A Small Sample
It has been big news. I, for one, certainly haven't had a lot of time to read what's being written all over the place about the Ted Haggard story. Here are a few that struck me, though.

First comes one from a gay blogger on Beliefnet:

Yesterday, Ted Haggard was my oppressor. Today his story reveals that life and all who live it are more complicated than fundamentalists want us to believe.... The debacle that Ted Haggard walked into yesterday is an opportunity for us to awaken to the gritty human realities that are everyone’s to grapple with. I don’t care what leads people like Bill Clinton, Mark Foley and Ted Haggard to do the very thing that is certain to ruin their careers. Perhaps it is the narcotic of power. Perhaps it is a society that requires its leaders to be less imperfect than the rest of us. All I know is that the combination of intolerance and hypocrisy from podiums and pulpits of power will never achieve the goals that the religious right hope to meet. I believe it is a time to remember that Jesus identified with the poor, the oppressed and the marginalized. It is they, not himself, that he came to set free.
--Macky Alston, on Beliefnet

Intolerance never does it. He is so right with that. Hypocrisy- which all of us are truly guilty of- will never achieve the goals that we claim to promote. I hope Ted Haggard hears that in his healing and not the biased views of those who seek only to use him for power.

I have to include this next one. I found it by accident from another blog who I can't give a hat-tip to because I was so appalled by what this one says that I forgot to go back and get the other address. This one is nothing short of sexist, weird, and downright scary that someone could actually believe this to be true.

Most pastors I know do not have satisfying, free, sexual conversations and liberties with their wives. At the risk of being even more widely despised than I currently am, I will lean over the plate and take one for the team on this. It is not uncommon to meet pastors’ wives who really let themselves go; they sometimes feel that because their husband is a pastor, he is therefore trapped into fidelity, which gives them cause for laziness. A wife who lets herself go and is not sexually available to her husband in the ways that the Song of Songs is so frank about is not responsible for her husband’s sin, but she may not be helping him either.
--Mark Driscoll Blog

Does this post show an even deeper problem within the evangelical movement than the Ted Haggard story? If only pastors' wives (I assume this is put this way since women can't be pastors) kept their sexiness alluring, the pastor husband wouldn't be tempted to have an affair. What hooey! I don't even know what else to say about this since everything I say only serves to give it more value than it should be given. Finished with it. Done.

This next one gets to the psycho-spiritual side as Jung would have come to it.

A shadow can be a hidden power—like when a timid woman feels she can't get angry, or when a kind-hearted man can't be assertive. It can be anything you disown in yourself or find yourself hating in others. In fact, what you find yourself hating most in the outer world is always a tip-off; this is an area where your psyche could use, as they say, "a little work." Jung himself said, "Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves." It almost seems like Shakespeare had anti-gay gay Christians in mind when he wrote: "The lady doth protest too much, methinks."
--Amy Cunningham on Beliefnet

We often attack in other people those very things that we are so terrified of in ourselves. I have seen that in many ways in many people. I have seen it in myself when trying to deal with some difficult people. The ones I have the most trouble with are those that have the same character flaws or fears that I do.

Conservative gay columnist Andrew Sullivan sees that connection between Haggard's denial of reality and the fundamentalist political denials of some basic human realities:

His denial of reality, his inability to cope with the world as it is, is often part of the same fundamentalist psyche we see exhibited at all levels of the Rove machine - and, dangerously, within the president himself. Denial is a very powerful psychic force. When combined with addiction, it can fuel destructive behavior. In a human being, it can destroy a person, a family, a marriage, an entire life.

One more obvious lesson: The religious right's lies about who gay people really are must end. Surely now. The victims are also Christians like Haggard. They are countless kids and teens in places where they are taught to hate themselves, and subsequently act out the psychic damage years later.
--Andrew Sullivan Blog post

Haggard himself is about to become the victim of his own denial and the denial he has fostered in the greater evangelical world. I hope he can find healing for the demons when he faces it openly.

Finally, from another blog, a challenge that should probably not be taken lightly:

It's time for evangelicals to rethink their priorities, reexamine the evil fruits of pragmatic and market-driven "spirituality," and retool their own movement. Better yet, Christians with a concern for the glory of God and the authority of Scripture should renounce the latitudinarian-style movement contemporary "evangelicalism" has morphed into. It is a hopelessly mixed and muddled multitude. The fashionable brand of NAE/Christianity Today-style "evangelicalism" actually abandoned historic evangelical principles long ago, and hasn't taken a firm stand for biblical and evangelical doctrine for some time. The current scandal is only a symptom of that much deeper problem.

Which is to say that evangelicalism right now is at least as much in need of Reformation as Medieval Roman Catholicism was before Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of the castle church. We need to face that squarely, rather than reflexively defending our "movement" in the wake of a scandal like this.
--Phil Johnson at Pyromaniacs Blog

Guess that's it for some of this surfing and cutting and pasting. There's a part of me that sees this as one of the most important stories in the Christian realm in a long time. It overshadows both the Jim Baker and Jimmy Swaggart scandals by miles and miles because it goes to the heart of the modern Protestant church in America, evangelical or not.

I have a hunch it is a story that could have more impact at levels and in ways that are not visible today. Ten years from now sociologists of religion may point back to this as either a final straw or a turning point. How, in what ways or why? You got me. It's reality and depth is yet to be seen.