Progressive Christians Uniting

The Sanctity of Marriage Is Looking a Bit Haggard

The progressive religious blogosphere is all but overflowing today with charity toward the Rev. Ted Haggard and his family and flock in the wake of the assertion by a former male escort that he engaged in gay sex for money with Haggard over a three-year period. My blogging colleagues are doing the “judge not, lest ye be judged” thing, which seems reasonable and right, as does the principle of “innocent until proven guilty.” The only problem, it seems to me, is that Pastor Ted has done a heck of a lot of judging in his run as head of the 30-million-member National Association of Evangelicals and also as pastor of the 14,000-member New Life Church in Colorado Springs. So he doesn’t quite start off as a total innocent.

Because the escort, Mike Jones, says that he retained Haggard’s phone messages as well as an envelope used by Haggard to transmit cash, it seems unlikely that Haggard will get a free pass from the committee of pastors looking into the charge. My prediction is that they will report (after the election) that Haggard did indeed have a liaison with Jones and they will describe Haggard’s behavior as a deplorable lapse but nevertheless one that should be met with compassion and forgiveness, not judgment and excommunication. They will talk about all the stress someone in Haggard’s position experiences, and they will note that sometimes it is God’s most faithful servants whom the Devil is most determined to trip up.

In the end (and again, this is just my prediction) erring Ted Haggard, married for 28 years and the father of five children, will be pretty much exonerated and forgiven–and then quietly disappeared from leadership. The affair certainly won’t affect evangelical campaigning against gay equality and against acceptance of gays within the community faith one iota.

This is because a straight man who has gay sex (from time to time) is by definition always morally superior to a gay man who has only gay sex. Vast, well-funded evangelical ministries exist to convert gay men to ignoring their natural attraction to other men and having sex with women instead, even though (to my mind) this amounts to promoting what Paul, in Romans 1, calls “unnatural relations”–literally, sex that goes against nature.

Most people will take strong exception to this reading of Paul, but I’m sticking with it. The whole point of living with integrity, whether straight or gay, is to honor as fully as possible how God made you. Haggard’s unforgiveable offense was not indulging his urge for a little manflesh on the side, although he might have considered his marriage vows before going there. No, his truly unforgiveable offense was his repeated public insistence that gay people who live lives of complete integrity before God are nevertheless unwelcome in God’s church and unworthy of full equality in American civil society.

Presuming to know the mind of God and making an idol of heterosexual marriage: these are the things for which Haggard and his fellow Pharisees must be held accountable.

I’m willing to withhold judgment on whether or not Haggard actually paid Mike Jones for sexual favors, but I cannot and will not withhold judgment on the “weightier matters of the law” in this case.

                                                                            - Peter Laarman

Posted under: Happening in the World