Jonathan Ebel and Anthea Butler, historians of American religion,
review the week in God, XXX edition (starring Rush Limbaugh and Ted
Haggard).

1. Rush to Judgment

By Jonathan Ebel

The Apocalypse must surely be upon us.
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At about half-past Morning Edition yesterday, I tuned into WDWS, AM 1400 to hear how Rush Limbaugh was processing the news of the week. I expected ten straight minutes of invective directed against Senator John Kerry, Max Cleland, Tammy Duckworth, or any other Democrat who had the gall to render honorable service in the military. I thought I might even catch a minute or two of Rush setting the record straight on Michael J. Fox’s various breaches of political advertising etiquette. Hadn’t Fox received the memo that the threat of suffering was all that was allowed in campaign ads? All I heard was Rush conceding the full Reformed Christian truth of the Democrats’ theological anthropology. What a disappointment.

The announcement came shortly after a commercial break on Friday morning, November 3. Limbaugh began the segment by noting that, during the break, someone in the studio had observed that Democrats were suddenly treating homosexual sex as perverse behavior; that they were taking pleasure in the outing of nationally prominent Republicans and using once-concealed sexualities to make political hay. Rush wasn’t interested that the issue was and is ex-Representative Foley’s allegedly criminal behavior on the one hand and Pastor Ted Haggard’s apparent hypocrisy on the other. No, this was clearly another case of Democrats playing both sides of the ball – using sexual behavior that liberals promote daily in the schools and via PBS to “keep Ma and Pa Kettle holed up in the shack on the roadside,” to undermine the institutions in which the Kettles have placed their faith, and to keep them away from the polls.

Then truth, like a bolt of lighting, cut through the cigar smoke in the EIB studio. “So [Democrats] think every human being is flawed, think every human being has big problems. The liberals think human beings are basically klutzes … so they embrace all this stuff, all these imperfections.” I nearly drove off the road. Suddenly, I was sitting in History of Christian Thought III at the University of Chicago Divinity School. In front of me was Professor Susan Schreiner. She was leaning into her lecture notes and describing Luther’s understanding of humanity’s predicament.

“When Adam fell,” she told us, “he didn’t just fall. He fell.” In the eyes of Luther and Calvin and the giants of the early Protestant Reformation, Adam’s fall had been so catastrophic that humanity, as Adam’s offspring, was left completely unable to do anything of divine merit. “Don’t try to earn salvation,” she proclaimed, adopting her Lutheran persona, “God doesn’t need your filthy little wagon load of good works. Your works are always tainted with sin.” The only hope for salvation, Luther and Calvin and Jonathan Edwards proclaimed, was faith imparted by divine grace. Human beings are, after all, basically klutzes.

Luther was not the first Christian thinker to look at humanity in this way. He developed his theological anthropology through intense study of scripture, particularly the writings of Paul. He also claimed the authority of Saint Augustine, the fifth-century bishop of Hippo who wrote so eloquently of his own “big problems.” One can certainly argue, as Luther did, that the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth as recorded in the synoptic Gospels conveys a similarly low anthropology and that Jesus’ revision of the Decalogue was intended to point this fact out to anyone who thought he or she was living a life that was virtuous in the eyes of God. Just try not to sin, Jesus seemed to be saying, let’s see how you do. This is not, however, the end of the message. Many Christians from across denominational and political spectrums have rejoiced in a God who could “embrace all this stuff, all these imperfections.” One of these is Pastor Ted Haggard, whose statement of belief on the question of salvation reads:

Salvation: We are saved by grace through faith in Jesus Christ: His death, burial and resurrection. Salvation is a gift from God, not a result of our good works or of any human effort (see Rom. 10:9,10; Acts 16:31; Gal. 2:16; 3:8; Eph. 2:8,9; Titus 3:5; Heb. 9:22).

Rush Limbaugh’s disdain for this view of humanity grows from a tension at the heart of the current Republican alliance between economic and social conservatives. The former believe that a person left to her own devices will act in ways that are rational and, generally speaking, beneficial to her and those around her. The latter believe that every human being is flawed. For more than a decade now, the theological anthropology of the economic conservatives has won out as “liberal” politicians have — with a ritual frequency and fervor — exposed their own deep imperfections. Liberals’ imperfections are still present, to be sure. Today the imperfections of even the most righteous on the Right are on display and may well end the once “perfect” political marriage.

And so, I am thankful this political season for Rush Limbaugh. Though he did it inadvertently, he has set a course for a revitalized theology of liberal politics in America. The evidence of human imperfection is even more overwhelming today than it was last week. Whether in war or in their personal lives, people are apt to mess things up horribly. The gravest danger seems to come when humans refuse to acknowledge these truths, stop trying to embrace imperfections, and somehow convince themselves that we are not all, basically, klutzes.

One measure of the integrity of liberal politics will be Democrats’ responses to the Haggard situation. As tempting as Schadenfreude is, it is a step away from the acknowledgment of human sinfulness that undergirds much of Christian theology. It is also a betrayal of liberal values. Just ask Rush.

Jonathan Ebel is an assistant professor in the Program for the Study of Religion at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

2. Ted Haggard Sees a Darkness

By Anthea Butler

Well, it was a humdinger (no pun intended) of a week if you were a white evangelical in America. Ted Haggard, the epitome of white evangelical patriarchy and Godly manhood, was exposed by a former gay prostitute who may actually have the moral attributes to be considered a good evangelical: someone who stood up for righteousness and justice at tremendous cost.

I cannot even begin to imagine the hurt and shame that Ted Haggard’s wife Gayle, and their five children are experiencing now. The members of the National Association of Evangelicals and Haggard’s Colorado Springs megachurch, New Life, have only just begun to taste the bitter pain and ramifications of a leader’s fall. But make no mistake: This fall was bought on by both the inability for evangelicals to engage both scripturally and culturally with sexuality, the deception that many good Christians live with in regards to their sexual orientation, and the deification of white masculinity. It is the deification of white masculinity in evangelicalism that objectifies every other person who does not fit into the “traditional family paradigm” into the other: dark, repulsive, and evil. I find it quite fitting that Mike Jones, the aggrieved party in question, realized who “Art” was by seeing Haggard on a special about the antichrist on the History Channel. In my estimation, this is proof that God exists…and that irony is perhaps a divine attribute.

The manner in which Haggard characterized his fall was telling indeed. First denial, then a hasty “I bought meth but didn’t smoke it and no sex happened” in front of his wife and three of his children last Friday. Haggard had both conservative pundit Tucker Carlson and myself in agreement. (another sign there is a God!) Carlson was appalled that Haggard had stopped to give an interview about the matter with his wife and children in the truck with him. Even more galling was that in his “repentance,” Haggard vilified same sex orientation in his apology letter to the congregation, by describing his same sex encounters this way: “There is a part of my life that is so repulsive and dark that I have been warring against it all of my adult life”; and, “Then, from time to time, the dirt that I thought was gone would resurface, and I would find myself thinking thoughts and experiencing desires that were contrary to everything I believe and teach.”

Haggard’s description of his homosexual orientation with themes of dirt, darkness, and repulsiveness are a vital part of many men and women who live lives of integrity every day, with those same desires. Except they have moved beyond thinking that they are dirty, and unworthy of love and respect. Haggard’s words are also offensive in the sense that darkness is always equated with evil and sin. Yes, I know it is described this way in scripture, but oftentimes, I wonder if white evangelicals can see anyone who is not white, just because of this turn of a phrase. Haggard may be sorry, but even in repentance, he has not learned the most important lesson about not casting the first stone.

And it is within that very biblical passage that Jesus comes closest to perhaps saying something about sex (John 8:3-7), but has something more important to say: “Let he who is without sin in you cast the first stone”. The political ethos of the last 25 years in the U.S. has been dominated by the religious right, who wish desperately we could go back to the days of casting stones. The “A” of the Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter has been replaced by a giant H for homosexual. And the final arrogance, as Jeff Sharlet has noted, is that lesbianism is not even part of the evangelical conversation about homosexuality.

It is the evangelical preoccupation with regulating sexuality, prohibiting gay marriage, and legislating morality that has produced the roll call of sexual exposes ranging from Jim Bakker, to Jimmy Swaggart, Bill Clinton, Mark Foley, and I am sure I am forgetting countless others. Legislating morality is not a job for churches to engage in within the political arena. Sunday morning service, fine. But leave my ballot box to me on the first Tuesday in November. I don’t like to think about sex when I am voting for someone who will be voting on tax cuts, or how fast (or not) we should get out of Iraq, or if my mother can understand the new Medicare/Medicaid laws.

Hopefully, evangelicals will realize that they are in a profound moment of self-examination right now, individually and corporately. That moment is not lodged in the sexual indiscretions of Ted Haggard, but in the profound sense that the political foray, the access to the White House, and all of the posturing and access by evangelical leaders like Ted Haggard and James Dobson has not produced the “Christian nation” and “righteousness” that they have so eagerly sought after. Haggard in the last year was trying to shape a more moderate stance, turning evangelicals toward a new appreciation for the preservation of the environment. Perhaps taking care of the garden of Earth that God gave, rather than listening to that snake whispering political prowess through abusing those who don’t conform to the unattainable evangelical ideal, might be a new tactic for evangelicals to consider in the coming days.

Anthea Butler, an assistant professor of religious studies at the University of Rochester, is co-editor of North Star, an online journal of African-American religious history.