Country:
USA
Recognizable Faces:
Fred Phelps
Directed By:
K. Ryan Jones
You might have never heard of the Westboro Baptist Church, but I'm sure that you have ran into a "God Hates Fags" signs one time or another. Then you know who they are. You just didn't know what they were called. They are a subject of constant fascination to me and (I dare to think) one of the biggest problem of free speech in America right now. The almighty Gods of Netflix were kind enough to suggest Fall From Grace this week, a documentary I could've easily overlook otherwise, because it's labeled as a Christian/religious film. It's not exactly the case. The Westboro Baptist Church has been officially declared a hate group after their joyfully celebrated the death of Matthew Sheppard in 1998, for the sole reason that he was homosexual (they also have a counter on their website, of how many days Sheppard has spent in hell). K. Ryan Jones does a great job at shedding some light on this mysterious and provocative group that doesn't have much to do with religion.
What you have to understand about the Westboro Baptist Church is that they're not a movement. They are the Phelps family (mainly, I'm unaware of any followers outside the immediate relatives). They are the creation of patriarch Fred Phelps, a very deranged man with an idea that homosexuality is an abomination. Here is the bulk of the man's teachings about Christianity, at least the way K. Ryan Jones presented it. He even interviewed the kids, who couldn't say much more about their branch of Christianity than "God Hates Fags". The Church make sure to enforce this ideology (and their right to free speech) wherever they go to picket and enjoy the demise of everybody that doesn't share their views. To them, the world is a decadent place, prey to the wrath of God for normalizing and accepting homosexuality. And everything is linked to that. They protest military burials, a Salman Rushdie reading and thunder out loud that tolerance and acceptation are an abomination. For a thick book like the Bible, they sure cut a lot of passages about being cool to people and accepting them how they are.
There were two very enlightening scenes to the film. First, the Phelps family justifying their celebration of IED s and American soldiers deaths in Iraq by referring to a pipe bomb attack that happened in their church, where nobody was hurt, but the penal system condemned the attack to sixteen days of prison. They see as divine retribution against the United States that similar explosive devices kill their soldiers by the dozens. Another great moment is the phone interviews conducted with two of Fred Phelps children who are not with the church anymore. His daughter described him as a rage-a-holic who cannot live without some kind of conflict and his son depicts all the physical beatings he went through for talking back to him or opposing him in any manner. Both of them describe him as profoundly sick, which leads me to think Fred Phelps has founded the Westboro Baptist Church because he wanted to be God or he felt accountable to him only. And that would imply he's the only one to understand Christianity and that's pretty much it. He condemns every religion but his own and even called Benedict XVI , "the false prophet".
My economics teacher in college Mr. Grégoire (who got me into Philip K. Dick and therefore influenced my life) was a riot. He told me once that the average fundamentalist had a secret wish to be God and disregarded whatever part of the scripture to fit his own system of values. Fred Phelps and his bunch of troglodyte fuck-ups might just be the very best example of that. When someone with utter contempt for the notion of common sense like Sean Hannity looks at you in disbelief, calls you disturbed and his ABSOLUTELY RIGHT, you know your moral stance is some kind of twilight zone (this is documented in the movie). Fall From Grace is very short (seventy-two minutes), but it's a fascinating trip into the twisted universe of Westboro Baptist Church. It could have been easily padded up to ninety minutes with introductions and voice-overs, but K. Ryan Jones chose to trust his viewers and let his subjects talk. It's a must see and it's free on Netflix. So you have no excuse not to watch Fall From Grace.
SCORE: 95%
