10% Happier: How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress Without Losing My Edge, and Found Self-Help That Actually Works—A True Story

Chapter 2 Unchurched

Seemingly unprovoked, the woman standing next to me erupted in a high-volume stream of feral gibberish.

“Mo-ta-rehsee-ko-ma-ma-ma-ha-see-ta!”

“Ko-sho-toh-toh-la-la-la-hee-toh-jee!”

She was scaring the crap out of me. I wheeled around to gape at her, but she didn’t notice because her eyes were closed, with her head and arms inclined skyward. It took me a few beats to put together that this person was speaking in tongues.

I looked around the packed 7,500-seat evangelical megachurch and realized that a whole bunch of these people were also doing it. Others were singing along with the surprisingly good band that was playing strummy, Christian rock up on the stage.

Coming through the crowd, glad-handing and backslapping as he went, was a sandy-haired guy in his forties. He caught a glimpse of me and started heading right in my direction. He thrust out his hand and said, “Hi, I’m Pastor Ted.” I took in his toothy grin, his boyish face, and his freshly pressed suit and immediately reached a whole set of conclusions about this man. All of which would eventually explode in spectacular, salacious fashion.

After the 2004 elections, the religion beat didn’t look like such a back-of-the-book dead end after all. Evangelicals had just mounted an impressive display of electoral muscle, helping George W. Bush remain in the White House. Questions of faith seemed to be at the core of everything, from the culture wars at home to the actual wars I’d covered overseas.

Even though I could now see the opportunity in the assignment Peter had given me some years before, it did not change my personal attitude about faith, which was one of disinterest bordering on disdain. Technically, I was not an atheist, as I’d told Peter when he’d first asked me to take over for Peggy Wehmeyer. Many years prior, I had decided—probably in some hackneyed dorm room debate—that agnosticism was the only reasonable position, and I hadn’t thought about it much since. My private view was quite harsh, and rooted in a blend of apathy and ignorance. I thought organized religion was bunk, and that all believers—whether jazzed on Jesus or jihad—must be, to some extent, cognitively impaired.

I had grown up in one of the most secular environments imaginable: the People’s Republic of Massachusetts. My parents met in medical school (where they shared a cadaver—true story). This was in the San Francisco area during the late 1960s, and they subsequently moved east and raised my brother and me with a mix of hippie warmth and left-of-Trotsky politics. Our childhood featured Beatles records, homemade tie-dyes, and touchy-feely discussions about our emotions—but zero faith. When I was maybe nine years old, my mother sat me down and matter-of-factly told me that not only was there no Santa Claus, there was also no God.

In seventh grade, I managed to convince my folks to let me go to Hebrew school and have a Bar Mitzvah, but that had nothing to do with religion; I was gunning for social acceptance in our heavily Jewish hometown. I also wanted the gifts and the party. My family being mixed, we found a reform temple that didn’t require that my mother convert. At Temple Shalom, I studied the basics of the Hebrew language, learned a bunch of Jewish folk songs, and flirted unskillfully with the girls at the annual Purim party. I don’t remember there being much God talk. No one I knew, other than maybe the rabbi, actually subscribed to the metaphysics, and since that time I hadn’t had a conversation of any significant length with a person of faith until Peter strong-armed me into this assignment.

After a three-year reprieve, during which time I covered the global, post-9/11 convulsions and then John Kerry’s failed presidential bid, I now decided the time was right to take a deep dive into religion. Weeks after Bush’s reelection, I traveled to a hard-right church in Florida, where I interviewed parishioners who were clearly feeling elated and empowered. One of them told me, “I believe our Lord elected our president.” Another said he wanted a Supreme Court that would enable him to take his kids to a baseball game and not have to see “homosexuals showing affection to one another.”

I interviewed the pastor, a televangelist by the name of D. James Kennedy, who was straight out of central casting: a tall, imposing man who dressed in robes and spoke with a booming voice. I asked, “What would you say to the people in those states who are really worried about the impact Christian conservatives can have on our government?” I expected him to offer an answer that was at least partially conciliatory. Instead, he issued a mirthless chortle and said, “Repent.”

In that moment, I converted happily from war reporter to culture war reporter. When the story aired, Peter and the rest of my bosses loved it, and I realized this beat that I very much hadn’t wanted was, in fact, tantamount to a full employment act for me—it got me on the air a lot, which was, of course, the coin of our particular realm.

For several years, I reported on every twitch, every spasm—or, as Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount, every “jot or tittle”—of the national argument over abortion, gay marriage, and the role of faith in public life. There was a new tempest seemingly every day, from Christians boycotting Procter & Gamble for sponsoring Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, to the uproar over a two-hundred-pound, six-foot-tall, anatomically correct sculpture of Jesus made out of chocolate called “My Sweet Lord.”

When I wasn’t gorging on the culture wars, I was out producing lighter feature stories about evangelicals, feeling like a tourist in an open-air zoo. I filed reports on Christian reality TV shows, Christian rock festivals, Christian financial advisers, Christian plumbers, Christian cheerleaders, Christian health insurance—you name it. During a story about a Christian fitness club in California, I noted, “You can work your thighs while you proselytize.” Not my finest moment.

After an extended run of this, the producer who’d been assigned to work with me started to grow weary of my approach. He was a young man with a pleasingly alliterative name: Wonbo Woo. Like me, he was also not an obvious choice for the faith beat. He was a secular, second-generation Korean from Boston. And, he was openly gay. Over long car rides through the Bible Belt, we had some pretty epic debates. Not about the fact that we were interviewing a lot of homophobes—Wonbo was too professional to let that deter him. What he objected to was my proclivity for pieces that revolved around conflict and caricature. He wanted me to stop acting like the Anthony Bourdain of spirituality, feeding on the most bizarre fare I could find. He was tired of the culture wars; he wanted to focus not just on people shouting about their faith but rather on how their faith affected their daily lives. In sum, he wanted to go deeper. I told him he should go work for NPR.

I was in pursuit of another of my fetishistic, look-at-what-the-wackyevangelicals-are-doing-now stories when I landed in that megachurch filled with people speaking in tongues. My crew and I had traveled to New Life Church in Colorado Springs, a complex of large buildings perched atop a hill with sweeping mountain views. We were here to see the “NORAD of prayer.” Our guide was a super-solicitous man of God by the name of Pastor Ted Haggard.

Moments after I was jarred by his noisily reverent congregant, the pastor ushered me and my team out of the main sanctuary, into the brisk Colorado air, and then into a gleaming, new, $5.5 million, fifty-five-thousand-square-foot building about a hundred yards away. We pushed through the glass doors, and walked down a long hallway decorated with religious art, the crew backpedaling in front of Ted and me, recording our conversation. Then we entered the main room, a rather astonishing space lined with enormous glass windows, at the center of which was a huge, spinning globe. It was meant to be a sort of mission control for human communication with God, outfitted with computers, and piping in news feeds from around the planet. “We’re watching the whole world all the time for events that need to be prayed for,” he told me with earnest excitement. Ted was what’s called a “prayer warrior”—someone who believes in the power of targeted, “intercessory” prayer to effect real-world changes. “If there’s any indicator that there’s a problem, we notify hundreds of thousands of intercessors immediately.”

Ted was really excited about this place—although I got the feeling he could muster equal ebullience while discussing parsnips or annuities. He did, in fact, have the air of a man who could be a top regional insurance salesman. With his short, parted hair and his sparkling eyes, he had the Clintonesque way of locking in on you and making you feel that, at least in that moment, you were the most important person in the world.

He and his wife, Gayle, had started New Life in their basement several decades earlier, with a congregation of twenty-two people. It grew with fevered intensity as Ted led his followers on a sort of siege of the city, praying outside government offices, gay bars, and the homes of suspected witches. He and his troops “prayer-walked” nearly every street in the city, and even prayed over random names in the phone book, all in an attempt to chase the Devil out of town. Undoubtedly, part of Ted’s appeal was that he had a way of invoking Satan while remaining ceaselessly chipper.

At the time of our visit, the church had fourteen thousand people on its membership rolls, and Ted was one of the leading lights in Colorado Springs, which, because it was home to many large Christian organizations, such as Campus Crusade for Christ and Focus on the Family, had come to be known as the “evangelical Vatican.” He wore his authority lightly, though, insisting that everyone simply call him “Pastor Ted.”

By now the congregants had filed out of the sanctuary, so that’s where we went to sit down and have our formal interview. As we talked, it became clear that Ted was a different breed from his fiery forebears on the Religious Right, figures like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and D. James Kennedy. He was part of a new generation of pastors who were trying to broaden the evangelical agenda beyond gay marriage and abortion. In some ways, he was more like a self-help guru. He’d written a series of books on things like making your marriage last and saving your neighbors from going to hell. He’d even published a weight loss guide, The Jerusalem Diet. To be sure, he was against abortion and homosexuality, but he didn’t go out of his way to talk about it.

After the interview, as the crew was breaking down their lights and packing up their gear, Ted sat down on the stairs leading up to the main stage and patted the step next to him. My first instinct was to make an excuse, figuring this was going to devolve into some sort of proselytizing session. But to beg off would have been rude, so I plopped down reluctantly, only to be pleasantly surprised by the conversation that ensued. With the cameras off, Ted toned down his eagerness a notch and began speaking with bracing frankness about the state of the evangelical scene in America.

“Can we talk off the record?” he asked.

“Absolutely,” I said, thinking, This could get interesting.

“There’s a huge difference between what I do as a pastor and what people like Jim Dobson do.” Dobson was the head of Focus on the Family, whose main office was right down the road and was so large it actually had its own zip code. Dobson was a pillar of old-school orthodoxy, a firebrand, and an avid critic of gays and “abortionists.”

“I have an actual congregation that I see face-to-face every week,” Ted added, “so I see what their real issues are, like their marriages, children, and finances. If I’m consistently negative, it doesn’t help them. Dobson, on the other hand, runs what’s called a ‘parachurch ministry.’ His ministry grows in the midst of controversy, because that attracts interest and funds.”

I was a little surprised to hear a big-time pastor trash-talking another major figure in Evangelicalism. It seemed a little . . . unchristian. But it was certainly intriguing, and I was starting to like this guy. He was a bit of a paradox: overfriendly and yet likable, saccharine but also capable of knowing irony. I sat there on those steps well past the point dictated by politeness, and Ted patiently answered all the questions about Evangelicalism I would have been too embarrassed to ask anyone else. He didn’t make me feel inferior for being, as they called it in evangelical lingo, “unchurched,” and he didn’t try to convert me. He was also not defensive at all when I asked how biblical literalists reconciled the fact that different books in the Bible said different things about key details in the Jesus story. He beamed mischievously and said, “We have our ways.”

Sitting there with Pastor Ted, I realized, with genuine regret, how unthinkingly judgmental I’d been—not only of Ted, but of religious people, generally. It hit me that I’d blindly bought into the prevailing stereotypes. The Washington Post had once declared these people to be “poor, uneducated and easy to command.” Pastor Ted’s story about the inner clashes of the movement put the “easy to command” notion to rest. As for my assumption about all religious people being unintelligent—Ted clearly wasn’t. Then again, neither were believers such as Tolstoy, Lincoln, and Michelangelo, not to mention contemporary people of faith like Francis Collins, the evangelical and scientist who led the charge to map the human genome.

Not only had I been unfair to people of faith by prematurely reaching sweeping, uninformed conclusions, but I’d also done myself a disservice. This beat could be more than just a chance to notch more airtime. Most people in America—and on the planet, for that matter—saw their entire lives through the lens of faith. I didn’t have to agree, but here was my chance to get under the hood and understand what was going on. More than that, I could approach faith coverage as a way to shed light instead of heat. At a time when religion had become so venomously divisive, thoughtful reporting could be a way to take audiences into worlds they’d never otherwise enter, and in the process demystify, humanize, and clarify. It was why I’d gotten into this business in the first place—to both get on TV and do meaningful work.

Shortly thereafter, I admitted to Wonbo that he was right; we could start covering this beat with more nuance without having to move to public radio.

I became so gung ho about improving my faith coverage that, in the spring of 2005, I packed a Bible in my luggage as I headed off for a reporting trip to Israel, Egypt, and Iraq. I figured if I was going to be a proper religion reporter, I should at least read the source material.

It was right before I left on this trip to the Middle East that I had my last encounter with Peter Jennings. We met in his office, ostensibly so he could brief me on what my reporting priorities should be. He opened, characteristically, with an insult. “There’s a perception,” he said, “that you’re not very good at this sort of overseas coverage.” Even though I was reasonably sure this was untrue—and probably just part of Peter’s never-ending psyops campaign—I felt compelled to defend myself. As soon as I started to stammer out some sort of objection, though, he cut me off and lectured me about the various stories he wanted me to produce for his broadcast while I was abroad. Then he abruptly took a call from his wife, Kayce. After cooing into the phone for a few minutes, he hung up and looked at me and said, “I have a piece of advice for you, Harris: Marry well—at least once.”

A few weeks later, I was sitting out on the veranda of our Baghdad bureau, Bible in hand, struggling to get through Leviticus, with all of its interminable discussions of how to slaughter a goat. I stood up in frustration to go back into the office to check my computer, and that’s when I spotted the message from Peter. It was a group email announcing that he had lung cancer.

I never saw him again. By the time I got home, he had taken medical leave. Just a few months later, he was gone. Despite the fear and frustration he had provoked in me over the preceding five years, I felt enormous affection for him, and the night he died was one of the few times I could remember crying as an adult.

Perhaps more than any other single person outside of my immediate family, he had genuinely altered the course of my life. He built me into a better journalist than I had ever imagined I could be, sending me all over the world, giving me the chance to get a taste of the same gritty, global education that he, a high school dropout, had gotten during his years as a foreign correspondent. He could be a massive pain in the ass, but he was, in his own funny way, very generous. He was a restless soul, an idealist, and a perfectionist—a man who definitely followed my dad’s “price of security” maxim. No matter how hard he was on me, I always knew he was exponentially harder on himself.

Interestingly, during the entire time I knew Peter, the subject of his personal faith never came up. It wasn’t until years after his death that I learned that Peter himself was not particularly religious at all. He hadn’t needed faith in order to see that religion was a vital beat for us to cover; he was simply an insatiably curious reporter with a peerless instinct for what would interest the audience.

Peter’s death set off a ripple of reassignments among the on-air staff. The network’s first choice to replace him was the anchor duo of Elizabeth Vargas and Bob Woodruff, the correspondent I’d met in the presidential suite in the Islamabad Marriott. Only weeks after his ascent to the Big Chair, however, Bob was hit by a roadside bomb in Iraq and nearly died, which sent the news division reeling. Charlie Gibson from GMA was then tapped to move to the evenings, while Robin Roberts was elevated to be Diane Sawyer’s cohost.

Meanwhile, Ted Koppel had stepped down from Nightline and was replaced by the troika of Cynthia McFadden, Martin Bashir, and Terry Moran. I was then tapped to replace Terry on the Sunday edition of World News—a promotion I considered to be incalculably awesome.

In no way, however, did this step up the ladder reduce my neuroses about work. Quite the opposite, in fact. Yes, it was insanely great to be given the steering wheel of the news division every Sunday night—to pick the stories we’d cover, frame how they were presented, and then deliver it all right from the chair that Peter Jennings once occupied. Whenever anyone asked me, I told them I had the best job on the planet. And I meant it. But perversely, my good fortune meant I now had that much more to lose, and thus that much more to protect.

And the competition all around had intensified. I’d been at the network for five years, and the ranks of younger people had filled out dramatically. It wasn’t just David Wright I had to watch out for. There was also: Chris Cuomo, the charismatic, strapping son of the famous former governor of New York, who had replaced Robin Roberts on GMA; Bill Weir, the hilariously funny and wildly creative former local sports anchor who’d been named as cohost of the newly created weekend edition of GMA; and David Muir, the eminently likable, ferociously hardworking anchorman who had been lovingly profiled in Men’s Vogue and was now helming the Saturday edition of World News.

My relationships with these newer additions were great—they were friends—but that didn’t change the fact that we were locked in a zero-sum competition for a scarce resource: airtime. Specifically, assignments to cover the big stories, as well as fill-in slots for when the A-list anchors were away.

The mental loop (How many stories have I had on this week? etc.) that began when I first arrived from local news went into hyperdrive, only with an even more personal tinge. It was one thing, back in the day, to be big-footed by a veteran correspondent—but to be beat out by someone my own age, now that stung. Like almost all correspondents, every day I would check the “rundowns” for various shows—the computerized lists of stories the broadcasts would be covering—to see who was doing which ones. If someone scored an assignment I wanted, I’d experience a brief rush of resentment.

I’d collect data points (Weir gets to cover the election of the new pope? Muir is filling in for Cuomo?), and immediately extrapolate to far-reaching conclusions (This means that x or y executive or anchor dislikes me → My career is doomed → I’m going to end up in a flophouse in Duluth). Sometimes, before I’d even thought it through, I’d find myself on the phone with an executive producer of one of our broadcasts, saying impolitic things.

I would occasionally complain about all of this to Dr. Brotman, who applied his perfect shrink-y mix of sympathy and skepticism. He had a competitive job, too, negotiating the executive ranks at his hospital, but often he thought I was blatantly overreacting to intramural developments at ABC. In fact, his theory was that, just as I had used drugs to replace the thrill of combat, I was now inflating the drama of the office war zone to replace drugs.

Maybe. I was conflicted. I was absolutely aware that worrying could be counterproductive. Furthermore, I did not enjoy harboring competitive feelings toward people I liked and admired. But I still firmly believed that a certain amount of churning was unavoidable, especially in this business, and I had no intention of abandoning the whole “price of security” thing.

During this period, as I continued to deal with the aftermath of my panic attacks, my residual drug cravings, and the intensifying competitive pressures of work, it never once occurred to me that any aspect of the religious traditions I was reporting on could be relevant or useful to me personally. Faith was proving an increasingly interesting beat to cover for journalistic reasons, but it wasn’t serving the same purpose for me as it did for all the believers I was meeting: answering my deepest questions, or speaking to my most profound needs.

That said, I continued with my plan for broadening our coverage beyond the hot buttons of the culture wars. I went to Salt Lake City to profile the Apostles of the Mormon Church; I interviewed the head of a Wiccan coven in Massachusetts; I even covered the annual American Atheists convention. On Wonbo’s urging, we launched a series called “Tests of Faith,” which included stories about a Unitarian congregation in California agonizing over whether to accept a registered sex offender, and also about an Episcopal priest who claimed that, after a profound conversion experience, she now believed in both Christianity and Islam.

I kept covering the born-again scene, of course. It was too juicy—and too newsy—to ignore. And with Ted Haggard, I now had a terrific inside source to make sure my coverage was more accurate and nuanced. He became my first stop when I was looking for candid answers about evangelicals. He was always willing to respond to questions off the record, returning emails instantaneously from his private AOL account.

When Pat Robertson publicly suggested that the United States send “covert agents” to assassinate Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez, Ted was the only major evangelical figure to go on the record about it, saying, “Pat was not speaking for Christianity.” I did the interview from an edit room at our offices in New York City, where I could see Ted on a monitor, beamed in via satellite from Colorado. When it was over, we exchanged a few pleasantries and Ted good-naturedly made fun of me for having worn an ugly green tie on television the night before.

Not long afterward, he and his top lieutenant, a crisp young guy named Rob, came to New York, and I took them out to a fancy restaurant for lunch. Ted seemed impressed by the whole Manhattan scene. Over the gentle clinking of silverware and with a view of Central Park, he continued to pull back the curtain on the inner workings of American Evangelicalism. He told me how he and Jim Dobson had clashed over Ted’s desire to focus evangelicals on issues like global warming. In Ted’s account, the behind-the-scenes maneuvering included behavior that was surprisingly ruthless.

It was fun to talk to Ted. You might think that the yawning cultural and philosophical gap between us—he was a guy who believed that he had a running dialogue with Jesus, after all—would make a genuine connection impossible, but that clearly wasn’t the case.

While I liked Ted, it was also pretty obvious that he had a dual agenda: to promote the faith—and to promote himself. I was by no means the only reporter Ted was working. In fact, he played the media like a fiddle, doing interviews with Tom Brokaw and Barbara Walters—and all that exposure worked. Since we’d met, Ted had been elected head of the National Association of Evangelicals, which had twenty-seven million members at forty-three thousand churches. Every Monday, he joined a conference call with the White House and other high-ranking Christians. Time put him on their list of the 25 Most Influential Evangelicals.

Sometimes he pushed his shtick a little too far. He made a memorably creepy cameo in an HBO documentary about the American faith scene, in which he said, seemingly off-the-cuff, “You know, all the surveys say that evangelicals have the best sex life of any other group.” In one interview with me, after I’d just asked him a series of questions about hot-button social issues, he stopped short in the middle of an answer. Then, while the cameras rolled, he said, “I hope I’m not coming across here as too harsh. Am I coming across as too harsh? I’m just going to focus on how cute Dan is, and then I won’t seem so harsh.” I had no idea how to deal with this comment other than to laugh and shift uncomfortably in my chair.

Notwithstanding Ted’s foibles, he’d helped me become utterly at ease around people who said “God bless you” when I hadn’t sneezed. Increasingly, I even now found myself in the position of defending evangelicals to my friends and family. Once, when I made a passing reference to “evangelical intellectuals,” a relative quipped, “Isn’t that a contradiction in terms?” Another stereotype I spent a lot of time batting down: that Christians were all spittle-spewing hatemongers. I met a few of those in my travels, of course, but they struck me as a distinct minority. Wonbo and I—two nonreligious New Yorkers, one of them gay, the other gay-friendly—were never treated with anything short of respect. Often, in fact, what we found was kindness, hospitality, and curiosity. Yes, people would always ask whether we were believers, but when we said no, there were never gasps or glares. They may have thought we were going to hell, but they were perfectly nice about it.

Then early one November morning in 2006, I was groggily rooting around the Internet, looking for stories. I started each day with an email to the senior producers of World News, pitching pieces I could do for that night’s show. And there it was on Drudge: an article saying that Ted Haggard had been accused by a male escort of paying for sex as well as for crystal meth. I immediately assumed it must be a mistake, or a smear. I was so convinced it couldn’t be true that I didn’t even include it in my pitch email. A short while later, when one of the senior producers from Good Morning America called to ask me about it, I confidently assured her it must be false.

But then the story took on real legs. The male escort, a beefy, incongruously soft-voiced man named Mike Jones, seemed pretty credible. He said he’d had repeated encounters with a man who called himself “Art.” In an interview with our ABC affiliate in Denver, Jones said, “It was not an emotional relationship. It was strictly for sex.” He explained that this had gone on for years, but that when he saw Ted/Art on television backing a ballot initiative that would ban gay marriage, he decided he had to come forward. “He is in the position of influence of millions of followers and he’s preaching against gay marriage,” he said, “but behind everyone’s back doing what he’s preached against.” Making matters worse for Ted, Jones had voice mails, on which he claimed Ted could be heard arranging assignations and drug deals. On one of them, a male voice said, “Hi, Mike, this is Art, just calling to see if we can get any more supply.” It was unmistakably Ted.

I was thunderstruck. No one I knew had ever taken me by surprise quite like this. The clean-cut, Indiana-raised, God-fearing Ted Haggard—a father of five and the spiritual shepherd to thousands—had been leading a double life. I had been in contact with the guy for years and had never had even the slightest inkling. In hindsight, there might have been a few signs: that all of his lieutenants were young and male; that time he called me “cute.” But really, none of that would have foretold the panoramic collapse that was now playing out.

The unmasking of Ted Haggard became a massive national story. There are few things the media loves more than a self-appointed paragon of virtue falling from grace. Local reporters captured Haggard leaving his house in an SUV, with his wife by his side and several of his children in the car. To me, he looked like a child caught dead to rights but still hoping against hope that he could talk his way out of it. He leaned over the wheel and told the assembled reporters, “I’ve never had a gay relationship with anybody, and I’m steady with my wife.”

“So you don’t know Mike Jones?” one reporter asked.

“No, I don’t know Mike Jones,” he said.

Moments later, in a flagrant bit of bad acting, Ted asked, “What did you say his name was?”

Days later, the charade crumbled. He stepped down from his positions at the National Association of Evangelicals and at New Life Church. In a statement read aloud to his followers, he said, “There is a part of my life that is so repulsive and dark that I’ve been warring against it all of my adult life.”

The affair gave birth to a thousand snarky blog posts, and it confirmed Americans’ lowest opinions about evangelicals. This was, after all, a man who described homosexuality as a sin, as a “life that is against God.” My gay friends were eating it up—Wonbo being one notable exception. He never once crowed. Like me, he seemed surprised and a little saddened. We both agreed that, while Ted was clearly guilty of towering hypocrisy, there was also some poignancy to the fact that the moral teachings associated with his faith had forced him to suppress a fundamental part of who he was. We covered the story aggressively, but we also took pains to point out that Haggard was much less strident than many of his co-religionists on the issue of homosexuality. In fact, he had once assured Barbara Walters in a prime-time interview that gays, too, can go to heaven.

Throughout the crisis, I had been calling and emailing Ted repeatedly. No reply. The guy who used to get back to me within seconds had gone completely dark.

After a few days, the story died down, as it always does. America, as then senator Barack Obama had noted after Hurricane Katrina, “goes from shock to trance” faster than any other nation on earth.

As Ted’s world fell apart, mine was getting much better. Just weeks later, Bob Woodruff told me he wanted to set me up on a date. Not two years after surviving a bomb blast to the head in Iraq, Woody—as he was known to his friends—was playing matchmaker.

At first I was skeptical. I wasn’t enthusiastic about being set up—to me it seemed slightly pathetic—but it was hard to say no to an American hero, a guy whose story was turned into a bestselling book, and who was greeted by Jon Stewart during an appearance on The Daily Show with the question, “Why are you still more handsome than me?”

Bob’s wife, Lee, an effervescent and hilarious blonde, was hard to refuse as well. Here’s how she laid out the whole setup situation: “Her name is Bianca. She’s beautiful, she’s a doctor, and you’re an idiot if you don’t do this.” This Bianca was, per Bob and Lee, an internal medicine resident at Columbia University. The Woodruffs were friends with her parents, and what could I do? I said yes.

On the night prearranged for the date, I was walking out of the gym on my way to the restaurant when my phone rang. It was Bob, calling to make sure I wasn’t flaking out. “Dude,” he assured me, “she’s hot.”

We were meeting at an Italian spot on the Upper West Side. Pathologically punctual, I showed up early and staked out a spot at the bar, near a pair of bankers from New Jersey doing shots. It was mid-December and the place had festive decorations and a holiday feel. My plan was to lean against the bar, staring at my BlackBerry, so that when Bianca walked in, she could come over and tap me on the shoulder and I could look up all cool and nonchalant. Of course, I was too nervous to pull that off and ended up staring anxiously at the door.

Minutes later, when she appeared, my internal reaction was similar to the one my cousin Andy described the first time he met his future wife: “I’ll take this one.” Bob had not exaggerated; she was beautiful, with golden hair and piercing, light blue eyes—like a husky’s, but much softer. As I did whenever I was confronted with anyone I found intriguing, I peppered her with biographical questions. She was raised in Manhattan. Her dad was a doctor, her mom an artist. She was six months out of medical school and in the hellishly stressful first year of residency. She was also, as I learned over the course of the evening, smart, passionate about medicine, humble, optimistic, quick to laugh, and a lover of animals and dessert. Pretty soon, we were doing tequila shots with the bankers.

Drinks turned into dinner. The first date turned into a second. Three months later, Bianca moved into my apartment. (On the day we brought her stuff over, I marveled at the affable yet unyielding diplomatic skills she employed to convince me to give up 60 percent of my closet space.) Two months after that, we adopted cats. When we called my parents to ask them to provide a character reference for the assiduous pet-vetters at the ASPCA, my father—who aside from being a worrier is also a wiseass—asked whether we were also going to have a commitment ceremony. The cats immediately became the butt of jokes among my male friends at work, who automatically associated felinity with femininity (ignoring historical cat-loving avatars of machismo such as Ernest Hemingway, Winston Churchill, and Dr. Evil). When Chris Cuomo heard about our pet adoptions, he sent me an email that read, “Do u sit when u pee?”

As a man who was a mild hypochondriac, it was handy to have a doctor around. More significantly, after living alone in my apartment for nearly a decade, I found it wonderfully strange to get back into bed after a middle-of-the-night trip to the bathroom and see three cats and a human form lying there, all of whom now had equal claim to the territory.

Bianca truly brought out the fool in me. I had never been this comfortable around anyone before. I would march around the apartment, a displeased feline under each arm, singing songs. I would make up ridiculous nicknames for them. When she was in the living room trying to work, I’d use the Remote app on my iPad to blast Steppenwolf and then lie there with a stupid, twisted-up grin as she burst into the room, tut-tutting about the interruption.

I was beguiled by the contrasts. This was a woman who subscribed to The New England Journal of Medicine, and also Us Weekly. She looked great in both scrubs and cocktail dresses. She could work a thirty-hour shift—during which she would perform chest compressions, manage ornery colleagues, and comfort grieving families—then come home, take a nap, and cook her grandmother’s sauce and meatballs. When I went away on work trips, I often arrived at my destination to find that she had packed snacks and a mash note in my suitcase.

I’d never been in love before. I’d long had a nagging fear that maybe I was too self-centered to ever get there. Everyone always said you’d “know,” but I never “knew.” Now, all of a sudden, I did. It was a giant relief to sincerely want what was best for Bianca—to worry about her life and her career, rather than just fixate inwardly. Selfishly, I felt she was both a smarter and kinder person than I was, and that being by her side might make me better.

Sorting out my romantic life after decades of often aimless bachelorhood was like scratching a huge existential itch. On the downside, though, it left me free to concentrate all of my neurotic powers on work. Bianca pointed out that I would sometimes come through the door at night scowling. “What’s wrong?” she’d ask. “Nothing,” I’d mutter, then make a beeline for the couch, turn on the television, and launch into a harsh postgame analysis of my latest story. It was hard for her not to take my occasional gruffness a little personally. More than that, she hated seeing me gloomy; she had a doctor’s urge to cure and a sense of sadness and frustration that she couldn’t.

It was not as if she didn’t understand and sympathize with the “price of security” stance. This was a woman who had graduated at the top of her med school class, was in an elite residency program, and who still felt she had more to prove than anyone else. She, too, would come home frayed, but—fairly or unfairly—the very nature of Bianca’s anxiety would make me feel superficial by comparison. She would cry over her patients’ pain or loss, whereas my complaints often involved a colleague getting a story I wanted, or questions about whether I’d handled myself well during a contentious on-air interview.

From Bianca’s point of view, though, perhaps the most annoying part of my work fixation was my unnatural attachment to my BlackBerry, which I kept within reach during dinner, on the couch as we watched TV, and on my bedside table all during the night. She’d catch me glancing at it in the middle of conversations and shoot me a j’accuse look. She did eventually convince me to at least move the offending instrument, and its charger, to the other side of the bedroom while we slept.

One of the things I was often doing with that BlackBerry was sending emails to Ted Haggard. I’d hit him up every month or so, desperately seeking that exclusive interview whenever he emerged from seclusion. Journalism aside, I also was massively curious about where he was and what he was doing.

Nearly a year went by before he wrote me back. When at last I got him on the phone, he had an incredible story to tell: Time’s 11th most influential American evangelical was now living with his family in a dingy apartment in Arizona, barely scraping by, selling insurance. Remarkably, his wife, Gayle, had decided to stand by him.

Several months later, on a frigid January morning in New York City, Ted and I sat down for his first network news interview since the scandal.

I was nervous—and it showed. I have a very obvious tell when I’m anxious: my face looks tired. And on this day I looked exhausted. I tried jumping up and down, slapping my cheeks, and standing out in the cold, but I couldn’t fix it. I was simply uncomfortable doing what was sure to be a tough interview with someone I knew and liked.

For the shoot, Wonbo had rented a studio downtown, and I was sitting in a cushioned chair opposite Ted, who was on a couch. Unlike me, he seemed entirely at ease with the inquisition that was to ensue. He was leaning back, legs crossed, wearing a blazer but no tie.

I dove right in. “Is it fair to describe you as a hypocrite and a liar?” I asked.

“Yes. Yes, it is,” he said, almost enthusiastically, as if he couldn’t wait to get this off his chest.

“Do you think you owe gay people an apology?” I asked.

“Absolutely. And I do apologize,” he said. “I’m deeply sorry for the attitude I had. But I think I was partially so vehement because—because of my own war.”

Amazingly to me, he insisted he wasn’t gay. Months of psychotherapy, he said, had cleared everything up. “Now I’m settled in the fact that I am a heterosexual, but with issues,” he said. “So I don’t fit into a neat little box.”

He said it was no problem to stay faithful to his wife. “It’s not a struggle at all now.”

“Why not just live as a gay man?” I asked.

“’Cause I love my wife. I love my intimate relationship with my wife. I’m not gay.”

“Can you hear people watching this, though, and thinking to themselves, ‘This guy is just not being honest with himself?’ ”

“Sure, but everybody has their own journey. And people can judge me. I think it’s fair if they judge me and that they think I’m not being real with myself.”

The toughest moment in the interview came when I surprised him by playing him a damning piece of videotape we’d obtained. It was an interview with a former parishioner, a young man who said he’d been sexually harassed by Ted. On the tape he described, in graphic terms, how one night Ted had hopped into bed with him in a hotel room and began to masturbate.

When the video ended, Ted said, “It is true. We never had any sexual contact, but I violated that relationship and it was an inappropriate relationship.”

“What’s it like to watch that?” I asked.

“It’s embarrassing. That was very embarrassing. I mean, I am . . . I am a failure.”

When it was all over, Ted didn’t seem at all resentful that I’d blind-sided him. I had coffee with him and his wife and we chatted as if none of it had ever happened. We talked a lot about what Ted’s next move might be. The one thing he swore he’d never do again was pastor a church. (A couple of months later, he asked me to meet him and Gayle for lunch at a midtown hotel because they wanted advice on how to pitch a reality show they were dreaming up. When that didn’t take off, they started a church.)

What struck me most from the interview was not Ted’s slipperiness or his eyebrow-raising claims about the nature of sexuality or even his wife’s decision not to file for divorce; it was something else. For all of Ted’s hypocrisy and deception, there was one issue on which he did not waver: his faith. “I never fell away from God,” he told me. When I pointed out that it was his religious beliefs that forced him to live a lie for so many years, he countered that it was the “culture of hatefulness” in the modern church that did that, not the core teachings of Jesus himself. In his darkest moments, when he was living in that apartment in Arizona, crying every day for a year and a half and actively contemplating suicide, his faith was his main source of comfort. It gave him the sense that his travails were part of a larger plan, that even if everyone on earth hated him, his creator did not. “I knew with assurance,” he said, “that God cared for me.”

In the weeks and months after the interview, I kept coming back to this. I, too, had endured my own self-created crisis, albeit of a less public and less intense variety. Ted’s involved doing drugs and cheating on his wife; mine involved doing drugs and having a nationally televised freak-out. On this score, I envied Ted—and not in a patronizing, I-wish-I-were-stupid-enough-to-believe-this-stuff way. It would have been enormously helpful to have had a sense that my troubles had a larger purpose or fit into some overarching plan. I had read the research showing that regular churchgoers tended to be happier, in part because having a sense that the world is infused with meaning and that suffering happens for a reason helped them deal more successfully with life’s inevitable humiliations.

Up until my interview with Ted, I had derived a smug sense of self-satisfaction that, unlike the believers I was covering, I did not have a deep need for answers to the Big Questions; I was comfortable with the mystery of how we got here and what would happen after we died. But I now realized that a sort of incuriosity had set in; my sense of awe had atrophied. I might have disagreed with the conclusions reached by people of faith, but at least that part of their brain was functioning. Every week, they had a set time to consider their place in the universe, to step out of the matrix and achieve some perspective. If you’re never looking up, I now realized, you’re always just looking around.

Ted Haggard, who had taught me to see people of faith in a different light, had also taught me something else: the value of a viewpoint that transcended the mundane. Of course, I wasn’t forsaking ambition—and I wasn’t planning to magically force myself to believe in something for which there was, in my opinion, insufficient evidence. However, I was about to cover a story that, for the first time since Peter Jennings ordered me to start reporting on spirituality, would actually penetrate my defenses. The message came in a deeply weird and extremely confusing package.