Haggard's re-hab - more denial, more shame...?

haggard is facing a long, hard road, and, imho, it will only be made all the more difficult by adhering to a fundamentalist christian ideology...

[A] theology of constant spiritual warfare has led some of his followers to blame Haggard's fall not on any personal weakness but on Satan's cunning. As congregation member Jan Long, 60, put it: "The enemy wants to destroy us."

Such constructions worry the Rev. Tony Campolo, a liberal evangelical leader who helped guide President Clinton's spiritual restoration after the Monica S. Lewinsky affair. "The idea that this is a matter of some evil spirit taking hold of him is setting Ted Haggard up for disaster," Campolo said. "He may have a tendency to pretend that he's been delivered from his homosexual feelings … and all is well."

Campolo said he hoped the restoration team would impress upon Haggard that "there is no easy fix. These are problems he will struggle with for a lifetime."

indeed, there is no easy answer for rev. haggard... coming to grips with one's sexuality is hard enough, but never so much so as when it has been buried in shame and self-loathing, and i suspect the serenity prayer isn't in common usage in fundamentalist christian circles... my crude and uninformed hunch is that the drugs were used to escape the feelings of shame, and that's yet another layer of complexity and plain hard work that rev. haggard has to face... if he chooses the "gay cure" route, again, in my opinion, that will only intensify the shame and cause him to try to bury it even deeper... all in all, not a good prognosis for the rev., but i still wish him the best...

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