A journey to here

How the Rev. Ted Haggard made me think outside my box

By: Kaitlyn Drinkwater

Posted: 7/6/09

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.

Another documentary, "Jesus Camp," features scenes disconcertingly similar to my own church-camp-going childhood. It provides a glimpse of how the children who become adults like Haggard start out. Ironically, Haggard himself has a cameo speaking out against homosexuality, back when he was still a pastor.

Children are our future, in the most literal of ways. But when we, as groups in society, start seeing children as the future we want to create and raising them to fit that mold, we prevent our children from becoming their own person and blur the line between culture and cult.

Becky Fischer, featured prominently on "Jesus Camp," recognizes children's usefulness. "They're so open, they're so usable to Christianity." I don't know about you, but talking about children as useful leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

In the documentary, young children are groomed to be warriors for God. Most of them are homeschooled and attend churches with the same conservative, evangelical bent as the camp. The scenes where children sob and speak in tongues while praying for an end to abortion don't bother me nearly so much as the behind-the-scenes footage of Fischer talking about how easy it is to win children over with a smile and a quick object lesson and have them back out on the street with pamphlets.

If you can win them over with five minutes and the clever application of a Jell-O brain mold, is it genuine or is it just another box?

Children are born blank slates, onto which is written the culture, language and morality of their parents and society. They have no frame of reference for the world. In some ways they crave someone to give them a box to inhabit: to provide clear rules and structure for a world that's really too complicated for that.

Children have no idea what is OK, what is normal or what is wrong. Which is why it can be so damaging to raise children in a parentally created box. If it turns out the child doesn't fit in that box or they run into someone else who doesn't, they have a schism of what's right in front of them and what they've always been told. Sometimes, worse yet, they never question the box, and they never get out.

I'm a follower of Jesus, but I didn't sign up for a system that uses its children as tools with no care for their futures. Haggard's situation doesn't make me angry, it makes me sad. He seems like someone who was raised inside a box, and when he started to feel that he didn't belong there he didn't know of any other place to go, so he ignored the parts that didn't belong as best he could, a point reiterated by Pelosi in an interview with New York Magazine.

"He hasn't fully formed his answer. He's going through all of this in public. He's working out his sexuality live on television. 'Are you gay?' 'Well, I'm … kind of …'" I genuinely believe that he has been forced to come up with an answer to these things that he's worked 53 years to ignore."

At 50 years old Haggard was unceremoniously dumped out of his box, which has led me to think about my own.

Kat Drinkwater is a senior University Studies-Honors: psychology and neuroscience major.