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Onward,
Alexander, Jeffrey, Becky and Deva
November
15, 2006
Those Who Preach in Glass Cathedrals ...
Rev.
Ted Haggard and the Eclipse of Evangelical Fury
By DAVID ROSEN
"Pastor Ted was a symbolically important
figure and a very public figure, so I think the ramifications
could be enormous," opined Randall Balmer, a Barnard professor
of religious history. By ramifications he meant, of course,
the consequences of the drug and sex scandal enveloping Ted Haggard,
the Evangelical pastor. Balmer was most worried about how this
latest revelation of sexual hypocrisy would impact on the 2006
election.
One can only wonder if the
ramifications might go much further than the good professor anticipated,
further than the sad pastor, his family, parishioners and fellow
leaders within the evangelical movement could have ever imagined.
Perhaps, this act marks the eclipse of the current fourth wave
of American evangelical fury.
A week or so before the election,
Haggard, a devoutly married father of five children, was caught
with his proverbial pants down in a homosexual scandal. Mike
Jones, a former male prostitute from Denver, claimed that he
had many drug-fueled trysts with Haggard during the previous
three years. Haggard, initially adhering to the oldest defense,
denied ever having met Jones, taking illegal drugs or having
a homosexual liaison. He insisted, he "[n]ever had a gay
relationship with anybody, and I'm steady with my wife, I'm faithful
to my wife. So, I don't know if this is election year politics
or if this has to do with the [gay] marriage amendment or what
it is."
Over the following few days,
his story unraveled. First, he acknowledged meeting Jones, but
only as a masseuse. As for the drugs, "I was tempted, but
I never used it," he admitted, insisting that he had bought
methamphetamine only to flush it down the drain. Finally, the
ugly truth came out: "There is part of my life that is so
repulsive and dark that I've been warring against it all of my
adult life." In a letter to his congregation, Haggard confessed
that he was "a deceiver and a liar" and begged for
forgiveness.
Haggard was a leading light
of the evangelical movement and, ironically, was considered a
moderate. He was the founder and head of 14,000-member New Life
Church, based in Colorado Springs, CO, and president of the National
Association of Evangelicals, a group that claims thirty million
members. He advocated against global warming, poverty and the
genocide in Darfur. He enjoyed considerable influence on Capitol
Hill and was a regular participant in the Monday-morning White
House conference call to religious leaders. He condemned both
gay marriage and homosexuality, insisting, on a scary YouTube
video, "We don't have to debate about what we should think
about homosexual activity, it's written in the Bible."
In disgrace, Haggard joins
a growing list of conservatives who exemplify the moral hypocrisy
that distinguishes the Bush era. Much has been made of the sex
scandals involving Mark Foley (R-FL) and Don Sherwood (R-PA).
Foley, following an allegation that he sent improper messages
to adolescent pages (if not engaging in worse behavior), had
been safely secluded in an alcohol recovery program to keep him
out of sight until after the election; his House seat went to
a Democrat. Don Sherwood (R-PA), swept up in a five-year long
adulterous relation with a woman half his age, and who he allegedly
tried to strangle, lost his seat to Democratic challenger Chris
Carney, a Navy Reserve officer.
These moral lapses join the
financial misdeeds pioneered by Jack Abramoff and his K Street
lobbying cronies. So far, this scandal has led to the defeat
and/or resignations of Sen. Conrad Burns (R-MT), who received
$137,000 from Abramoff, and former Congressmen Tom DeLay (R-TX),
Robert Ney (R-OH) and Randy "Duke" Cunningham (R-CA);
John Doolittle (R-CA), whose wife received payments from Abramoff,
held on to his seat. Many post-election surveys found that one
of the important reasons voters went to the polls was outrage
over such scandalous, if not criminal, behavior.
Finally, we have the example
of William Bennett, the self-serving, self-righteous hypocrite
who turned "virtue" into a dirty word. This devout
Catholic, former drug czar under Bush 1st and outspoken critic
of drinking, gay marriage and wife swapping, was one of Bill
Clinton's most unrelenting detractors during his impeachment
hearings. However, as reported in The Washington Monthly
and other sources, over the last decade Bennett made dozens of
trips to casinos in Atlantic City and Las Vegas where, as a "preferred
customer," his total losses topped $8 million. He is also
reported to have maintained a clandestine liaison with a buff
Las Vegas dominatrix, Mistress Lee, his "beautiful domme
muse mistress." In his best seller, The Book of Virtues,
Bennett wrote: "We should know that too much of anything,
even a good thing, may prove to be our undoing... [We] need ...
to set definite boundaries on our appetites." In the face
of such self-serving hypocrisy, one should never forget Mae West's
memorable words: "Too much of a good thing can be wonderful."
(While an on-screen election commentator, no one mentioned Bennett's
past sins.)
Sin came to North America
with the first colonists four centuries ago. In the words of
the prominent Puritan minister Samuel Willard, " in nothing
doth the raging power of original sin more discover itself than
in the ungoverned exorbitancy of fleshly lust." This terror
of "ungoverned fleshly lust" continues till today,
finding its most fervent expression in the waves of evangelical
revivalism that have repeatedly swept the nation.
The Haggard scandal is more
significant than the end-of-century unravelings of Jim Bakker
and Jimmy Swaggart. Those individual scandals were just that
failings of particular individuals. Today's scandals resonate
far more deeply because they are enmeshed into a tapestry of
social and political crisis, a nation being restructured by globalization,
empire and growing economic inequality. Today, all scandals,
all ethical corruptions, all media manipulations, all political
opportunism, all illegal payoffs, all displays of ill-gotten
gain, all moral hypocrisy are increasingly seen as part of a
culture of greed and selfish acquisitiveness not seen since the
Robber Barons.
Today, America may be witnessing
the end of the fourth religious "Awakening." Over
the last two-and-a-half centuries, it has been overwhelmed by
waves of revivalist fury. Each wave has preceded or accompanied
a momentous phase of national development. The initial Great
Awakening galvanized the rural citizenry and contributed to the
American revolution; the second, the Great Revival, anticipated
the Civil War and fueled the abolitionist movement; the third,
while not a formal awakening, took the form of the Social Gospel
movement that reached its zenith in the wake of the Great War
and the rise of the temperance movement; the fourth arose with
Cold War anti-communist McCarthyism and the development of the
consumer society and took shape with Billy Graham's crusades
that launched the modern evangelical movement it culminated
with the inclusion of "In God We Trust" in the national
anthem and on our currency.
Today's awakening, a continuation
of the Graham's evangelicalism and Republican realignment of
the national political landscape, floundered during the '60s
and '70s but gained momentum following the AIDS panic of the
'80s. At its core is the desire not simply for its adherents
to live a religiously-inspired "moral" life, but a
life that they insist must be embraced by all other people, whether
children, neighbors, fellow Americans -- even distant Iraqis.
And it's a moral "life" covering all aspects of one's
life, particularly the most intimate aspects of sexual intimacy,
reproduction, child rearing and death. Within the matrix of
capital's push for globalization and the neocon's quest for empire,
today's evangelical movement has come to be defined as much by
its conformist religiosity as by its support for patriarchy (e.g.,
anti-abortion, opposition to sex education), social regression
(e.g., anti-evolution, anti-gay marriage), political control
(e.g., Patriot Act), economic oppression (e.g., cuts of entitlements)
and imperialist (mis)adventure (e.g., Iraq, Afghanistan). After
nearly two hundred years of incubation, evangelicals finally
seized state power.
President Bush is a strong
believer in evangelical revivalism. A few weeks before the election,
as reported in The Washington Post, he stated: "A
lot of people in America see this as a confrontation between
good and evil, including me. There was a stark change between
the culture of the '50s and the '60s -- boom -- and I think there's
change happening here," and added, "It seems to me
that there's a Third Awakening." (For a review of just how
much of the Bush Administration is under the control of evangelical
Christians, see "A Country Ruled by Faith" by Garry
Wills in The New York Review of Books.)
Bush, however, failed to acknowledge
that as powerful as the current wave of evangelical fury might
seem, it is following a pattern common to previous awakenings.
The Great Awakening, in part a popular movement against the
privileges of the wealthy and powerful, including the clergy
(and the colonies had state-sponsored churches), dissipated following
the Revolution. The Great Revival, inspired by a belief that
everyone could achieve grace and that slavery was immorally,
was overwhelmed by the Civil War and the growing social diversity
that remade the nation. The Social Gospel movement, which culminated
in the enactment of the 19th Amendment to restrict alcohol consumption,
collapsed under the corruption of Prohibition, interracial "slumming"
and the women's suffrage movement. And today's wave might just
be cresting.
Does the moral hypocrisy symbolized
by Ted Haggard's sex and drugs scandal indicate the "enormous
ramifications" that Professor Balmer worried about? Does
it represent an eclipse of the overbearing movement of fundamentalist
self-rigorousness? When the Haggard scandal is put in context
with the other equally hypocritical conduct represented by Foley,
Sherwood, the Abramoff gang and Bennett, it might well indicate
that the fourth wave of evangelical fury might be petering out.
In a secular world, each of
these conservative "sinners" has the right to maintain
their very private secret, be it homosexuality, ephebophilia
(i.e., adoration of adolescent youth), extramarital relations,
or gambling and masochism. As such, as long as their "sin"
neither violates the law (which the Abramoff gang failed to do)
nor the ethical basis of interpersonal relations (especially
with a wife and children), such sin could well remain a secret.
As long as one's private fantasy doesn't harm another, we are
all entitled to our personal privacy. However, when a private
secret contradicts a public declaration, especially when this
declaration is offered as a moralistic proscription that all
must adhere to and upon which public policy is legislated, one
crosses an ethical line. And when this violation of trust is
done by a "public" figure, be he or she a preacher,
politician or pundit, the public figure, like Haggard, Foley
and Bennett, engages in moral hypocrisy.
A revealing indicator of the
growing popular revulsion with such moral hypocrisy is suggested
by the evangelical vote in recent election. In 2004, white evangelical
or born-again Christians made up a quarter of the electorate
and 78 percent of them voted Republican; however, according to
initial 2006 exit polls, these voters accounted for only 57 percent
of the Republican vote. Equally revealing, a quarter of the
evangelicals are reported to have supported Democratic candidates.
Now that the election is over
and the Democrats have secured both the House and Senate, we
can, hopefully, expect a relaxation in the cultural wars. A
more tolerant cultural climate might provide a window to examine
perhaps the gravest moral hypocrisy that shadows the nation:
The great lie that Bush and his co-conspirators perpetrated on
the American people to get the nation into the Iraq war. We
must open the window further through exhaustive Congressional
hearings into the war and, if the truth of the conspiracy finally
comes out, impeachment might be the most important of the "enormous
ramifications" resulting from the Haggard scandal.
David Rosen is completing the manuscript for "Perversions:
America's Secret Passion for Deviant Sexual Pleasures."
He is author of, most recently, "130 Parties in 30 Days:
Matt Gonzales & Indie Culture," The
Political Edge, a collection on the 2004 San Francisco mayoral
election (ed., Chris Carlsson, City Lights, 2005).
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