Republican Gomorrah

by Max Blumenthal

  COMPLETELY HETEROSEXUAL

  As the 2006 midterm elections approached, Haggard basked in his media close-up. Among those beseeching him for face time were the producers of Jesus Camp, a documentary about the religious indoctrination of preadolescent evangelicals. Haggard cheerfully invited the filmmakers to his church to capture him in action. With cameras positioned at the foot of his pulpit, he performed with gusto. “We don’t need to have a general assembly about what we believe,” Haggard boomed. “It’s written in the Bible! All right, so we don’t have to debate about what we think about homosexual activity. It’s written in the Bible!”

  Haggard strutted toward the camera, growing closer until he was staring down its lens. He had a message for the liberal media. “I think I know what you did last night!” he exclaimed. Gales of laughter rippled through the pews. Haggard was on a roll. “If you send me a thousand dollars, I won’t tell your wife.” More laughter. Finally, as he paced back and forth on the stage, Haggard flashed his trademark toothy grin, punched his index finger at the camera, and warned half-jokingly, “If you use any of this, I’ll sue you!” Pastor Ted’s audience rolled in the aisles.

  Haggard’s rhetoric was classically anti-gay, but to have described his histrionics as hateful would be off the mark. His resentment of homosexuals was rooted more in envy than in loathing. Jeff Sharlet, a chronicler of the Christian right, noted that Haggard and many other leaders of the evangelical men’s movement viewed what they call the “homosexual lifestyle” not as a dark dungeon of sin but as “an endless succession of orgasms, interrupted only by jocular episodes of male bonhomie.” Homosexuality was dangerous because it was so tempting. “The gay man promises a guilt-free existence, the garden before Eve,” Sharlet wrote. “He is thought [by movement members] to exist in the purest state of ‘manhood,’ which is boyhood, before there were girls.” It was through his private admiration, and then emulation, of the stereotypical gay male that Haggard became the spitting image he had painted of the Antichrist.

  Every month or so, starting in 2003, Haggard stole away on motorcycle trips to Denver, traveling as “Art from Kansas City,” an anonymous, average white guy who just happened to be seeking impersonal gay sex. His excursions to the Mile High City began when he discovered explicit Internet advertisements placed by a bodybuilder and veteran male escort named Mike Jones on a website called rentboy.com. Over the course of three years, Haggard’s sessions with Jones progressed from mildly erotic massage to kinky sex involving an increasing variety of adult toys. Jones described Haggard’s favorite erotic instruments as “cock rings made of leather, rubber, or metal; jock-straps; tit clamps; and porn that he wanted to watch.”

  Eventually, Haggard asked Jones to procure methamphetamines for him, claiming he liked snorting it before having sex with his wife. In reality, Haggard snorted it during visits to Jones. Becoming more adventurous, he asked Jones to arrange an orgy with “6 to 8 college age guys from age 18 to 22.” Because Jones could not organize Haggard’s fantasy orgy, “Art from Kansas City” settled on voyeurism, watching Jones and a bodybuilder friend have sex—a spectacle he paid double to behold.

  “You know all the surveys say that evangelicals have the best sex life of any other group,” Haggard boasted in 2006 to Alexandra Pelosi, one of the documentarians who flocked to his exurban cathedral to spend some time with the Christian right’s golden boy. Mugging for the camera, Haggard grabbed a random male parishioner from his church and asked him how often he brings his wife to sexual climax. “Every time,” the man responded with an embarrassed grin. Haggard grinned. “Twice a day,” the man said. Haggard laughed.

  Despite Haggard’s apparent enthusiasm for gay sex, both as participant and as voyeur, Jones said he detected a pronounced sense of shame from the preacher each time he visited. In his tell-all memoir I Had to Say Something, Jones compared himself to a “combat nurse” tending to “wounded men . . . showing the emotional battle scars of trying live a life other than the one they want to live.” Jones said that once, after Haggard ejaculated, he noticed “tears form[ing] in his eyes, but I didn’t say anything.” Jones concluded, “When a man cries in front of another man, especially one he does not know well, there is some deep-seated pain there. I felt bad for him. I would have loved to ask him what was going on, but he didn’t want to go there.”

  Jones resisted prying. He was a professional sex worker, after all, and anonymity assured him more business. It was not until Jones sat down before his television, flipping from channel to channel, that he realized “Art” was Ted Haggard. As Jones leisurely channel-surfed one evening, a bizarre History Channel special about the Antichrist flashed on the screen. “Every generation has thought they were the last generation,” a man identified onscreen as Ted Haggard commented. A spooky soundtrack underscored Haggard’s narrative, while images flashed across the screen of a handsome man—presumably Satan, the notorious Man of Sin—strutting through an adoring crowd of photographers and reporters.

  The following day, Jones googled “Ted Haggard.” He was shocked by what he found. “Bouncing around the World Wide Web,” he recalled, “it became clear to me that gays, lesbians, and anyone else who was different would not fare well in one nation under Ted Haggard’s God. I had to do something, or at least, I had to say something.” But Jones kept silent for several more months, enduring an agonizing series of visits from Haggard during which he said he had to resist urges to physically attack the preacher. Only when Haggard announced his support for Amendment 43, a Colorado ballot measure that would have banned same-sex marriage, did Jones snap, delivering to local news outlets several voice messages and letters Haggard had sent him requesting meth. Soon a local news crew intercepted Haggard in his driveway.

  “I called him to buy some meth, but I threw it away,” Haggard told a reporter from the driver’s seat of his car. “I was buying it for me, but I never used it.” Flashing a forced, weirdly incongruous grin, Haggard denied ever having had sex with Jones.

  Haggard’s peers were stunned by the allegations. James Dobson initially rejected the charges against his friend as a fabrication of the Enemy. “It is unconscionable that the legitimate news media would report a rumor like this based on nothing but one man’s accusation,” Dobson fumed in a prepared statement. Haggard’s associate pastor, Rob Brendle, was dismissive as well. “This is clearly a political stunt,” he said. “Ted is the farthest thing from a homosexual as you can get. Trust me.”

  On the afternoon that Jones’s story surfaced, New Life Church organized a rally in downtown Colorado Springs to condemn the “politically motivated allegations” against Haggard. The faithful knew in their hearts that Haggard was not gay. He was one of them, after all. As Arterburn said of his first meeting with Haggard, “I had this overriding feeling he was so normal.”

  But just two days before congressional midterm elections, Haggard confessed. In a letter read aloud to New Life Church, Haggard wrote, “For extended periods of time, I would enjoy victory and rejoice in freedom. Then, from time to time, the dirt that I thought was gone would resurface, and I would find myself thinking thoughts and experiencing desires that were contrary to everything I believe and teach.”

  Haggard’s teary confession prompted a rare outbreak of candor among the Christian right’s PR-obsessed kingpins. During a Focus on the Family broadcast recorded hours after Haggard released his letter, Dobson and his leading allies conceded that their fallen friend’s homosexuality was not an aberration but, rather, the latest incarnation of an epidemic rapidly engulfing their flock. “Though we’re talking about Ted Haggard today, I guarantee you there are 50 or 100 cases like this breaking across the nation today,” said Dobson’s first cousin, H. B. London, whose own father—Dobson’s uncle—was stripped of his ministerial credentials after he was caught boffing his secretary. London, who operated a Focus on the Family hotline for sexually transgressive pastors, added that four clergymen had called in to confess their affairs that week.

&nbs
p; Even the saintly Billy Graham was drawn to sin, said Ravi Zacharias, an international evangelical radio personality who frequently appeared on Dobson’s show. During a trip to Paris in the 1950s, Graham became so overwhelmed by his desire to experience “all this nightlife available to him,” Zacharias remarked, that he locked himself inside his hotel room and tossed his key outside. “I think one of the biggest dangers here is solitude,” the Reverend Albert Mohler interjected. “Someone has to be there to interrogate and investigate every aspect of our lives.”

  In the eyes of Dobson and his allies, Haggard was not a closeted gay man acting out his repressed desires; he was just a regular guy seduced by the queer “siren within” that tempts us all. Haggard conceded, “There is a part of my life that is so repulsive and dark that I’ve been warring against it all of my adult life.” If Pastor Ted ever seemed virtuous, it was because, he admitted, he was “a deceiver and a liar.”

  Some of Dobson’s disciples blamed Haggard’s behavior on the seed of sin that they believed was implanted in all men. But the charismatic Calvinist minister Mark Driscoll, of the Mars Hill Church of Seattle, Washington, an incorrigible hipster, offered a more novel theory: Haggard’s wife had become too fat. “It is not uncommon to meet pastors’ wives who really let themselves go,” Driscoll wrote on his blog the day Haggard admitted his sins. “They sometimes feel that because their husband is a pastor, he is therefore trapped into fidelity, which gives them cause for laziness. A wife who lets herself go and is not sexually available to her husband in the ways that the Song of Songs is so frank about is not responsible for her husband’s sin, but she may not be helping him either.” According to Driscoll, if Haggard’s wife had only followed his “Jerusalem Diet” more rigorously, he would never have wound up in the arms of a studly male escort. And if the wives of other star pastors did not hit the elliptical machine for an hour each day, their husbands might surrender to their latent gay urges, too.

  Contrary to Driscoll’s flippant hypothesis, however, Haggard’s wife, Gayle, was pretty and relatively fit. What’s more, she was loyal to a fault. Had she been anything less than unswervingly devoted to her husband, she would not have accompanied him all the way to Tucson, Arizona, into an intensive “spiritual restoration” program that promised to purge him of his homosexual demons.

  Under the watchful eye of Dobson’s cousin, London, Pastor Ted was monitored for progress. Everything appeared to go swimmingly. Although Haggard’s “overseers” publicly predicted his restoration would take as long as five years, after only three weeks they pronounced him “completely heterosexual.”

  Miracle accomplished, Haggard announced plans to follow in the footsteps of the movement guru Dobson and study for his master’s degree in psychology. He accepted a payout of $130,000 from New Life under the condition that he never disclose details of his scandal (the church would also cover his living expenses for nearly a year) and left town, presumably to prepare for his return as the Christian right’s prodigal son. New Life immediately convened a “Day of Hope” on February 18, 2007, a cathartic ceremony to christen the dawning of a new era. The House That Haggard Built would be born again—again.

  But that day did not materialize as church leaders had hoped. Instead of ringing in the return of moral values to the evangelical Vatican on the slopes of the Rockies, New Life’s already dejected flock was treated to the reading of yet another grim letter, this one revealing that several staffers were under investigation for “sin issues.” Then parishioners were informed that the director of the church’s youth group had been fired for “sexual misconduct with an adult.” A month later, New Life sacked at least thirty more employees whom it could not afford to pay because the church had doled out Haggard’s hush money and begun bankrolling his rehabilitation.

  As Haggard’s former congregation suffered shock after shock, Mike Jones, the male prostitute, stepped into the limelight, granting numerous interviews and earning national headlines by placing the well-worn massage table “where it all happened” for sale on the online auction site eBay. Pledging to donate his profits to an AIDS awareness group, Jones raked in bids that topped $1,000. His gesture outraged Christian-right groups, which pressured eBay into removing Jones’s item.

  Haggard and his family, meanwhile, had departed to the Phoenix Dream Center, a “deliverance ministry” where what Haggard called “broken people” such as prostitutes and drug addicts were treated and “restored.” “I identify,” Haggard said. Seeking therapy for his demons, Haggard studied new techniques to purge evil spirits out of others. According to Rick Ross, a noted cult expert and deprogramming specialist, “A deliverance ministry [like the Dream Center] basically tells their members that any type of negative feelings they may have—negative things that are occurring in their day-to-day lives—can be ascribed to demons or the devil, or that they are demon-possessed, and that they need to be ‘delivered.’ They go to someone in the group who’s a self-styled exorcist who then joins together with others and they cast demons out of that individual. This can traumatize a person and cause almost irreparable psychological and emotional damage.”

  Haggard’s fall from grace gave him another vision. The lost souls at the Dream Center could become potential recruits for the new army of Christian soldiers he planned to lead. Preparing to lay the foundation for his next religious empire, Haggard sent out a thinly veiled fundraising letter, pleading, “We are looking for people who will help us monthly for two years . . . Any help we get will . . . be rewarded in heaven.” He urged heaven-bound financial angels to funnel their checks through an obscure outfit called Families with a Mission (FWAM). But Haggard avoided mentioning that FWAM had been essentially defunct for six months, and he omitted the fact that the group’s president, Paul Huberty, was a registered sex offender who had been convicted of coaxing a seventeen-year-old girl to have intercourse with him. The exposure of Haggard’s scheme by Colorado Confidential , a Denver-based independent Web magazine, infuriated the preacher’s “overseers,” prompting them to administer the most severe punishment possible. Haggard was officially excommunicated, forbade from ever working in Christian ministry again.

  The camera-hungry media darling known as Pastor Ted was defrocked. A spiritually neutered shell of a man—a “broken” person—stood in his stead. While Haggard planned a last desperate media blitz to restore the attention he craved, putting out feelers to Oprah Winfrey, Larry King, and filmmaker Alexandra Pelosi, the destruction that his hypocrisy and destructive behavior had fostered had only begun to spread. As it is said, the evil that men do lives after them.

  CHAPTER 20

  THE NIGHTMARE OF CHRISTIANITY

  A few miles down the road from Colorado Springs, in the quiet bedroom community of Eldredge, a deeply disturbed young man named Matthew Murray followed the unfolding debacle at New Life Church with an interest that bordered on obsession. Murray, a sallow-faced, bespectacled twenty-four-year-old, had been indelibly scarred by a lifetime of psychological abuse at the hands of his charismatic Pentecostal parents. Murray’s mind became crowded with thoughts of death, destruction, and the killings he would soon carry out in the name of avenging what he called his “nightmare of Christianity.”

  On an online chat room for former Pentecostals, Murray heaped contempt on his mother, Loretta, a physical therapist who home-schooled him to ensure that his contact with the outside world was severely limited. “My ‘mother,’” Murray wrote, “is just a brainswashed [sic] church agent cun,t [sic]. The only reason she had me was because she wanted a body/soul she could train into being the next Billy Graham . . . ”

  He went on:

  . . . my mother was into all the charismatic “fanatical evangelical” insanity. Her and her church believed that Satan and demons were everywhere in everything. The rules were VERY strict all the time. We couldn’t have ANY christian or non-christian music at all except for a few charismatic worship CDs. There was physical abuse in my home. My mother although used psychotropic drugs bec
ause she somehow thought it would make it easier to control me (I’ve never been diagnosed with any mental illness either). Pastors would always come and interrogate me over video games or TV watching or other things. There were NO FRIENDS outside the church and family and even then only family members who were in the church. You could not trust anyone at all because anyone might be a spy.

  An authoritarian Christian-right self-help guru named Bill Gothard created the home-schooling regimen implemented by Murray’s parents. Like his ally James Dobson, Gothard first grew popular during the 1960s by marketing his program to worried evangelical parents as anti-hippie insurance for adolescent children. Based on the theocratic teachings of R. J. Rushdoony, who devised Christian schools and home-schooling as the foundation of his Dominionist empire, Gothard’s Basic Life Principles outlined an all-consuming environment that followers could embrace for the whole of their lives. According to Ron Henzel, a one-time Gothard follower who coauthored a devastating exposé about his former guru called A Matter of Basic Principles, under the rules, “large homeschooling families abstain from television, midwives are more important than doctors, traditional dating is forbidden, unmarried adults are ‘under the authority of their parents’ and live with them, divorced people can’t remarry under any circumstance, and music has hardly changed at all since the late nineteenth century.”

  At the Charter School for Excellence, a school in South Florida inspired by Gothard’s draconian principles that receives $800,000 in state funds each year, children are indoctrinated into a culture of absolute submission to authority almost as soon as they learn to speak. A song that the school’s first-graders are required to recite goes as follows: