Reconsidering Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. Christopher Peys
of persons and peoples who fail to conform to their organization’s narrow, prejudicial interpretation of the Bible, but also one that is defined by its rigid “us” versus “them” understanding of societal relations.
This view of the world shapes the entirety of the WBC’s ideological framework, and it informs the sense of inimicality that characterizes this small but vocal community of Americans. Discussing the views of her former church in a 2015 interview, Phelps-Roper stated that the WBC fostered an in-group/out-group mindset, one that serves as the frame through which this organization sees the world:
It [was] so strong—“us” versus “them.” There [was] no middle ground. That was something again that was also drummed into us. You are either a Jacob or an Esau [. . .] they were twins in the scriptures, and God loved Jacob and hated Esau. This was before they were even born, God loved Jacob and hated Esau, and so, you’re either a Jacob or an Esau, and if you are a Jacob, you want nothing to do with the world. The Book of John talks about [how] friendship with the world is enmity with God. “Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world.”25 So, it was very important, this “us”/“them” [. . .] and that definitely solidified this identity.26
A self-proclaimed “Jacob,” the WBC views itself as the community of faith chosen by God to enter into the Kingdom of Heaven, and that all those who do not share their perspective are akin to an “Esau”: the nonelect progenitor of Israel’s early biblical enemy, Edom.27 In her recent book, Unfollow: A Journey from Hatred to Hope, Leaving the Westboro Baptist Church (2019), Phelps-Roper describes her family’s conflictual relationship with the world as “the quarrel of the covenant,” which is to say, the “never-ending struggle of the good guys against the bad,” or the “eternal conflict between the righteous and the wicked.”28 Channeling a thoroughly Schmittian understanding of “the political,” whereby the “specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy,”29 the WBC’s self-identification as a “Jacob” puts them at odds with the other peoples of the world: enemies with whom “friendship” is impossible and the possibilities of cultivating a commonly held, political “middle ground” are limited. Pitted against all who exist beyond the theological confines of their church, then, the members of the WBC bring to life an ideological disdain for the world, as well as the “things” in it, and they embody a distinctly anti-world worldview that alienates them from the people who comprise the broader sociopolitical community within which they live, move, and act.
In this sense, when Phelps-Roper speaks about her life as a “Jacob,” as well as the period during which she went about leaving the WBC and becoming an “Esau,” it is evident that her personal experience of cultivating a renewed relationship with those persons and peoples whom she once treated with contempt required her to overcome an extreme state of alienation from the “world.” Though it is difficult to pinpoint precisely how Phelps-Roper and the members of her former church define their usage of the term “world,” a word which can be interpreted in an assortment of different ways depending on the biblical text and translation used, I focus here specifically on how this expression pertains to “the political,” thereby employing it in notably Arendtian terms as that which corresponds to the “space for politics.” Given the extent to which the Westboro Baptists’ ideology and activism maintain a rigid us/them conceptualization of “the political,” Phelps-Roper’s story of forsaking her family and of starting anew within the community of “Edom,” therefore, offers an example of what it might mean to (re)cultivate the world shared with the (unknown) Other when sociopolitical tensions and political polarization have engendered seemingly intractable states of civic worldlessness. Phelps-Roper’s narrative offers but a single experience of someone who has attempted to renew their relationship with the people of the world and to reconcile herself to those whom she had once worked so hard to rebuke, reject, and remain at odds with as a congregant of the WBC. Her story is nevertheless an intriguing account of how the practices of forgiveness and cosmopolitan hospitality care for the world during times of sociopolitical darkness and when states of worldlessness take shape within civic communities.
While the historical context within which Phelps-Roper lives, moves, and acts differs from that of Arendt’s lifetime, there is, within an Arendtian register of thought, a theory of politics that is fundamentally concerned with the maintenance, reparation, and preservation of “the political” during “dark times.”30 For Arendt, these are those periods of human history when the public realm of human affairs has fallen into a worldless state of intractable sociopolitical alienation, violence, and/or terror. The threat to the world posed in dark times is, as she writes, “the growth of worldlessness, the withering away of everything between [people], [which] can also be described as the spread of the desert.”31 As in early twentieth-century Germany, the danger that exists in deserted spaces of such vast nothingness is “that there are sandstorms in the desert,” which “can whip up a movement of their own.”32 Although the “sandstorms” to which Arendt refers are those of the totalitarian movements she once found herself caught up within, the salience of her observations have broader significance. Equating to a loss of shared experiences had between people, the “growth of worldlessness”—or development of states of “world alienation”33 —is an ever-present hazard whenever and wherever a plurality of people live and act within sociopolitical communities. Throughout her corpus, Arendt underscores that the worldliness of the public, political realm is precarious, ever in need of care, and perpetually under threat precisely because “dark times”—as she writes—“are not only not new, they are no rarity in history.”34 In this sense, when Arendt tells Günter Gaus—during a 1965 interview for German television—that “nobody cares what the world looks like,”35 she is expressing her concern for the public realm of “the political,” which, in her view, has grown “dark” in the modern age.
In emphasizing that there is a perpetual need to care for worldly spaces within which people can speak and act freely together, Arendt’s political theorizing can be interpreted as a call to action that flows from her broader critique of contemporary civil society: that humankind has lost its feeling for, love of, and capacity to act politically within the public realm. That is, Arendt’s pointed remark to Gaus stems from her deep-seated concern for public life and the overall mission of her work, which George Kateb suggests “should be recognized as the recovery of the idea of political action, in a culture which [. . .] has lost the practice of it, and in which almost all philosophy is united, if in nothing else, in denying intrinsic value to it.”36 More specifically, Arendt sought to re-invigorate “the political” in an historical age when worldlessness had permeated civil society. While the Westboro Baptists’ anti-world worldview offers an example of a radical rejection of worldly affairs, a hyperbolic expression of their fundamentalist belief in what Arendt would describe as the “uncompromising otherworldliness of the Christian faith,”37 their approach to the world is in alignment with the ways in which people throughout history—scholars and laypersons alike—have tended to privilege the vita contemplativa and/or the vita spiritualis over the various activities that comprise the vita activa. In other words, the Arendtian criticism that humankind has largely neglected to “care for the world” strikes a chord when thinking about the ways in which members of the WBC have devoted themselves entirely to the task of securing—at least according to their faith—their respective places in the Kingdom of Heaven. Arendt’s conceptualization of the “world” demands that a renewed attention be paid to the very environment that supports people as public, political beings: the “world” and the “things” of the world that provide the conditions of existence for a thoroughly human life.38
Extending Arendt’s metaphor of the “desert,” the conditions that give rise to the “growth of worldlessness and the withering away of everything between people” are not established during a single summer heatwave. Rather, the “desert” can be said to form through a gradual process of desertification, occurring over an extended period of time—maybe even the longue durée—and as a plurality of factors crystallize in such a manner that a state of worldlessness comes to condition the sociopolitical relations within civic communities. Here, it is worth emphasizing that Arendt’s