For Jay Bakker, the son of televangelists Jim and Tammy Bakker, loving God meant always having to say you were sorry. “I had this idea of an angry God, that everything I did was bad and wrong,” he says now about his childhood, which until the age of 13 was spent living, literally, in a theme park, Heritage USA, built by the millions of dollars the Bakkers raised through their Praise the Lord ministry.
Despite his seemingly idyllic upbringing, Bakker says, “I thought I was losing my salvation.” Those feelings of guilt only intensified in 1987, when a sex and accounting-fraud scandal brought the PTL empire crashing down. Eventually his parents would divorce, Jim Bakker would go to prison and Jay would spend his teen years adrift in a haze of drugs and alcohol.
Now rehabilitated and married, Jay Bakker, who turns 31 later this month, is a minister of the gospel himself. He's even on TV -- though only for a few weeks. “One Punk Under God,” a documentary about his life, airs for six weeks beginning 8 p.m. CT Wednesday on Sundance Channel (digital cable).
With his bald pate, sideburns, pierced lower lip and arms filled with tattoos, Bakker resembles the comedian David Cross if Cross had joined a biker gang. Yet on screen and in person, he is a paragon of Christian humility, soft-spoken and quick to talk about the tender mercies of God.
When we spoke in California this summer, Bakker and his wife Amanda were preparing to move to New York City to start a new planting of Revolution, a sort of anti-church he first became involved with in 1994, when he was recovering from substance abuse but still feeling alienated from God.
“One Punk Under God” chronicles his final months in Atlanta, when Revolution was based at a club called Masquerade and undergoing a crisis mostly instigated by Bakker. Risking the support of his church's biggest funders, he declared Revolution to be gay-affirming and began teaching that the Bible does not condemn homosexuality. (Here are photos and an account of his visit to the Open Door Community Church, which figures in an episode of "One Punk.")
Though Bakker attributes his liberal outlook to his parents, who welcomed Christians to PTL without regard of creed or sexual orientation, it's clear that his primary influence was Mom, aka Tammy Faye Messner, with whom he remains close.
The production company behind “One Punk” has made two documentary films about Tammy Faye Messner, including “The Eyes of Tammy Faye,” and Bakker says he agreed to do a TV show because of their sympathetic treatment of her.
By contrast, his decision to thumb his nose at Revolution's financial supporters reflects the strained relationship with his father, who is once again involved in TV ministry. Before he agreed to be filmed for a documentary, Bakker had not spoken to his father for two years.
Released from prison in 1993, Jim Bakker remarried and relocated to Branson, Mo. He does a daily TV show with his wife, Lori Bakker, on a set that looks like it was borrowed from “Live with Regis and Kelly.” In the fourth episode of “One Punk,” Jay goes to Branson to visit Jim, and they have a heart-to-heart talk ... on “The Jim Bakker Show.”