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Originally Posted by alansmithee
What might be best for the country is not always what is best for the individual. Maybe these "hypocrites" are merely putting what they believe to be the country's best interests ahead of their own personal interests.
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....so, you think that you can just slip back in here....after 9 months' absence and start posting again?
Welcome back, alansmithee !
I don't think that you are correct... in simply dismissing this "self loathing" phenomena as altruistic. It has much to do with religiously influenced, dysfunction driven delusion, or possibly vice versa. More and more, I am struck by my observation that, with all of their talk of "discernment"....Ted Haggard's flock of faithful, and indeed, the larger collective of evangelicists have an unimpressive "track record" when it comes to picking spiritual and political leaders, dontcha think? Could one reason be that it is so difficult to distinguish their spiritual leaders from their political leaders?
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http://www.therevealer.org/archives/timely_002694.php
Haggard's Downfall
02 November 2006
By Jeff Sharlet
I was relaxing this afternoon, watching an episode of Big Love, the HBO series starring Bill Paxton as a Mormon hiding his polygamous life, when I heard from from "The Peter Boyles Show" in Denver: "Your buddy Ted Haggard's in a shit storm."
The "buddy" part was ironic -- since I wrote about Ted Haggard and his church, New Life, in the May, 2005 issue of Harper's ("Soldiers of Christ,") Ted has been decidedly less than friendly. I always wondered why. Although my article was critical, it led to a surge of more mild-mannered media for Ted, one of the most powerful but least-known evangelical bigs in America. Barbara Walters asking him about heaven, Tom Brokaw doing his "on the other hand" routine.
But too much attention can be a bad thing. Details are still coming in, but it seems a gay man in Denver named Mike Jones was watching TV recently when he saw one of his regular sex partners, whom he knew only as "Art," on the tube: Ted, welcome to celebrity.
I just talked to Jones on the phone. He's not vindictive, nor particularly political; he's voted for Republicans and Democrats. He struggled with his decision, out of compassion for a man in the closet. <b>He was motivated, he said, simply by being a gay man who's been around long enough to know how Ted's politics play out in the ordinary lives of people Jones cares about. That's about as good a motive for outing someone as I've ever heard.</b> This afternoon, Ted announced that he was temporarily stepping down from his positions of authority......
.....It's been big news at the state's major paper, The Denver Post, as well. That's because the story is bigger than Ted; statewide, he's one of the key forces behind two new anti-gay amendements. Nationwide, as president of the National Association of Evangelicals, he sets the political tone for the Christian conservative movement at an administrative level broader than the influence of better-known figures such as Jerry Falwell.
If the story is true, Ted's a hypocrite of the worst kind; then again, he's also another victim of the very closet over which he publicly stands guard, as are all the New Life church members he's led into it. That story may not make the mainstream media. Indeed, it seems unlikely that Ted's downfall will be reported with any more nuance than that of Mark Foley's political collapse. Sex, it seems, blinds the press to politics.
I'm re-posting my original Harper's piece below not because I think I got the story right -- if Jones' story is true, I missed it by a mile -- but because I hope it'll help the journalists now on the job get the story right by not making the mistake I did. The downfall of Ted Haggard is not just another tale of hypocrisy, it's a parable of the paradoxes at the heart of American fundamentalism. <b>I wrote about the role of sex in Ted's theology, but removed it from the final edit of the story (some of it I refashioned into a short essay on Christian Right's men's sex books for <a href="http://www.nerve.com/dispatches/sharlet/sexasaweapon/">Nerve)</a>. I made the mistake of viewing Ted's sex and his religion of free market economics as separate spheres.</b> The truth, I suspect, is that they're intimately bound in a worldview of "order," one to which it turns out even Ted cannot conform........
<b>Soldiers of Christ: Insider America's Most Powerful Megachurch
The following is the first half of "Soldiers of Christ: Inside America's Most Powerful Megachurch," a feature by Revealer editor Jeff Sharlet in the May, 2005 issue of Harper's.</b>
....... At the complex’s western edge is the World Prayer Center, which looks like a great iron wedge driven into the plains. The true architectural wonder of New Life, however, is the pyramid of authority into which it orders its 11,000 members. At the base are 1,300 cell groups, whose leaders answer to section leaders, who answer to zone, who answer to district, who answer to Pastor Ted Haggard, New Life’s founder.
Pastor Ted, who talks to President George W. Bush or his advisers every Monday, is a handsome forty-eight-year-old Indianan, most comfortable in denim. He likes to say that his only disagreement with the President is automotive; Bush drives a Ford pickup, whereas Pastor Ted loves his Chevy. In addition to New Life, Pastor Ted presides over the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), whose 45,000 churches and 30 million believers make up the nation’s most powerful religious lobbying group, and also over a smaller network of his own creation, the Association of Life-Giving Churches, 300 or so congregations modeled on New Life’s “free market” approach to the divine. Pastor Ted will serve as NAE president for as long as the movement is pleased with him, and as long as Pastor Ted is its president the NAE will make its headquarters in Colorado Springs.
Some believers call the city the Wheaton of the West, in honor of Wheaton, Illinois, once the headquarters of a more genteel Christian conservatism; others call Colorado Springs the “evangelical Vatican,” a phrase that says much both about the city and about the easeful orthodoxy with which the movement now views itself. Certainly the gathering there has no parallel in history, not in Lynchburg, Virginia, nor Tulsa, nor Pasadena, nor Orlando, nor any other city that has aspired to be the capital of evangelical America. Evangelical activist groups (“parachurch” ministries, in the parlance) in Colorado Springs number in the hundreds, though a precise count is hard to specify. Groups migrate there and multiply. They produce missionary guides, “family resources,” school curricula, financial advice, athletic training programs, Bibles for every occasion. The city is home to Young Life, to the Navigators, to Compassion International; to Every Home for Christ and Global Ethnic Missions (Youth Ablaze). Most prominent among the ministries is Dr. James Dobson’s Focus on the Family, whose radio programs (the most extensive in the world, religious or secular), magazines, videos, and books reach more than 200 million people worldwide.
The press tends to regard Dobson as the most powerful evangelical Christian in America, but Pastor Ted is at least his equal. Whereas Dobson plays the part of national scold, promising to destroy politicians who defy the Bible, Pastor Ted quietly guides those politicians through the ritual of acquiescence required to save face. He doesn’t strut, like Dobson; he gushes. When Bush invited him to the Oval Office to discuss policy with seven other chieftains of the Christian right in late 2003, Pastor Ted regaled his whole congregation with the story via email. “Well, on Monday I was in the World Prayer Center”— New Life’s high-tech, twentyfour- hour-a-day prayer chapel —“and my cell phone rang.” It was a presidential aide; “the President,” says Pastor Ted, wanted him on hand for the signing of the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act. Pastor Ted was on a plane the next morning and in the President’s office the following afternoon. “It was incredible,” wrote Pastor Ted. He left it to the press to note that Dobson wasn’t there.
No pastor in America holds more sway over the political direction of evangelicalism than does Pastor Ted, and no church more than New Life. It is by no means the largest megachurch, nor is Ted the best-known man of God: Saddleback Church, in southern California, counts 80,000 on its rolls, and its pastor, Rick Warren, has sold 20 million copies of his book The Purpose-Driven Life. But Warren’s success has come at the price of passion; his doctrine, though conservative, is bland and his politics too obscured by his self-help message to be potent. Although other churches boast more eminent memberships than Pastor Ted’s—near D.C., for example, McLean Bible Church and The Falls Church (an Episcopal church that is, like many “mainline” churches today, now evangelical in all but name) minister to the powerful— such churches are not, like New Life, crucibles for the ideas that inspire the movement, ideas that are forged in the middle of the country and make their way to Washington only over time. Evangelicalism is as much an intellectual as an emotional movement; and what Pastor Ted has built in Colorado Springs is not just a battalion of spiritual warriors but a factory for ideas to arm them.
New Life began with a prophecy. In November 1984 a missionary friend of Pastor Ted’s, respected for his gifts of discernment, made him pull over on a bend of Highway 83 as they were driving, somewhat aimlessly, in the open spaces north of the city. Pastor Ted—then twentyeight, given to fasting and oddly pragmatic visions (he believes he foresaw Internet prayer networks before the Internet existed)—had been wondering why God had called him from near Baton Rouge, where he had been associate pastor of a megachurch, to this bleak city, then known as a “pastor’s graveyard.” The missionary got out of the car and squinted. He crouched down as if sniffing the ground. “This,” said the missionary, “this will be your church. Build here.”
So Pastor Ted did. First, he started a church in his basement. The pulpit was three five-gallon buckets stacked one atop the other, and the pews were lawn chairs. A man who lived in a trailer came round if he remembered it was Sunday and played guitar. Another man got the Spirit and filled a fivegallon garden sprayer with cooking oil and began anointing nearby intersections, then streets and buildings all over town. Pastor Ted told his flock to focus their prayers on houses with FOR SALE signs so that more Christians would come and join him. Once Pastor Ted and another missionary accidentally set off an alarm and hid together in a field while the police investigated. It was for a good cause, Pastor Ted would say; they were praying for the building to be taken off the market so it could someday be purchased for a future ministry. (It was.)
He was always on the lookout for spies. At the time, Colorado Springs was a small city split between the Air Force and the New Age, and the latter, Pastor Ted believed, worked for the devil. Pastor Ted soon began upsetting the devil’s plans. He staked out gay bars, inviting men to come to his church; his whole congregation pitched itself into invisible battles with demonic forces, sometimes in front of public buildings.
One day, while he was working in his garage, a woman who said she’d been sent by a witches’ coven tried to stab Pastor Ted with a five-inch knife she pulled from a leg sheath; Pastor Ted wrestled the blade out of her hand. He let that story get around. He called the evil forces that dominated Colorado Springs—and every other metropolitan area in the country—“Control.”
Sometimes, he says, Control would call him late on Saturday night, threatening to kill him. “Any more impertinence out of you, Ted Haggard,” he claims Control once told him, “and there will be unrelenting pandemonium in this city.” No kidding! Pastor Ted hadn’t come to Colorado Springs for his health; he had come to wage “spiritual war.”
He moved the church to a strip mall. There was a bar, a liquor store, New Life Church, a massage parlor. His congregation spilled out and blocked the other businesses. He set up chairs in the alley. He strung up a banner: SIEGE THIS CITY FOR ME, signed JESUS. He assigned everyone in the church names from the phone book they were to pray for. He sent teams to pray in front of the homes of supposed witches—in one month, ten out of fifteen of his targets put their houses on the market. His congregation “prayer-walked” nearly every street of the city.
Population boomed, crime dipped; Pastor Ted believes to this day that New Life helped chase the bad out of town. He thinks like that, a piston: less bad means more good. Church is good, and his church grew, so fast there were times when no one knew how many members to claim. So they stopped talking about “members.” There was just New Life. “Are you New Life?” a person might ask. New Life moved into some corporate office space. Soon they bought the land that had been prophesied, thirty-five acres, and began to build what Pastor Ted promised would be a new Jerusalem. .......
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http://www.nerve.com/dispatches/sharlet/sexasaweapon/
<b>Sex as a Weapon<br>
Decoding the Literature of the Christian Men's Movement</b>
by Jeff Sharlet
A discussion of the Christian men's movement — Iron John for fundamentalists, Promise Keepers to the tenth power — is best begun with some mean-spirited fun. Not because there is anything laughable about loving Jesus or thinking about gender, but because the language with which conservative evangelical men combine these two passions, at conferences and in "cell groups" and in books with titles such as You, The Warrior Leader; The Barbarian Way and Fight on Your Knees often seems as if it's been lifted directly from Beavis & Butt-Head, absent the adolescent giggles. The movement itself is deadly earnest, and worse, a threat — legally, emotionally, sometimes physically — to all those who can't or won't conform to its perversely precise dream of a nation of sexually self-regulating spiritual warriors. I’ll get to that. But first, some yuks.
Take, for example, God's Gift to Women (the title of a manliness guide for young men), male "headship" of the American family. Women can't get enough of good headship, but a man must be careful; a woman's hunger for his headship may lead him to abuse its potency through the sin of anger. A few years ago, I learned in an evangelical magazine what to do in such a situation: push your anger down and store it inside your heart, where Jesus will work it over it until it is ready to be "released," transformed into "white-hot brother love."
Christian men love some brothers more than others. Most loved of all, besides J.C., may be the Scottish warrior William Wallace, basis for the film Braveheart. In Wild at Heart: Discovering the Secret of a Man's Soul — still a hardcover bestseller four years after publication — John Eldredge writes of a present given to him by his wife: "Stasi slipped out of the room with the words, ‘Close your eyes . . . I have a surprise for you.'" When she tells him to look, Eldredge finds "a Scottish broadsword exactly like the one used by William Wallace. I had been looking for one for several months."
Apparently, Braveheart isn't just for lovers. In God's Gift To Women: Discovering the Lost Greatness of Masculinity, Eric Ludy writes of his youthful "introduction to ultimate manhood" in the form of Wallace, "one of history's most provocative men." Ludy, who opens his book by recounting a recurring nightmare of being "ushered in front of a mob of scrutinizing females" who find him inadequate, describes the image of William Wallace, riding to battle, that won him over: "His countenance was calm but intense. His sword was drawn. His cheeks were suffused with blood." Ludy asks himself, "Who is this man? And how can I get what he has?" (italics Ludy's).
Such questions have a double meaning that's obvious to the Christian men Ludy writes for, and it has nothing to do with Braveheart's broadsword: It's about Jesus. But the fact that so much of the language used to discuss Christ is homoerotic is no coincidence. The first miracle of Jesus to believers is that his appeal crossed so many boundaries of the ancient world. Rich
What's sad about books like God's Gift to Women is that they translate sexuality into codes of combat, and clichéd ones at that.
and poor, Jew and gentile, men and women — every kind of person loved him, and what's more, desired him. Theologians of far greater subtlety than Eldredge and Lundy suggest that while Christ was biologically male, his gender is harder to fix, since he held a literally erotic power over followers of all persuasions. For that matter, "eros," as a concept of any nuance in Western culture, owes its endurance to the Christians who for 2,000 years have been dreaming about God and how to know him, completely, fully, in spirit and in flesh.
What's sad about books like God's Gift to Women and Wild At Heart is that they attempt to contain the mystery of that question in metaphors that translate its inherent sexuality into codes of combat, and clichéd ones at that. The "enemy," of course, is Satan, but his names are legion: pornography, homosexuality, feminism, humanism, the monolithic foe Christian conservatives call, simply, "the culture." In a chapter dedicated to "military maneuvers," Lundy spells out his personal, three-point "battle strategy": "1. An identified point of attack [a personal vice to eradicate]. 2. A POW targeted for rescue [a non-Christian acquaintance to convert]. 3. A constant readiness to fight and fight hard."
Eldredge, one of the most influential gurus of the Christian men's movement, takes an even more aggressive tone. "A boy wants to attack something," he writes with approval, "and so does a man." Such hostility is not a sin to overcome, but the heart of headship, "a man's heart, his passions, his true nature, which he has been given by God."
Nonetheless, writers such as Eldredge and Lundy shy away from intellectual conflict. Even as they preach a metaphorically violent, domineering, and paternalistic vision of manliness, they dodge the natural question of that what happens when such men venture from their sacred hearths into the world. Not so Dr. James Dobson, one of a handful of the evangelical kingmakers to whom George W. Bush paid court before announcing his bid for the presidency in 2000. Dobson is most-recently known in the secular world for his charge that Spongebob Squarepants had been recruited as an agent of the "homosexual agenda," but for the millions who tune into his radio shows or read his books or subscribe to one of the publications produced by his organization, Focus on the Family, Dobson has long served as a source for wisdom that embodies the feminist adage that the personal is political.
Not that Dobson acknowledges a debt to feminism; indeed, he sees it as a threat to Christianity. The problem, as he outlines it in Straight Talk to Men, a Dobson "classic" originally published as Straight Talk to Men and Their Wives, is that men, in a righteous attempt to resolve the problems of sexism, have ceded too much power to women. As a result, he insists, women are engaging in a parody of male headship and most men lack the guts — and the sensitivity — to stand up to them. "Everything we do is influenced by our gender assignment," he writes. "Any confusion… in the relationship between the sexes… must be seen as threatening to the stability of society itself." Dobson, unlike other Christian manliness gurus, gets specific about the consequences, illustrated in this new edition of Straight Talk through an
"Homosexuals" is kind of a code within the Christian men's movement.
imaginary dialogue between a group of "yesterday's husbands and fathers" (from 1870) who've been transported into the present to talk to a representative of "the culture."
The culture's spokesman paints a lurid portrait of today's world, in which boys typically look at pornography depicting women "hanging from trees, and being murdered with knives, guns, ropes, etc."; in which "it its legal for a father… to have a homosexual experience with his son"; in which women are called to combat in a time of war, because men are not up to the job. "I miss John Wayne," laments Dobson.
The focus here is, as always, not on women, but on men, Jesus and John Wayne on the one hand, those whom C.S. Lewis — who privately enjoyed being dominated by his wife — called "men without chests." That is, "homosexuals."
I place "homosexuals" in quotes to suggest that the very term itself — so often referred to with code such as Lewis' — is itself a kind of code within the Christian men's movement. Lesbians, as one might imagine, are not popular among evangelicals; but then, they are not really imaginable. In the theology of "Jesus plus nothing," there is no room for anything that is not man-God (or God-man, if you're particular about such things), and that includes female sexuality. Many of the man-manuals advise loving attention to wives and speak of the joys of married, heterosexual sex as a bulwark against the culture (which is queer by definition, since it is not Christ-centered, a peculiar oxymoron at the heart of the faith), but they also teach a "sensitivity" that is called to stand in for the sins of their cavemen fathers. In an interview with New Man, a Christian magazine, John Hagee, a popular pastor who is the author of What Every Man Wants in a Woman, explains what, in turn, every woman wants in a man (which is odd, since Hagee's wife, Diana, is the author of a book of that name, and would have presumably been the more logical explicator): "nonsexual affection."
Well, sure. That this is news to anyone is hard to believe. But more shocking is Hagee's announcement that nearly every woman he's counseled over the years has told him that "It's really no big deal if I never have sex again with my husband." This makes sense only if one accepts the division of identity increasingly popular in evangelicaldom: young men are knights and young women are virginal maidens, and even after marriage that formula, in a sense, continues: Men must get dirty in battle, women must stay pure at home. Sex is for the fellas.
Some fellas respond to that "spiritual reality" by seeking out other fellas; guys, the thinking goes, are always up for a good time. The oversexed female as public enemy has been replaced by the oversexed male; and in the worst case scenario, he is gay. Or perhaps it is, for the Christian right, the best case scenario — as the 2004 election proved in the eleven states where conservative activists put anti-gay rights laws up for popular voting, rhetorical gay bashing has proven one of the most effective organizing tools in recent American political history.
Of course, if you ask Dobson why homosexuality looms so large in the evangelical mind, he'll tell you it's because godless humanists planted it there by way of subversive signals in our television programming. Ask Pastor Ted Haggard, president of the National
"The gay man" is the new seductress sent by Satan to tempt the men of Christendom.
Association of Evangelicals, and good cop to Dobson's bad cop at the top of the evangelical world, and he'll offer a more nuanced answer. Like most fundamentalists, Haggard believes that sexual sin is among the worst; he also knows it is the most common. Evangelicals, he'll say, aren't more obsessed with sexuality these days; rather, homosexuals are, somehow, more homosexual. The official line is that gay marriage marks a tipping point (Haggard, like many evangelicals, is a fan of Malcolm Gladwell's book of that name) into wholesale hedonism. The unofficial line, among leaders such as Haggard and Dobson is that it's a fight their side has already lost.
But the specter of gay marriage still serves a function. Christian conservatives take pains to distance themselves from the sexism of their forefathers. Every Christian man-guide emphasizes the claim that women play just as important a role in the maintenance of what evangelicals view as society's all-important unit, the family, and it's more than dishwashing, suckling, and sex (though what else they are to do is not often discussed). Women must submit to their husbands, but their husbands in turn must commit to "serving" their wives. The phrase that comes to mind is "separate but equal."
But with Christian womanhood restored and redeemed, a crucial character in the Christian conservative morality play has gone missing: the seductress. It is no longer acceptable to speak of loose women and harlots, since sexual promiscuity in a woman is the fault of the man who has failed to exercise his "headship" over her. It is his effeminacy, not hers, that is to blame. And who lures him into this spiritual castration? The gay man.
Christian conservatives loathe all forms of homo- and bisexuality, of course, but it is the gay man (singular; he's an archetype) who looms largest in their books and sermons and blogs and cell group meetings. Not, for the most part, as a figure of evil, but one to be almost envied. "The gay man" is the new seductress sent by Satan to tempt the men of Christendom. He takes what he wants and loves whom he will and his life, in the imagination of Christian men's groups, is an endless succession of orgasms, interrupted only by jocular episodes of male bonhomie. The gay man promises a guilt-free existence, the garden before Eve. He is thought to exist in the purest state of "manhood," which is boyhood, before there were girls.
Most Christian conservatives are deadly earnest in their proclamations of love for the sinner, even as they hate the sin. Indeed, that love is at the heart of books like Wild at Heart, and Jim George's A Man After God's Own Heart, and Every Man's Battle, a self-help manual for giving up masturbation which was co-authored by a couple of buddies. They love the gay man because he is a siren, and his song is alluring; and because they believe that the siren is nonetheless stranded at sea, singing in desperation from a slippery perch on a jagged outcrop of stone. The gay man, they imagine, is calling to them; and they believe they are calling back — as if all of human sexuality was a grand and tragic game of Marco Polo.
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