The pierced and tattooed Bakker grew up in Charlotte at the heels of his parents’ Praise The Lord ministry and television network. The PTL empire imploded in scandal in the 1980s. Afterward, Tammy Faye, who divorced an imprisoned Jim Bakker and married Roe Messner, re-emerged as a television and cult personality — this time embracing gay men infected with the AIDS virus.

Her son is following in her footsteps — fighting to end religious and political discrimination against gays and lesbians, and presenting a nonjudgmental, inclusive face to his Christian faith.

As the son of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, Jay Bakker was born into the televangelists’ limelight. Later he was shunned from it, to never return. The same empire his family had worked so hard to create was the same one to kick them down, refusing to offer God’s mercy, forgiveness or grace. [video]

Jay Bakker, Jim and Tammy Faye’s prodigal son, has come into his own as an alternative preacher, a pilgrimage chronicled in a Sundance Channel reality-TV series.

One Punk Under God finds Jay continuing a minicrusade for an alternative to the God he could never make peace with: a wrathful God who hated him for all the flaws he hated in himself.

For a while, I thought God hated me, and the church hated me, seeing everything that my parents went through and going through prison, Bakker says. I left the ministry completely and didn’t want anything to do with Christianity or the church because I just felt judged all the time. I didn’t feel comfortable with God in my life.