More on Haggard's battle against "Control"

Yesterday, Radio France's Rachel Maddow interviewed Jeff Sharlett, the author of "Soldiers of Christ," the definitive article on Ted Haggard published in Harpers last Spring. From the interview, we learn the following facts about Pastor Ted's battle against a shadowy group of demon-possessed evil doers that he calls "Control."

• Pastor Ted staked out homosexual bars and sex shops in an effort to recruit the establishment's patrons into a Christianist lifestyle.
• He laid siege to homosexual bars and federal buildings by praying in front of them and rebuking the demons within them.
• One Haggard follower would take a garden sprayer filled with blessed water and spray it onto sinful intersections.
• Pastor Ted says that Satan sent a witch to stab him.
• His parishioners say Haggard resurrected a dead person.

Here's a recording of that interview:



Update: Haggard resigned from New Life Church, today.

Update II - From Talk to Action, here:

Colorado Springs has been seen as a religious battleground for years. People actually 'prayer-walk' this city, spray cooking oil on places they believe are inhabited by 'strongholds' of demonic spirits, and have made it very uncomfortable for people of other faiths, including moderate Christians, to live there.

And here:

In groups that practice "spiritual warfare" (and at least in pentecostal and charismatic communities, this does relate to dominionism--honest, Fred!--in that much of the theological basis for dominionism in these groups is linked with the "spiritual warfare" beliefs) annointing oil is used less to sanctify an object and more as a literal "territorial p*ssing".

In the groups within the pentecostal dominionist community (like New Life Church in Colorado Springs, the AoG church I'm a walkaway from, Youth With A Mission (which is actually a dominionist group), etc.) they have a specific belief in "territorial spirits". (Many dominionist leaders actually claimed that Hurricane Katrina was God's own way of "cleansing" the "territorial spirits" possessing New Orleans or otherwise claimed "territorial spirits" were the reason NOLA got hit with the hurricane. These included an Alabama state senator linked with Roy Moore and the dominionist movement in that state as well as Pat Robertson et al.)