In the creepy documentary about the brainwashing of children at evangelical camps, Ted Haggard slings the hate speech toward gays.
The Rev. Ted Haggard has been fired amid allegations of gay sex and drug use, but the evangelical leader can still be seen at the height of his powers preaching to thousands and condemning homosexuality in the documentary “Jesus Camp.”
In one scene of the film, which follows a group of children as they develop evangelical Christian beliefs, directors Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady visit Haggard’s 14,000-member New Life Church in Colorado Springs, Colo. He tells the vast audience, “We don’t have to debate about what we should think about homosexual activity. It’s written in the Bible.” Then Haggard looks into the camera and says kiddingly: “I think I know what you did last night,” drawing laughs from the crowd. “If you send me a thousand dollars, I won’t tell your wife.”
Is it really fair, however, to use an extreme fundamentalist example as representative of the entirety of religion?
I’m not suggesting, by any means, that Haggard represents the entirety of religion. He was handpicked, however, to represent evangelical Christians as the president of the National Association of Evangelicals. His own church has 14,000 members, and the organization over which he resides is a group of churches with 30 million members, so, extreme as he may seem to us, a lot of Americans think he’s not an extremist at all. He has boasted that, if all evangelicals were to vote, they could control politics in America. The NAE website talks about the “new NAE Office of Governmental Affairs project,” which “aims to inspire evangelicals to creative public engagement on a broad biblical agenda;” these folks aren’t exactly fringe players.