Daniel Walmer

danielwalmer@ldnews.com

Eric Phelps’s Reformation Bible Puritan Baptist Church is Lebanon County’s only organization plotted on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s map of hate groups, but his picturesque farmhouse near Newmanstown doesn’t look like a headquarters of hate.

Perhaps its most striking feature, aside from the collection of large King James Bibles and Reformation books displayed in the center of his living room, are the hunting trophies that decorate its walls. Phelps doesn’t hunt, but his father-in-law does, and the deer head and animal pelts “sort of fit with the rugged individual white male who is protestant or Baptist,” he said.

While he insists he isn’t hateful, Phelps is a proud and active advocate of racial separation and anti-Catholicism — and he has big plans for Lebanon County. His goal: a community that secedes from the United States and Pennsylvania, is devoid of Hispanics, African-Americans and Catholics, institutes the death penalty for “doing dope,” and forbids homosexuality and adultery.

“These Hispanics and these blacks that commit crime everywhere - they have reduced Lebanon to nothing but a savage war zone, for the most part. That’s all done by the Pope — he brought them in here,” Phelps said. “If I can’t have (racial separation) in Lebanon, I’ll move to another county where we can do it, but we have to go to a white county that’s historically Protestant.”

Phelps isn’t idle while waiting for the consummation of that dream. He pastors his church, which meets in his home to study the Bible and eat fellowship meals of “white Protestant cuisine,” like meat and potatoes. Attendees include his family and a few others, but his personal invitation is required to join.

He also broadcasts an Internet radio program with followers around the world and hosts “private citizenship” classes in Myerstown that have been attended by as many as 25 paying customers, he said, preaching an anti-Catholic gospel message wherever he goes.

Jesuit conspiracy

Phelps, 62, was raised in the predominately Catholic town of Tara Hills, Calif. While he wasn’t Catholic, most of his girlfriends were, and he fell for temptations of Catholic culture until he heard the gospel as a teenager and knew he needed to repent of his sins, he said.

In the 1970s, he spent five years in the Air Force before dropping out after becoming convinced that it “was no place for a white man” because African-Americans were allowed to cut in line and take over the basketball court. Four years in Bible college from 1977 to 1981 helped him appreciate the Reformation, and he gradually developed the conviction that Jesuits and secret societies like the Freemasons are behind many of the world’s sinister schemes.

Phelps now believes the Jesuits control presidents and presidential candidates, from Franklin Roosevelt to Donald Trump. The Jesuits murdered fellow Catholic John F. Kennedy for resisting their plans and more recently poisoned Antonin Scalia for supporting gun rights, he said. They gave Phelps himself metallic poison about 15 years ago, but he survived symptoms of a high temperature and a rapid heartbeat, he said.

For those who call him a conspiracy theorist, Phelps has a simple response.

“They’re coincidence theorists, and I say that’s their religion. They’re of the religion of coincidence,” he said.

Aside from writing his 2001 book “Vatican Assassins,” Phelps’ first way of spreading his message was through radio — where Michael Donohue, who says he is a retired Portland, Ore., police officer, first stumbled across him 10 years ago.

“I heard an angel from heaven,” said Donohue, an ex-Catholic who still listens to Phelps regularly and has purchased several years of his sermons. “All of a sudden, everything in scripture was making sense.” Donohue contacted Lebanon Daily News to speak about Phelps after he heard Phelps was the subject of an upcoming article.

Phelps, currently married with two children, has worked in pouring concrete and other jobs but now makes his living selling books and CDs on his website, peddling products like OneCoin, leading his church, and teaching classes on how to become a private citizen by destroying a contract he said is created by your birth certificate.

Hate group

The one thing Phelps doesn’t do, he said, is teach people to hate. He loves all races even though he believes they should be separated, and some of the people that he mentors are of other races and they also advocate racial separation, he said. He also supports Jews and wants them in his country.

He is not related to and does not support the radically anti-gay Westboro Baptist Church in Kansas, founded by the late Fred Phelps.

“I take them on. I call them a bunch of horrible, terrible bigots,” he said. “God does not hate the homosexual — he doesn’t hate anybody. He hates the sin.”

Phelps said his church was targeted by the Southern Poverty Law Center because one of the SPLC’s leaders is loyal to the Catholic church, but SPLC senior fellow Mark Potok provided a more objective list of criteria. Groups must have ideologies that malign an entire group of people to be included on the map, and they must be actively promoting their ideas and attracting a larger audience than a single person, Potok said.

“Most of the groups — probably the vast majority — do not engage in criminal violence,” he said.

Nationwide, the number of hate groups grew 14 percent in 2015, fueled by increases in both Ku Klux Klan and black nationalist groups, the SPLC said in a recently released report.

Lebanon Valley College Chaplain Paul Fullmer said groups that judge people based on surface characteristics like race are probably more common in this area than most people realize.

They tap into the potential for discomfort that we all face when approaching someone who is different and frustration about a perceived lack of action by the government on issues like preventing illegal immigration, Fullmer said. The growth of the Internet also provides a forum for people to spread their ideas and gain followers.

Potok warned that many hate groups have deceptively innocuous names, and Fullmer urged people to critically examine and look at academic literature on a subject before assuming that a leader’s claims are accurate.