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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

The Wrathful Fred Phelps

As we read and ponder Canto XVI of Dante’s Purgatorio, in which the pilgrim enters into the hot, black, smoking cloud of Wrath, it’s worth reading Tony Woodlief’s reflection on what wrath did to the late Fred Phelps. Excerpt: It’s easy to hate a man like Fred Phelps, and just as easy to say that […]

As we read and ponder Canto XVI of Dante’s Purgatorio, in which the pilgrim enters into the hot, black, smoking cloud of Wrath, it’s worth reading Tony Woodlief’s reflection on what wrath did to the late Fred Phelps. Excerpt:

It’s easy to hate a man like Fred Phelps, and just as easy to say that we should have hearts filled with pity for him, for the sheep who followed him. It’s easy for me, anyway, because that was never one of my sons in a box, body flayed by a roadside bomb, his memory dishonored by shouting, sign-bearing heretics. I can’t imagine that horror without also tempting myself to hate him even now, to hope he burns as he ached to see others burn. Me, who was never wronged by him.

In truth, people like me need someone like Fred Phelps. He made me feel better about myself. I am as the Pharisee who gave thanks he was not the tax collector—a comparison to which some might object, on the grounds that in that story, the tax collector was a humbled man, aware of his sins and begging mercy.

If you go to Tony’s entry, you’ll see a 1932 photograph of Fred Phelps, age 3, embracing his sister. How stunning it is to confront visually the fact that that he began life as a sweet little boy, and left it as a hateful and hated old man. This can happen to us too, and it can happen to us if we allow ourselves to be blinded by the same wrathfulness that blinded Fred Phelps. Self-knowledge is impossible in a state of Wrath, because it is all-consuming, and directed outward, toward others.

I have known this feeling, and so have you. No wrath is more poisonous than the wrath that comes from righteous judgment — I mean, judgment passed on people who really have done terrible wrong. I am reminded of how my wrath at the Catholic bishops over the abuse scandal ate away at my faith like sulfuric acid. It wasn’t that the bishops were undeserving of the wrath of the faithful. I believe they were, and that many of them escaped justice, in this life at least. Yet I also believe that the wrath I could not suppress, because to do so felt like a betrayal of the victims, did those bishops exactly no harm, but nearly destroyed me spiritually. It’s not so much that wrath hid my sins from me in this case (though it certainly might have done) as that it blinded me to the long-term costs to my soul of tendering its white-hot fire in my heart with bellows-blast of fresh indignation.

Two older black men, both of my parents’ generation, come to mind. Both grew up in the Jim Crow South, under conditions of serious oppression and injustice. One of them was a fighter, who raged his whole life against the enemy. The other refused anger. The angry one more or less destroyed himself. The pacific one thrived. When I learned about these men, and what kinds of things they endured growing up, my heart instantly went out to the angry man. I would likely have been that man had I been black in that era, and suffered what that man suffered. Seen from the vantage point of today, I would have hoped to have been the black man who was not overcome by his entirely justified wrath, because he built a good life for himself and his descendants, despite the injustice. I once talked to him about this; he told me that he took his own mother and father seriously when they told him that to give in to anger gives a victory to those who want to destroy him.

He was right. If anybody had the right to be wrathful, it was that man. But he had the wisdom and the grace to refuse it. Last autumn and winter, I found it within myself to set aside my own anger, which had me trapped in the bramble-bushes in a dark and terrible wood. Today, I can still see the situations that provoked my wrath; they are no less unjust today than they ever were, and no more resolvable. But I came to see that raging at things I could not change was destroying me. I had to be purged of wrathfulness. And so I was. Am. It’s hard. But it’s necessary.

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