TV preacher’s son
He was born into the glare of televangelist parents Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker.
Then the “Praise the Lord” empire collapsed in scandal. His father went to jail for fraud.
Jay Bakker spent his teens in the darkness, rebelling and bent on self-destruction from alcohol and drugs.
But now, this tattooed, multipierced pilgrim is on a righteous path: preaching God’s grace to a flock of young, downtrodden and disillusioned parishioners most any other church would turn away.
Jay is the focus of “One Punk Under God: the Prodigal Son of Jim & Tammy Faye,” a Sundance Channel reality series about the back-to-basics church he calls Revolution – which, notwithstanding his decadelong sobriety, holds services in an Atlanta bar.
“I think Revolution is kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place,” he muses. “With some groups we’re too Christian, and with the Christians we’re not Christian enough.”
But Jay has other concerns throughout the six-episode series, which started this week.
His mom is gravely ill from cancer; Jay will be traveling to her North Carolina home for tender visits.
His dad, now remarried and with a new TV ministry, is estranged from him – a rift Jay will make great strides in repairing.
And after several years’ devotion to his church, he will be uprooted when wife Amanda, a young woman with fluorescent red hair and a beatific smile, is accepted by New York University for its doctoral program in psychiatry.
In short, 2006 is eventful for Jay Bakker, far more than he imagined when “One Punk Under God” began filming in February.
He initially was reluctant to sign on, and even camera shy, he insists: “I feel like I’m just a guy who has a church with 15 people that meets in a bar.”
He has no wish, he adds, to leverage his TV exposure into an ongoing video pulpit, as his parents had on such a grand scale with “The PTL Club,” which at its peak reached some 13 million cable households.
“If anything, I’d like to write more books,” Jay says.
Five years ago his first book, “Son of a Preacher Man: My Search for Grace in the Shadows,” testified to his troubled past and deliverance from it.
Now “One Punk Under God” finds Jay continuing a minicrusade for an alternative to the God he never could make peace with: a wrathful God who hated him for all the flaws he hated in himself.
“God loves us for who we are,” he contends. “God isn’t counting our sins against us.
“Yeah, we’ll have to pay the consequences; life has consequences. But God isn’t keeping a record.
” ‘You better watch out, you better not cry’ – that’s not God. That’s Santa Claus!”
In defiance of both his billing as “punk” and his calling as preacher, Jay is an affable, unassuming chap who happens to wear a stud in each ear as well as a lip ring.
And tattoos: He got the first of many – it praises Revolution – at 19 while living in Phoenix, where he helped found the church. In the series finale, he will get a tattoo in tribute to his mother.
Jay has tattoos because he likes them, simple as that.
He never set out to be the punk anti-Bakker for a lost generation. Nor has he disavowed his parents, whose past disgrace easily could fuel skepticism about his own ministry.
“I don’t have a strategy like, ‘OK, I’m gonna distance myself from them, so I can build a church and be my own man,’ ” Jay says. “Me and my dad have a hard time getting along, and now, with my mom being as sick as she is, that’s hard – but I love them, and they did a lot of great things, as well as make mistakes.”
At the end of “One Punk Under God,” Jay’s life remains full of challenges: his mom’s worsening condition; the new city for him and Amanda to navigate; a new congregation to forge. He even speaks hopefully of kicking cigarettes.
Then he shares his foolproof plan: “You put one foot out in front of the other, and you say, ‘OK, this is what I believe. This is what I’m seeing in the Word.’ “
He smiles.
“It’s a struggle,” he says. “But what have I got to lose?”