Ted Haggard 2.0
Posted on 02 December 2009 | by Wendy Norris | 
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Pastor Ted stands astride two hay bales triumphant and seemingly oblivious to the frigid night air inside the Haggard family barn, where 75 people have gathered for a prayer service.
Dressed in jeans and a favorite gray NYC sweatshirt, Haggard launches into a Borscht Belt routine for evangelicals that plays to raucous laughter. He wisecracks that God’s preoccupation with keeping tabs on Barack Obama may delay immediate answers to their prayers. A joke about the biblical significance of preaching in ramshackle sheds glides effortlessly into tonight’s homily from Acts 28:17, in which Paul, exonerated, returns to Jerusalem from Rome to persuade the Jews that the Messiah has indeed come.
In Haggard’s reading, he is Paul: not guilty as charged by the authorities, and preaching true redemption to the skeptics. His exegesis simultaneously taps into evangelical anxieties about persecution and lambastes its harsh authoritarianism, a foil for the self-styled apostle banished from his secular and spiritual kingdom for committing modern American evangelicalism’s cardinal sin of homosexuality.
The teachings of Paul play a starring role in Haggard’s personal and professional resurrection following the 2006 sex and drugs scandal that led to his abrupt resignation from the twin pulpits of conservative religious power: New Life Church in Colorado Springs and the National Association of Evangelicals and an unceremonious exile to Phoenix, Arizona.
Haggard fancies himself the rebel bucking authority, and bringing Christ’s true message to the masses. “I’m gonna be like Paul,” he tells me, relishing his new itinerant role. “This is insanity but I’m gonna to do it.”
The fallen pastor’s own Road to Damascus is taking place just off Interquest Parkway in Colorado Springs, a city referred to as the Jerusalem of evangelicalism.
Read the rest of the story at Religion Dispatches.
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