I thought that maybe Keith would post something about Tammy Faye’s death since he has taken care of discussing the passing of other “luminaries” of late. Maybe it’s because of the news cycle that not many blogs have said anything about her passing yet either. At least the handful of blogs that I regularly check have been silent about her. There could be other reasons for silence about Tammy Faye, but I won’t attempt to speculate why.

For those who are too young to remember anything about the Bakkers before their fall, you may be interested to know that they represented to the world, and to evangelicals, much of what it meant to be Pentecostal along with others like Jimmy Swaggert, Oral Roberts, etc. They had their minor differences, but in the North among my very separatist roots, the Bakkers and others showed what the charismatics were like. It wasn’t fair of course to lump them together like that, but it happened. John Piper and others have made charismatic expressions more mainstream today, but it wasn’t so in the late 1980’s. Nobody wanted to seem like the Bakkers and company.

What should we be thinking today about Tammy Faye and the Bakkers? In some ways the Bakker scandal is very far removed. In other ways it remains fresh. It reminds me of the problems we all face of grasping for power, influence, success, etc. When mixed with religion it is a very dangerous potion. The results unfortunately can compromise the name of the church and of Christ. The Bakker’s lives became parables of that problem.

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