The FundamentaList (No. 63)

[Joanne98]

This week in the religious right: Reconsidering Ted Haggard, a deeper look at Rick Warren's finances, and Bristol Palin on birth control.

Sarah Posner | January 14, 2009 | web only

1. Ted Haggard, Sex, and Rick Warren's Marketing Strategy.
Just a few short years ago, Ted Haggard sat atop the evangelical empire of Colorado Springs, where he was lauded as the nation's most successful megachurch pastor and most politically connected evangelical. Then he had the most public, ridiculed fall from grace since Jim Bakker, a fall made possible not by lying, or cheating on his wife, or even buying drugs. His great, unforgivable transgression? Being gay.
Back in 2004, it was impossible to see any daylight between Haggard's politics and Rick Warren's. They both were cheerleaders for George W. Bush, and both were fixated on the conservative evangelical imperatives of stopping gay marriage and squashing abortion rights. Yet in the four intervening years, during which anyone with an ounce of political acumen realized that continuing to hitch one's wagon exclusively to the Republicans was a recipe for irrelevance, and that making some Democratic friends might be politically beneficial, Haggard crashed and burned. Warren filled the void with some clever and strategic marketing. Voila! He's not so conservative after all.

While it's not evident that Haggard could have been willing or capable of engineering a Warren-esque shift to become Barack Obama's invocator-in-chief, it is a curious question to ponder. Had no scandal upended his pastoral career, would he have chosen a similar path to that taken by Warren? Could he have repackaged himself as a kinder, gentler homophobe, or firmly aligned himself with the NAE's civil-unions-embracing, contraceptives-endorsing Richard Cizik? Suppose he had just decided to admit to being gay, and to continue pastoring, this time in a gay-affirming ministry? That, if anything, might have landed him a second-tier spot at the Lincoln Memorial two days before inauguration, instead of in front of the Capitol for one of the most important moments in American history.

Banished from church work, Haggard now sells insurance, and, according to a Newsweek article previewing an upcoming HBO documentary, he is flailing in his efforts to come to terms with his sexuality. In the documentary, the magazine notes, Haggard "puts himself back on the couch, asking, 'Gay, straight, bisexual—what are you, Ted Haggard?' Perhaps naively he also allows himself to be filmed lovingly sucking an ice pop."

Haggard's sad tale is a case study in the durability of the conservative evangelical obsession with sexuality and sex roles, in spite of a full-bore marketing blitz over the past few years to convince America that the chief evangelical mission is serving as stewards of the environment and champions of the poor. In addition to refusing church membership to "unrepentant gays," Warren maintains his own version of evangelical patriarchy dogma, which requires male "headship" of the family, the basis for, among other things, his edict that abused wives stick with their husbands. Evangelicalism's most manly man, Mark Driscoll, profiled in Sunday's Times Magazine, might find Warren a limp-wristed sissy. But underneath Warren's public persona as a warm-hearted do-gooder is the fundamentalist view of what the Bible says about how men should act: that they can't be gay, and they're in charge of their wives.

2. Is Warren Transparent About His Charity Finances?
Warren and his wife boast on their Web site that "as philanthropists, Rick and Kay Warren give away 90 percent of their income through three foundations: Acts of Mercy, which serves those infected and affected by AIDS; Equipping the Church, which trains church leaders in developing countries; and the Global PEACE Fund, which fights poverty, disease, and illiteracy."

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http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=the_fundamentalist_011409