When conservative evangelical minister Ted Haggard’s secret life, seeking male prostitutes, was exposed the media took notice. There has always been a certain drama in the tent meeting revivalist seducing young women along the “sawdust trail” or the charlatan faith healer taking money from the gullible and desperate. It is no surprise that revelations of Haggard’s hidden gay life received such attention.
That quintessential American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne tackled this topic a century and a half ago in The Scarlet Letter, his story of Hester Prynne who gives birth, out of marriage. Hester is ostracized and shamed by the community, but refuses to allow this to destroy her and she hides the secret of the child’s father—the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, even when Dimmesdale joins in vilifying Hester and demanding that she identify her lover.
In this somewhat prophetic tale Dimmesdale is chosen to give the Election Sermon, an important honor. What Hawthorne wrote of Dimmesdale could be applied to Haggard, “‘At least, they shall say of me,’ thought this exemplary man, ‘that I leave no public duty unperformed or ill-performed!’ Sad, indeed, that introspection so profound and acute as this poor minister's should be so miserably deceived! We have had, and may still have, worse things to tell of him; but none, we apprehend, so pitiably weak; no evidence, at once so slight and irrefragable, of a subtle disease that had long since begun to eat into the real substance of his character. No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.”
