Tammy Faye Bakker’s story and Mark Driscoll’s in conversation
Church celebrity is complicated.
Tammy Faye Bakker was a caricature even while she was alive. A prosperity preacher, an exuberant performer, and the cofounder of the Praise the Lord media empire (with her husband Jim Bakker, who was later convicted of fraud and conspiracy), her outlandish makeup and outsize personality were parodied on late-night television and vilified by most commentators. Every portrayal of a big-haired, overly made-up evangelical preacher wife since then has had a little Tammy Faye in it.
The Eyes of Tammy Faye (directed by Michael Showalter) wants us to know Tammy Faye beyond this caricature. In an early scene, Tammy (Jessica Chastain) and Jim (Andrew Garfield) are having a chaste picnic on the lawn of their conservative Bible seminary, having found each other in an exegesis class where Tammy defended Jim’s early prosperity teaching and Jim defended her choice of provocative makeup and tight-fitting sweaters. In sharing their conversion stories, Jim confesses that before he found the Lord he wanted to be a DJ. To his embarrassed delight, Tammy stands up, starts belting out “Blueberry Hill,” and insists that Jim dance with her on the lawn.
This is Tammy’s spiritual gift, the movie suggests: an exuberant love of life and of other people that is fueled by her sense of God’s capacious, inexhaustible love. We see this extravagance in action repeatedly, from her first puppet shows for children to her controversial decision to openly embrace a gay pastor who was HIV-positive at the height of the AIDS crisis.
