The film follows Haggard after the church he founded, Colorado’s New Life Church, rejects him once it is revealed that he bought crystal meth and had sex with a gay prostitute. Pelosi documents Haggard's "exile" as he and his family move around Arizona in a U-Haul truck while Haggard interviews for jobs and eventually becomes a traveling insurance salesmen. (Haggard actually agreed to leave for a year in return for his severance pay, but Pelosi doesn't explain this in the film.) Most critics agree that The Trials of Ted Haggard presents a sympathetic view of the man, but can't decide whether this is because Pelosi is trying to tell the poignant tale of a man starting over at middle age, or if she's simply grown too close to Haggard. Below, the critics hash out whether there's a genius to Pelosi questioning Haggard "with all of the tact and nuance of a toddler," as Salon says, or if Pelosi has taken on the role of Haggard's publicist.

The New York Times

The film doesn’t merely document Mr. Haggard’s fall from grace, it also tracks the pathology of his attempt at a comeback. It’s a cautionary tale for disgraced public figures; for viewers it’s a master class in the art of self-serving remorse and hubris dressed up as humility.

The Washington Post

It's evangelism. Haggard is looking for a job, but what he's really doing is casting himself as a Job. Pelosi clearly knows this; she's even hinted at it in her title. The quid pro quo that underlies this film is obvious: He's giving her access. She's giving him a pulpit again. And Haggard is a good evangelist. He knows he doesn't need to preach sin and redemption, it's more powerful if he lives it.

No matter where you stand on the culture wars, you can't help but like [Haggard]. He's tortured, and for all this film's real and manufactured intimacy, Pelosi never plumbs how. She doesn't push him to reconcile his biblical theology with the evidence of his own life. She doesn't probe what happened between the experimentation of a 7-year-old and the blow-up of a 50-year-old's life. We sense only that he's tortured, and yet sincere. Sincerely tortured.

The L.A. Times

"The Trials of Ted Haggard" is a strange, disturbing, imperfect but in the end heartbreaking little film that may wind up being the most powerful indictment of homophobia since "Brokeback Mountain." It's not so much a documentary as it is a series of encounters with a man struggling to hold on to two mutually destructive identities: an evangelical who is not exclusively heterosexual. That he cannot let go of the latter and will not let go of the former makes him a tragic embodiment of the still-raging war between sexuality and religion.

Variety

Despite the tendency to dismiss Haggard as another pulpit-pounding hypocrite, Pelosi zeroes in on a more poignant and relatable theme: a man forced to start over at middle age ... Pelosi zooms in close enough to turn Haggard into a semi-tragic figure, literally walking him to the door (under the camera’s lens) on job interviews and having him discuss his situation while lying on a dingy motel bed ... Having clearly gained his confidence, Pelosi peels back the symbol enough to expose fleeting glimpses of the man underneath — peddling only himself, and, as in his door-to-door gig, unable to make the sale.

The Boston Herald

Filmmaker Alexandra Pelosi met Haggard while filming another documentary, and she’s the other major player in this almost 45-minute film, videotaping him with her hand-held camera and cajoling him with questions. She likes him and wants him to succeed, even if his fellow Christians want him to burn ... Pelosi’s affection for Haggard gets in the way of getting a true sense of him. His perpetual ear-to-ear grin is off-putting, and he vacillates between self-pity and self-loathing.

The Boston Globe

Given her access to Haggard, Pelosi's approach struck me as inadequate. I didn't want to watch an attack of the man or of the church, or a stubbornly balanced profile; but I didn't want to feel that the storyteller was in the pocket of her subject, either. I wanted to see a close-up of a man fallen from grace, not a close-up of his myth-making.

Salon

This is the once wildly popular pastor who practically smiled to reporters as he admitted to buying meth and "getting massages" from a male prostitute. Clearly Haggard is a master of disguises, and Pelosi's film doesn't really provide the sort of unforgiving peek behind the curtain that we might've hoped for. At times, in fact, "The Trials of Ted Haggard" feels less like a search for the truth and more like a collaboration between Pelosi (as publicist) and Haggard (as client with a tarnished image) to pull Haggard's name out of the gutter ... Sadly for Haggard and his family, though, thanks to new revelations about his past indiscretions, that isn't about to happen. It looks as if no matter much work Haggard puts into revising and reimagining his life story, the truth will wriggle its way to the surface eventually

The Trials of Ted Haggard airs tonight on HBO at 8, Eastern and Pacific times; 7, Central time.

Tucker starts off his piece by just throwing it out there that the real problem is that all us coastal elites hate evangelicals:

Let’s concede right up front that you hate evangelicals. Most affluent, educated people do. Where I live, they're the most unpopular group there is.

Now, I'm a coastal elite, and most people who are educated and affluent don't hate evangelicals. We might, say, resent that their leadership has attempted to use its political opportunities to impose its particular religious world view on the rest of us, but I don't hate individual evangelicals except for the people at the subway stations who keep cursing my pagan soul. Those people suck. But, already, he's missed the point: the story isn't amusing or creepy because it's about evangelicals — replace Ed Young with a rabbi, a priest, an imam, or a Lutheran minister (I'm pretty sure that's how most jokes start anyway) and it is, in fact, equally creepy if not more so. It's one thing to suggest that people take time out of their hectic schedules to engage in intimate acts with their partner — which include but are not limited to penetrative vaginal intercourse, by the way — in order to improve their marriages and another to order everyone to bone for 7 days straight while lounging on a bed in a church. One is solid pastoral advice, and another is using your religious beliefs to try to force you to do something you don't actually want to do.

Tucker then goes on to add that it's really just a public health issue:

Once you factor out venereal diseases, there’s almost nothing better for you than regular sex.

Oh, well, gee, once you factor out the risk of death and infertility, among other things, it's all good? What kind of advice is that for people — especially the women quoted in the Young article whose husbands were unfaithful? Fuck him anyway, just "factor out" the disease risk? It also ignores the many men and women who suffer from some form of sexual dysfunction, which can range from an inabilty to get a non-chemically-enhanced boner to women that cannot engage in intercourse without pain — let alone the many, many women that simply can't achieve orgasm or have difficulty enjoying sex due to psychological trauma. For those people, no, it's not the best thing for them and it's unfair to place upon them the burden that they are not doing right by their marriages or God to try to make it so.

Tucker adds to his thesis that Americans aren't having enough sex, and that religious women have better orgasms, supposedly. While it's a bit foolish to cite one study as evidence that religious people enjoy sex more — I am far from religious and I'm happy to take the challenge of who has better orgasms pretty much any day — the real problem is that assuming that people should want to have sex more. Maybe they do, and maybe they don't. I would like to have sex more, perhaps Tucker would like to have sex more, Ed Young apparently prefers to have more sex (but, if the time his wife tried to ask him for it and he turned her down is any indication, on his schedule alone), but that doesn't mean Americans are all unhappy with the frequency of their sexual contact. There is no standard for how much sex a married couple (or a single person) "should" have — they should have as much consensual sex as they and their partner mutually agree to have and on the schedule they agree to have it.

Tucker engages in a little marital therapy at the end, offering his sage advice for those couples in bad relationships: just fuck, it will keep you in the relationship.

Let’s say your marriage was falling apart. Alienated, angry, frustrated with couples therapy, you decide to divorce. But before you do, you agree to try one last thing: Every day for a month, you'll have sex. You don't particularly want to, but you will, and you'll be disciplined about it: half an hour minimum, naked, both striving for orgasm.

Let’s say you actually did that. Do you think by the end of the month you'd go through with the divorce? Maybe you would. Likely you wouldn't.

Ed Young is right. Sex is medicine. It’s worth doing, whether you feel like it or not.

Great, so, his advice is to let fucking keep you in a relationship that leaves you angry, alienated and frustrated because between the social aspects of how you're "supposed" to feel about the person that you're having daily sex and the oxytocin your body produces when you do, you'll stick around. That's not even to discuss the vaguely humiliating prospect of forcing oneself to engage in penetrative intercourse with a spouse one doesn't love anymore every day for 30 days. Little is less sexy or less of a bonding experience than having coercive sex, even if the coercion is mental or emotional or self-inflicted. And then that's not even to mention the divorces that are occurring because of abuse, addiction or just plain incompatibility that means two people probably shouldn't stay together for 60 years, religious teaching aside.

Sex isn't going to fix a relationship: it might paper over the holes momentarily, but a bad marriage can't be saved with sex, and it shouldn't. And a pastor should try counseling his parishioners about mutual respect, fidelity, emotional intimacy, honesty, trustworthiness, thoughtfulness and quality time spent being in a partnership, as those are the things that make a lasting, fulfilling marriage — not daily sex.

Why Are Christians Having Better Sex Than the Rest of Us? [The Daily Beast]

Earlier: Which Flavor Of Ice Cream Would You Swap For Sex?
There's A Reason The Name Tucker Rhymes With…

MEGAN: Happy week-before-the-convention! When everyone in DC is on vacation or checked out anyway!

SPENCER: How is it possible that I am still hungover from Saturday night's bout of drinking?

MEGAN: Well, I assume you at least drank well into Sunday morning... Just say you're hungover from Sunday and keep pounding the water.

SPENCER: Red Bull is powerless against the force of this hangover. Let's talk about something.

MEGAN: Ok, not that this will resolve your headache, but we can talk about McCain and Obama's churchin' time.

SPENCER: So neither of us actually saw the debate, but the mystical forces of the internet allow us to comment on it. Jonathan Martin has something that seems significant:

"I am saved and forgiven" [said McCain]

MEGAN: Well, good to know! I guess he got some time on the God phone from GWB.

SPENCER: Where's everyone's bullshit detector? McCain is admirably reluctant to discuss his religion during the three years he doesn't run for president, and here he goes doing this kind of thing to the "agents of intolerance." You're Catholic (the Jewwiest of Christians) and I'm a Jew, so the question we probably can't answer: do evangelicals really fall for this kind of snake oil?

MEGAN: I do not understand the whole "saved" thing, and everything I know about "saved" and that whole brand of Christian theology, I honestly have from Mrs. Chant's 10th grade English class when we discussed Calvinism in regards to The Scarlett Letter. But, yes, I think plenty of evangelicals do. They buy it from candidates because they buy it from their pastors.

SPENCER: Times like these I want to play them "Leper Messiah" off Master of Puppets. I mean, these can't all be stupid people. I guess I like being pandered to as much as the next guy so maybe I shouldn't find it so inexplicable. But here's an idea that I'm stealing from a friend of mine on a secret journalist listserv: everyone figured McCain won, but didn't Obama win just by showing up in a forum that's de facto a base-vote for McCain? Like if McCain spoke before an antiwar crowd or a MoveOn audience, you'd have to say he won by proving he can interact with people who disagree.

MEGAN: I don't think so, because it wasn't just watched by those people. I still don't understand why Obama gave a boost to Rick Warren, though.

SPENCER: 'splain.

MEGAN: Well, so, like if the only people who watched the thing were the evangelicals and the pundit class, then I would sort of agree with you. But it's ended up being like the first debate between the two, and most undecided people aren't going to view it in the way you suggest. They're going to view it as just another debate, and the relatively unfriendly audience — or the more enthusiastic support of McCain, say — is going to be viewed in that way.

SPENCER: But in August, with the Olympics on, did anyone besides evangelicals and punditclassers watch it? I mean, you and i were too drunk/preoccupied to see it, and this is our job, you know?

MEGAN: Hey, I wasn't drunk! I got drunk loooong after it ended. I was eating Thai food and putting away the dozen pairs of shoes that were under the coffee table. I can see the point about that he gets bonus points for showing up, I just don't see with whom. Like, maybe the evangelicals that vote against him won't hate him quite so much once he's in office?

SPENCER: ok, well, one person the McCainvangelical magic worked on was... Sally Quinn. This is a column whose subtext rebels against its thesis.

When I was little, I had a recurrent dream that there was a terrible earthquake. My father, his body a horse with wings, swooped down from the sky, kneeled so I could jump on his back and flew away just as the earth cracked open beneath me. It was my most comforting dream. I want to live in that world again. I want to live in John McCain's world.

UMMM. Now, she says that she thinks we actually live in Obama's world, but still:

By the time McCain finished his interview with pastor Rick Warren at the Saddleback Church in Orange County, California, Saturday night, part of a forum that also featured Barack Obama, I was curled up in a fetal position in my chair, wrapped in a mohair throw, practically sucking my thumb.

UMMMMMMMMM.

MEGAN: Why does it matter that her throw was mohair?

SPENCER: That's what they call 'color' in this business! she, she's a professional. Bloggers can't touch prose like this.

MEGAN: Oh, see, so, like, I should say to you, "Why, Spencer, I feel so inspired to write Crappy Hour, sitting here cross-legged on my leather sofa with my fleece blanket on my lap!" tomorrow? Good to know.

SPENCER: Give that woman a WP column! Also write about dreams involving your father.

MEGAN: Most of my memorable dreams involve falling or losing my teeth. Yes, I am a control freak.

Sally does seem to have managed to put one thing in relatively sharp relief that other writers have hinted and and no one came out and said:

He talked directly to Rick Warren as though they were having a real conversation, whereas McCain played to the audience, rarely looking at Warren.

Who's trying to be a great orator, now, John McCain?

SPENCER: That goes back to your warren point, right? But I want you, Anonymous Lobbyist, to interpret all the lobbyist stuff that we'll check out next week in Denver at the Dem convention.

MEGAN: Well, now, I actually kind of completely love this story. So, if you'll recall in those halcyon says of January 2007, Nancy Pelosi and her colleagues were going to "drain the swamp" that lobbyists had made of Washington by treating people to lunches, handing out coffee mugs and hosting lavish receptions and crap because several GOP Congressmen had taken actual bribes and most Americans viewed PAC and campaign donations as legalized bribery. So, they did nothing about campaign finance reform and wrote some very non-specific language about parties AND particularly about convention parties. Fast forward to Summer 2008 and in the rule-making process, most of the namby-pamby legislative language has been gutted and so, like in 2004, the biggest and best parties will still be hosted by lobbyists in Denver and Minneapolis. Presto-change-o, there goes the "reform." It looks a lot like the pre-reform days except lobbyists file their disclosures 4 times a year instead of 2. Doesn't the swamp look drained to you?

SPENCER: Yeah, but this year, you & I are pigs at the trough! We benefit from the country's lamentable decline! Bring on the ice sculpture that urinates vodka. Yeah, well, Obama will magically change everything.

MEGAN: But only if it's Grey Goose or better!

SPENCER: You can totally have my ice-sculpture vodka, Ican't drink that stuff.

MEGAN: More of a bourbon man?

SPENCER: Exactly. Your grandfather didn't drink no vodka!

Friends of Jesus are also talking about sex these days, and not just the missionary position. In his new book Rapture Ready!: Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture , Daniel Radosh explores a Christian website called The Marriage Bed, which offers sex advice toChristians. "This is the site to check if you're looking for the Christian case for women using strap-on dildos on their husbands ('If the only access to the prostrate is through the rectum, and I know for a fact that my pressing on the prostrate increases his pleasure, then perhaps it is ok in God's eyes for me to do that for the man He's given me') or men ejaculating on their wives faces ('It's part of our nature to want to be creative with where we 'release' our most basic creative force, and I can't help but want to be creative, I was created in my Creators image')," Radosh writes. Facials, pegging, abortion: it can be a regular old liberal party when you're down with J.C.!

How Would Jesus Choose? [Newsweek]
Rapture Ready! Excerpt [Salon]