Soldiers of Christ (Haggard's megachurch)

[madmusic]

Inside America's most powerful megachurch with Pastor Ted Haggard
Posted on Thursday, November 2, 2006. Originally from May 2005. By Jeff Sharlet.

They are drawn as if by magnetic forces; they speak of Colorado Springs, home to the greatest concentration of fundamentalist Christian activist groups in American history, both as a last stand and as a kind of utopia in the making. They say it is new and unique and precious, embattled by enemies, and also that it is “traditional,” a blueprint for what everybody wants, and envied by enemies. The city itself is unspectacular, a grid of wide western avenues lined with squat, gray and beige box buildings, only a handful of them taller than a dozen stories. Local cynics point out that if you put Colorado Springs on a truck and carted it to Nebraska, it would make Omaha look lovely. But the architecture is not what draws Christians looking for clean living. The mountains help, but there are other mountain towns. What Colorado Springs offers, ultimately, is a story.

Lori Rose is from Minnesota and heard rumors about this holy city when she lived on an Air Force base near Washington, D.C. Her husband isn't a Christian, refuses Jesus, looks at things he shouldn't; but she has found a church to attend without him and joined a marriage study group there. Ron Poelstra came from Los Angeles. Now he volunteers at his church, selling his pastor's books on “free-market theology” after services. His two teenage boys stand behind him, display models for the benefits of faith. L.A., Ron says, would have eaten them up: the gangs. Adam Taylor, now a pastor, grew up in Westchester County, an heir to the Bergdorf Goodman fortune, the son of artists and writers. In Colorado Springs he learned the Bible the hard way, each word a nail pounded into sin.

The story they found in Colorado is about newness: new houses, new roads, new stores. And about oldness, imagined: what is thought to be the traditional way of life, families as they were before the culture wars, after the World Wars, which is to say, during the brief, Cold War moment when America was a nation of single-breadwinner nuclear families.

more: http://www.harpers.org/SoldiersOfChrist-20061103288348488.html

[Neshanic]

1. Uniforms designed by Haggard himself. "My that's a big loincloth!"

[Erika]

2. I feel sadness for the Jonestown type of Haggard follower

Thank goodness he was outed and they were given a chance to wake up and quit drinking the GOP kool aid.

[Name removed]

3. Deleted message

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[Erika]

4. I have no problem with him being bisexual

But I have a huge problem with his hypocrisy.

I find your post offensive.

[Name removed]

5. Deleted message

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[Old and In the Way]

6. It really is a show business church.

This place looks to have more of a musical, LV show atmosphere than a place of reflection. Ted was just the star of the show.

[Erika]

8. I couldn't believe the size, the lights, etc

Pastor Ted collected the $ big time. I've always wondered how the Bakkers, the Swaggerts, Falwell, etc.
could get the public to give them millions for such lavish buildings and networks.

I guess helping the poor is not on their agenda.

[Freedom_from_Chains]

7. That's what the Puritans said when they came to this country

They were going to create a Christian utopia their "City on a Hill," which of course turned into a brutally oppressive society which is what all societal schemes like this turn into.

[Erika]

9. Yeah, and the Puritans killed witches in Salem n/t