The Dupes of Haggard

The megachurch pastor who was the also titular leader of the U.S. evangelical lobby has finally admitted that he is guilty of "sexual immorality". Haggard, a man with an apparent hotline to God and a weekly conference call with someone who thinks he is God, is deeply anti-intellectual, a notorious homophobe and a highly vocal opponent of gay marriage.



Haggard became a born-again Christian in 1972, and then went on to study at the aptly named Oral Roberts University, a charismatic Christian university in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He took up the position of associate pastor of a megachurch in Louisiana in 1984 and moved to Colorado to establish the New Life Church shortly afterwards. This church grew from a small group meeting in his house to the huge congregation and enormous campus it currently occupies.

The scandal came to public attention last week, after a claim made by masseur Mike Jones on a Colorado radio station that he had been paid to have sex with Mr Haggard almost every month over the past three years. Ted Haggard has denied the claims made by Mr Jones but said he did receive a massage from him. He also admitted to buying methamphetamine but claims that he "never used it".

He was fired by the church on Saturday 4th of November, having stepped down as the head of the National Association of Evangelicals the previous Thursday.

For anyone interested, Harpers have a very interesting article with lots of background info on the church, its former pastor and their somewhat bizarre beliefs.

On the issue of gay marriage, I guess I am what most fundie Christians would describe as 'luke warm'. In reality, I think there are far more urgent and important issues to occupy my thoughts and my time than the relatively trivial question of whether two people of the same sex should be able to have a piece of paper that declares them to be in a legally recognised civil union.

One of the issues that I feel does warrant concern is the enormous undue influence the fundamentalist evangelical lobby has on the United States government and in particular the foreign policy of the administration. I am also concerned about the unquestioning support that lobby has for the state of Israel and the utter contempt it displays for those who happen to find themselves in Israel's firing line.

Quite a few members of that same lobby decry anyone who shows any concern for the environment or the future of the planet as being an 'earth worshipper' and believe that the dominion over the earth that was given them by the great real-estate agent in the sky is a right to plunder, consume and destroy the finite resources of the planet.

I am convinced that the sort of duplicitousness and hypocrisy displayed by Ted Haggard is but the tip of the iceberg and that many more such skeletons are hiding out in the closets of various high-profile fundamentalist leaders. The sooner the rest of them are outed, the better for all of us.