The (closet) case for Fred Phelps

Speculative fiction

Fred Phelps held fast to his cowboy hat, anxiously clutching its tattered brim as he drifted along the darkened corridor. He knew he was dead, of course. He’d been dying of cancer for years, and by the time the fiendish disease had severed the threadbare ties between his living and dying, he was already blessing the world out a final time.

I depart into the arms of the Righteous King who will embrace the work I’ve done and banish to Hell the wicked I leave in my wake, he wanted the church’s official statement to read, but internal squabbling within the top brass of the Westboro Baptist Church lead to his ousting in 2013. Upon his death, a post on the church’s blog read simply:

People die — that is the way of all flesh.

But Fred no longer cared about the life behind him. His eyes, no longer clouded with age and resentment, but now youthful and unburdened, took in the vacuous depths — but he dared not reach out. He merely gazed, enraptured by mystery and anticipation.

After exhaling his final breath in the hospice facility, a sort of … tear in the ceiling opened, letting a soft glow pour in languidly to settle on his skeletal frame and gently extract him. His entire being was permeated by, in corporeal terms, something akin to warmth and he was lifted skyward, swathed in a serenity so profound it would never be unraveled by fear. The bleating of machinery and ensuant nurse chatter faded behind him. And it was lovely. For the first time since he was a youth, he felt lovely.

Death was not exactly as he’d expected. He always found the speculations to be diminished and hackneyed old wives’ tales. In truth, when he was alive he wasn’t even sure if he believed in life after death … or of God. He would lay awake at night as a young man, the frustrating contradictions of the book he knew best pulling him this way and that, until he conceded that the only way to make certain he keep his search for truth pure was by choosing a side. The side he chose would need to keep his mind from straying from his studies, as it often had. He would need to retain his laser-like focus on seminary and stop sinfully plundering the depths of pleasure he’d often entertained with other young men. The side he chose would need to mask his distaste for the sexual nature of womankind and annihilate any suspicion about his genuine attraction to the gents of his ilk. So he chose hate to cloak his homosexuality, a hate that resembled the disgust he was taught to feel about himself.

Memories of his summer on the Mississippi washed over him. Each weekend, he and Micah, another Eagle Scout, would camp on the muddy banks with a kerosene lamp and a tin of new baseball cards. Wading in the water, shirtless and feeling for catfish, Micah would smile back to the young man on the shore, aware that the exchange ensnared Fred’s heart each time. And such shame that befell the two when a passerby found them locked in an embrace as they slept under the stars. Micah was sent out West and they would never speak again.

Enraged and humiliated, Fred enrolled in a university in South Carolina, but found himself engulfed in an unbearable pressure to conform. He didn’t want to court young women, couldn’t stand their giggling and merriment at his nature, which they simply mistook for shyness. To his credit, he did try. The preppy sophomore he shared a dorm with encouraged him to ask their single classmate to a social. Gladys accepted Fred’s offer and assumed it meant interest, but when her hand reached for his at the end of the evening, he hissed in disgust and pulled away for good. He penned articles in the student newspaper admonishing the rampant sin and sexuality on the grounds of the school and garnered a small following. The next semester, however, Fred’s diary was discovered by the same roommate who, in equal parts duty and revulsion, read aloud to the student body Fred’s confessions of lust for a popular male professor on campus. Disgraced, he fled to Canada, vowing never to let his desire for men get the better of him again, burning all his love for love in this world in the wildfires that raged in his soul. In his heart, he had killed Micah and his professor thousands of times over while exalting his ridiculers to great heights with undue gratitude. His self-loathing gave him gruesome, powerful, beastly wings and transformed him into the cruel and impenitent founder of America’s most hated church.

But now, as his spirit ascended without haste or mission into the unknown, ambling as a paper sailboat might along a lazy stream, he felt sorrow for lashing out so viciously at those who had nothing to do with his shaming. He felt sorrow for spreading his fire into the souls of his babies. He felt sorrow for scarring the innocent with his brutal crusades that were, in truth, against himself, but mostly, he felt sorrow for never finding his truth before the clarity of death gave him the courage to admit it.

At any rate, we are free to interpret what the meaning behind all of it was, should we bother. We are allowed to reel in hatred; we are allowed to pity; we can shrug in indifference; we can forgive. I’ve seen a lot of sympathy, mind you, and messages of consolation to those he left behind and while it may have been curious at first, it should come as no surprise that some people just responded in love. Why? Because people love — that is the way of all flesh.