By: John Dyndril

Fall From Grace is perhaps one of the most comprehensive looks at the Westboro Baptist Church and its followers, including extensive interviews with Fred Phelps (the minister for the church), his followers—which is almost ninety-percent just the rest of the Phelps family—and experts ranging from Biblical scholars to other preachers acquainted with Mr. Phelps. But the most essential question that the documentary answers is: Who is Fred Phelps?

We all know of him. And if we don’t, then we at least have heard of the Westboro Baptist Church, the church most infamous for picketing soldiers’ and homosexuals’ (among others) funerals for the past fifteen or so years. With their official website being called www.godhatesfags.com, it is certain that they are unequivocal in their hatred. But the Westboro Baptist Church has a much more extensive history that has been overlooked by many of its commentators and critics. For one, it was started fifty years ago by Fred Phelps with just a small following. Fred, himself, was a lawyer that surprisingly enough started his own law firm in 1964 and took on many civil rights cases in Topeka, KS. He is claimed to have “single-handedly brought down the Jim Crow system in the city.” As baffling as this is, it wasn’t too surprising to hear that he was disbarred in 1979 for perjury after conducting a frivolous and petty lawsuit against a court reporter who he constantly attacked as being a ‘slut’. Post-disbarment, Phelps was then allowed to pursue his ministering without distraction. And that’s when the problems started.

He is the man who preaches hate. It doesn’t necessarily have to be homophobia, racism, anti-Semitism, anti-Americanism, or anything else specifically. He just likes to hate. That’s the pure and simple truth of the matter. If you look up the list of people he hates, your name will probably pop up. I’m surprised this man has not died of some sort of stress-induced heart-attack or stroke considering how agoraphobic he is. But he peters on at the age of 81, still getting up every Sunday morning to preach his vile sermons filled with 19th-century-like fire-and-brimstone rhetoric. Still making the occasion to go out to as many funerals of people he never met as he can possibly get to, or sending his family there in his absence, just to shout and harangue and harass and be generally disrespectful as possible.

And to what effect? He and his church haven’t drastically changed anyone’s life. Most people you go up to will probably express their contempt for him and his ideologies. Occasionally we’ll hear of people like Pat Robinson or Jerry Falwell endorsing the Westboro Baptist Church and their beliefs on homosexuality. But for the most part all they do is shout, get others to shout at them for a few hours each day, and then everyone goes home in hopes of forgetting these irascible, hateful people before hearing about them again on the news doing the exact same thing they did yesterday. In their repetition and lack of a substantial argument or message, the Westboro Baptist Church and Fred Phelps represent how man can be infinitely empty.

To get back to the film, Fall From Grace will make you angry. It will make you want to find these people so that you can beat some semblance of logic or reason into their heads. But most of all, by the end of the film, it will make you sorry for these people. It will even make you sorry for Fred Phelps, a megalomaniac who has been rejected all of his life and must project the hatred he harnesses about his constant failures onto the rest of the world. The only sad part about it is that he’s brought his kids and grandkids along with him.

The most sickening moments are when Phelps’ grandkids are being interviewed, all of whom have been indoctrinated by his hatred, and repeat his words with blind veneration as young as five-years-old. And the most heartbreaking moments are when two of the four children that left the Phelps clan-cult talk about growing up under Fred Phelps’ constant hatred and anger, being beaten and bullied by a man that is simply too afraid of the rest of the world to deal with it.

Besides angering you about Phelps’s cult, Fall From Grace brings up some poignant questions about homosexuality and the church. Despite popular beliefs that there are passages that specifically prohibit homosexuality in the Bible, there is no actual mentioning of man-on-man or woman-on-woman love, but rather a prohibition on man-on-child love—what today’s society considers pedophilia. Like many things in the Bible, the translation just happened to be slightly off, and the church, for a vast amount of its history, has been trying to proselytize its own sense morality without giving much credence to scripture. So, essentially, homosexuality is not even considered a sin in the Bible, let alone, as Phelps likes to think, a condemning feature that will send all of society to hell for just passively or actively accepting it. Of course, such an argument will do little to convince any of the Westboro Baptist Church members, who regularly cite Noah’s warning of an impending flood as a justification of their beliefs.

But if there’s one message to take away from this film, it is that the Westboro Baptist Church and Fred Phelps are the only group of people that can get Bill O’Reilly and Michael Moore to agree on something.