I will confess to indulging in a small amount of schadenfreude of this whole Haggard thing. Okay, it’s not nice of me to take the piss because he and his family and his church will be being torn apart over this and no matter how much you dislike someone, on a basic human level what’s happening to all of them must be utterly hideous. However. If you’re going to effectively work yourself into a position where you’re very, very publically responsible for advocating that certain kind of extreme right-wing moralising and you are expected to live as a paragon of that model, then you don’t do yourself an awful lot of favours by going out and buying drugs off a gay prostitute who you are also (allegedly, etc) fucking on the side. I mean, you know, great testimony to the transforming power of Christ, there.
However, much as I disliked Haggard before, I think the person this has brought the worst out in is the famously potty-mouthedstraight-talking Mark Driscoll. A former participant in the Emergent conversation, Driscoll has developed his own distinctive style of no-compromise conservative Christianity-with-piercings-and-goatees. And also a view on women that wouldn’t be totally out of place in, say, the 18th Century. Anyway, in his response to the whole thing, he says:
Most pastors I know do not have satisfying, free, sexual conversations and liberties with their wives. At the risk of being even more widely despised than I currently am, I will lean over the plate and take one for the team on this. It is not uncommon to meet pastors’ wives who really let themselves go; 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.
Yeah, you tell ’em, Mark! It’s his wife‘s fault for not being enough of a dolled up submissive sex-toy that drove poor innocent Ted to go and fuck a man instead. Well, maybe not her fault, but clearly any woman who lets herself go a bit and doesn’t submit to her husbands every sexual whim shouldn’t be at all surprised if he, I dunno, goes off and has a three year drug-fuelled affair with a gay prostitute.
But, hey, it’s not like Mark doesn’t know what he’s talking about here: he has plenty of experience with sin and temptation himself:
On one occasion I actually had a young woman put a note into my shirt pocket while I was serving communion with my wife, asking me to have dinner, a massage, and sex with her. On another occasion a young woman emailed me a photo of herself topless and wanted to know if I liked her body. Thankfully, that email was intercepted by an assistant and never got to me.
Well, thank goodness Mark is such a great holy man that he’s able to resist the evil advances of these brazen harlots! We all know how those poor women’s tiny brains can become all addled and confused and filled with lust in the presence of such a fabulous specimen of a man such as himself!
Driscoll then goes on to say:
Christians cannot be guilty of playing plank-speck with non-Christians on matters of pornography and homosexuality and be guilty of going soft on sin in their own leadership.
Maybe the problem is that we pay too much attention to sexual sin? Maybe because the Evangelical church is so busy seeing the gay bogeyman (now there’s a mental image) hiding in every closet it’s setting itself up for far more of a fall when someone does fail to live up to their rules in this area? I’ll put my hands up and say that I don’t fall into line on the whole condemnation of homosexuality thing, but seriously: the bigger deal you make of something, the harder its going to hit you when you fail to live up to it. And you can guarantee that eventually, someone is going to fail, because we’re human, fallen and very, very good at failing.
Mark then goes on to suggest a whole stack of ways that pastors can avoid getting into situations where they might fall prey to the wicked wiles of loose women: well, at least he has as low a few of men as he does of women, I guess. Men are weak, women are sluts. Glad we’ve got that one cleared up.
The cult of the rock-star Evangelical pastor has claimed a number of people over the years. It won’t stop claiming people, either, if the church keeps holding these people up and expecting them to be utterly infallible paragons of virtue. How about we stop banging on about holiness and purity and start doing all that fighting for justice, helping the poor and feeding the hungry instead? That sounds like a much better idea to me.