Sins of the Father Revisited by a Forgiving Son

It’s an arresting image: a silver-toned black-and-white photograph of a young man with a pierced lip, a goatee and a left arm covered with a huge tattoo of Christ crowned with thorns. It’s even more arresting when you realize that the man is Jay Bakker, the son of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker. He’s written “Son of a Preacher Man” to share with us his strange journey from young prince of televangelist royalty to alcoholic outcast to happily married countercultural minister. “It’s just the book of my life,” 25-year-old Jay informs us at the outset, “my testimony, and what I’ve gone through. I feel like I’ve lived through all that I have so God could use me to help bring back hope to a hopeless generation and help bring unity back to the body of Christ and to the church.”

Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker were one of the big scandals of the 1980s. As the head of PTL (which is an acronym for Praise the Lord), Jim Bakker was a famous and wealthy preacher. Almost as famous was his wife, Tammy Faye, a favorite target of ridicule for her disturbingly wide eyes and heavy mascara. Jim Bakker occupied a universe shared by Oral Roberts, Jimmy Swaggart, Robert Schuller and Jerry Falwell. He was ever-present on television, preaching the good word and raising money, but when word leaked out of his affair with Jessica Hahn, his world collapsed. In 1989, he was indicted and convicted of fraud for overbooking rooms at his Heritage USA Christian theme park. Sentenced to 45 years in prison, he was eventually released in 1994, but in the interim, Tammy Faye divorced him, and Jay went through an adolescence that, judging from this book, you wouldn’t wish on anyone.

These details about Jim and Tammy Faye aren’t simply background to Jay Bakker’s memoir. They are central to it. Jay Bakker has spent most of his life dealing with the fallout of his parents’ disgrace. What a wrenching experience for a young boy, to see his parents attacked by everyone, their property seized, his father jailed. Understandably, Jay attributes his years of drugs and alcoholism to the experience of having fallen from a high place. He paints a sympathetic portrait of his father and in fact ascribes Jim’s downfall to the scheming manipulations of other ministers, including a malicious, greedy Jerry Falwell. When the Bakkers were banished from the public eye, Falwell inherited the pieces of the PTL and used Jim’s disgrace as fodder for his own empire.

At least that is how Jay perceived matters, but it’s difficult to assess how accurate that explanation is. Certainly, Jim Bakker seems to have been made a scapegoat for the pent-up rage of millions who felt alternately charmed and suckered by televangelists. A somewhat passive man in public, Bakker made an easy target as the ultimate preacher-as-hypocrite, and he was treated with little mercy. That was a source of pain and confusion for his son. Jay confesses his amazement that Christians could be so unremittingly judgmental of his family. When prominent ministers refused to help Jim Bakker get early parole, Jay was devastated. “How could these men call themselves ministers?” he asks. “How can these people truly be servants of Christ?”

For all of these questions, Jay is remarkably forgiving. He focuses mostly on his own spiritual journey. After years of addiction and facing the intolerance of the church, he became a minister himself, eventually joining a ministry called Revolution, founded to spread the Word to “hippies,” skateboarders and punk rockers. Unlike other ministries, Revolution sees the strange clothing, piercings and disaffected manner of many suburban teenagers not as things to reform but as signs of spiritual devastation. Now newly married, Jay Bakker ministers to the outcasts and the misfits, preaching a message that “Jesus loves you for who you are.”

“Son of a Preacher Man” is a simple, touching memoir, but it’s also strangely anemic. Jay Bakker is not an adept writer, and though the book was largely written by a ghostwriter, Linden Gross, the ghostwriter may have been a tad too faithful to Jay’s voice. The prose is at best Spartan, and the analysis is not much more sophisticated. For all of his struggling with his parents’ legacy, Jay Bakker never indicates that he’s come to grips with why so many people turned so violently on them. He has learned the language of Christian forgiveness, but he hasn’t come to grips with the darkness. He may have flirted with his own demons while binge drinking, but he prefers to focus on love and embracing the outcasts. While that is something all of us can celebrate, in the context of this memoir, it seems more naive than noble. Had Jay tried to grapple with the reasons his life took the course it did rather than the platitudes of it, his message of love might have resonated powerfully. As it stands, it falls flat.