Sharlet: The NYT reports today on more trouble for Ted Haggard’s Colorado Springs New Life megachurch, forced to lay off staff following a decline in giving in response to Haggard’s meth-fueled gay sex scandal. The Times‘ report is a weak little story, suggesting a straightfoward connection between the decline and Haggard’s fall. That’s no doubt part of it, but let’s give credit where it’s due: Haggard put on a good show, and the church’s decline may have as much to do with the inferior preaching power of his successors as it does with disillusionment over Haggard’s performance, to to speak.

More to the point, though: Why is this in The NYT at all? As someone who’s spent a chunk of his life writing about New Life and Ted Haggard, I’m more interested in the story than most. But I don’t see the staffing troubles of a megachurch that no longer possesses national political power as national news. Especially when there’s another political preacher who could use some press scrutiny, Pastor Mac Hammond of Minnesota, a rising star in the mold of Ted Haggard. The Minnesota Monitor has been doing good work sifting through Hammond’s seemingly shady finances, which apparently include his church’s purchase of a stunt plane for their pastor, not to mention a lot of questionable loans.

But outside the Minnesota press, the story has received almost no attention — probably for the same reason Ted Haggard avoided scrutiny even as he moved into the first tier of evangelical GOP power brokers. The national press can’t see the politics of the new model of evangelical politics: younger, regional bosses like Haggard, Hammond, Ohio’s Rod Parsley, and Seattle’s Mark Driscoll, all of them hipper in style than dinosaurs like Falwell and James Dobson. They talk nice, and they play local, but that doesn’t mean that their impact is limited, as Haggard proved before he became the latest poster boy for fundamentalist hypocrisy.

That doesn’t mean the press should start scrutinizing every megachurch pastor. It means that it should pay attention to those whose theology leads them for better or worse into power politics — or, as in the cases of Haggard and Hammond, other temptations.