Return of the King

According to the Wall Street Journal, Ted Haggard is back.  As Tiger Woods needs to golf and Michael Vick needs to play football (or, from a British perspective `stand around posing in spandex tights, giving high fives and doing little else for three hours a week’) so Ted Haggard needs to be leading a church, or so he says in this interview.  That’s what ministry is all about, of course: personal therapy.

However, while he clearly grasps one important truth — America is the can-do land of second chances where success is the sacrament of forgiveness — he misunderstands his own culture in one important way.  He tells us that one of the problems was that he “over-repented.”  Given that religion here is often just a branch of the entertainment industry, and  church leadership is all about celebrity and public performance, over-repenting is surely just one more vital part of that ecclesiastical repertoire: over-acting.

Oh, but it’s not all bad news.  He cusses now.  The grown-ups in the radical Reformed world will no doubt take some comfort from that.