Another One Bites the Dust

Evangelical minister, that is. Ted Haggard is just the most recent, the fallen du jour, if you will.

The Ted Haggard story made me recall other fallen ministers: Jimmy Swaggart, Robert Tilton, and, locally, Walker Railey. These scandal stories are always accompanied by a gasp and a look of shock by most people. Of course, there are always athiests and lefties who will point and say it's just symptomatic of evangelical Christianity. Then there are those who claim they "don't like" writing about subjects like this, then post on it repeatedly (no attributes here!).

Typically, the left talks about hypocrisy in evangelical Christianity, which is a nice swipe at the estimated 4.5 million evangelicals in the U.S. These swipes paint all people of faith with the same broad brush. In other words, if Ted Haggard bought meth from a gay prostitute, what does that say about other evangelicals?

In a word: nothing. He is one man, a very flawed man (and a criminal to boot, if he did buy illegal drugs). This is the part of the story I despise because the bad behavior of one man (or, in the political sense, a group of men) is applied to all people who might fit into a given category (Christians). I've seen certain unmentionable sites refer repeatedly to the fact that Ted Haggard supposedly "has the ear of the President," meaning, I suppose that President Bush isn't just taking his marching orders from Dick Cheney and Karl Rove, now Ted Haggard is pulling the strings, too. It must get really crowded in the moonbat box, what with everybody who is supposedly running the government for that "idiot" George Bush.

What has bothered me about the rise of nondenominational churches is that they can teach pretty much anything they want without being held accountable for it through a larger church organization. Of course, I doubt Ted Haggard was preaching on the joys of meth to his congregation, and it doesn't help the argument that he was the head of the National Association of Evangelicals, but even that titular head has no control over what is taught in these various churches. In short, the theology that took 2,000 years for other denominations to shape isn't binding for these non-alligned churches. In my book, that's a far bigger problem for Christianity than one preacher's meth addiction.