Based upon the 2000 documentary of the same name, The Eyes of Tammy Faye dramatizes the real life rise and fall of the eponymous televangelist and her husband, Jim Bakker. Powered by a riveting performance by an almost unrecognizable Jessica Chastain, this slightly airbrushed tragedy presents an arresting cautionary tale about the seductions of wealth, success, and celebrity status, even when pursued “for the sake of the Gospel.”
On the one hand an immaculately produced immersion in the well-intentioned if sometimes wrong-headed efforts of the early 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s Protestant televisual ministries, Eyes also offers a fascinating study in the well documented sociological interrelations between poverty, charismatic Christianity, and the so-called gospel of prosperity.
Beginning with Tammy Faye’s girlhood experience of “slain in the spirit,” speaking in tongues Pentecostal-style Protestantism, the film jumps to her days as a bible college student, where she meets her soon-to-be husband Jim Bakker. The pair bond over Bakker’s enthusiastic interpretation of the Scriptures as promising to believers virtually limitless material well-being, and when challenged by a member of the college faculty to recall the Beatitudes – e.g. “blessed are the poor” – the young couple drop out of school to advance their own vision of the faith.
Starting with children’s programming that revolves around puppets and late-night appeals to TV watchers to support their message of God’s love, Jim and Tammy Faye quickly become some of the world’s most successful and celebrated televangelists. They start their own media network, gross donations in the millions, and even kickstart a loosely Gospel-themed amusement park, all the while encouraging increased giving from their viewership backed by the assurance that God will reward such generosity.
Then the scandals begin to break: allegations of questionable financial practices and sexual misconduct lead in due course to criminal convictions. (I won’t spoil the details in case you decide to tune in.)
One of the most interesting motifs of the film is how persistently the couple is able to couch their aberrant beliefs and experiences in terms they find consistent with the teachings of the Gospel.
When they purchase a car they cannot afford, it is a matter of “stepping out in faith.” When they are accused of fraud and embezzlement, it is because there are evil people out there who want to suppress “the message of God’s love.”
Yet after the bottom falls out of their hyperreal “church royalty” existence, some hard won self-reflection prompts Jim, at least, to reevaluate the motives underlying their phenomenal this-worldly success. Seated across from Tammy dressed in his standard-issue prison uniform, Jim articulates a haunting question about whether they had, in effect, by proclaiming a message of limitless material prosperity, made a career out of teaching that God must not love people who are poor.
This flipping on its head of values consistently portrayed in the Scriptural witness – consider Our Lord’s birth in a manger, his parents’ Temple offering which was under the Law of Moses the concession made for the poorest families (Luke 2:24), Our Lord’s announcement that “the Spirit of the Lord is upon me … to proclaim good news to the poor” (Luke 4:18), etc., etc. – betrays both the vulnerability of interpreting the Gospel in a vacuum as well as the blinders we all as individuals bring to the Truth, often as a result of own our hard experiences.
Jim and Tammy Faye discovered in Christianity a reason to hope for the happiness they lacked in this world, and there was just enough truth in what they saw that they managed to build an empire. Yet, like all the approximations of God’s love we erect merely upon what looks good in our own eyes, when the rains fell, and floods came, and the winds beat against that house, great was its fall.