Dispatch #2: Bob Whetstone: True Believer

by Jonathan Riley

Bob Whetstone, on a mission to save souls at Boston HempFest 2013.

By Jonathan Riley

SEP. 15, 2013. BOSTON COMMON, BOSTON, MA-   “After this I’m going to the Red Sox,” says Bob Whetstone, explaining to me how he is misunderstood. “They think I’m judging them, cause I’m here, but I’m just doing the same as I will tonight at the Red Sox.”

One can see where the confusion might arise. Whetstone, 65, looks a bit out of place, decked out in Jesus gear, standing in the middle of Boston Common at HempFest 2013, amidst a crowd wearing Bob Marley T-shirts and plastic pot-leaf headdresses.

But Whetstone has been following what he considers his calling in life for more than twenty years now, and does “everything: fairs, festivals, parades.”

Wearing a large sign hanging around his neck, several smaller signs attached to it, and a custom painted hat, all covered in slogans about eternity, damnation, salvation and Hell, Bob cuts quite a figure, if you’re into that sort of thing.

Whetstone, who says he’s “mostly Baptist,” or “kind of between Baptist and Pentecostal,” may have a bit of a fixation with fire and brimstone. He talks, however, like an old burnt out hippie. At one point he starts telling me about hippies in California and their need to be saved. But as far as marijuana goes, he doesn’t “have any problem with people doing it for medicinal purposes. Herbs are herbs.”

He says he does better at HempFest than at 80% of the places he goes. While I’m talking to him, three people separately approach him and respectfully ask for various pamphlets he’s handing out. A small crowd also gathers behind him to snap pictures of the signs on his back, without his realizing, while he is preoccupied, telling me about the Lord.

“When I got saved, God wanted me to come to Boston, and go to bible school,” he says. Originally from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, he spent most of the 1980s doing, from his description, a somewhat less flamboyant form of “street ministry” in Lynn, MA.

Although he now has a graphic depiction of the fires of Hell hanging around his neck, he “didn’t wear it in the beginning. I’d have it over on the side, but people would steal it.”

It is Sunday. Bob says he spent more than seven hours at HempFest yesterday, before returning for a second round.

“I’m already going to Heaven, so I can miss church and come out here. I like to go to church too,” he says.

“There’s a lot of people who are religious, but they’re not saved,” Whetstone says. He has a lot to say about the many people he perceives as faking it when it comes to religion, who don’t get what it’s really all about.

He says he doesn’t like to talk about Hell, but the reality of its existence and the orders he’s received from God drive him to continue. He is a man on a mission. People need Jesus.

“There’s Arabs that are more sincere, there’s Moslems that are more sincere than some Christians,” he says. “But they’re not saved.”