The Westboro Baptist Church (WBC) is a small and "virulently homophobic, anti-Semitic" religious group that regularly stages protests at the funerals of U.S. soliders killed in Afghanistan and Iraq. Why? Because the WBC believes that U.S. soldiers are fighting to promote tolerance of homosexuality. To make their point, members of the church may fly 1,000 miles or more to stage protests with signs reading, "Thank God for Dead Soldiers," "Planes Crash, God Laughs," "Pray for More Dead Soldiers," "God Hates Fags," and "You're Going to Hell."By and large, most people try to ignore the WBC, hoping they'll tire of their crusade and melt back to obscurity. Certainly, few people suggest that the WBC represents Christianity at large or even a sizable segment of the Christian population. But, what if it did? What if the WBC were a m
ainstream Christian organization? Would this make the word of its founder, Fred Phelps, the word of Christ and of the Christian world? Certainly not. Yet, many of these same people believe that when a handful of radical Islamic clerics espouse their conception of Islam that it must, by definition, be the word of Islam.
The point is simple: any world religion is complex and multivocal. There is can be no one true interpretation--that is, when it is mere mortals who must do the interpreting. Yet, it is often the case that the interpretation that receives the most notice, especially among non-believers, is the one which is most virulent or the most fanatical. When we add into the mix an understanding that the interpretation of religious "texts" does not occur in a vacuum, but is instead influenced by an array of political, social, economic forces, it is easy to see that we must be very careful about ascribing universality to any view of any religion.
