Ted Haggard

It's fitting that Ted Haggard led New Life Church, as he is now exploring a new life as an insurance salesman and sometime Oprah guest, sometime documentary subject. And now he's looking for redemption, the essence of "new life" as defined in Christianity. He's an ex-pastor, but not just any pastor; Haggard was the head of the evangelical movement - a man of real power. He believed it was his duty and the duty of all Christians to use government to make "God's will" a reality, and was the leader of like-minded millions who think they know the nature of this particular god and what its will would be, and how to implement that will correctly. And thus he was targeted, rightly, as an enemy of equality and a friend of authoritarian government.

ABCNews.com: "Before the scandal broke, Haggard was a powerhouse and star in the evangelical world, rising quickly from the humble founding of Colorado's New Life Church in his basement in the 1980s. By 2006, the church was 12,000 members strong and Haggard, as president of the evangelical association, was exchanging weekly phone calls with President Bush."

So in November 2006, when news broke that a male prostitute named Mike Jones had information linking Ted Haggard to him, and to crystal meth, and to Denver, these hi jinks were irresistible to a political left who had been battered and electorally bruised (soon to change starting with the congressional victories later that month) - they held him up as an example of all the hypocrisy of the evangelical right. His fall represented the end of power for the evangelical right, and for good reason: This is the same lot who proselytizes about the intrinsic value of marriage between a man and a woman and yet has the highest divorce rate of any religious division in this country. This is the group who leads the "family values" fight and attempts to erase the reality of homosexuality from the culture by marginalizing gays, fighting hard against their right to wed by using their bible to advocate their hard-wired bigotry, insults them on a basic level by claiming to "cure" them through misguided and misanthropic programs which are supposed to replace their natural homosexuality with dishonest heterosexuality, shoe-horned in using that contradictory bible and the bastardized authority of Jesus Christ and mostly pressure from Christ's tragically simple followers. The deadly hypocrisy of a sect that claims to love all of God's children and yet wants millions of them not to exist is obvious, yet still striking. Ted Haggard led that swath of the country to the great distress and damage of homosexuals like himself.

Somehow New Life Church didn't believe the story that Haggard "threw away" the crystal meth he had bought and his denials about his series of rendezvous with the male prostitute named Mike Jones, and of course neither did anyone else. I watched him on Oprah yesterday while I was snowed in and he said that he was "lying" and his assertion that he threw the drugs away was "stupid." New Life Church banned him from their congregation, banned him from the state of Colorado (this lasted one year), and banned him from ever ministering there again.

Haggard told Oprah that if his wife and children had abandoned him after this fall from grace, during his steady spiral downward, he would have committed suicide. He said he still had thoughts about men, sexual thoughts. He told Oprah that he was a heterosexual with homosexual tendencies. He told Newsweek that he is still opposed to gay marriage, because he is "evangelical at heart." It is this last assertion, this clinging to the last vestiges of bible-assisted bigotry, that causes me to wonder if redemption can ever truly be his.

I can believe that there may be some gray area between heterosexual and homosexual; therefore goes bisexuality. Redemption always wins eventually with Christians, as this is what their entire fundament leads to. They will not deny this man Ted Haggard redemption, although he has fought and will continue to fight for it in full. So now the question that rattles around in his homosexual head must be this: Can I get back to where I was, and who I was, the leader of a powerful church?

If it is in his heart to be an evangelical pastor, then he feels this as deeply as he feels his homosexuality, and the seed of his inner conflict was probably sown early, at six or seven years old, when he was sexually abused by a friend of his father. Because he cannot marry the two, the evangelical man and the homosexual man, he sees his homosexual bent as something to defeat and not give in to, as if he's trying not to go to the gas station for a pack of smokes after quitting. He reports to Oprah Winfrey that he fasted an extra day, and redoubled his efforts in prayer, in an attempt to resist the manifestation of those urges at different times. This after the outing that cost him his career.

He clearly hasn't accepted who he is. One can see how Haggard became the leader of such a powerful movement; he is charismatic and believable, seemingly honest and now, crippled by his manifested homosexuality, harmless. But he was not always harmless, and the biblical anti-gay stance that he voiced, which allowed him to preach bigotry to a dominated congregation and make a very good living doing so (he and his family still lives in a $700,000 house) and speak regularly with a sitting president, is still present despite his own partial reckoning with his nature.

And it is the partial aspect of this reckoning that prevents him from full redemption in the public eye. This man must advocate for the reality of homosexuality at least, and end this blurring of that reality with his waffling nonsense about "homosexual tendencies." Those tendencies reveal homosexuality, not some dark aspect of the human condition that must be "cured" or resisted. And this is his test: Can Ted Haggard come to terms with who he is, and if so, will he use the empathy within him to take the courageous stand and see homosexuals fully as people? Or will he continue his hedging in an attempt to "fix" himself and prolong what is clearly the primary struggle in his life? If he does the latter, he isn't only denying his own nature: He's claiming something worse than the evangelical Christian belief that gays are somehow second class people. Haggard still believes that homosexuality itself is evil and must be defeated, and therefore naturally, by extension, so must homosexuals themselves. This is an advance into dark territory indeed, spearheaded by the forces of self hatred and fear. This is why he says that he's still against gay marriage, because he lacks the essential courage to reckon with his nature and will do anything, including abandoning the idea that homosexuals should exist equally and fully, to avoid this reckoning. Haggard isn't "evangelical at heart," unless that phrase is a euphemism for his self loathing. Which it must be, for what else explains a man who is clearly gay and yet cannot find it in himself to advocate for the equal treatment of fellow gay people? This choice between "fixing" homosexuality and coming to terms with and accepting it for Ted Haggard represents the same choice that many, many self-hating gays in positions of influence in the church must make in the interest of truly celebrating the breadth of humanity on this planet and carrying the torch for salvation.

Of course, Ted Haggard could be a psychotic careerist who is on a singular mission to preach because he's good at it and it has been quite profitable. If that's true, he is truly a gifted charlatan, especially if he succeeds after this incredible transgression against his church and his followers.

What would Jesus do? The Jesus that Ted Haggard's people believe in, the one who loves all, would surely not stop with flipping the tables of the money changers when hearing of this abominable treatment of so many of his children. The fact that so many Christians fail in this basic aspect of their own faith, to interpret the grander meaning of the redemptive power of their own savior continues to astonish, and continues to marginalize them and homosexuals both in the name of pure evil. The choice is theirs.