No one outside a relationship can know for sure what lies between two people. In chronicling her relationship with her husband — once-powerful evangelical minister Ted Haggard — Gayle Haggard makes a courageous argument for love and forgiveness while polishing the roughest parts of the scandal that upended her life.
Early on, she details the founding of the couple’s most enduring achievement, New Life Church, the nondenominational megachurch based in Colorado Springs. Over more than 20 years, the Haggards shepherded the church through phenomenal growth and acquired enormous political and social influence.
Their success was shattered in 2006 when a Denver man claimed on Peter Boyles’ radio show that he had a three-year sexual relationship with Ted Haggard. Gayle Haggard writes that she believed at the time that the incident was the result of the church’s volatile political positions.
“None of us would have been surprised if someone took a jab at Ted. . . . Because Ted had spoken against same-sex marriage from the pulpit, I assumed the accusation was designed to embarrass him,” she writes.
She soon found her husband had plenty of secrets, drug use not least among them. In the privacy of a lawyer’s office, one of the most powerful religious voices in America admitted to his wife that the allegations were more or less true.
What follows is a portrait of a man engaged in the mass deception of everyone in his life, not least himself. It’s a difficult story to hear, despite being told by Ted Haggard’s most ardent supporter. Even as Haggard admitted in private that some of the allegations being leveled against him were true, he lied to the media the very next day. After resigning from his pulpit, Haggard made a full confession to Gayle on a flight as they fled Colorado Springs for seclusion in Florida.
“I learned that Ted had been battling sexual temptations for years and that he had succumbed to those temptations involving sensual massages and other sexual sin,” his wife writes. “His dark thoughts had become obsessions, and those obsessions had led to compulsive behaviors.”
Gayle Haggard’s loyalty to her husband rings true, even through the worst moments of her married life. Her acknowledgment of her doubts, her private struggles and her love for Haggard sound genuine, not merely a byproduct of her husband’s ongoing public rehabilitation.
“I was going to demonstrate my love by fighting for the dignity and honor of everyone and everything I held dear,” she writes.
Conversely, her rationalizations for Haggard’s behavior are quite dubious. Ted tells Gayle that he feared the health of one of their children, a boy with special needs, might have been affected by an earlier incident — “A situation involving another male but not involving sexual intercourse.” In another chapter, Haggard admits spending the night in Cripple Creek with a male member of the church but repeatedly denies a sexual relationship. It’s hard to take many of these declarations at face value.
There are also affirmations of Haggard’s multiple polygraph tests and descriptions of the couple’s trauma-resolution therapy, in which Haggard’s behavior is linked to his sexual abuse as a child. These Byzantine justifications, punctuated by biblical parables, grow tedious as the story unfolds.
Yet revealing moments remain. Gayle Haggard describes one terrible day during which she confronted her own anger. “At a particularly dark and lonely moment, I used the most vulgar language I could dredge up to attack Ted,” she writes. “I accused him of the vilest acts, and when he answered, I discovered that my dark imaginings were far worse than anything he had actually done. But after visiting that dark place a couple of times, I knew I didn’t want to stay there.”
It’s difficult to say, in the end, just who this book is meant for. The Haggards have long since had their say in the media, most recently in the HBO documentary “The Trials of Ted Haggard,” so as a response to Haggard’s public drubbing, “Why I Stayed” is fairly muted.
Those who reveled in the man’s downfall won’t find much new ammunition here, and those who championed the couple’s ministry continue to do so. Perhaps the story to take away from Gayle Haggard’s confessional is the one that didn’t make the media headlines the first time around.
“I made a simple choice — to love,” Haggard writes. “To cling rather than separate. To bring everything out into the open, as opposed to remaining sheltered. And I remembered something I’d learned long before: Love isn’t a feeling, it’s a choice — a choice we make every day, sometimes every hour.”
Clayton Moore is a freelance writer.
NONFICTION
Why I Stayed
by Gayle Haggard, with Angela Hunt, $25.99
