Ted Haggard Scandal

The Ted

Haggard scandal gives grassroots evangelicals something to ponder as they enter
the voting booth on Tuesday, and it will have reverberations for evangelicalism
and for the Religious Right far beyond the mid-term elections.

The Ted Haggard scandal gives grassroots evangelicals
something to ponder as they enter the voting booth on Tuesday, and it will have
reverberations for evangelicalism and for the Religious Right far beyond the mid-term
elections.

Haggard tendered
his resignation as president of the National Association of Evangelicals on
Thursday after a former male prostitute accused him of soliciting gay sex. He
was dismissed as pastor of New Life in Colorado
Springs after an internal inquiry determined that he
had “committed sexually immoral conduct.”

Haggard’s accuser,
Mike Jones, has said that he stepped forward when he realized that it was
Haggard – whom he knew simply as “Art,” Haggard’s middle name – who was the driving
force behind Colorado’s
ballot initiative to ban same-sex marriage. Jones said he was troubled by Haggard’s
duplicity. “Friends have suffered because of our laws,” Jones said. “I felt
obligated to get the information out about the hypocrisy of people who make
these laws and those who support them.”

Hypocrisy indeed.
Aside from his anti-gay rhetoric, Haggard was one of the stars of the Religious
Right, who reportedly participated in weekly conference calls with Karl Rove
and George W. Bush.

For those looking
for evidence of hypocrisy in the Religious Right, however, the Haggard scandal
represents merely the tip of the iceberg. Ralph Reed, former head of the
Christian Coalition had unsavory associations with Jack Abramoff, and at least
one prominent leader has had alliances with white supremacist organizations.
And the larger hypocrisy is that the people who trumpet their “pro-life”
positions have refused unequivocally to denounce the Bush administration’s
policies on torture.

Both the White
House and the leaders of the Religious Right have already tried to distance
themselves from Haggard in an effort to control the political damage. But for
evangelicals, a scandal of this magnitude may be even larger than the
pedophilia scandals afflicting the Roman Catholic Church. Without trying to
minimize the tragedy or the collateral damage of pedophilia, Roman Catholicism
has the ballast of the institution to help it sail through stormy seas, whereas
evangelical congregations very often galvanize around a particular charismatic
leader, something akin to a cult of personality.

Haggard’s anti-gay
rhetoric calls to mind the old saw about people in glass houses, but his indiscretions
should provide a lesson for evangelicals and for the Religious Right. Jesus tangled
repeatedly with the moralists of his day, who were always tut-tutting about the
behavior of others and who were forever confusing morality with moralism. Jesus
affirmed his commitment to the law and to morality (although he said nothing
whatsoever about either abortion or homosexuality). But when pressed by those
who had appointed themselves the arbiters of morality, he counseled compassion
above all and allowed that the law and the prophets could be summed up in a
simple phrase, love the Lord your God and your neighbor as yourself, which is
far more difficult than merely following the law.

I suspect that when
Jesus invited his followers to love their neighbors, and even their enemies, he
probably didn’t mean that we should torture or kill them. I suspect that the
man who spent most of his time with lepers and paralytics and the outcasts of
his time would look askance at the efforts to deny equal rights to anyone –
women or Muslims or immigrants or gays. I suspect that the man who warned
against pointing out the speck in another’s eye while ignoring the log in your
own might have something to say about the moralism so evident among leaders of
the Religious Right.

The Haggard scandal
may finally prompt rank-and-file evangelicals to reclaim their faith from the
leaders of the Religious Right, who have delivered evangelicalism into the
captivity of right-wing politics.