Evangelical Scandals: Who Matters Now?

Posted by Sarah Posner at 12:40 PM on March 6, 2007.

At The Revealer, Jeff Sharlet, who knows what he's talking about when it comes to Ted Haggard, has an insightful post about why today's Times article noting the declining membership of the fallen preacher's New Life Church, and resulting staff layoffs, has less to do with Haggard's john and meth than it does the cult of personality. Jeff says:

But I don't see the staffing troubles of a megachurch that no longer possesses national political power as national news. Especially when there's another political preacher who could use some press scrutiny, Pastor Mac Hammond of Minnesota, a rising star in the mold of Ted Haggard. The Minnesota Monitor has been doing good work sifting through Hammond's seemingly shady finances, which apparently include his church's purchase of a stunt plane for their pastor, not to mention a lot of questionable loans.

But outside the Minnesota press, the story has received almost no attention -- probably for the same reason Ted Haggard avoided scrutiny even as he moved into the first tier of evangelical GOP power brokers. The national press can't see the politics of the new model of evangelical politics: younger, regional bosses like Haggard, Hammond, Ohio's Rod Parsley, and Seattle's Mark Driscoll, all of them hipper in style than dinosaurs like Falwell and James Dobson. They talk nice, and they play local, but that doesn't mean that their impact is limited, as Haggard proved before he became the latest poster boy for fundamentalist hypocrisy.

I've discussed Hammond's airplane stunt on these pages, because, like Jeff, I think it's a national, not just a regional story. But Hammond is not just a rising star because, like Jeff says, he's hip and cool, but because he's tied into same televangelist infrastructure as Rod Parsley and John Hagee, which is rapidly gaining power in the evangelical movement and conservative politics. Hammond is a protege of televangelism heavyweight Kenneth Copeland, who has also recently come under scrutiny about his own jet, as well as a regional director for Hagee's Christians United for Israel.

If you find all of this just endlessly fascinating, I'm working on a book on these new power brokers and how their network operates. If you want to find out more about who's who and what's what, you can look forward to that. And soon here on Alternet I'll tell you all about my trip last weekend to Tulsa, OK, where I felt the ghost of Ted Haggard at Oral Roberts University.

Tagged as: evangelicals, haggard, hagee, hammond, televangelists

Sarah Posner is an investigative journalist whose work has appeared on Alternet, The American Prospect, The Gadflyer, and in other publications.