On Fallen Preachers

Ah, Ted Haggard. Mammoth prosperity as a preacher of the nondenominational New Life Church in Colorado Springs. I'd be lying if I said I wouldn't happily sit down and have coffee with him. Personality warm enough for the half-lookers. Funny, by all accounts paid real attention to his individual listeners, intelligent, kind, with a masterful preaching style and exegetical skills. He was also stone cold anti-homosexuality in the lawbook of his teachings. Nothing new; see the religious right (with a few exceptions).


We'll ignore for the moment that there's no explicit support for condemnation of homosexuality in either Old or New Testaments, and that's putting the case very generously. Leviticus with its arbitrary laws ideal for a community at a particular place and time: homosexuality warnings juxtaposed with prohibitions for haircuts (Lev. 19:28) and polyester (v. 19). The story of Sodom and Gomorrah and Lot in Genesis 19, which has absolutely no negative value stance toward homosexuality in the story, though the ignored or unlooked-at Ezekiel 16:49-50 points out the sins of Sodom in a list sharp enough to cut glass: pride, gluttony, "prosperous ease", refusal to aid the poor and needy. They were depraved, yes, and rape -- homosexual or not -- is a spiritual and ethical no-no. As Gordon Atkinson (aka Real Live Preacher) would have it, "let's all say it together, 'God doesn't like rape.' You could have listened to your heart and learned that, Christian. Move on." Yes, move on. Romans 1? Well, homosexuality is mentioned there as a subset of a deeper problem: paganistic sensuality. That's different, I'm afraid, than condemning homosexuality itself. And I'm also afraid that I didn't keep my promise to ignore.

But Haggard. Well. He didn't like homosexuality. He wanted the positive breaths of his clique against his back as he condemned the world. And what happened? Why, it turns out he's not simply a homosexual, but an adulterous methamphetamine user who solicited sex from a male prostitute. He had sex with his wife while drugged up. His church attempted a cover-up. He was a good guy with an otherwise harmless secret that he could have been open to accepting, but instead turned out pretty bad. I don't like muckraking unless there's a point to be applied, so we'll stick to the story.

What's the driving force behind the conspiratorial walk that Haggard once cleverly concealed? He isn't alone. Jimmy Swaggart walked the route with solicited sex toward a prostitute in a pornography decked-out hotel room. Jim Bakker walked through allegations of rape and financial exploitation and came out blood red at the end. They're all preachers who preached well -- respected, talented, apparently ideal. They all fell because the law was loved before love itself. And there are millions upon millions of others, preachers or not, Christians by name, who carry the same inward decay clothed with immaculate whitewashed walls.

People like Haggard have flesh. He occupies space. Imagine him sitting in his recliner in his living room the day after his church was told, trance-like, trembling inwardly over his humiliation. Imagine him constrained with anxiety over what to say to his wife and children, and how fearful he must have felt as he thought of the barbs his friends he once shared a sparkling ideology with would throw at him, the coldest of all indifference and unconcern. Imagine the deathly old age that painted his middle-aged face as he carried the world on his shoulders. There's always a second scandal with every scandal: that all of humanity holds dark secrets and only a handful of individuals get dropped into the morbid spotlight, bewailed and destroyed by a world just as inwardly thrilled over the stimulation a secret like this brings as it is externally paternal in its culprit rage. When scandals happen, I loathe the hot-trot lookers more than the emasculated looked-at. That's what Jesus did, but I would feel this way in a world without a Christ-contained history.

Haggard's former spirit hovers over every denomination flirting on the continuum whose extreme is Pharisaism. Every preacher whose highest value is less than love, who preaches love in the abstract, or not at all, who relies on the relative intelligence of the mind over the universal bathing power of the heart in choosing verses to support spiritual murder. Perhaps he is learning love at this very moment, even if his mind is sledding away from God. I hope.

You see, people like Haggard have the last judgment on earth. The true human beings (and Christians among them) never changed their inner love for him, before or after the fact. They, the amiable minority, are the innocent, and the rest of the world is in for bad times. I exult in a last judgment, not because I want the wicked or weak to be unveiled, but because I want the ill-treated to fit back into the universally human. Guilt plagues our past but the future holds our innocence, and she is always there, smiling brightly at our side. Blessed are the uncovered, for with them eternity is downhill. "Nothing is covered up that will not be uncovered, and nothing secret that will not become known" (Matthew 10:26). Lord, let it be.