Edited from the original, with changes marked.
The major news media have uniformly marched behind a “gay sex scandal” label for the sex-and-drug allegations against the Rev. Ted Haggard, now-former head of the National Association of Evangelicals.
But it’s not a “gay sex” scandal. If the allegations are true, then Haggard — a father of five — is more likely an irresponsible and dishonest bisexual man who has devoted much of his career recent years to the promotion of discrimination against people who are more honest and faithful to their partners than he.
Beyond the issue of sexual attraction, there is another issue that Ted Olsen, an editor at Christianity Today, raises in a Nov. 3 article in USA Today.
“This is so much bigger than what happens (in the election) Tuesday,” says Ted Olsen, online managing editor of Christianity Today, the magazine founded by evangelist Billy Graham and the leading religious publication of the evangelical movement. “It has the potential to be a significant long-term crisis moment for evangelical political engagement — but, more importantly, for the whole question of evangelical identity.”
There’s that word again: Identity.
If recent remarks about so-called “identity” by Olsen and the leadership of Exodus are representative of broader evangelical Protestant sentiment, then evangelical U.S. Christianity may be a bit more corrupt than I realized.
Have evangelical leaders in general really sunk so low that they view Christianity as an Officially Sanctioned Brand Name® defined by a media-savvy marketing concept — that all-important, ill-defined, abstract, morally relative, and utterly nonexistent vaporous product called IdentityTM?
Is anyone in the evangelical leadership aware that, somewhere beyond the sales pitches and ad campaigns, there is a measurable, material reality, a physical realm that cannot be manipulated by propaganda gimmicks? Do evangelicals believe anymore now, if ever, that Reality Matters®TM?
And who, exactly, are the morally corrupt compromised individuals who comprise evangelical Christianity’s ever-shifting, “identity”-defining focus groups?