I recently read John Wigger\u2019s PTL: The Rise and Fall of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker\u2019s Evangelical Empire.\u00a0<\/em>It\u2019s a gripping story which goes beyond one ministry to encompass the rise of televangelism\u2013and the triumph of the prosperity gospel, which continues to resonate with Americans in spite of the fall of some of its most popular promoters. (For a good exploration of PTL\u2019s religious roots, try the terrific review\/essay where I discovered Wigger\u2019s book<\/a>.)<\/p>\n Tammy was always a little more gritty, capable of enthusiasm about people and events she didn\u2019t control. Jim skittered from project to project, rapidly accumulating crazy debts and funding them through constant televised improv begging for the next<\/em> project\u2013robbing the future to pay for the past, and deceiving viewers about where their money would really go. There are all kinds of fascinating things happening at the beginning of PTL: They were technological innovators, among the first to see the potential of satellite TV. They started with a fearless pop-culture evangelism that included interviews with born-again, but not exactly sanded-down, Christians like Little Richard and Larry Flynt. But also, from the very beginning, Jim Bakker believed that if he needed money for something he wanted, God would send the cash. Debts and deception began to pile up early.<\/p>\n On TV and also in his books, Bakker preached that God wants us to be happy and rich. He leaned heavily on the idea that if Christians gave generously to his ministry, God would reward them\u2013not in the next life, but very much in this one. By emptying their wallets into his, they\u2019d become wealthy as well as good. Because God wants us to be happy and rich, there should be no contradiction in a man of God buying multiple fancy homes, cars, clothes. Their son had an air-conditioned treehouse; in one house Tammy kept a glass atrium full of parrots. And this was an advertisement for Bakker\u2019s message, not a contradiction of it. He (apparently) had the life he promised his followers.<\/p>\n Jim Bakker fueled American Christians\u2019 perception that they were constantly under attack; he raised money off of crisis and a feeling of persecution, even when \u201cpersecution\u201d really meant \u201cinvestigation of your actual financial crimes.\u201d The desperation was real. Part of the pathos of PTL, in Wigger\u2019s telling, is that Bakker preached the holiness of wealth when his own riches brought him isolation, a broken marriage, and the lurking terror that somebody would bring down the house of cards. He preached that you can have what you want if you only have the courage to name it; and this very preaching brought him anxiety, loss of self-control, and ultimately public humiliation and prison.<\/p>\n This may be overly psychological, but Wigger seemed to me to present Jim Bakker as a man desperate to prove that he had control of his own life. By saying his life was working out, he could make it work. \u201cName it and claim it,\u201d whether what you\u2019re claiming is wealth or a safe, marital heterosexuality. After the collapse of PTL, Bakker revealed that he had been sexually abused as a child; this early experience of loss of control must have made it unbearably hard to integrate and accept his sexuality. He ended up \u201cacting out,\u201d as they say, not only with Jessica Hahn (who was labeled a \u201cbimbo\u201d for accusing him of rape) but with men, including PTL staffers.<\/p>\n PTL was an early adopter not only of technology but of therapy. The Bakkers promoted therapy the way they promoted diets: as a self-improvement strategy. Therapy was not a path toward accepting helplessness or learning from it, but overcoming it. Therapy would fix you and make you a good Christian with a good marriage.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t think I\u2019m reaching to see this set of beliefs as one of the currents flowing into the ex-gay movement, and one of the reasons it has proven so resilient in spite of so many public failures. The ex-gay movement includes a lot of people with a lot of different experiences and interpretations of their experience, including people who don\u2019t think any action on their part prompted God\u2019s work in shifting their orientation. But the central promise<\/em> which makes the ex-gay narrative so attractive is the idea that gay people can (and should) take effective action to become straight. The promise of a huge swathe of therapy that goes by names like \u201creparative\u201d or \u201creintegrative\u201d is that it will fix your feelings.<\/p>\n And American Christians desperately need a way to fix gay people\u2019s feelings, because they have nothing else to offer us. If you\u2019re gay and you grew up in a non-progressive church, I can pretty much guarantee that the only<\/em> thing you ever heard about your desires was what you couldn\u2019t do with them. The Church offers guidance, you\u2019re told, but the only guidance you get is \u201cno.\u201d The Church serves the God Who is love, you\u2019re told, but your own desires for devoted intimacy were treated as shameful deviance. American Christians mostly accept the Lava<\/em><\/a> view of life, where you either get married or live in pointless isolation; Catholics have it a little better than Protestants in this regard, but even priesthood and religious life become suspect when gay people do them, and we very<\/em> rarely hear anything about the beauties and potential of lay celibacy.<\/p>\n If it were true that there is no positive guidance for gay people then okay, sometimes life is just hard. But what I find especially frustrating is that there is actual guidance in Scripture for same-sex love! We could honor the beauty of celibacy<\/a>. We could honor the beauty, devotion, commitment of same-sex love<\/a>, expressed in covenant friendships or in many other forms. We could honor, you know, the acceptance of constraint, the surrender of control, which leads Christians to come out of the closet<\/a> and seek ways of life they were never taught.<\/p>\n There are so many reasons to be grateful that ex-gay therapy doesn\u2019t work. On the most basic level, for Christians in a self-improvement culture, for whom God\u2019s power always seems to be manifest when He does what we want or what our parents hope for, it\u2019s necessary to learn that God\u2019s power is often manifest in what He asks us to accept. He is greater than our desires\u2013greater than what we desire<\/em>, and not constrained by our wants or our cultural values. He has for us something better than what we could design for ourselves. I\u2019ve known many gay Christians, raised wealthy and good, for whom their sexual orientation was the first place they truly confronted a lack of control over their lives. It was the first place where they needed to trust a God Who is bigger than their expectations.<\/p>\n