her family and of starting anew within the community of “Edom,” therefore, offers an example of what it might mean to (re)cultivate the world shared with the (unknown) Other when sociopolitical tensions and political polarization have engendered seemingly intractable states of civic worldlessness. Phelps-Roper’s narrative offers but a single experience of someone who has attempted to renew their relationship with the people of the world and to reconcile herself to those whom she had once worked so hard to rebuke, reject, and remain at odds with as a congregant of the WBC. Her story is nevertheless an intriguing account of how the practices of forgiveness and cosmopolitan hospitality care for the world during times of sociopolitical darkness and when states of worldlessness take shape within civic communities.
While the historical context within which Phelps-Roper lives, moves, and acts differs from that of Arendt’s lifetime, there is, within an Arendtian register of thought, a theory of politics that is fundamentally concerned with the maintenance, reparation, and preservation of “the political” during “dark times.”30 For Arendt, these are those periods of human history when the public realm of human affairs has fallen into a worldless state of intractable sociopolitical alienation, violence, and/or terror. The threat to the world posed in dark times is, as she writes, “the growth of worldlessness, the withering away of everything between [people], [which] can also be described as the spread of the desert.”31 As in early twentieth-century Germany, the danger that exists in deserted spaces of such vast nothingness is “that there are sandstorms in the desert,” which “can whip up a movement of their own.”32 Although the “sandstorms” to which Arendt refers are those of the totalitarian movements she once found herself caught up within, the salience of her observations have broader significance. Equating to a loss of shared experiences had between people, the “growth of worldlessness”—or development of states of “world alienation”33 —is an ever-present hazard whenever and wherever a plurality of people live and act within sociopolitical communities. Throughout her corpus, Arendt underscores that the worldliness of the public, political realm is precarious, ever in need of care, and perpetually under threat precisely because “dark times”—as she writes—“are not only not new, they are no rarity in history.”34 In this sense, when Arendt tells Günter Gaus—during a 1965 interview for German television—that “nobody cares what the world looks like,”35 she is expressing her concern for the public realm of “the political,” which, in her view, has grown “dark” in the modern age.
In emphasizing that there is a perpetual need to care for worldly spaces within which people can speak and act freely together, Arendt’s political theorizing can be interpreted as a call to action that flows from her broader critique of contemporary civil society: that humankind has lost its feeling for, love of, and capacity to act politically within the public realm. That is, Arendt’s pointed remark to Gaus stems from her deep-seated concern for public life and the overall mission of her work, which George Kateb suggests “should be recognized as the recovery of the idea of political action, in a culture which [. . .] has lost the practice of it, and in which almost all philosophy is united, if in nothing else, in denying intrinsic value to it.”36 More specifically, Arendt sought to re-invigorate “the political” in an historical age when worldlessness had permeated
