ABSTRACT
In November 2006, Ted Haggard resigned both as pastor of the New Life Church he had founded in conservative Colorado Springs and as leader of the US-based National Association of Evangelicals when it was revealed that he had been paying a gay prostitute, Mike Jones, for sex and drugs. Jones cited Haggard’s hypocrisy (condemning homosexuality in public while engaging in gay sex in private), alongside the negative impact that Haggard’s public pronouncements were having on gay issues, as the factors that motivated him to come forward. As genuinely shocked as Haggard’s congregation and other evangelical leaders seem to have been, this sex scandal was only one in a series of similar incidents among conservative Christians in the US and elsewhere. The Los Angeles Times in September 2004 accused Paul Crouch, founder and president of the Trinity Broadcasting Network, the largest Christian television network in the US, of having paid a former male employee of the network almost a half million dollars to keep him from revealing a coerced sexual encounter. Similar examples date back to the earliest years of the movement. In 1916 John Balcom Shaw, Presbyterian pastor, college president, and one of the editors of The Fundamentals (the series of publications that lent its name to what became Christian fundamentalism) was disgraced by accusations that he had attempted the seduction of several young men at YMCAs and elsewhere around the country. Similar struggles and contradictions between belief and behavior can also be seen in the recent international crisis facing the Catholic clergy that resulted, for example, in the 1995 resignation of the Archbishop of Vienna, Hans Hermann Gröer, after allegations that he had coerced young men into sex. Charges of what is usually described as “pedophilia” against Catholic clergy in the US are not uncommon. According to one American report, four out of five victims of such illicit advances are male, most often boys in their teens.1
