I’m sitting here in the Rev. Ted Haggard’s new church of St. James in Colorado Springs, listening to him talk about love.
“The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself as love,” says Haggard, who speaks softly and matter-of-factly in a collared shirt and jeans and has lost much of the bravado he once exhibited before he was outed three and a half years ago for having sex with a male prostitute and buying crystal methamphetamine from him.
“How cruel and mean and brutal people are getting toward one another,” he says. “Even the hatred in the church toward our current administration, I think, is sad.”
Evangelicals have gotten too focused on politics and not enough on improving the lives of those around them, he says.
After everything that has been said and done in the past several years by the religious right, his remarks sound positively refreshing, so much that I feel like putting my hands in the air and giving him a hearty “Amen.”
I know. Weird. But in Haggard’s church Sunday, there is no discussion of Obama being a covert Muslim, of socialist-led plots to force death panels on Grandma, or of decrying the concept of social justice. (Actually, each week, Haggard devotes 30 percent of the offering to a cause named by a member of the congregation.) So, it makes me realize just how quickly times have changed in only three years.
In this context, Haggard seems tolerant. There are no far-right historical revisionists here trying to hijack the civil rights movement from the memory of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. by holding a religious rally at the Lincoln Memorial; no one is trying to further a conservative political agenda by calling President Obama’s faith a “perversion,” as Glenn Beck said last week:
“You see, it’s all about victims and victimhood; oppressors and the oppressed; reparations, not repentance; collectivism, not individual salvation. I don’t know what that is, other than it’s not Muslim, it’s not Christian. It’s a perversion of the gospel of Jesus Christ as most Christians know it.”
At least if Haggard is harboring such ideas, he’s not talking about them. Instead, he just talks about love, which he says is woefully lacking in today’s evangelical churches. He says he can’t find a seminary class exclusively devoted to teaching future leaders about love. He can’t find any megachurch conferences that have one workshop developed to teaching about how to love one another.
“It’s not surprising that we’ve developed a loveless church,” Haggard says.
Since June, at the Pikes Peak Center (Cheech and Chong will be performing their Getting Legal tour there Oct. 16), Haggard holds Sunday worship in Studio Bee. It’s part of his gradual return to his ministry, which he began in November.
Perhaps he’s picked up some humility since the scandal which led to his ouster from his pastorship of the 14,000-member Free Life Church and his resignation as head of the 30 million-member National Association of Evangelicals. Or perhaps his ego is still stinging from some of the comments church leadership made about him, a man who was once one of the most powerful evangelical leaders in America. After he had pronounced himself healed of homosexual “urges,” he received much criticism from his former community.
Haggard closes his sermon by addressing the elephant in the room. He refers to it as the “tragedy” that befell him, an interesting choice of word for someone who says he’s accepted responsibility for his actions. He says the three weeks of trauma resolution therapy he received saved him and since then he says he has not had “one compulsive thought or one compulsive act.”
Haggard tells me later that his message hasn’t changed and that he has always espoused a message of love. But the ubiquitous Youtube videos certainly reveal a man who spent a lot of time preaching about the biblical evils of homosexuality. He says he hasn’t changed his opposition to gay marriage (he supports civil unions), even though he claims to have an “inclusive” church that embraces people from all walks of life. He still maintains that homosexuality is a sin. So I guess inclusive means he wants to help those who are gay find “healing” as he did.
Also, the man who has often spoken of the violent spirit of the Qur’an, says that the Park 51 mosque is a local zoning issue and should not be up for national debate.
Now that Haggard knows what it’s like to be judged, it remains to be seen whether he is truly creating a church based more on compassion than hate. But it’s interesting that he chose the Book of James as the cornerstone of his church. James 2:13 says that “judgment without mercy will be shown to anyone who has not been merciful. Mercy triumphs over judgment.”
