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Ted Haggard is senior pastor of New Life Church in Colorado Springs and president of the National Association of Evangelicals. The author of several books, Haggard's most recent isFoolish No More!: Seizing a Life Beyond Belief, in which he takes a new look at Paul's epistle to the Galatians.

Foolish No More!: Seizing a Life Beyond Belief by Ted Haggard Random House, 2005 224 pp.; $16.99

Why did you decide Galatians is something you wanted published right now?

This book reflects the crisis that America is in right now. Right now it's trying to decide what to do about the law, and how to use the law to encourage people to be more moral or whether the law should ever be used to encourage people to be more moral—or example, the Lawrence decision that outlawed anti-sodomy laws across the country.

That was the discussion of Galatians, whether or not the law can be used to help people be better people. I don't want to take a purely spiritual argument and try to impose it on civil law, but I do think Christians have to wrestle with it, because the easiest way for us to appease our own conscience is to pass a civil law. That is the argument of the Judaizers when they came from Jerusalem and said to the church at Galatia that they needed to have higher standards. The apostle Paul shot back, and he said, "No, these are Gentiles that have been saved; they don't live according to the same standards as the Jews that have been saved."

As a church pastor and the head of the NAE, where do you come down on it?

I think some issues should have rules within the church. For instance, we believe within the church that sexuality should be only between a married man and a woman. But in civil law, I would never want that inculcated.

There are many things that I teach in the church that I would never want integrated into civil law.

Do you think there's a need for the Federal Marriage Amendment?

Yes. And the reason we need the Federal Marriage Amendment is for the sake of children. All the research shows that children have the greatest opportunity to be successful in life if they're raised by their biological parents. And so my argument for the Federal Marriage Amendment is not a biblical argument.

The biblical argument could be made, but not in this particular case. In Washington, D.C., our argument has to be the fact that the greatest benefit to society and to our culture and to the children of our nation would be to instill in our Constitution that marriage is the union between a man and a woman. It would be devastating for the children of our nation and for the future of Western civilization for us to say that homosexual unions or lesbian unions or any alteration of that has the moral equivalence of a heterosexual, monogamous marriage.

So that needs to be inculcated into the Constitution, otherwise we run the risk of a Supreme Court decision that will say that a gay couple living together and a heterosexual couple living together have the same standing under the law.

What are some other issues that you would teach in church but shouldn't be made the law of the land?

I think one of them probably is the Lawrence decision. Two consenting adults in a bedroom is not really the role of the state. All over the country, these sodomy laws had not been enforced for many years. So, even though I don't believe in activist judges, and I wish that would have been corrected in the legislature, I think that was probably a good decision.

On the other hand, something that I teach in church that should be made into law is the fact that a fetus is a human being. Since a fetus is a human being, that human being should have state protection. I don't think that should be a random choice by a mother. The human being inside the mother should be protected just like the mother is protected.

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November (Web-only) 2005, Vol. 49