David K: The key to understanding Ted Haggard is his mouth. He has one of those irregular, omnivorous mouths — a rubbery, cartoon-like mouth that doesn’t cooperate with the upper part of his face. His oral compulsions conflate with his sense of entitlement. Entitlement that’s fostered by all the power he’s accrued over the years. It’s a bad combination. Gobble, gobble, gobble.

You’d think he’d be a good cocksucker, but as his sex worker friend/Judas Michael Jones revealed to Michelangelo Signorile this morning, Haggard’s blowjobs were only ho-hum.

John Calendo: I think it’s all about the eyes. There’s insanity there. The crazy fire of total conviction. Do you notice how they never quite focus, never quite meet the eyeline of the interviewer? They’re always slightly off somewhere else.

DK: Psychologically the man is a disaster. He’s Elmer Gantry on meth. Living in the closet is harsh enough, but when you add all of the twisted religious proscriptions into the mix and then top it off with the boisterous, obnoxious style of his “preaching” against homosexuality — well it has to result in a deeply split personality, a kind of pathology.

In the letter to his congregation Sunday, he wrote, “There’s a part of my life that is so repulsive and dark that I have been warring against it for all my adult life.” This is where religion is truly harmful — when it forces people to completely distance themselves from psychological understanding.

JC: And when it divorces them from humanity — their own and everybody else’s. It’s a very American brand of Christianity that goes right back to the Plymouth colony and the Puritans. The body is unholy. The body is the enemy, not created in the image of God, but the image of the Devil. It teems with the dark and the repulsive. Against it the Puritan places the soul, which is so removed from the physical that it seems a judgment against it. Yes, as you say, the religion of so many of these evangelicals and spastic charismatics is a harmful, life-rejecting theology, where the goal of life is for the body to die away, and the soul to live on in some pointless phantom world.

DK: It’s heart breaking that an adult gay man, no different from you or I, has to have all that junk in his head. How wonderful, how revolutionary it would have been if Pastor Ted had said something like: You know I’ve lived my life as a married man and father, but also as a man who loves other men and I think Jesus did that to me to teach me a lesson, to teach me that both kinds of love can live in a good man. I think Jesus gave me my homosexuality as a gift.

JC: Well, he’d have to be a different person to figure that out. He doesn’t impress me as someone who does much self-reflection, and certainly not someone who checks in with reality very often. I mean, this is a man who believes Halloween is “Satan’s Holiday.” He’s one of those people who get bent out of shape over Harry Potter — not to mention Darwin. There’s a certain foolishness in his thinking, a child’s eyeview of the world, with demons and angels sitting on people’s shoulders.

DK: He takes his congregation to pray outside of gay bars to rebuke the demons within them. Jeff Sharlett, the author of Soldiers of Christ, that great article on Ted Haggard that ran in Harpers last March, was on the radio recently talking about it. Haggard’s parishioners actually believe he resurrected a dead person, and that Satan once sent a witch to stab him. It’s just nuts what these people swallow! Just nuts [At left, Thomas Blackshear's famous painting Forgiven, which depicts Jesus and a blacksmith. It hangs in Haggard's megachurch and was described in Sharlett's Harpers piece.]

JC: And yet, I find dizzy Pastor Ted sad and touching. I know that doesn’t make sense. But I see him as a gay man who got caught in the door when the closet slammed shut. I know how easy it is to dismiss him as just another fatuous hypocrite, but I think Brother Ted was actually sincere. He really does hate “the gay agenda.” He sees homosexuality as a great failing in himself. He sees the push for gay rights as a way of legitimizing degeneracy, which includes his own. I mean the man had five children. You have to give him A for effort.

DK: I have the opposite reaction. The more I see him, the crueler and more power-hungry I think he is. I wonder how this and the Foley scandal are going to play out in tomorrow’s election. The Republicans have put so much money and time into gaybaiting these people and now all these right-wing homos are going off like suicide bombers.

JC: One thing’s for sure. Ted is a lot cuter than Mark Foley. Was it Lincoln who said every man gets the face he deserves at 50? Foley looks like an iguana. But Ted looks like an arrested kid, a sort of elderly 5-year old.

DK: Give me a fucking break! He’s no kid! This is a man who praised-the-lord his way into the White House.

JC: I see that too, David. He’s a grown man, he’s responsible for what happens to him in life. He chose to ignore the lessons of experience. He didn’t take the time to contemplate what it meant to be the man he was. Instead, he became a blind believer and recited empty words and trusted in a surface reading of an ancient book, and he expected that to do all the heavy-lifting and thinking for him.

So what he’s left with is a life that seems dark and repulsive. Joseph Campbell said a wonderful thing about spirituality. He told the myth of the hunter who comes upon the goddess Diana bathing in a stream. There he is, a man beholding a God in all her awesome immensity, and he runs away. The goddess is so incensed by this that the man is robbed of his speech, turned into a stag and is shot down by the other hunters. And the eternal story behind this is that if you’re not ready to experience God when God reveals herself, she appears as a monster. And that’s what these negative, life-hating religionists are left with. A dark, repulsive embrace of death, ugliness and horror.

DK: Haggard’s New Life megachurch is still getting it all wrong. They made it very clear last Sunday that there could be no admission of the real truth. The truth that Haggard isn’t possessed or demonic or a sinner — he’s just fucking gay! What’s the big deal! In response to Haggard, New Life Church has inflated its anti-gay blind spot to solar proportions. An example being the statement New Life’s administrative pastor Lance Coles shared with the congregation at the Sunday service:

“I know who Ted is at his core. I think in his zeal to love and serve people, he committed himself to so many noble causes that it brought him to a point of weakness that we’re seeing exposed.”

In other words Pastor Ted was so good he was forced to do bad. Satan just couldn’t stand all those pious works and had to come a-calling in the guise of a male escort.

JC: With meth yet. A variation on the “I was so drunk last night” lie. The whole thing is so Fifties. All this church-based homophobia is so musty and dusty and cornball. And the New Life church is 100% Ted’s own personality. Remember, he created the New Life Church in his basement. He was its moving force, its marquee name. He made the decision to go anti-gay, to hook his fate to that particular black star in the Evangelical agenda — those are the people who really do have an agenda. They go to Washington with a list of political goals they want to make law, and wrap it all up in the flag and Jesus.

And it was also Pastor Ted, who wanted to put a younger, “hipper” face on evangelicalism. Do you know he used to ride around that big boxy megachurch of his on a scooter — like some smug Silicone Valley techy? He had the whole place wired for the internet, and decked out with concert-size TV screens and every Saturday night, he would put on an arena show. Roseanne Barr last week on HBO had such a funny line: “I don’t get these religious people. They have like this, ‘Christian Rock.’ What’s that bullshit about? What next? Christian porn?”

DK: Well, when you consider the outrageous art that dominates different corners of Ted’s church — the homoerotic paintings that the Harpers piece zeroed in on — we may already have Christian porn. I love this description from the Harpers piece:

The atrium is a soaring foyer adorned with the flags of the nations and guarded by another bronze warrior angel, a scowling, bearded type with massive biceps and, again, a sword. The angel’s pedestal stands at the center of a great, eight-pointed compass … Each point directs the eye to a contemporary painting, most depicting gorgeous, muscular men — one is a blacksmith, another is bound, fetish-style, in chains — in various states of undress

My favorite is The Vessel, by Thomas Blackshear, a major figure in the evangelical-art world. Here in the World Prayer Center is a print of The Vessel, a tall, vertical panel of two nude, ample-breasted, white female angels, team-pouring an urn of honey onto the shaved head of a naked, olive-skinned man below.

The honey drips down over his slab-like pecs and his six-pack abs into the eponymous vessel, which he holds in front of his crotch. But the vessel can’t handle that much honey, so the sweetness oozes over the edges and spills down yet another level, presumably onto our heads, drenching us in golden, godly love.

Part of what makes Blackshear’s work so compelling is precisely its unabashed eroticism; it aims to turn you on, and then to turn that passion toward Jesus.

That should have set the gaydar alarms ringing across the Mountain States!