Onetime Evangelical superstar, Ted Haggard, has a big day coming up this Thursday. That’s when he appears on Larry King Live to promote an HBO documentary about himself that will debut that same night. The documentary project is meant to examine Haggard’s two year time in exile from his pulpit at the New Life Church in Colorado Springs— an exile resulting from revelations about Haggard’s homosexuality— and early reviews of the cable film have cynically labeled it, “Haggard’s pity party.”
New Life sent him on his way with a quarter-million-dollar severance package (see my blog of 1/20), but we didn’t know until this weekend that Haggard’s old congregation (actually it was the congregation's insurance company) also had to pony up additional tens of thousands of dollars to settle with a young man who had been homosexually involved with Haggard for years while he (Haggard) was preaching from New Life’s pulpit about the evils of gay sex. This all has a very Catholic feel about it.
Anyway, Haggard has evidently burned through his $250K severance money and he feels that now is the time to try for a comeback. Since he makes no claim about being rehabilitated from his own self-destructive sexual tendencies, I can only assume that his attempt at reinvention will be based partly on a feel-sorry-for-me approach, and also partly on the claim that he is “born again” and “right with his Savior,” or however it is that Evalgelicals phrase this stuff. For me, personally, I can’t wait to see if he still projects that smirking, arrogant confidence that always reminded me of Eddie Haskell.
Also see: Jesus = $$$$, Even In a Bad Economy
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