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Westboro Baptist Church has become infamous over the past twenty years for its stridently anti-gay messages and picketing of soldiers’ funerals. Steve Drain is a former documentarian who joined the Church in 2001. Drain featured heavily in Louis Theroux’s documentaries The Most Hated Family in America (2007) and America’s Most Hated Family in Crisis (2011), and runs the media side of WBC.

I wanted to ask why you’re seen as a hate group, and why your core message doesn’t seem to come across. What is your core message?

Well first of all, the idea of being a hate group is a category mistake – it’s equivocating on what the term “hate” is. We’re not talking about a base human passion like you or I might feel, we’re talking about an attribute of God. It’s a perfect attribute just as his love and his mercy is. The hatred of God is outlined in the scripture three to four more times than his love: it’s his fixed determination to punish the wicked in Hell for their sins.

When you say that they don’t connect with that message, our job is not to make that connection, our job is to preach the word of God, and how it lands on the hearts of men is God’s prerogative. So our core message is simply this: “the Bible’s right and the moral standards of man are wrong.” The fact people want to say we’re a one-trick pony and all we’re focused on is the issue of homosexuality is a misunderstanding. We didn’t make homosexuality a front-burner issue, society did.

Your motivation is that you’re doing God’s will?

It’s out of obedience to our god. It’s out of love for our fellow man. Here’s the irony for you – when the Lord says “love your neighbor as you love yourself” he’s quoting from Leviticus 19:17 and 19:18, where the definition for how you love your neighbor as yourself is … when you warn him that his sins are taking him to Hell. If you were about to walk off a cliff, is the loving thing for me to say “keep going,” or is it to warn you and tell you to stop? That’s what our job is. Whether or not you stop is God’s business.

So you’re saying it as loud as possible? Is that the motivation behind going to funerals and other high-profile events, as well as having a lot of provocative signs?

We live in the soundbite generation, so every one of those signs we hold is only provocative to you because you don’t understand the Bible sentiment or the Bible standard that’s contained therein.

As far as going to funerals, dying time is truth time. There [are] only a couple of times in a man’s life where he’s going to truly contemplate where the eternal state of his soul will reside. So I don’t think there’s anything kinder we can do than show up at a funeral and say “look, he didn’t die fighting for our freedoms, he died fighting for a nation that’s awash in sin, and no God-fearing man would lift a finger fighting for a nation awash in sin.”

As for high-profile events, when someone’s in the media they have a considerable platform. When you acquire the attention of the media and you’re not helping your fellow man by warning them about the condition of this earth, then when you quit this earth God will cast you to Hell.

Cool. So when everyone simply dismisses you as a hate group they’re unable to see all of the reasoning you’ve been talking about, and instead put your behaviour down to ulterior motives?

You gotta ask the question, “what would be the point there?” Look, we’re all educated people, hard-working people, what would be the point in just wanting to shout at people? It’s an old tactic – if you can’t poke a hole in the message poke a hole in the messenger. People want to call us loons, [so] here’s what I say to them: “there’s a great advantage to know the wrong and right side of an issue. We’ve all read the scripture, we’re all intelligent creatures like the rest of you.”

I think what would help convince a lot of people that you guys are actually rational is an example of an intellectual struggle that faces the WBC and how the WBC overcame that. That would show people that your position stands up to criticism.

The only time a God-fearing man is going to struggle is when he’s leaning on his own understanding. The Bible is an instruction manual for the rest of your life – when a man turns away from that standard and reasons with morality himself, that’s when [he is] going to have difficulties. People at WBC, we don’t intellectually struggle with anything. What we do is put our foolish, vain ideas away and focus on what the scripture has to say about it.

So you don’t need to use reason because the Bible tells you exactly what to do? But obviously rationality had to be used to get to the belief that the Bible tells you everything. Rationality even comes into the reading and interpreting of the Bible, so what’s been the most difficult challenge to your outlook that you’ve faced?

You’re putting the cart before the horse there – we don’t have an opinion and go to the scripture to see if it’s supported. We go to the scripture and that tells us our position is. You’re asking a question with no answer.

Okay.
[Editor – abridged]