#2578: Wellington Boone

Wellington Boone is the founder and chief prelate of the Fellowship of International Churches (as well as numerous fundamentalist organizations and networks) and a dominionist fundie’s fundie. He has been a regular feature on the TV networks CBN (Pat Robertson’s propaganda apparatus) and TBN, and a speaker for Promise Keepers, Focus on the Family (Boone has enjoyed quite a bit of a career as a James Dobson sidekick), the American Association of Christian Counselors and the Family Research Council. He has also been a member of the board of the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability and the Board of Trustees at Regent University. Not the least, Boone is the author of the book Black Self-Genocide: What Black Lives Matter Won’t Say.

 

The latter topic has been central to Boone’s efforts the last couple of years. According to Boone, Black Americans are suffering from “self-genocide”, insofar as many more Blacks are killed by other Blacks than by policemen (ostensibly what the BLM “won’t say”), especially through abortion and inner-city murders. Part of the reason it is this way, according to Boone, is that Black people in America from the 1960s onward has started depending on sources like the government for support rather than God.

 

Boone has also said that “I believe that slavery, and the understanding of it when you see it God’s way, was redemptive.” Indeed, Boone wants to “boldly affirm Uncle Tom. The black community must stop criticizing Uncle Tom. He is a role model.”

 

That said, Boone has been sharply critical of comparisons between the Gay Rights Movement and the Civil Rights Movement, calling it “Rape of the Civil Rights Movement”. Given his view of slavery (and apparently agreeing with Pat Robertson saying that Martin Luther King Jr. was helping Planned Parenthood commit black genocide and that black families were better off in the 1930s), it’s unclear whether to interpret that as a criticism of the Gay Rights Movement, but Boone certainly hasn’t expressed particularly civilized views of gay people elsewhere: homosexuality unchecked will, according to Boone, “result in the ultimate destruction of society”. He has also defended laws making homosexuality a crime punishable by the death penalty. In fact, Boone has pointed out (this “will absolutely blow the gay community’s mind right now”) that gay people “are eunuchs. You are a eunuch culture;” gay people have “let the devil trick” them into thinking otherwise (for some unexplained and incomprehensible reason). Equality is, in general, something Boone makes no attempts to understand; the goal of Promise Keepers is, after all, women’s submission and instituting a theocratic patriarchy.

 

Indeed, Boone doesn’t usually try very hard to hide his theocratic intentions – he is, after all, member of the dominionist Coalition on Revival, which campaigns for replacing Constitutional democracy with Biblical law.

 

George Barna and Harry Jackson Jr. ranked Boone as the #1 Black American leader in racial reconciliation of the 20th Century, and Ben Carson described Black Self-Genocide as “riveting” and “sage advice for how to empower the black community in America”. Guilt by association, we know, but what association!

 

Diagnosis: Yeah, another one of those: Boone’s bigotry and hatred toward certain groups of people are strong enough to make him willing to sacrifice quite a bit just to see those groups suffer, and he’s been aptly characterized as a “minister of minstrelry”. A thoroughly unsavory fellow.