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And even though Haggard has disgraced himself, he doesn't try to justify himself. At one point, Pelosi asks him point-blank about whether he had to choose between being gay and being evangelical. Faced with this question, many "gay Christians" have said,"I am who I am. I'm gay." Not Ted Haggard. "I am evangelical," he says. "I am who I am."

His fundamental identity, then, is formed more by his faith than by his sexuality.

The Trials of Ted Haggard portrays a man who cannot be separated from his Bible. He reads Scripture from his mobile phone while stretched out on a motel-room bed. He reads from a black leather Bible while sitting on the Arizona desert sands. He and his wife, Gayle, read from the Sermon on the Mount while sitting in the cab of his truck. "Love your enemies, do good to them that hate you, pray for them that despitefully use you." That's the sort of passage "that'll get you through the night," he says. Gayle echoes softly: "That's a good line. It will get you through the night."

Gayle, Ted's wife of 29 years, is the real miracle in this movie. If she had left him after the scandal broke, no one would have blamed her. But she stayed with him, forgave him, and says she would marry him all over again. "I stuck with him because I love him," she says. "I believe he's worth it because he's a human being. I don't believe in writing people off because they [make] mistakes. I believe you fight for the good. And I knew to restore honor to our children, the best thing I could do was to restore honor to their father."

Restoring honor to Ted Haggard is going to be difficult. In the past week, new details have emerged of yet another inappropriate sexual relationship, this time between Haggard and a young male volunteer at NLC. His distorted sexuality was not just driving him to visit a prostitute while away from home. He was sexually engaged with a member of his own congregation.Who knows what other revelations may further taint his reputation?

Yet through all of this, Haggard sees the working of Providence. He may never regain the things he once had: career, respect, national prominence, good salary, friends. But something internal has changed through his trials, his therapy, his insights into himself, and his reliance on God: "I'd still [rather] be the way I am now, and broke, and a man of ill-repute, than the way I was and have that horrific internal struggle that I had."

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Christianity Today also posted an interview with Alexandra Pelosi and an article by Patton Dodd, a former New Life Church staffer. CT has several previous articles on Ted Haggard.

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January (Web-only) 2009, Vol. 53