Goddamn this "Holy Scripture" Bullshit

This post is sponsored by the Sacrilegious Wire Service of the Church of the Orange Sky.

Five hundred years later, it still comes down to who gets to have righteous sex with whom, and whose gets "blessed" as a result. Watching the ongoing dissolution of the Anglican communion in Canada is like watching the last two seasons of Battlestar Galactica - it's hard to choose sides among stubborn reprobates.

I wrote some posts a few months back when the "Anglican Network in Canada" was taking its first steps to provoke a schism in Canadian Anglicanism. The issue has returned to the secular news, which is usually the only kind I read these days, as a result of South American archbishop Venables' visit to a conference here in Canada, put on by the "Network" schismatics. The schism, and particularly the firm opposition to gay marriage (and somewhat softer opposition to the ordination of women, who are almost as troublesome as gay people, and sometimes even are gay people!), is being justified on the grounds of "Holy Scripture," whatever that is.

(The latest twist has been covered by such major news sources as the CBC and the National Post.

On the one hand, we have Canadian archbishop Fred Hiltz, who demonstrated his opposition but also his impotence in demanding that Venables not make the trip - bluntly adding that the southern bishop should "stop interfering in the life of this province." Hiltz heads up a church hierarchy that managed, in true Canadian fashion, to thumb its nose at every principled position a couple years ago by ruling that gay marriage wasn't forbidden by the core doctrines of Anglicanism, but that Anglican churches wouldn't bless gay marriages anyway - somewhat like claiming that giving food to the hungry is a nice thing to do but that it's best left to someone else with more money to spare. The fact that Hiltz's best argument against the Network schism is that the church of the Southern Cone is violating the sovereignty of its Canadian sister is a sign of how weak the Canadian church's position has become. If the issue really was the hierarchy, then this issue would presumably require some sort of intervention from Rowan Williams of Canterbury, who is keeping deliberately aloof from the squabble. My experience has led me to believe that most Canadian Anglican churches strive for the faithful inclusion in communion of anyone who worships Christ - but this is rapidly going to get lost amidst accusations of border violations and exclusion of those who are part of the new "Network."

On the other hand, we have South American archbishop Greg Venables, who offers the dubious excuse that he wouldn't have supported the schism if the Canadian rebels weren't already causing trouble in the first place - a rationale approximately as morally justifiable, under the church's hierarchical traditions that both archbishops claim to accept, as claiming that it's okay to join in a bank robbery if you walk in while it's already underway. Venables, correctly in my opinion, insists that "truth" outranks "geography" - which in this case means that while claiming to stand up for true Anglicanism, he violates the traditional Anglican order for the sake of the new and novel problem of manning the walls and defending God from waves of gay and lesbian marauders. I normally wouldn't side with hierarchical institutions, but I have to say that Venables is behaving like a Baptist, arguing that any old separation is both legitimized and indeed necessitated by some relatively minor doctrinal differences. As another testament that his point is foolish, Venables even uses the notorious "some of my best friends are gay" argument.

To his credit, it seems Venables also disagrees with the activism of Anglican primate Peter Akinola of Nigeria, who at this very moment is campaigning in that country to have homosexuality declared a criminal offence. These shreds of integrity, however, are further undermined by his blatant hypocrisy over exactly how "literal" the Bible's teachings on sex and gender really might be: he is willing to permit his Canadian flocks to ordain women because this is not a "doctrinal" issue, rather a "secondary" one. What the fuck is this bullshit line of division between "doctrinal" and "secondary" morality?

I've said before, and I will say again, that the proper response from the Anglican Church of Canada should be to call the Networks' bluff, not mutter darkly about border violations and sovereign rights. The position of a church which stands for inclusion of all who have faith in Christ should and must be that those who wish communion with the Anglican Church of Canada may have it, and those who do not wish such communion are free not to share it - and to search for fellowship elsewhere, if they find it necessary, but to do so in the knowledge that the Anglican church will remain faithful and remain welcoming should they ever wish to return. Of course, Hiltz can't afford to take such a position, because he has to look out for the powers and privileges of his institution - which means he can't afford to dilute the traditional privileges of that institution (like sovereign borders and a monopolization of Anglicanism within Canada). So much for the Canadian church.

Now for some of my own biased feelings on this subject. The Southern notion that the Bible defines our "doctrinal" and "secondary" morailties, wherever the line between them may fall, is a transparent fiction worthy of prompt disposal. You can choose to keep all of the law of Moses or none of the law of Moses, but you can't pick and choose which part of "God's moral code" is good enough for you and which can be safely ignored - which also means you can't keep the Levitican ban on homosexuality unless you're willing to consider all of the other sexual rights, privileges and obligations of that law. Even without discussing the explicit issue of owning women (which I will take up later, and have already discussed at length in my Biblical commentaries), let's review some of the sexual morals which according to Venables's argument really ought to be reinstated at once: no sex during a woman's period (penalty: execution or banishment), the importance of female but not male sexual purity (penalty: death for one, nothing for the other), all nudity is evil (penalties vary), concubinage, polygamy, brothers' widows are inherited, sex makes one unclean, interracial marriage is wrong, and so on. Of most interest to unmarried Christians, perhaps, is the obvious point that this Old Testament sexual law doesn't explicitly prohibit unmarried heterosexual consenting men and women from having sex, provided the woman's value as a bride or wife is not endangered in the process.

Presumably, therefore, Venables is drawing on the New Testament for inspiration on the subject of homosexuality, but the sexual message of the New Testament is even sparser and less coherent. Jesus himself was notably unconcerned about sex - it's common to say he never mentioned homosexuality, but really, he hardly mentions sex at all, and only rarely talks about marriage, beyond exploitation (inappropriate divorces and mental "adultery"). So obviously the real meat of the issue must be found in the epistles, which return on several occasions to the very great concern about sex which the Jewish authors had, the early Christian writers also had, but Christ seemingly did not, his teachings more largely concerned with love and integrity, two things which are demonstrably lacking in the Anglican schism.

Even there, of course, it's tough to know what to do with what we find. Paul explicitly declares in Romans and Galatians that we now live beyond the Old Testament law, and that he's not trying to create a new law through his writings. But that doesn't stop Christians from looking for new laws in his writings, anyways. Trouble is, this usually requires much "harmonization" and "interpretation" and such even from those who claim to take the Bible most "literally." In Romans 1, for example, Paul certainly does appear to condemn homosexuality - though in the process he's engaging in some deliberately exaggerated sarcasm, something which would become immediately apparent if people erased that giant and idiotic chapter numeral that cuts Paul off in mid-argument. I guess you could take as binding all of his claims on gender, marriage and sex in Corinthians, Timothy, etc., if not for the fact that they're hopelessly, ridiculously confused: Should unmarried women get married quickly (1 Timothy), or not at all (1 Corinthians)? Can women speak in church, or must they be silent, or must they be silent unless veiled, or perhaps silent except when delivering prophecies? If you're not going to take Paul absolutely literally on those issues (even where he contradicts himself), you have no business claiming there's a "clear" moral teaching against homosexuality, since it would have to be derived from the same flawed books. I guess Jude mentions sexual immorality too, but then, Jude is a useless, paranoid rant, even less worthy of canonical status than the elitist reactionary babbling of 1 Timothy. Of course it doesn't talk about gay marriage, because there was no such thing as gay marriage at the time. Are we going to make moral decisions for today based on the social customs of 1st century Palestine?

The most telling moment, of course, is when Venables says that there is in fact a form of "holy" sex - specifically, heterosexual intra-marital sex. Never mind that the Old Testament said this sex was unclean and St. Paul said it was a "concession" to sinfulness. Holy indeed, which is why we don't have time to worry about "secondary" issues like global poverty, or the massive crisis of food shortages now occuring worldwide even while Western wheat is sold for "biofuel" in what may become one of the greatest crimes of humanity of the present time. No, we can't worry about those problems, because there is a much more severe problem, which is that there are unauthorized orgasms going on! When a man and his wife fuck, it is sacred, because their papers are signed and everything is in order. We cannot possibly worry about poverty, exploitation, or other injustices until we've made sure we won't be accidentally blessing the wrong orgasms.

In the past, the Church of the Orange Sky has always condemned efforts to reduce marriage to sex, most notably in the case of the ridiculous Christian Sex Challenge and its clearly superior successor, Dave's Relevant Christian Sex Challenge. I'd love to continue doing so, but in this case the church is working against me, because pretty much the only thing that can objectively separate heterosexual "marriage" from gay "marriage" is that the latter has greater potential for vaginal intercourse involving a penis, and for the various reproductive opportunities which follow therefrom.

I'm sure there are plenty of people who disagree with my feelings on sex and marriage here, but even granting that I might be wrong, it's hard to argue that there's a clear Biblical teaching on the subject which is so "central" to the Christian gospel that it would justify splitting a church.
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Dave's Relevant Christian Sex Challenge

The Church of the Orange Sky has no place in the bedrooms of the world.
-- Pierre Elliot Trudeau Grand Prophet of the Clouds The Right Rev. Lord David of Azure

I've been thinking about the "Relevant Church" and its proclamation that married people should fuck on a regular basis to improve the quality of their marriage, i.e. their life, lest the heavens fall and the earth perish in fire and water and the divorce rates continue their climb into the evil red zone of sin at the top of every statistical graph, that terrible hellish realm of the "post-family values" West which lies somewhere beyond the grand glass ceiling of righteousness, which shattered years ago as our rampant liberal hippie society climbed up, up, up the stairway to Hades. Or something like that.

In my previous life as a relevant and loyal evangelical, I was a "youth leader," a curious creature who, having been more or less properly indoctrinated by the church, is sent out to high school students to teach them simple lessons about faith in words that everyone can understand, with answers always at the ready to questions about the meaning of life and the universe and everything (which is never equal to 42, at least not in Christianity). The "youth leader" exists for two reasons: (1) the relevant task of converting the children of "unchurched" parents to the righteous ways of God the All-Father, probably through a hackneyed story-and-drawing combination like "the bridge" or "the chair" or some other suitably fabulous exposition; and (2) the important task of creating a "safe" spot for the children of "churched" parents to hang out on Friday night, so that they won't be out drinking and taking drugs and fucking each other and listening to rock music and watching American Pie and possibly even experiencing life outside the comfortable walls of our worldly paradise, the Traditional Family® and its Traditional Church®. And always hope that we had enough influence that the debauchery did not resume apace on Saturday night, though for some of the kids it sometimes did.

Every year we had a talk on sex. Apparently the year I left the program they had an entire "unit" on sex and dating, which means they spent several weeks talking in small groups and listening to righteous presentations from the youth pastor, who is usually smiling and easy-going and usually on his way to a better job as a senior pastor somewhere, though in the meantime at least he's living what he understands as a full life of service to God, which is more than most of his congregation can say. "He" I use deliberately. Is there such a thing as a female pastor who is not a pastor of children or perhaps a pastor of other women?

Sometimes, churches like to bring in outsiders to do the sex talk. It is often an awkward one and youth leaders welcome some outside credibility. Thus there are two types of speakers on sex and youth: pastors who are always married, and outside speakers who are always married. We don't really need to bring in legitimate outsiders, because the message is the same anyways, and so instead we could just dress up the youth pastor and give him a mask of some sort and maybe create the same effect. There are always two parts to the lesson: (1) chastity and abstinence are essential things you as a Christian teenager must practice, and as a child of God this might be something you struggle with from time to time but it is something that all good children of God must do!; and (2) sex is a wonderful and pleasurable act which I (i.e. the speaker) practice safely within the context of the walls of marriage, a word which sounds kind of like "mirage," but is actually an illusion closer to the "halo," i.e. a glowing curtain of righteousness which descends for the sake of privacy upon the filling out of proper forms and licenses and certificates of the state, to which the church outsourced the rights to the regulation of marriage long ago, an act which led directly and inexorably to the present fight over gay marriage. Never trade away a power, because someone else might exercise it in a way you didn't intend! If only the church still exercised unchallenged authority on the subject of which orgasms are permitted and which are not, we could restore traditional family values and restore our country to the splendour and glory and general awesomeness which God must have somewhere promised to all good white children-states of old, white but now senile father-England, right?

But I digress. Sometimes the don't-have-sex talk is buttressed by bullshit myths like "condoms don't actually work," which come to think of it might go some way towards explaining why American conservatives cheer their government for pulling condoms from family planning charities in sub-Saharan Africa and thus inevitably and directly contributing to the growing body count of the ongoing holocaust of HIV/AIDS. Occasionally people proudly brandish Bibles and denounce fornication, though that is widely recognized as being not effective anymore. Back when I was in the game, we sometimes looked for fairly young people, in their late 20s or so, newly married but still young enough to be "relevant" to teenagers. Some of them turned quite a lucrative profit from the teenage abstinence business, like Joshua Harris, who wrote a book in 1997 about how he'd "kissed dating goodbye," and another in 2000 about how he'd successfully wooed a wife of some sort. Perhaps I shouldn't be too unfair to Harris, but my rage remains righteous because he has continued this "ministry" of his after being happily married.

Being married is a problem for someone who's going to preach on abstinence, because almost invariably they don't practice abstinence: they only expect others too. A position of such moronic moralistic inconsistency is difficult to reconcile in a culture where teenagers - inevitably, whether their parents wish it were otherwise or not - have been encouraged to see the benefits and possibilities of sex damn near everywhere. This indeed is something the religious right usually accepts, which makes my argument even easier, though their purpose is usually to denounce said culture, having safely been plucked from the maelstrom by Christ and brought onto the high safe ground of salvation, where not only is everyone fortunely holy and free of sticks in their eyes, but upon which God has conveniently stacked large piles of stones which we who are without sin may freely hurl at the heathen below.

The usual answer to the above would be that sex is permitted in marriage and in marriage only, which sounds like a nice response except that marriage is not a possible outlet for teenagers, and is clearly not a necessary outlet for teenagers. The righteous usually compound the problem by claiming that once you are married sex is a good and wonderful thing and that they are glad they are able to enjoy such intimacy with their partner - basically a "mine! you can't have it!" approach to teaching the young, which doesn't work with alcohol and unsurprisingly doesn't work with sex either, and ironically reinforces the suspicion that people can't really live without sex for any extended period of time, because this adult who is married and preaching about abstinence can't and doesn't live that way either.

So I now propose Dave's Relevant Christian Sex Challenge: all parents, teachers, youth leaders, and various others who presume to teach on the subject of abstinence should practice abstinence from the time they begin teaching it, to the time they lay down this "ministry" and move on to another, which in the case of parents would basically mean until your kids have married. I am confident that all people whom the Orange Sky leads to this challenge should be able to coast comfortably through from one end to the other, since they preach it to others, and surely if they preach it to others they can just as easily accomplish the task themselves, or else they would be self-righteous hypocritical pricks. If you want to be all things to all people, sometimes you have to climb down into the mud.

Those who are married but not teaching abstinence to anyone of any age may still join the Relevant Christian Sex Challenge! There is a very queer oddity about the teachings on sex in the church: it is a terrible thing which will inevitably destroy relationships of the unmarried young, but a wonderful thing which - according to the Relevant Church - is apparently the universally best way of strenghtening relationships among married adults. The Church of the Orange Sky has no place in the bedrooms of the world, so you may do whatever you like, but instead of the Relevant Church's idiotic challenge to have sex every day for a month, the Church of the Orange Sky challenges you to do something which is both intimate and relevant to your lives every day for a month. This Church shall not reduce marriage to sex nor shall it reduce sex to marriage, but it shall permit the freedom of all of its members in the guidance of their own lives!

The true brilliance of the Relevant Christian Sex Challenge of the Church of the Orange Sky is that it can give almost exactly the same advice to those who are married and those who are not married, rather than building up bullshit categories and telling those of us who are not married that we are lesser and incomplete. Thus those who are unmarried should also do something, every day, which they feel is relevant to the improvement of their happiness and quality of life, and perhaps even to the quality of someone else's life who is close to you, though that is entirely your own choice.

Thus the heaviest burden of the Relevant Christian Sex Challenge falls upon those who teach, which, according to James 3:1, is precisely where the heaviest burden ought to fall.
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Christian Sex: Thirty Days Later

I'd almost forgotten, but last month, I wrote about how the hideously named Relevant Church ordered its members to have sex every day for the next month. Well, the month's up now, and some people were apparently up to the challenge. Somewhat disturbingly, they're also talking to the media about it. What a witness for Christ! It's almost as fun as missionary dating.

No word on whether the unmarried congregants met the challenge too. Theirs was not to have sex for an entire month.
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Christians Need More Sex!

Kind of like the teenagers-wearing-diapers story a couple of months back, there's so much idiocy here I hardly know where to begin.

Paul Wirth is a senior pastor in Ybor City, Florida. The church that decided Wirth was worth the money is... the Relevant Church! Come on, people. I know all the evangelicals want to be "relevant" to today's "postmodern" unchurched, but when you put it in the name, you kind of start to look desperate.

The Relevant Church claims that it is designed "specifically for urban professionals and young families." That's awesome. Ybor City is a Tampa neighbourhood which had a proud (and, in the American South, isolated) history in labour organization. Then it was gentrified and now, apparently, its churches aim to be "relevant" to professionals. That's brilliant. There are only about six thousand homeless people in Tampa's county, and some other ministry will probably take care of them, right? When James wrote that the wealthy were oppressive and that catering to them dishonoured the poor, surely he didn't mean "relevant" urban professionals. It's this nonsense that has convinced me that "emergent" churches, which apparently is what the Relevant Church bills itself as, are a fad for Christian yuppies who listen to indie music and drink fair trade coffee and want a suitably "alternative" religious identity to go along with their "rejection" of the corporate mainstream. Galatians and James, not just the gospels, should be required reading.

(Speaking of the above, Tampa is one of a large number of cities in both the U.S. and Canada which have been gradually pressuring church and charity groups to stop charity programs for the homeless, usually through a combination of outlawing feeding the poor and harassing groups with unnecessary police surveillance. I don't usually have anything nice to say about Pentecostals, but in Tampa's case, one New Life Pentecostal church defied police orders to disperse and dared the city to a public confrontation. Well done, Pentecostals. The Catholic church also offered sanctuary to a food program after police ejected it from its usual location within a public park.)

But that's enough about depressing subjects like poverty. Mr. Wirth has correctly noted that Tampa's urban professionals have more pressing problems than the poor and the destitute within their city. For example, they have to worry about making sure their sex lives are as exciting as you'd expect from righteous Christians.

Wirth thinks that divorce rates are unreasonably high and that the solution is for Christians to have more sex. Specifically, he wants married Christians to have sex at least once a day for the next month. With each other, presumably, otherwise it would defeat the purpose of the exercise. I'm not married, but if I was, I have to think my response to Mr. Wirth would be to (a) stay the hell out of our bedroom and (b) stop defining relationships - any relationships - as sexual intimacy. But I'm not married, so the fact that to me thirty straight days of sex is starting to sound a lot like work isn't really germane.

Single Christians are said to have a "slightly different" challenge: they should have no sex for the next thirty days. Oddly enough, I don't think I needed Wirth's "challenge" to accomplish this grand feat, but then, I'm not an urban professional. At any rate, this is equally important, Wirth says, because "when you're single it's like you're always thinking about it and you're like, man I'd like to have it as much as possible." The solution to single people always thinking about sex, it would seem, is to go to a church where people are always talking about it.

Even among the "alternative" "emergent" crowd, apparently, sexuality and marriage just have to be at the center of everything. I'm not sure I'd go so far in criticizing this idolization of marriage as Paul does in his letters to the Corinthians, in part because Paul's as bad as Wirth in basically reducing marriage to a way of getting laid without doing anything immoral. Unfortunately, the church seems to have only three responses to sex and sexuality: nervous silence, condemnation of non-marital sex at high volume, or praise of intra-marital sex at equally high volume.
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The Pitfalls of Professional Christians: Of Pastors and Pornography

Prophet: This is the word of the Orange Sky.
Congregation: Thanks be to God.

Another month, another news story about a pastor losing his position because of lust. This one because of online pornography, specifically, and I admit I missed this story by a month, because I'm not usually at the cutting edge of gossip about pulpits in Florida. In my defence, my source on the story is a more recent article at Church Central which defends the pastor in question on the grounds that there are "deeper emotional issues" which motivate "addiction" to pornography.

The original story is fairly familiar if the circumstances are somewhat specific. A pastor confesses to a leading committee at a church that he is dealing with a personal moral failure. The committee, in this case, consults others within its denomination before sending the pastor on an indefinite "leave of absence." Dubiously, it brings in "a computer firm under contract" to "investigate the computers" at the church, because even though the pastor hasn't committed a crime, his word can't be trusted anymore and it's time to investigate him like a criminal. Other than that, the Methodists have been fairly gracious here. Instead of running him out of town, Mr. Brian James is permitted to stay in his church-owned home "for up to three months," and gets a vague promise of "some support." What happens at the end of the three months, I'm not sure.

Church Central tries to be compassionate by noting that this is probably a common problem and that the church should consider the presence of "deeper emotional issues" underlying pornography "addicts." I suppose that's true, though I'm a bit skeptical of whether we can basically equate looking at porn with being a victim of sexual abuse or even being on par with other "sexual addicts," something the article does unquestioningly.

The main problem which concerns me is something Church Central only hints at, in noting that pastors likely feel unable to confess their sins to others at the church because doing so "can cost them their job."

Basically, the church creates in its leaders a new category of religious person - the professional Christian - who simultaneously becomes the model of Godly behaviour, a sort of stand-in for Christ, while also a scapegoat in the event anything goes too seriously wrong. Such professional Christians are expected to be able to relate to sinners but nevertheless float somewhere above sin, at least "serious" sins, an artificial category of sin we establish to separate the sins we think are "imortant" and socially disruptive from those which are "less important" and not socially disruptive. Pornography presumably fits into the first of the two categories.

This despite the fact that fully half of evangelical church-attending men in the U.S. struggle repeatedly with pornography, according to one claim. The group which conducted the survey doesn't seem to be fully active online anymore, so I can't verify the results of that survey, but based on similar numbers at sites like this and this, I think we can basically conclude that pastors are human, and generally fall on the low side of the porn-addiction spectrum at that, probably statistically lower than most of their congregations.

Projecting an image of moral superiority onto religious leaders may be convenient in churches but it can also create expectations that these people shouldn't reasonably be expected to meet. My point here isn't to legitimize porn - and in any event, that's a debate for another day. What's important here is that, even from an evangelical perspective, our current system encourages churchgoers to project an image as more than human, and pastors to do this even more so than others. It's unrealistic and harmful. If churches really want to tackle the clearly serious issue of porn use, it would probably be helpful not to pretend that some of the people involved are morally superhuman.
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Prophets for Profit

It was a bad week in American Christendom. First, a male prostitute in Colorado claimed that evangelical preacher and head of New Life Church Ted Haggard had paid him for a series of... um... appointments over the past several years. To add some fuel to the fire, it also surfaced - apparently from the same source - that Haggard had also purchased crystal meth. Just a few days later, another prominent evangelical, creationist Kent Hovind, was convicted of tax fraud in Florida after failing to pay about $850 000 in employee taxes at his creationist theme park, where, among other things, he provides evidence that dinosaurs and humans once walked the earth together. (Hovind's entertaining if scientifically dubious theory of creation is that Noah boarded his ark just before an ice meteor crashed into the earth, causing a shower of "super-cold snow" which buried the mammoths, shattered the canopy which protected the earth from the water beneath the crust, and resulted in an ice age lasting several hundred years.)

This isn't Hovind's first legal trouble, though presumably it is the most serious (we haven't heard what the sentences will be yet for either him or his wife, who was also convicted of 44 counts). In 2002, he was charged with assault by his former secretary, but the charges were dropped. The same year, he was charged with several local regulation violations at his Dinosaur Adventure Land (I'm sorry; I have to keep mentioning this park because it's just such an amusing concept). Hovind lost most of these cases and paid moderately small fines (but spent tens of thousands in legal expenses to protect his dinosaur-human propaganda center). In 1996, he tried to file for bankruptcy but was found to have lied about his possessions and income (he claimed that as a minister, everything he had belonged to God and therefore he was not subject to the American tax system). Two years later, he claimed to revoke all signatures he had ever written on government documents on the grounds they had been signed under duress. In 2002 he failed to pay his taxes again, and this time went on the offensive by suing the IRS for harassment. In 2004, they raided his home to confiscate financial records, eventually leading to his current difficulties. Apparently Hovind forgot about the "give to Caesar what is Caesar's" part when he was busy taking his Bible so literally that he convinced himself that mammoths were all buried standing up by a massive wave of cold, hard snow.

Haggard seems to have had a cleaner record, at least up to the present. He denied all of the allegations, and the prostitute subsequently failed a polygraph test he had volunteered for to verify the claims (although the administrator noted that the man was stressed and had not recently eaten or slept). However, Haggard resigned anyways, on the grounds that he would "seek both spiritual advice and guidance" while an "overseer process" could investigate the claims "with integrity." Senior officials from his mega-church promptly told the local TV that he had admitted to some of Jones's claims, and wrote to their parshioners that Haggard "confessed to the overseers that some of the accusations against him are true." The next day, Haggard admitted that he had purchased crystal meth but claimed he had only received a massage from Jones. To paraphrase Clinton, "I did not have sex with that man!" The overseer board concluded shortly afterwards that "our investigation... prove[s] without a doubt that he has committed sexually immoral conoduct," and they affirmed his removal from his job.

From our perspective outside the fishbowl, it seems almost inevitable that many major Christian leaders will be arrested for some sort of behaviour that they themselves have railed against as deviant. During the 1980s, there was a mass of televangelists exposed as in some way sinful - Swaggart screwed a prostitute, Bakker screwed his secretary, and Roberts, Whittington, and others ended up out of a job for various suspicions of fraud. Peter Popoff, distributor of miracle spring water (i.e. non-Catholic holy water) which apparently comes from Chernobyl (yum... radioactive water), was revealed to perform his miracles via planted audience members and an in-ear radio receiver through which he could hear prompts from his watchers in the crowd... I mean, from the Holy Spirit of God, of course.

I'm not really qualified to judge whether the entire Christian mass preaching industry is riddled with corruption or not, although certainly large sections of it are. I've just acquired an old documentary from the 1970s on the career of Marjoe Gortner, a travelling preacher of the time who spent six months preaching and the next six months smoking pot with his friends in San Francisco (he explained on his tours that he raised money for six months and then spent six months ministering to the youth and drug addicts of the inner city). He eventually decided he could no longer live with this tactic, but rather than just resign or come clean in a public press conference the way most would today, he decided to take a film crew along for his last revival tour. The documentary alternates between scenes of wild Christian merriment in revival tents and charismatic churches, and footage of Gortner back in the hotel explaining to the film crew the various aspects of his scam. (Among other things, Gortner explains how to prophecize, speak in tongues, and administer various other miracles.)

The fact that these individuals turn out to be grossly corrupt and in it for the money isn't really the part that disturbs me. People in the big church business are entrepeneurs, and like people in any other business, they're going where the money is. Issues of personal morality are not particularly relevant to this. Those who are genuinely honest, and there are probably at least a few, doubtless aren't having the same exciting sexual adventures, but because we never hear news like "Billy Graham did not have an affair this week" (for the simple fact that it's a non-event), we probably get a skewed picture of what's going on. Not every Republican congressman is attracted to his teen-aged interns, but occasionally one is, and the rest get tarred for it. (Of course, if they weren't so judgemental in the first place, it wouldn't be such big news that they were guilty of the same things they condemned others for. Perhaps this is one of the reasons the Bible says we should not judge others.) The rush to condemn the particular individuals involved can be a little unseemly too sometimes. The church either rallies around people they think could be innocent, or shoves out someone they realize is guilty, as though they're worried that he'll contaminate them if he's not cast out fast enough. A former pastor of mine used to say that the Christian army was the only one to shoot its own wounded. A few months after I met him, we shot him, too. The pursuit of collective holiness apparently requires that individuals occasionally be sacrificed for the greater good.
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