Religion

Spare a thought for Ted Haggard  

The outed evangelical leader was a moderate, and is in for a terrible time now 

by Michael Nenonen  

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On November 3 2006, following allegations that he had been using methamphetamine and having sex with another man, Ted Haggard resigned as the pastor of the New Life Church and the president of the National Association of Evangelicals. In a letter made public on November 5, Haggard wrote, “The fact is I am guilty of sexual immorality, and I take responsibility for the entire problem. I am a deceiver and a liar. There is a part of my life that is so repulsive and dark that I've been warring against it all of my adult life.” Haggard, who has been an outspoken opponent of gay marriage, has been directed by his church to undergo counseling with evangelical pastors Jack Hayford and Tommy Barnett, who, Haggard says, will “perform a thorough analysis of my mental, spiritual, emotional and physical life. They will guide me through a program with the goal of healing and restoration for my life, my marriage, and my family. ” That program will apparently include polygraph tests. Judging from the discussion boards I’ve visited, a lot of people are happy that this homophobe has been hoisted on his own petard. The scandal gives little cause for rejoicing, however. As right-wing evangelists go, Haggard was a moderate.

He’s one of the few evangelical leaders to argue that Christians have a moral responsibility to address poverty and global warming, and he’s been critical of the slanderous attacks upon Islam by people like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. While Falwell was calling the Prophet Muhammad a “demon-possessed pedophile,” Haggard was saying, “We must temper our speech. There has to be a way to do good works without raising alarms.” He wanted to have a meeting with Falwell, Robertson, and other Islam-bashing Protestant leaders to discuss the damage their comments were causing. And, while Haggard believed that as a Christian he was obligated to condemn homosexuality and oppose same-sex marriage, he wasn’t opposed to legislation allowing for same-sex civil unions.

Haggard’s fall will only drive the evangelical movement further to the right. I can’t help wondering whether he was outed in order to purge the evangelical community of a moderating voice and discredit his more progressive beliefs.

I also wonder whether those beliefs had anything to do with his sexual leanings. Homosexual desire can sometimes be an intellectually and emotionally liberating force in a man’s inner life. By blurring the lines between masculinity and femininity, it encourages men to acknowledge their emotions, their vulnerabilities, and their interconnectedness, traits that men within patriarchal societies are supposed to deny. Could it be that the desires that Haggard described as “so repulsive and dark” helped him become a better man?

If so, then Haggard will be the last person to realize it. To understand Haggard’s predicament, it’s useful to read Susan Griffin’s Pornography and Silence: Culture’s Revenge Against Nature (Harper, 1981). While Griffin’s analysis focuses on the psychology of “pornographers,” her theory illuminates the struggles that are tearing Haggard apart.

Griffin argues that patriarchal culture is fuelled by the masculine desire to be liberated from nature and from the physical body through which nature most intimately expresses itself. The patriarch craves this freedom because “nature can make him want. Nature can cause him to cry in loneliness, to feel a terrible hunger, or a thirst. Nature can even cause him to die.” Patriarchs yearn for a world in which the mind has total mastery over nature.

Sexuality poses the greatest challenge to this project of emancipation, because “inside the experience of sexual knowledge, he learns that culture and nature, meaning and love, spirit and matter, are one. And in this he loses the illusion that culture has given him against the vulnerability of his own flesh.” It’s here that the patriarchal war against nature is most intense.

The war is vividly displayed in the iconography of sadomasochistic pornography. Griffin writes that the sadist and the victim, “the essential couple in pornography, that couple which appears in so many disguises and so many familiar social modes—it is that part of the mind which belongs to culture pitted against the body.”

If sadomasochistic pornography is patriarchy’s shadow-side, then patriarchal religions like Christianity are its public face: “If all the literature of pornography were to be represented by one performance, and if that performance were to move into its most dramatic moments, the scenes which have been secretly promised by all that has gone before, which will both embody the entire action and meaning of the play and give to its audience their most acute emotional experience, these would have to be the moments (which are inevitable in the pornographic oeuvre) in which most usually a woman, sometimes a man, often a child, is abducted by force, verbally abused, hung, his or her body suspended, wounded, and then murdered. But this is a drama we have all been called upon to witness, to witness and weep at beholding, taking this suffering into our hearts with our very belief in the divinity of goodness; for who in this culture can have escaped the story of Christ’s martyrdom?”

While Griffin’s analysis fails to account for schools of Christianity that focus on Christ’s teachings rather than his murder, or that view the crucifixion as a mythological allegory rather than a historical narrative, when it comes to right-wing Christianity her point is well-made. After seeing Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, a sadomasochistic spectacle of unrelenting horror, Haggard called it “A beautiful, wonderful account of the last twelve hours of the life of Jesus Christ.” For Gibson and Haggard alike, the triumph of the immortal soul requires the humiliation of mortal flesh.

And here the tragic dimensions of Haggard’s story are fully exposed. Haggard seeks salvation through the enslavement of the flesh, but the flesh, which is in the end life itself, will not tolerate slavery. Haggard’s body will constantly rebel against such abuse, and Haggard, knowing no better, will humiliate it all the more. He’ll encourage others to do the same, and chastise those who don’t. The war he wages against himself is futile and unjust, and he won’t be its only casualty.

So spare a kind thought for Haggard, a man who’s not without virtue, and whose name means to have “a gaunt, wasted, exhausted, or worn appearance, as from prolonged suffering, exertion, or anxiety.” As the Christ he’s crucifying would tell us, he doesn’t know what he’s doing.

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