Reply #36: and now for a slightly serious answer.... [View All]

First of all, most of what you need to know about Fred Phelps is that his 'church' has been looked at fairly closely and its membership is pretty close to a list of his family and some relatives. Secondly, the 'Christian Right' contingents that are most vociferous about gay people...well, it seems as if their leaders in the course of time are just about all discovered to have been caught soliciting sex from men, fondling adolescent boys, taped on Man Date phone sex lines, and the like. The larger 'Christian Right' crowd largely treats gay people as a group that can be 'morally' objected to and treated as lower class than themselves- as class/status politics, really. A small subset sees gay people as a 'religious' problem and sees a sanction in 'tradition' for the suppression and abuse- violence, even killing- of gay people.

The Bible as such doesn't say much about gay people. There's basically an attitude of contempt and scorn of a sort, not too different from social disapproval given prostitutes and abusive promiscuity, in my opinion, in the Hebrew Bible and New Testament. The real source of 'Christian Right' dogmatic problems with homosexuality lies in the 'Christian Right' actually being a highly syncretic belief system- the 'Christian Right' is a set of older religions mashed together with large chunks of their beliefs systems intact, substantially harmonized with the Bible where it's possible. A lot of the CR religious dogma and 'certainty' derives not from a sense that what they believe is learned/originated in the Bible- they rely very strongly on 'tradition', on what other people have told them the religion is. So there's a great internal reliance in the individual groups that (paradoxically) propose to be 'fundamentalist' on a kind of oral history and line of priests passing down the "right" way to (mis)understand the words of the Bible. You can suspect- and it's pretty clearly so in the religious apologia from the European Middle Ages- that there's a line of this in every (sub)denomination originally defined by its regionality and ethnicity in Europe extending back to the days of (forcible) conversion to Christianity, In fact, you would be able to guess that conversion to Christianity did not absolutely interrupt the chain of religious viewpoint and dogma handed down, and that in the early days of conversion the missionaries would be significantly accommodating to the Old Religion's point of view on a lot of subjects as long as it all didn't grossly deviate from The Good News etc.

I'm a little stuck with you terming yourself a Pagan. Because to talk about where the Law Of Nature dogmatism and demonology comes from that the 'Christian Right' reflects means to go back to the pre-Christian religions, particularly of Europe north of the Alps or so. Contemporary paganism is a very much more civilization-bound matter than the often highly brutal pre-Christian religions of the heathen. And I know of what I speak, because I grew up among rural northern Germans, people whose ancestors tossed adulterers and homosexuals and other offenders against the Fertility Deity (associated with water) into the local bogs. Northern European heathen 'morality' was a very intricate, highly detailed set of rules defining offenses against the many, rarely humane, gods- one of missionary Christianity's great allurements was that its system of explaining and arranging the world and society was so much simpler, so much more concerned with human beings and their nature than Nature. (In rural societies, as all of them were at the time, Nature is an absolute concern and can easily be made into a dictatorial force.) Of course the leaders used the Nature Gods to keep their unruly peoples submissive, that's a part of the story. But much of it was very literal superstition and orthopraxis- the fear that if things are not done right in form, the Nature Gods will find offense. And the worse the floods and famines were, the greater the social pressure to 'conform' in a pretty literal sense- and over time all of these peoples became, to our Modern measures, horrifyingly conformist and dogma-driven and inseparable from their Tradition. They didn't have the abilities necessary to critique the ever-tightening rules effectively (they didn't have Science), nor to question the basis of it all well. In a sense, the conformism and 'Christianity' and conservatism of the (white) American Midwest and South is the great survivor of this pre-Enlightenment Europe.

The root belief set violated by homosexuality is the Order of Nature. In the heathen social and religious point of view and experience, whenever the Order of Nature is significantly violated the offense to the Nature Gods must be destroyed or atoned for by men. People in psychoses and other mental conditions were killed, i.e. for their 'evil eye' or some other imputed spreading of evil and 'cursedness'. 'Unnatural' sexual acts- homosexual or sodomy of animals- amounted to death sentences unless the person could stop 'offending' and atone for what was done. Infants with 'monstrous' birth defects were killed. In some groups, one member of a pair of twins born was killed. Strangers were treated with hostility- xenophobia- unless they proved themselves to be harmless and peaceful. Every violation of the Original Condition- the way Creation was evidently intended to be- was considered suspicious. Succeeding at things considered too difficult for ordinary people to do was reason for suspicion- you might be succeeding due to witchcraft, after all.

The 'Christian Right' represents the survival of pre-Christian religions under the banner of Christianity. Its sense of identity lies in its non-Christian parts, its survival depends on pretending to Christianity. Its adherents cling to its anti-spirituality, its magic materialism (or just plain old materialism), its categories of blessed and cursed, its Nature ideologies, its extra-Biblical persuasivenesses, its black and white occultisms and occultic priesthoods (aka televangelists), its fertility cultism (anti-abortion politics and human breeding incentivizing), its arrogant pretense to superiority to reality and Other People. It embraces the old symbols- the Four Directions of the swastika and are now embodied in the Cross, the triad of Indoeuropean Rain Gods and their fire-associated antagonist (completing a foursome) are now the Trinity and the Devil. The theological schizophrenia involving Judaism is incredible- they can't explain to you what the Law of Love is, or the New Covenant, and the contortions around the idea of Covenant itself (they want to have all the benefits of one, but it would mean they'd have to be committed to the humane and individually valid revelation) are torturous beyond any ridicule or description.

The Christian Right is something pretty incredible. In many senses of the word 'incredible'.