Kent and Wonder discuss the documentary Better Angels: The Gospel According to Tammy Faye using evangelist Tammy Faye’s timed birth chart. Striking themes that emerged were faith and sacrifice and the search for meaning in the wake of loss and difficulty. Astrologically these themes can be linked to the sign of Pisces, which is where Tammy’s Sun resides, and the planet Jupiter, which rules both her first and twelfth houses, and is located in her 6th.
Distribution: More info
Director: Dana Adam Shapiro
Run Time: 101 minutes
Astrological Data: Tammy Faye Bakker Messner, born on 7 March 1942, 3:27am CWT+5:00, International Falls, MN (48.6023, -93.4041), Rodden Rating of AA via Astrodatabank
Music Credit: spacedust by airtone
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:13.459] Kent Bye: Hello, my name is Kent Bye. Wonder Bright: And I'm Wonder Bright. Kent Bye: And welcome to the Story All the Way Down podcast, where we're unpacking the archetypal dynamics of different documentaries from Sundance 2024. Today's episode, we're going to be diving into Better Angels, The Gospel According to Tammy Faye, which is a part of the episodic series at Sundance that actually showed two out of the four of this series. So we've only seen about half of it, but it gave us a start into the story. And it's directed by Dana Adam Shapiro. And this is the 5th out of the six of our series of looking at the faith and ritual as a subtheme of the 36 documentaries that we're covering. So I wonder if you'd be willing to share with us the synopsis for this film. Wonder Bright: I would be delighted.
[00:00:54.810] Wonder Bright: Better Angels, the Gospel According to Tammy Faye. As told by her family, friends, and enemies, the meteoric rise, scandalous fall, and unlikely resurrection of Tammy Faye, the First Lady of the Electric Church, poses an increasingly relevant question. How did we get the story so wrong? Having premiered an Academy Award-nominated documentary feature, Murderball, and an animated short, My Biodegradable Heart, at the festival, director Dana Adam Shapiro returns with Better Angels, the Gospel According to Tammy Faye, a lively, ruminative documentary series that provides fresh insights into the life of American icon Tammy Faye Messner. A larger-than-life personality whose singular visage became a cultural touchstone, Messner and her personal breakthroughs, both high and low, were reflected in the political, religious, and societal news of the day. Shapiro adroitly excavates private and historical artifacts to craft a profile that distinctively centers Messner as the leading woman of her own story. And the initials of the programmer who wrote that synopsis is DC.
[00:02:03.490] Kent Bye: All right, so there's been a number of different documentaries and shows about this that have happened over the years. And I think this one hit me a little bit different, or maybe I've noticed things that maybe I didn't notice before. And one of the quotes that I had from this film that really stuck with me was from the son, Jay Bakker, who is featured quite prominently throughout the course of this. He was involved quite heavily in both helping to advise, but also speaking on his own behalf. He said something along the lines of like, I've written like this many books, I've done this or that, you know, basically saying all of his accolades. And then he said, but I will always be introduced in everything I ever do as the son of disgraced Minister Jim Bakker and Tammy Faye Messner. Oh, and I'm doing it again. I'm sort of fulfilling that prophecy in some sense. But I feel like there's something about the downfall of what happened with Jim Bakker that colors everything that has happened in not only his life, but also his mother's life. And I think in some ways, this film feels like it's trying to reclaim some of the other aspects of what she had going on and what her vision was. And so, yeah, I'd love for maybe have you share some of your own history of following someone like Tammy Faye Messner and also some of your impressions of this episodic series that we started to watch.
[00:03:20.000] Wonder Bright: Well, I've been a fan of Tammy Faye since the Eyes of Tammy Faye, the documentary in the mid-aughts. I think it came out in 2000. And I just fell in love with her. I just thought she was amazing. So I've always been really interested in her. And you know, in fairness, I've always been really interested in misunderstood women. So that's been like a theme in my life where I've always been really curious to hear the stories that we're not necessarily hearing because anytime a woman gets pilloried, I'm immediately suspicious. I just can't help it. And this one was especially appealing to me. Her story is especially appealing to me because of the venom with which she was pilloried, but also because she really is a person of faith. And what was not apparent to me when I watched The Eyes of Tammy Faye in the mid-aughts was they didn't unpack in the same way why she was so famous or what the PTL, the TV show that she and Jim Bakker produced, like how big it was and the kind of cultural impact that it had because growing up in the 80s, they were just kind of a joke to me and my friends. And that kind of televised evangelical Christianity was just something that was very othered in my liberal social groups. So she was just absolutely not on my radar. So when the scandal broke, it was still very, like, peripheral for me. So being introduced to her through the eyes of Tammy Faye in the early aughts was a revelation. But getting to see her again in this series, they spend the first episode or so really breaking down how different she and Jim Bakker were than other evangelists and what they pioneered in their evangelism through media. that was really intriguing to me. Like, I just really hadn't understood that she was on television every day and the entire family was on television every day for basically like two to three hours a day. So one of the points they make in the film that Jay talks about a fair bit is that they were probably, like, the first reality TV family. And I just did not know that because first of all, my family didn't have a TV. But secondly, even if we had, we wouldn't have been watching them. So, that was fascinating and there was so much footage of the PTL network in the time that they were on the air. PTL stands for Praise the Lord, the Praise the Lord network while they were on the air. And it was amazing to go back in time and see some of the things that they were saying and doing and to have her life colored in by instances where, you know, it wasn't going to be entirely easy for her to contain her emotional reaction to something because she's on air all the time. So I have a lot of room for Tammy Faye's story and the conversations that it brings up. despite the lack of Christianity in my background, the phrase Christ consciousness is still the thing that comes to mind. And this conversation around what does it mean to forgive and to be humble, which are attributes that we often attribute to Christianity, but that are often much harder to achieve in real life. We talked a little bit about this when we were talking about the film Sugarcane. And this film explicitly is talking about forgiveness in ways that I found really, really intriguing. And Tammy Faye's embodiment of forgiveness was also really powerful and evocative.
[00:07:05.461] Kent Bye: Yeah, this PTL network, which was on the air from 1974 to 1989. So this was quite a run of being on air and having a lot of what was happening in their daily lives just out there. You know, like they said in the film, really the first instance of this type of reality TV where their lives became so much a part of their ministry. And it really goes back to the beginning from when they met and then how they dropped out of Bible school and started to travel around and then just had this vision of stepping into all these new technologies and having their own satellite networks and televangelism, which was something that was exploring all the potentialities of these new technologies. So yeah, really early adopters in that sense. some of the nuances of the scandal that had unfolded in terms of the, you know, it sounded like that she had potentially had an affair that didn't really dive much deep into that. But then what was much more public was Jim Bakker's affair and everything that had happened after that, revealing all these family secrets that then led to their downfall. There's a lot of financial shenanigans that was going on as well, but there seemed to be a lot of these 12th house themes that I just wanted to read from Demetra George because she talks about how the 12th house being “hidden matters causing disruption and harm, secrets, scandals, family skeletons, physical dysfunctions, clandestine and illegal activity, spies, traitors, and witchcraft”. You know, those are some of the significations of the 12th house that I feel like this film in particular is getting at the heart of the inciting moment that is causing all these transformations. So obviously, they're doing a lot of 9th house religion, using the communication technologies that may be in the domain of the 3rd house to be able to evangelize and this sort of 2nd house, but there's a lot of money that's involved. So like this drive towards raising all this money and building all this infrastructure. So there's all this telethons that are happening and what happens with that money and if it's like the second house, eighth house. So it's their money, but they're also asking for other people to give them money in these donations and these patronages. So yeah, those are some of the significations and there's one other that I want to save, but I would love to hear what you think in terms of some of the primary significations of this piece.
[00:09:26.141] Wonder Bright: Well, we're really lucky because we actually do have good accurate birth information about Tammy Faye, so we were able to look at her natal chart. And the 12th house themes are coming through really, really strong because she has the 12th house - I'm using a Placidus angular chart for you astro-nerds in the audience - she has a Sagittarius rising and using Placidus she also has Sagittarius ruling the 12th house. Sagittarius is ruled by the planet Jupiter and she has Jupiter in detriment in Gemini in the 6th house. So the Lord of the 12th house, which we've been pretty keen to establish in our conversations thus far, is about losses and sorrows and suffering and hidden things, hidden matters, secrets. The Lord of the 12th house is also the Lord of her first house. So there's this strong identity with 12th house matters. And that Lord is in the 6th house of service and enslavement and illness. And it's in detriment. So we can see right out of the gate that Tammy Faye has this strong attunement to the experience of loss and sorrows. And that it's not just that she's attuned to it, she actually identifies with it. And the planet Jupiter, which rules Sagittarius and is in her sixth house of enslavement and illness, is closely associated with faith and with religion of all kinds. So Demetra, if memory serves, says that Jupiter is about the search for ethical truth and values. And so in that sense, there's this, like, you can see the connection to being of faith, because if you're searching for truth, then regardless of the circumstances that happen to you, you're going to try and find some real meaning in it. And so we can see that from Tammy Faye's chart that she has an identity with loss and sorrows and suffering, and she's going to seek meaning through acts of service. Not only is her ascendant in her 12th house ruled by Jupiter, but her Sun is in Pisces, which is also ruled by Jupiter. And her Sun is conjunct her south node, so I can get to that in a minute. But we have the primary light, the Sun, that sheds light on all of the other planets and allows them to reflect the light back. That Sun is also ruled by Jupiter. The second, another light, which is the ascendant, which is a light because whether the person is born on the Earth during the day or night is dictated by the horizon line. That's where the Sun rises at dawn is on the horizon. And so we think about the Ascendant as being a light. And so anything that has to do with the lights and astrology is really important because that's what dictates whether or not we can see things. So for Tammy Faye, two of the lights are ruled by Jupiter and ruled by this need to find meaning in life. But they're also ruled by the need to find meaning in difficult situations because that Jupiter also rules the 12th house and it's placed in the bad house that is the 6th house. So there's this really powerful statement in her chart around that expression of the search for healing out of loss and sorrows. And because the sun is in Pisces, Pisces is a sign that I really associate, it's often associated with a kind of like Christ like consciousness because there's this element of Pisces that's the final water sign before the start of the zodiac in Aries, the spring equinox, which heralds the new year, for the traditional astrological lexicon. And so Pisces, which is the final sign of the zodiac and is the last water sign, is sort of expressed through this idea of, like, we're all one. There's this element of like the death and rebirth happens through Pisces in March, like, it's the end of the year, it's the beginning of the year. In order for the new year to begin, the old year must die. So Pisces is kind of like, you know, even the symbol of it is two fish swimming in opposite directions and Christianity often uses the fish as a symbol of Christ consciousness. So there's something around Pisces, which is associated with those things. For my money, it's also often associated with a kind of martyrdom, like, Pisces are known to be really compassionate, but, like, compassionate to a fault. So there's this idea in Christianity that we turn the other cheek and that we practice forgiveness. But Tammy Faye is somebody who practiced so much forgiveness for others and yet experienced so little forgiveness from people around her. So forgiveness is this, like, primary experience in her life, whether she's the one giving it and not receiving it. And then I just wonder how much forgiveness she was able to practice for herself. There's this moment in the film where there’s, like, one of my favorite subjects that they interview a man by the name of Bishop Carlton Pearson, who, by the way, has a documentary has been made about him. And I would love to watch that if you're up for it, because he was really dynamic and phenomenal. And he was apparently, like, got one of his televised starts. as an evangelist was on the PTL show. So he worked closely with both Tammy and Jim Bakker for a long time. And he has this great quote. He says, “I would venture to say a lot of what Tammy did and Jim was not just on guts. It was based on guilt. They never felt holy enough, faithful enough. You don't fast and pray enough. You're not clean enough. You're not smart enough. So there's always not enoughness there. It was that victim consciousness that gave them the drive”. And that like speaks to a certain aspect of Pisces energy, which is all compassion for others and not enough compassion for oneself. And that can turn into a kind of sense of being victimized, a sense of being the martyr, which if we're going to practice compassion, we need to be able to practice it for ourselves. Which, by the way, I have, like, Mars and Pisces in my first house. So like when I'm saying this and I'm saying they, I mean me. You know, it's a real codependent trope to, like, put all of your empathy and compassion into others and then not practice it for yourself. And that, you know, is actually ultimately really harmful. It means that we don't have good boundaries. It means that we're not able to say no when things are not working, when things are not right. We're not able to protect ourselves and we're not able to protect the people that we love, even though that might be the thing that we think that we're trying to do the most. It's like, We're trying to save others because if we can do that, like somewhere along the way, we got the idea that by saving someone else, we're participating in our own salvation. But it can be, like this problematic loop where you're still not attending to your own garden. So it's an open question, obviously. We can't say for sure whether or not she felt that she needed to forgive herself or not. But I think Bishop Carlton Pearson's quote really pointed to something really powerful at the heart of Tammy and Jim's demise. Yeah, anyway, I've been talking for a while. I want to hear what you have to say about that.
[00:17:04.845] Kent Bye: I think having access to a double A rating chart of the birth time, which means that there's certain ratings of saying that, okay, we have a timed chart, it's double A rated, which means that it's actually got the birth chart and verified in a way that you can speak on a little bit more authority because sometimes we don't always have these timed charts to be able to dig into the nuances of some of this. And, so, yeah, really quite pithy insights into her chart. One of the things that I was going to speak about in terms of the signification of her chart that is a bit more from a Tarnasian perspective of having this conjunction between Saturn and Uranus where Saturn's at 23 degrees Taurus and Uranus is at 26 degrees Taurus. And so I'm going to read this quote from Tarnas because I think it also kind of speaks to not only her life, but also some of the challenges that she was facing in terms of this combination of Saturn and Uranus. So “the archetypal principles associated with these two planets are that it's an exacerbation of tensions between authority and rebellion, order and freedom, structure and change. Often the two archetypal principles combine and interpenetrate in contradictory ways repressive revolution, erratically unpredictable authority, and so forth, especially frequent with this cycle were crises and the sudden collapse of structures, crashes and accidents, grim awakenings, and sudden breakdowns, whether political, economic, or psychological”. So, this is the Saturnian nature of a lot of the structure and the Uranian impulse to disrupt a lot of that structure. So, you have this paradoxical aspect of structure and the resistance of that structure. When I did an interview with Richard Tarnas back at NORWAC 2009, it was just after the election between Barack Obama and John McCain, and it was right in the midst of a Saturn-Uranus opposition. where he actually was describing Obama as someone who was the liberal, but yet he was the more pragmatic, centrist type of perspective. So he's actually a little bit more conservative as a liberal, but yet John McCain was seen as this maverick and he's got this totally wild choice of vice president of Sarah Palin, which was completely Uranian and unpredictable, kind of like a precursor to someone like Trump who's completely Uranian in his nature. So you have this kind of juxtaposition of the structures and how sometimes there's like this polarity swapping of those two significations where Tammy Faye is like this conservative Christian who's this huge authority, but yet she's bringing in all of these queer representations, people talking about being gay, having AIDS, some of these things that were actually threatening to the conservative agenda of trying to politicize a lot of these people and create demons of them. And while Tammy Faye was trying to create this unity and openness to this kind of erratic nature. There's actually a lot of people in the context of this documentary who were from the queer community who had seen her as this hero and icon who were giving voices of you know, the Christian thing to do in these situations would be accepting and loving of these people, not trying to demonize them and use them for political agendas. And so I feel like in some ways, this Saturn-Uranus complex within her own chart, and it's in the 5th house and her own creative expression, and the way that she is expressing her own creativity is to have these conversations and to bring out all of these contradictory aspects, which I feel like was really quite a fascinating signature that I would say was pretty prominent, which also happened to lead to some of these other manifestations of the sudden breakdowns of structures that she faced within her own life. But anyway, that was the biggest aspect and signature that I was looking at in terms of this story.
[00:20:48.934] Wonder Bright: Yeah, I was noticing that and then also noticing that, of course, she's going to go through a Uranian return this summer. So it could be that we get a little bit of a Tammy Faye renaissance as a result of this film coming out. Of course, Tammy died in 2007, I think. So she's not here to appreciate that. But let's hope that she gets a little bit of love this summer.
[00:21:15.442] Kent Bye: Yeah, that's like an 84-year cycle that sometimes these transits happen and even if they're living or not, sometimes their legacy of their work can have another iteration of their life.
[00:21:26.164] Wonder Bright: Yeah, I want to be really clear that when I'm talking about Tammy Faye expressing compassion and yet maybe not compassion for herself, it doesn't mean that that Piscean like codependent desire to express compassion for others is like false or not real. Obviously, there's like a tendency towards a codependent state, but it doesn't have to be that. It seems very clear that Tammy Faye knew what she was doing when she had an AIDS survivor on her program to talk about AIDS and to talk about what it meant to have that. And that this was coming from this incredibly genuine and real space in her heart. And that's one of the things that comes up over and over again in this film is that she was just able to meet people where they were. They would come up to her on the street and they would start, you know, accusing her of being a heretic and like whatever it was that they were like slinging these like slurs at her. And she would say, “Hi, I'm Tammy. What's your name?” And she would just really like listen to their grievance and like be with them. in a way that, you know, that takes something, that takes real moral character. And it's a really powerful thing to be able to do, to just live in service to your values and your ideals in that way, even when the world around you is not reflecting back what it's taking for you to do that or the fact that you're doing it at all.
[00:23:00.494] Kent Bye: Yeah. And so I guess what are some of the things that you're bearing witness to in the story?
[00:23:05.518] Wonder Bright: Yeah, so for me, the themes in this piece are really like this is a meditation on Pisces and compassion and forgiveness, and also the expression of Jupiter as an act of service in the world. And I want to note that Tammy's 6th house did result in colon cancer. So this is one of the people that we'll be talking about in this season who had colon cancer. So for me, when I'm looking at Tammy Faye, I'm also looking at my own diagnosis. And there are points of similarity that I see in my chart with Tammy Faye's that have me want to understand my illness. And your mileage may vary on this. I am not saying that this is how it is for anyone else. But for me, I'm really interested in trying to understand, not in the way of blaming myself for my illness, but in the way of trying to take responsibility for my illness. Like, what can I know about this illness? How can I let this illness instruct me? And I've been listening to a lot of Caroline Myss recently, who I first found when my mom had an acoustic neuroma tumor in the 90s. But the minute that I got the diagnosis that night, I was up until like, I think four in the morning listening to Caroline Myss again. It felt like it was time. And Caroline Myss calls herself a medical intuitive and she breaks the body and the illnesses of the body into categories related to our chakras. So any illness that happens around the root chakra, the base chakra, around the pelvic area, which colon cancer and rectal cancer, which is my cancer, Those are related to unresolved pain that you are carrying around from your past, from your childhood. In Caroline Myss's system, that's how she relates those illnesses. And Caroline Myss's idea is that when you have a situation in your life that you can't move past, when you can't find a way to fold in your experience holistically, then you're going to continually send energy back to that past moment and it's going to prevent you from living in your present. And if you have an illness that's attached to your root chakra, then it's going to be talking about something that happened in your family of origin or your culture of origin, something that you're unable to let go of. And it's talked about over and over again in this film that Tammy had a really difficult childhood. They don't really go into too much detail about what that was, but the family that she created with Jim Bakker also suffered from some real difficulties, and it's just this sort of experience of watching her continually try to forgive something, that maybe, you know, It's not on her to forgive, like she can't solve this problem by forgiveness for someone else, like, we have to cut and run, we have to, like, get out of there. We have to take care of ourselves - and we have to take care of the people that will also take care of us. So those are some of the things that come up for me when I'm thinking about like, what is forgiveness really? And what is it to have compassion for others? And can we have true compassion for others ultimately when we're not able to have it for ourselves? And when we're so committed to this idea, as Bishop Carlton Pearson says, that there's not enough, like we're not enoughness, then what kind of experiences are we then bringing into our life? If we're not enough, are we ever going to have enough? Are we ever going to be enough? What does it mean to, like, actually grapple with those concepts in a way that is healing for both ourselves and others?
[00:27:06.984] Kent Bye: Yeah, and as I think about this as a story and the primary significations, I feel like one of the threads that really struck me as I was watching it was there's clearly a lot of strong 9th house themes of religion and the way that religion is a crucial part of so many aspects of the culture here in the United States. And their praise the Lord PTO network was really around the world. So they were speaking to a global audience. But just how over time, the 10th house influence of the political situation, the government and how much of conservative movements of the religious right had really started to politicize aspects of religion to serve a political end, and how in a lot of ways, Tammy was trying to reject that. So she's standing firm against that type of politicization. She's trying to really maintain the secular position of really living into the principles of the religion. And so I feel like that is something I'm bearing witness to. But also this Saturn-Uranus conjunction that is speaking to the erratic nature of someone who's resisting the status quo of whatever's happening within the context of larger religious organizations, Saturn being a place of authority and structure and in this institutional connection and then the Uranian liberation impulse to try to bring about more freedom and agency rather than the constraints that are coming from the more Saturnian aspect. And so just how she was going against the grain and marching to the beat of her own drummer by having whoever she wanted on her show and to really give a platform to these voices that she thought were critical to understanding what it means to be human. And so I'm just really reflecting on all the people who were lifting her up. And, you know, it's pretty stark to see a film about someone who is in this religious context, but having people who are gay, transgender, just all these drag queens, putting Tammy Faye up as this cultural icon, because she was really representing this voice that hadn't really been voiced all that much up to that point, and how much she was really bringing that voice of liberation. through her platform and broadcasting out into the world in the midst of the 80s and AIDS crisis when there was a failure of the political establishment to really even acknowledge what was happening with AIDS. I don't know if you were to look at who would you diagnose this to? Are there any signatures that come up?
[00:29:39.208] Wonder Bright: Before I do that, I just want to also give a shout out to her son and to bear witness to the fact that whatever change she wasn't able to sever between herself and her family of origin for her own self, she certainly seemed to be able to do that between herself and her son. and to liberate both of them into a space of true communion. Despite this extremely unusual childhood growing up on TV, Jay Bakker just comes across as being somebody who's really grounded in his own faith and clear about who his mother was and certainly who she was to him. You can tell because he's able to talk about her for who she is in her own right. And he's able to do it with a lot of grace. And I just feel really grateful to him for opening his heart and opening up his stories of his mom so that we could experience her through his eyes.
[00:30:39.605] Kent Bye: Yeah, yeah, for sure. And I really appreciated his voice throughout the piece as well. He seemed like a pretty reliable narrator in terms of what was happening, whereas his dad, maybe not so much. So yeah, I guess I'd love to hear, you know, if you were to diagnose this as to some sort of remedial measure, what kind of signature would you be looking for?
[00:31:00.154] Wonder Bright: Well, I would prescribe this one for people who are interested in Pisces and what it takes to experience compassion and offer it to others. And also perhaps to prescribe it to people who want to understand the cautionary tale that can ensue when we prioritize forgiveness for others versus having good boundaries and forgiveness for oneself. so that we can become a bit of a doormat, a bit of a martyr, a bit of a victim. And that Tammy Faye was a survivor in many, many ways. And then there are other ways in which she really created the ground for other people to survive and thrive, and often at her own expense. So it's both sides of that Pisces compassion and that Jupiterian faith.
[00:31:55.731] Kent Bye: Yeah, well, that's all that we have for today on today's episode of Story All the Way Down. I'd like to thank you for joining us here for the latest episode. And if you enjoyed the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends and consider joining up on our newsletter at storyallthewaydown.com and have you keep track for where we go in the future. So thanks for joining us. Wonder Bright: Thank you.
