It’s getting hard to keep up.

Just this past weekend, a second Colorado pastor had to step down from his evangelical church due to an unscheduled outing from the closet.

“I have struggled with homosexuality since I was a 5-year-old boy,” confessed Paul Barnes, in a videotape message played on Sunday for his congregation. “I can’t tell you the number of nights I have cried myself to sleep, begging God to take this away.”

We can think of a lot of reasons for hardline evangelicals to cry themselves to sleep. The least of which would be a little harmless R&R with one of the boys. Just for starters, wasn’t being born the first time traumatic enough without wanting to repeat the trip?

It seems every time we turn around, some new evangelical blowhard — someone you never heard of, from the back of beyond — is catching media fire with an even nuttier stand against Darwin, or medical research, or Walmart (which we have learned not only sells the Brokeback Mountain DVD to “families” but has begun actively “pushing the gay agenda”, according to WorldNetDaily, a Christian publication currently in the throes of “Operation Just Say Merry Christmas.”)

The rapid turnover in outlandish pronouncements and exploding closets is why we depend so heavily on Mark Lanham (right) and his hilarious Sinner’s Guide website. We think of it as the Drudge Report for the Evangelical Right.

An up-to-the-minute report on all the latest antics of the Left Behind crowd, the site serves as a daily update to Lanham’s quite wonderful handbook The Sinner’s Guide to the Evangelical Right. The book is not only laced with zingers but is a substantial factbook based on eye-witness reporting.

The author went around the country with a crew of researchers, posing as evangelical believers, rating the various preachers on a “Fire and Brimstone” scale and befriending the congregations. A dozen of these churchgoers reappear throughout the book as a sort of Greek chorus, offering at times surprisingly moderate takes on the high-powered vitriol that is often spewed from the pulpit. In fact, one woman identifies herself as an “evangelical lesbian,” says she is currently in a serious relation with a woman who “use to run a gay de-programming class” , and admits “many people in my church wouldn’t accept me if they knew I was gay.”

Lanham’s book is not, strictly speaking, a hit job, despite the flying quips. It is, in fact, informed by a real desire to understand an often remote, authoritarian mindset.

Nightcharm editor John Calendo recently interviewed the author, who, it turns out, was raised in a strict Southern Baptist household by parents “who speak in tongues, vote Republican and have a vanity plate that says Prayzin.”

Nightcharm: The evangelical animosity against gay people is one of the prime focuses of your book. Just for the record, are you gay?

Robert Lanham: I’m straight. Got married 3 years ago. I’m 35 and an agnostic. The evangelical demonization of gay people was probably the main reason I decided to write The Sinner’s Guide. I’m very close with several gay Christians — it’s apparently not an oxymoron. Hearing them compared to animals by closet-cases like James Dobson got me ticked off enough to want to fight back.

NC: We love your website. You trawl through all those awful Focus on the Family sites to bring back the prime muck. And we want to thank you for keeping us up to speed on Pastor Ted Haggard’s heterosexual “restoration.” May the laying on of hands continue!

Lanham: I spent close to a month visiting Ted Haggard’s New Life Church in Colorado Springs and spent a morning interviewing Pastor Ted. The day that I met with him, he actually was on his way to Denver to “catch a flight” which in hindsight I realize must have been an evangelical euphemism for “snort lines of methamphetamine off a gay prostitute’s naked body.”

Haggard actually surprised me when I asked him about homosexuality. He said it wasn’t the government’s job to legislate “what goes on behind closed doors.” This makes more sense now, given the scandal. Unlike Dobson and others, Haggard didn’t want to outlaw homosexuality — which he referred to as a “sin” and “sodomy” — but he did want to make sure that the “traditional definition of marriage” remained intact.

My gaydar must have been on the blink that day. I never expected Haggard to be gay. I assumed his downfall would come as a result of his ego and his apparent need for power. I suppose the life-sized homoerotic statues in his church lobby should have tipped me off.

NC: Excuse us while we pick our jaw up off the floor. We didn’t think straight men had gaydar. Must you guys copy every thing we do! So what does your gaydar tell you about the Haggard prognosis?

Lanham: Sadly, it seems that not much is going to change at the New Life Church. Haggard is seeking counsel from people who think homosexuality can be cured. It’s too bad. This was clearly an opportunity for the Church to become more progressive on the issue.

NC: Your book features ongoing interviews with a group of ordinary people who are evangelicals. Did any contact you after the book was published? Has there been any outcry from the evangelical leaders?

Lanham: I’ve been in contact with several people I interviewed and most of them were very happy to be included. Moderate Christians have been a surprising audience for this book. They’re more fed up than I am by the extreme fundamentalists misrepresenting their faith.

Mark Driscoll, who runs a megachurch in Seattle, blogged a bit about the book. He was pretty pissed off. I was happy to see that I hit a nerve. Driscoll’s the guy who recently said Ted Haggard’s wife may have been partially responsible for his betrayal

NC: How essential is homophobia to the theocratic mindset?

Lanham: The politics of most evangelicals doesn’t make sense.

They claim they want less government, while lobbying for more regulation. This is especially true when it comes to homosexuality and abortion.

What they don’t get is that the Constitution was written to protect the minority, not to enforce the religious beliefs of those in power.

NC: I often think their disgust with male homosexuality is a more socially acceptable way to vent a deeper disgust with sex in general.

Lanham: Clearly they’re uncomfortable with sexuality, which ties into America’s Puritan heritage. I also think the Church needs an enemy to keep recruitment numbers high. The liberals and the gays are convenient stand-ins for the godless communists now that the Cold War is over. Plus, as Haggard illustrates, there is no shortage of self-loathing. In-the-closet homosexuals fill the pews.

NC: Evangelicalism is largely a Sunbelt movement of white Protestants. How would you relate it to this same group’s investment in past crusades against racial integration and feminism?

Lanham: I discuss this in my book. Leaders such as James Dobson, Jerry Falwell, and Paul Weyrich, the so-called father of the Religious Right, have been instrumental in getting Christians behind reactionary and often bigoted politics. I think working-class white evangelical Protestants have systematically been manipulated and tricked by the people they’ve chosen to elect as their religious and political leaders.

Gays are the new lepers to the fundamentalists — the “unclean.” Ironically, fundamentalists forget that Jesus spent most of his time hanging out with the socially downtrodden people the church leadership had rejected.

NC: At the end of your book, you talk about the new evangelical pastors coming up. Is it just more “old wine in new bottles”?

Lanham: Many up-and-coming evangelical pastors are just repackaged versions of Pat Robertson and James Dobson. But there’s a small minority, such as Jim Bakker’s son, Jay Bakker, who are actively pro-gay and very liberal. I think a big backlash has begun so I hope to see more evangelical progressives emerge.

NC: Have evangelicals made any positive contributions to American life? Frankly, that’s hard for us to imagine.

Lanham: Many evangelicals have done great things for society. The obvious example being Martin Luther King. I also like C.S. Lewis who approached the bible intellectually and believed that challenging its teachings was part of being a Christian. Today, most evangelical leaders try to dumb-down the bible.

I think evangelicals in recent history have done some great work helping to reduce poverty overseas — most recently in Darfur. It’s too bad most feel the need to convert people too.

Their knee-jerk support of the Iraq War, though, was particularly troubling and hypocritical to the teachings of Christ in my eyes.

NC: Any parting thoughts?

Lanham: Yes, buy the book! It makes a great holiday gift! Ha!

NC: Robert, it’s already sitting under our tree, beside our Operation Just Say Merry Christmas manual.

Want to learn more?

Pick up a copy of the immensely enjoyable
The Sinner’s Guide to the Evangelical Right
Visit the Sinner’s Guide website

Special Nightcharm Feature:
Great Moments in Jesus