Got your attention now?
Larry Cohler-Esses emailed me his most recent piece on the religious right and their political intersection with power,
which is quite an eye opener. (To refresh your memory on Larry Cohler-Esses, he and I met when our reporting on the Iranian badge story crossed paths and inevitably became quite explosive.) Larry is an amazing reporter. Anyway, with the election now over, we learn from Larry that the story about Haggard has just begun to be told.
First we've got the basic facts coming out of the election wipe out of Republicans,
which included the wholesale rejection of the religious right's main man on
Capitol Hill, Rick Santorum. The other issue is that now that the religious
right has been humbled, other religious institutions feel there may be a greater
sharing of the focus, which up until now has been narrowly focused on one segment
of our diverse spiritual population.
For a man witnessing a debacle in real time, Rev. Louis Sheldon, a leader
of the Christian Right political movement, sounded amazingly sanguine Tuesday
night – even as an early AP exit poll indicated that almost one-third
of white Evangelicals chose a Democrat for Congress.(snip)
Everyone agrees that the Evangelical right’s legislative agenda for
the next session of Congress appears dead as a result of Tuesday’s Democratic
House victory. That is a source of great satisfaction for mainstream Jewish
groups; they strongly opposed several measures passed by the House last session
that had the movement’s backing.These include the Public Expression of Religion Act, which would stop judges
from awarding lawyers’ fees to plaintiffs who win suits against the
government for violating the separation of religion and state. Another bill
passed last session would empower faith-based groups to discriminate on the
basis of religion in hiring staff for government-funded social service programs
such as Head Start.Both bills are stalled in the Senate. With the change in control of the House,
“passage of these bills now becomes much less likely,” said Richard
Foltin, head of the American Jewish Committee’s Washington office. …
But that's not the real news in Esses' piece. Get a load of this one.
Then, as if things could not get worse, there was the disgrace of
Sheldon’s own friend and colleague, Rev. Ted Haggard, the Colorado mega-church
leader and president of the National Association of Evangelicals, an even
bigger pillar of Republican support on the Christian right. Sheldon disclosed
that he and “a lot” of others knew about Haggard’s homosexuality
“for awhile … but we weren’t sure just how to deal with it.”Months before a male prostitute publicly revealed Haggard’s
secret relationship with him, and the reverend’s drug use as well, “Ted
and I had a discussion,” explained Sheldon, who said Haggard gave him
a telltale signal then: “He said homosexuality is genetic. I said, no
it isn’t. But I just knew he was covering up. They need to say that.”
That's right, the “Christian” right leaders of the evangelical movement
knew about Haggard but were confused on what to do. There are so many things
wrong with this that it's hard to know where to start. We need to first ask
ourselves when did truth become something we were confused about? When did transparency
in the face of wrong doing become something akin to a struggle for p.r. spin?
The Christian right is lost in the wilderness. The bankruptcy of their rationalizations
for keeping the Haggard story a secret is a scandal of monumental proportions.
Did these people learn nothing from the Catholic Church?
Our most visible religious institutions have collapsed in a heap of moral criminality.
Yet these same institutions find a way to criticize Katharine Jefferts Schori,
the first female bishop of the Episcopal Church. I've met Bishop Schori a couple
of years ago in Nevada at All Saints' Episcopal Church where she was giving
a visiting sermon. The religious right could learn a lot from her.
Larry Cohler-Esses's story is a good one. Make sure you read the whole thing.
It's a tale of collapse, floundering lack of fidelity to faith, as well as the
hypocrisy that is rampant in the upper echelons of many organized religious
hierarchy. This story is one reason I remain a rebel Christian Episcopalian.
Many of the formal church structures in this country are completely and totally
bankrupt. It's why Bishop Schori is a hero to me. Compared to the Haggard and the evangelical right, she is a saint.
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