One Punk Under God

One Punk Under God was a miniseries on the Sundance Channel about Jay Bakker, son of Jim and Tammy Faye. He's a preacher himself and founder of the Revolution church, which is in many ways the anti-PTL. Where PTL (his parents' infamous ministry) was enormous, cheesy, Disneyfied, televised, and ghastly, Revolution is low-tech and--I guess you could say--punk. In Atlanta the church met in a bar. Judging from the show, Jay Bakker's preaching seems mainly to consist of him working out his "dad" issues in front of a supportive crowd. Maybe that's what preaching is these days, or it's always that way and I just never realized it. Anyway he goes around putting stickers on lampposts that say "as Christians, we apologize for being self-righteous bastards." He decides during the course of the show to make Revolution a gay-affirming church. He's a dead ringer for David Cross, and his wife is extremely colorful--an odd inverse of Tammy Faye. He'll never bag me as a convert, but things could be worse. They mostly are.