I watched a fantastic documentary-style report by ABC News about Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker a few weeks ago that had me batting away my kids’ hungry cries for dinner and tossing them some Flavor Blasted Goldfish to shut them up so I could stay glued to the trainwreck unfolding TV. I love a salacious story as much as any average voyeuristic consumer, but when it revolves around the underbelly of Christendom, I’m drawn in like a millennial to a celebrity Twitter pile-on.
Growing up in a Christian home, a pastor’s home actually, I’ve been privy to every type of Christian ugly you can imagine. For pastor’s kids, we can really go in any one of several directions: Some of us back away slowly from the “light” and prefer to live in the safe comfort of anonymous, drunken darkness, while others rage against the machine and piece our tongues and others find the fortitude to sift out the humanity from the Christianity, realize everyone is born selfish and stupid and we all need Jesus.
The tragic story of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker was a mighty, flaming-ball-of-fire, break-neck-speed downward spiral from grace that equally horrified and delighted the entire watching world. In my own circles, being a pastor’s kid, pregnant and unwed was my own trifecta of spectacular destruction that equally horrified and delighted the world in which I existed. My parents took it as well as could be expected considering the circumstances, but the rest of that journey was fraught with
