The Refined Woman

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The Eyes of Tammy Faye with Jonathan Merritt

Katherine Harris
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Thank you Newsstand Studio at 1 Rockefeller Plaza for providing a place for me to record this episode for y’all! No more Brooklyn closet recording!!!



I recently saw the movie The Eyes of Tammy Faye and quickly went down a rabbit hole of all things surrounding the infamous televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker. I knew I wanted to talk about this (and I did on Patreon, which you can watch here), but I also knew I wanted to explore this topic on the podcast with my buddy Jonathan Merritt. He wrote an incredible article on Tammy Faye for The Atlantic. He is one of America’s most popular writers on issues of faith and culture and is the author of Learning to Speak God from Scratch. 

Tammy Faye 101: Who is she + why should we care?

  • Pre-1960s, there wasn’t really any religious TV with entertainment value.

  • Post-1960s, liberalism was on the rise and conservative evangelical Christians didn’t like that so they began to use TV as a way to get their message out.

  • Tammy Faye Bakker and Jim Bakker worked for PTL, Praise The Lord.

  • The downfall: Jim Bakker had an affair with a young church secretary. Then it came out that Jim was bisexual. The ministry also had a lot of shady dealings when it came to money. He served 5 of 45 sentenced years in prison.

  • Tammy Faye eventually divorced him and married a real estate developer. She became one of the most hated figures in mainstream media, but was a gay icon.




“Why is she being punished for the sins of her husband?” - Kat Harris


Where did we go wrong + how do we be better?

  • Women paying for the sins of men is not a new idea and was certainly not unique to Tammy Faye or that era.

  • This trend goes all the way back to Genesis 38 with Tamar.

  • People have been hurt by religion… so they typically outsource that hurt to whoever is in the spotlight. It’s valid, but misapplied.

  • We project feelings like “you should never disappoint me” onto religious people in the spotlight, and once they do disappoint you it feels like betrayal.

  • Tammy Faye died of cancer and the day before she did, she forgave everyone.

“The gay community, and now Hollywood, is doing the job that the church never did.” - Jay Bakker

Resources





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