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The Lighter Side of Christian Nationalism: Tammy Faye
Spinning an evangelist grifter into a camp icon and sorta-feminist heroine is a little hard to take right now.
Clearly the production’s not all that interested in people with serious Christian-conservative leanings, unless they have a whole lot of patience for endless puns about Jesus being “inside her/him/me/you” and “the sound of the Lord, coming right in your ear.” And if you are, to quote Tammy Faye ’s version of Jimmy Swaggart, a “liberal-loving Marxist,” you’re probably too heartsick to find all this much fun. “The Electric Church is a spiritually vacuous abomination, like all things American,” sniffs Tammy Faye ’s cartoonish version of Robert Runcie (Ian Lassiter), Archbishop of Canterbury, dismissing the televangelist phenomenon that was sweeping the U.S. It’s a joke — and also, for all of the Southern twangs and praise the lord hoopla, there’s an ocean’s worth of distance baked into the show’s DNA. “You know, throughout all of time, many a prophet was persecuted,” ponders Pope John Paul II (Andy Taylor), who pops up in Tammy Faye now and again on what appear to be illuminati group calls with Runcie and the president of the Mormons, Thomas S. Monson (Max Gordon Moore).
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