Tammy Faye was a prophet

Finally, someone was listening to God

Born in 1942, she was raised in a religious culture that seems unbelievably cruel. But it was just some ordinary Christians in Minnesota.

I’m reading Tammy Faye Bakker’s 1978 memoir, I Gotta Be Me. When she was three, her father left a family of a wife and two kids. He just wanted to be married to someone else, somewhere else, but blame was cast. “To the church, my mother was just a harlot,” Tammy Faye writes.

The insults, the barbs—she remembered it all.

Tammy Faye Bakker in 1987

A theological insight came to her.

She writes: “They didn’t have any spirituality in themselves so they had to find a ‘bigger sinner’ to pick apart.”

That’s a big insight into Christianity.

At age ten, she responded to an altar call. She writes: “For hours I lay on the floor and spoke in an unknown language. I wasn’t aware of anyone else. I was walking with Jesus.”

And she began to dream of another Christianity—one that wasn’t cruel to women, or cruel at all.

As a teenager she wanted to try make-up.