The end of Tammy Faye

Saw the Larry King interview with cancer-stricken Tammy Faye Bakker Messner tonight. It was tough to watch. She is suffering terribly, is down to 65 pounds, and speaks in a gaspy whisper. I've always thought her to be one of the more ridiculous figures in American religious life, but you'd have to be Christopher Hitchens not to pity the poor woman under these circumstances. Yet before signing off, her husband Roe Messner told viewers that if they wanted to know Tammy's take on Falwell and others, they should buy her 1996 book "Telling It My Way."

By odd happenstance, after the interview I went digging through some old files looking for a document, and came across a photocopy of a Wall Street Journal column I did in 1999, it must have been, about Tammy Faye and the film "The Eyes of Tammy Faye," which turned her into a gay icon. I had totally forgotten about this piece (which isn't available online, or I'd link), and must say found it quite strange to have come across it after watching the dying Tammy Faye on TV. It added an interesting perspective. From the column, which calls her "the Imelda Marcos of American Pentecostalism":

"The Eyes of Tammy Faye" is more or less the film version of Mrs. Messner's preposterous memoir ["Telling It My Way" -- RD]. According to the movie, Mrs. Messner is a bewigged bundle of love cruelly victimized by a sinister cabal of rival televangelists. The ringleader: mean old Jerry Falwell, out to steal the PTL ministry. In the book, Mrs. Messner suggests that members of the Reagan administrations were in on the scheme. Before the Clinton's apparently, the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy cut its teeth on the poor, pitiful Bakkers. [snip] If you don't take religion seriously, the daffy Tammy Faye, who admits to asking Jesus to lead her not into paying retail, is campy fun. What's lost in this movie, and in the round of squishy-soft interviews Mrs. Messner is doing these days, is the fact that Tammy Faye finances her grotesquely extravagant lifestyle on the donations of believers, many of them poor and working-class -- an unpleasant truth she skirts or outright denies.

The movie features a clip of the press conference in which Mr. Falwell allegedly committed his coup d'etat. He held up a scandalous wish list that the Bakkers had sent his as the PTL's new chief. "I don't see any repentance there. I see the greed. I see the self-centeredness. I see the avarice that brought them down," he said then.

That's a fair review of "The Eyes of Tammy Faye." Though there are worse scoundrels in American public life than Mrs. Messner, she does not deserve the rehabilitation this movie and its admirers are giving her. The film offers Tammy Faye cheap grace on celluloid, and Lord knows this woman has never been one to pass up a bargain.

Reading that tonight, I felt a twinge of guilt, given Tammy Faye's present agony. But unless I've missed something in the ensuing years, Tammy Faye has never owned up to her role in the great PTL swindle. In fact, with Roe Messner's final words on CNN tonight being to recommend that self-pitying, self-justifying garbage memoir, it seems not unreasonable to conclude that Tammy will go to her grave believing she was nothing but a victim in that PTL scandal. Even Jim Bakker has confessed his sin in that scandal, writing a 1996 book called "I Was Wrong," and publicly repenting of having advocated the wicked prosperity gospel.

I'm not trying to be mean to a dying woman. She needs prayer, of course, and anyway, the state of her conscience is between her and God. But concerning her public life, well, it was a pity, I thought, to see tonight that even as the poor woman is at death's door, she's still convinced that she was sinned against by the disgraceful denouement of the grand swindle called PTL, and not a sinner. Even so, Lord have mercy on her. Such grim evidence of mortality lends her a terrifying dignity.