Issue date: 7/6/09 Section: Opinion

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The Rev. Ted Haggard is a familiar name to many Americans. First as the highly successful and well-loved pastor of a Colorado Springs evangelical megachurch, and more recently as the disgraced and disowned former pastor of the church he founded following a gay-sex scandal.

While he was pastor of New Life Church, Haggard endorsed and propagated a system that vehemently condemned homosexuals, making him public enemy No. 1 for many in the homosexual community. A lot of people feel he's gotten what he deserved, since he was basically beaten and kicked to the curb by a system he helped create. It's true - there is more than a little irony in his punishment.

When I first read of the scandal, I was sickened. By his church's merciless response toward him and by Haggard's own hypocrisy. But rather than feeling vindicated by his downfall, I'm saddened.

When asked why he didn't come out about his problems before, Haggard made a painfully accurate observation: "The reason I kept my personal struggle a secret is because I feared that my friends would reject me and abandon me and kick me out and the church would exile me and excommunicate me, and that happened and more."

I wonder how we got here. How did Ted Haggard happen? What kind of religious system splits a man in two, to the point that he doesn't know who he is, but knows with certainty there is no one he can talk to about it? I'm not saying Haggard is blameless, far from it. But neither is the evangelical church in America when our children are growing into conflicted adults who can't discuss their issues.

Alexandra Pelosi, a documentary filmmaker, followed Haggard and his family for a year after his exile from Colorado. He was forced to leave the state as part of a severance deal from his former church. Instead of the confident pastor, the film shows a humbled Haggard trying to rebuild his world after being forced to abruptly reconcile the two lives he'd been leading and being betrayed by everyone he'd considered a friend.

So, how did we get here? Somewhere along the way the church started looking at people like Haggard as bad for business instead of remembering that "I am their business," as Haggard put it. "Jesus came for the sinners," he reminds himself and the filmmaker.

Continued...

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