Happy Hour Gospel

"It can be painful, but it's also really healing to come back," says Renee Schaller, a Queens native with curly dark hair, after her first visit to Revolution. Through the hubbub of the bar crowd drifting into the backroom while the congregants of Revolution stream out, Renee talks about her upbringing in a Pentecostal church where both of her parents were ardent fans of the Bakkers. Her father is a friend of Reverend Vince, and she's come to say hello to him -- her first church service in years. She's not exactly sure what she thinks of it yet, but she acknowledges that it resonated with her, and that she'd like to come back. "As you get older, you want to go home."

More than a few Revolution members have Jim and Tammy Faye's PTL Club as a reference point -- often because their parents were dedicated followers.

"I don't talk too much about Revolution with my parents," says Chris Anderson, a young man with a dark beard and dark glasses who has been a member with his wife for more than three years. "But they have a lot of respect for Jimmy and Tammy Faye. A lot of people who come here, though . . . see PTL as not the kind of religious experience they want to relate to."

Jerry Falwell, never one to mince words, once called Jim Bakker "the greatest scab and cancer on the face of Christianity in two thousand years of church history." It's hard to know whether Falwell was referring primarily to the elder Bakker's embezzlement scheme or to his message of radical acceptance, but the second is a legacy the younger Bakker has embraced.

After Jay's move to New York in 2006, precipitated by his then-wife Amanda's acceptance in to a master's program in the city, Revolution became increasingly outspoken on the issue that remains one of the major litmus tests for American evangelicals: gay rights, and gay marriage in particular. As well as addressing the issue in his sermons and in talks around the country, Bakker has taken action.

In 2008 he officiated a marriage between two women in California the day it was ruled legal by the State Supreme Court. That same year Bakker was one of the more prominent pastors involved in a project called the American Family Outing, which sought to organize meetings on Mother's Day and Father's Day between LGBT families and allies, and a number of influential Evangelical leaders (including Joel Olsteen of Lakewood Church in Texas and Rick Warren of Saddleback Church in California). The effort was organized by a coalition that included SoulForce, a Christian gay-rights organization that often makes headlines with its confrontational tactics.

"At first I was really uncomfortable about all the attention. I didn't think that was the best way to advance the conversation," says Jay of the resulting media brouhaha. "But you realize that a group like SoulForce uses media campaigns as part of their civil disobedience, as part of a political strategy. And you reach a point where you realize that the cause is bigger than yourself."

Bakker had spent this particular afternoon sending out a call to action to his followers on Twitter around a recent piece of proposed legislation in the Ugandan parliament, an anti-gay bill, which, among other things, would sentence HIV-positive homosexuals to death. The bill has been particularly controversial in the United States, given the close relationships between some American evangelical leaders and the very same Ugandan members of parliament who drafted the bill. His tweets were mostly directed toward other church leaders and religious figures, asking them to speak out against the so-called Kill-the-Gays Bill, and rallying others to lobby on the issue.

"I'm really curious what a documentary on the History Channel will look like fifty years from now, when it describes how our society treated gay people," Bakker tells me. "Some people say, oh we're going to have to wait for the older generation to pass on, but I think that's unacceptable."

Jay's activism has raised the ire of many in the evangelical movement and has cost the church at least one major donor. Twitter, Facebook, and blog comments regularly denounce Revolution and call Jay a heretic. Ken Silva, an influential pastor, writer and columnist for the conservative religion blog Apprising Ministries, has launched a particularly spirited campaign against Bakker, calling his gay-affirming stance "the doctrine of demons," and warning that "outlaw pastors" like Bakker "are steadily gaining ground within evangelicalism."

"I think we're in another time of reform; there's a sea change happening in the faith," says Reverend Vince, the bearded assistant pastor with kind crinkly eyes and a brown fedora. "We're trying to put the Bible back in to context with the time, what is and isn't relevant today."