Pastor Ted stands astride two hay bales triumphant and seemingly oblivious to the frigid night air inside the Haggard family barn, where 75 people have gathered for a prayer service.
Dressed in jeans and a favorite gray NYC sweatshirt, Haggard launches into a Borscht Belt routine for evangelicals that plays to raucous laughter. He wisecracks that God’s preoccupation with keeping tabs on Barack Obama may delay immediate answers to their prayers. A joke about the biblical significance of preaching in ramshackle sheds glides effortlessly into tonight’s homily from Acts 28:17, in which Paul, exonerated, returns to Jerusalem from Rome to persuade the Jews that the Messiah has indeed come.
In Haggard’s reading, he is Paul: not guilty as charged by the authorities, and preaching true redemption to the skeptics. His exegesis simultaneously taps into evangelical anxieties about persecution and lambastes its harsh authoritarianism, a foil for the self-styled apostle banished from his secular and spiritual kingdom for committing modern American evangelicalism’s cardinal sin of homosexuality.
The teachings of Paul play a starring role in Haggard’s personal and professional resurrection following the 2006 sex and drugs scandal that led to his abrupt resignation from the twin pulpits of conservative religious power: New Life Church in Colorado Springs and the National Association of Evangelicals and an unceremonious exile to Phoenix, Arizona.
Haggard fancies himself the rebel bucking authority, and bringing Christ’s true message to the masses. “I’m gonna be like Paul,” he tells me, relishing his new itinerant role. “This is insanity but I’m gonna to do it.”
The fallen pastor’s own Road to Damascus is taking place just off Interquest Parkway in Colorado Springs, a city referred to as the Jerusalem of evangelicalism.
Meet Ted Haggard 2.0
“I’m going to teach the Scripture,” Haggard tells me in his living room two days before the service. “But I’m going to teach it first person singular. I’m going to tell you how God has worked in my life and you can work it out with my story with the Scriptures and the Holy Spirit and how God’s going to walk you through your life. But I’m not going to tell you what God thinks. You have to determine that on your own.”
Haggard’s weekly Oval Office phone calls and grip and grin NAE photo ops with former President George W. Bush are now mere vestiges of an old life, prior to what he calls the “crisis.” At New Life, which Jeff Sharlet described as “not just a battalion of spiritual warriors but a factory for ideas to arm them,” worship services were extravagant multimedia, fog machine-choked productions, in which Haggard used his pulpit to wage spiritual war against satanic forces, including the demon of homosexuality. “It would be devastating for the children of our nation and for the future of Western civilization,” he told Christianity Today in 2005, “for us to say that homosexual unions or lesbian unions or any alteration of that has the moral equivalence of a heterosexual, monogamous marriage.”
At the pinnacle of Haggard’s power, he moved seamlessly between the firebrand populism of evangelical believers and the institutional halls of fundamentalist realpolitik. Now, from his rustic pulpit (not unlike the basement from which he launched New Life, or, perhaps, an intentional manger), Pastor Ted weaves a personal metaphorical tale of running afoul of the authoritarian religious leadership to which he once belonged.
“We don’t really know you but we know you’re bad,” Haggard preaches from atop the hay bales as he awkwardly tries to weave a reference to the authorities who banished him New Life.
“The Kingdom of Earth is bound by rules,” he declares from his New Living Translation Bible. “There is no forgiveness in the Kingdom of Earth. The only hope is for the Kingdom of Heaven to invade the Earth.”
The cracker barrel-styled reading of Acts—and of I Corinthians 13 at the prayer meeting the week before where 150 people reportedly swarmed his house—are emblematic of Pastor Ted’s uncanny, Zelig-like talent for reflecting the emerging Christian Right zeitgeist of the moment. In the mid-1980s, the so-called Charismatic and Pentecostal “shift in gravity” from the Deep South westward had much less to do with a random vision to build a church in Colorado Springs than the rapid population boom fueled by cheap land that would lead to a new free market Christianity political power base in the Western United States.
In less than a decade, Haggard built one of the most influential megachurches in the nation.
Not Everybody Loves a Comeback Story
Today, Haggard and his wife Gayle jet set nearly every weekend to speak at emergent churches across the nation with a well-worn script about forgiveness and redemption.
“Out of Hebrews I know I am forgiven past, present and future,” he tells me during our living-room chat. “Out of John, I know that anyone who says he has no sin is a liar. Out of some of the other Scriptures, I know I am cleansed. I know I am a new creation. I know my mind is renewed.”
Haggard’s new role makes some of his fellow travelers very unhappy.
H.B. London, the dour head of pastoral ministries at Focus on the Family, denounced the prayer services in the press, in a widely-circulated email, and on his blog. London reportedly told the Religious News Service of Haggard’s plans to hold prayer services, “When you think of the ethics of that, it, to me, just defies explanation.”
Tags: homophobia, homosexuality, new apostolic movement, ted haggard
Those preaching Christian hatred are discovering how much inspiration they can draw from each other.
Wendy, excellent read. Followed this story since its inception and one of the best takes on the events as well as his "recovery." I knew it was only a matter of time.
Thank you for the kind comment.
Ted Haggard is a very complex guy — and not just sexually. He's fascinating, maddening, charismatic and a right wing authoritarian, just like his critics.
This guy is a very confusing man. I mean, who could think that he could be what he was. What ever, lets try to see what the future holds for him.
From Wat, the Jump Manual guy
I could sum this all up in one simple sentence. Ted Haggard is still just as phony as he always seemed to be. End of story.
Not quite end of story. It seems a lot of people are looking for that quality in their spiritual guide. How would you explain that?
my guess is that Haggard is half-way there. I am not interested in his sexuality, but he is not done and has not resolved it, for sure. The most valuable point about his story so far is he has experienced and acknowledges what so many others have: the rejection of the church either because of something they have done or because of who they are. It is amazing and disturbing that so many are playing the part of God in saying the Haggard isn't ready to preach. How dare they!
May I suggest that this episode tells very deeply about the the nature of religion? Charisma is the coin of the realm, strongest in founders like Muhammed, Jesus, Buddha. Their mesmeric power interacts with our mass suggestibility to create new narratives of meaning, faith, and devotion, completely apart from rational content or discernment.
Unfortunately, charisma is equally prone to negative as to positive teachings, not to mention fraud and deceit, as in all the ills of prosperity gospel. Suggestibility is dangerous, fiery material, easily lit.
Ted Haggard is a prime example of charisma- a gift with no necessary connection to virtue, reason, or discernment.
I really think that someone should interview Sarah Palin on her thoughts about Ted Haggard.
Haggard is a gay man who has spent his life in the closet, and he needs to come out before he can even begin to resurrect himself.
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