Onward Christian Soldiers, Despite Haggard’s Whore
While everyone’s having great fun celebrating Haggardfest (and he is indeed a juicy trophy) I’m wondering what his minions are up to.
I really couldn’t give a damn if Haggard’s gay, other than for the schadenfreude of it all(and this affair has turned into what one of Tbogg’s commenters called a schadenfreugasm) or even the drug-use. What’s always bothered me about Ted Haggard and his church where it is and what it does.
There’s a reason his megachurch located in Colorado Springs, and that’s to evangelise, proselytise and convert in the military and defence industries: all told, at least 35,000 people are employed by the military there, many of them rootless people looking for certainty and instant community. It’s prime convert territory.
They are drawn as if by magnetic forces; they speak of Colorado Springs, home to the greatest concentration of fundamentalist Christian activist groups in American history, both as a last stand and as a kind of utopia in the making. They say it is new and unique and precious, embattled by enemies, and also that it is ?traditional,? a blueprint for what everybody wants, and envied by enemies.
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I saw Haggard interviewed recently on Newsnight and he comes off as a plausible guy (at least until he starts talking about god – he’s perfectly rational on matters of church property development) It’s not until you read the whole Harpers article ( get a coffee, it’s a long one but well worth the read) that you get just how bizarre some of he and his Church’s beliefs are. They believe that spirits and demons lurk everywhere. Linda is a convert:
We are surrounded by demons, she explained, reciting the lessons she had learned in her small-group studies at New Life. The demons are cold, they need bodies, they long to come inside. People let them in in two different ways. One is to be sinned against. ?Molested,? suggested Linda. The other is to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. You could walk by sin?a murder, a homosexual act?and a demon will leap onto your bones. Cities, therefore, are especially dangerous.
Haggard himself is demonstrably unbalanced:
He was always on the lookout for spies. At the time, Colorado Springs was a small city split between the Air Force and the New Age, and the latter, Pastor Ted believed, worked for the devil. Pastor Ted soon began upsetting the devil’s plans. He staked out gay bars, inviting men to come to his church; his whole congregation pitched itself into invisible battles with demonic forces, sometimes in front of public buildings. One day, while he was working in his garage, a woman who said she’d been sent by a witches’ coven tried to stab Pastor Ted with a five-inch knife she pulled from a leg sheath; Pastor Ted wrestled the blade out of her hand. He let that story get around. He called the evil forces that dominated Colorado Springs?and every other metropolitan area in the country??Control.?
[My emphasis]
Lets face it, the guy’s not just got issues: he’s bona fide nuts and was in deep deep denial until yesterday’s outing.
Like I said, really I couldn’t care less about his sexuality, it’s the totally bonkers part that’s worrying as his particular brand of religious insanity seems to be so virulently contagious. The real problem is just how big his church is and how far its tentacles spread. Again we’re back to location and constituency: defence workers and military members move regularly and when they do, New Life church members among them bud off to form their own daughter congregations in other towns and US military installations across the USA and worldwide. New Life uses the affinity group and viral marketing methods to build brand loyalty and lock new recruits into the cult.
How far has it gone? Just ask Mikey Weinstein and his sons. Haggard and his fellow cultists have been bent on infiltrating the military, particularly the Air Force, and making it into a holy army, so Jewish cadets like the Weinsteins simply couldn’t be borne:
As cadets, Weinstein’s sons personally experienced religious coercion by aggressive right-wing evangelicals. One son is a plaintiff in the case against the Air Force, along with three fellow second lieutenants. Mikey Weinstein said he expects another plaintiff to join the case soon. But there’s an extremely high fear factor.
He said that he gets “thousands of calls” from people in the military who tell him they have experienced religious coercion, but, because of fear, “the vast majority won’t let me tell their anonymous fact patterns.” Only 117 have agreed to share their experiences ? anonymously — to buttress his lawsuit. Of those, eight are Jews, one is a Muslim, 12 are Roman Catholic and the rest are Protestants who, Weinstein punned “are not used to being prayed on by fellow Christians.”
Reports from the Academy over the last several years have told of proselytizing by chaplains and of officers and cadets warning subordinates that they (and their professional careers) would burn in hell unless they accepted Jesus. Jewish cadets told of important events scheduled on major holidays. Outside investigators noted sectarian prayers at official occasions and an overall coercive atmosphere. (For additional background see Religious Coercion by Chaplains at the U.S. Air Force Academy on JewOnFirst.org. Click here.)
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…Weinstein said that on almost every one of the hundreds of US military installations there is an Officers Christian Fellowship. (its website slogan is “Christian officers exercising biblical leadership to raise up a godly ministry.”) There is a similar network of fellowships for enlisted personnel, he said.
Throughout the military officers are reading You The Warrior Leader: Applying Military Strategy For Victorious Spiritual Warfare by Southern Baptist Convention President Bobby Welch (Broadman & Holman, Nashville, 2004). Generals and admirals are carrying the book around, Weinstein said, which conveys a message to lower ranks.
Military law strictly forbids pushing anything ? “not even Amway” ? yet, he says it’s now “okay that senior members share their view of Jesus” with their subordinates. “No matter how nicely they do that, for the subordinate saying ‘Get out of my face, sir,’ is not an option.”
“It’s an imperious contagion of unconstitutional triumphalism,” Weinstein said. Every day it gets worse. If we can’t beat this imperialist Christianity in the military, then what chance do we have” to beat it in civilian society?
Suddenly the taunt ‘Crusader’ doesn’t seem quite so groundless, does it? Haggard may have been shamed publicly and shown to be a hypocrite over the past couple of days, and the Republicans could lose the elections but he’s just the head of this religio-corporate hydra. The cult Haggard’s established will continue without him, barring Enron-style fraud being uncovered.
Many depend on the New Life church and its offshoots for their livelihood, people like accountants, the cashiers, the lighting riggers and stagehands, the building maintenance, the printers, the cleaners and not least the baristas in the church’s onsite Starbucks. It’s a massive corporate money-making (tax-free!) enterprise. Florida New Life ministries alone were given over half a million dollars in federal faith-based funding in 2003 and this has been mirrored in minsitries nationwide each succeeding year. Why kill the goose that’s still laying golden eggs?
Many church members are not only emotionally dependent but domestically dependent too, for schooling, daycare, food banks, day-centers for the elderly and so on; many of the people who need those services are in the military, both because of the social programmes Bush has cut and because of wilful Republican neglect of military families’ basic needs. If you don’t go to church, you don’t get.
Those military New Life Church converts won’t be going away and they won’t stop trying to convert others. For years to come military members whose first loyalty is not to the constitution but to their religion will be still be Dominionist agents in place of on US military bases at home and overseas, getting promoted, moving around, spreading the germ, convinced they’re doing God’s work by killing unbelievers and eager to assimilate more Borg.
Haggard’s fall from grace is a five-minute wonder. I doubt the damage he’s done can be undone so quickly, if ever.
Read more: US politics, Religion, Evangelism, Colorado Springs, New Life Church, Ted Haggard, Mikey Weinstein, Military, USAF Academy
